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Intro: What We Get Wrong

The 1984 movie, Amadeus, won eight Oscars and has been seen by millions of people. It was an excellent film, but it lied through its teeth. Mozart was not an arrested-development adolescent potty mouth. And Antonio Salieri never tried to kill him.

Poor Mozart, he has had his life twisted over the centuries to illustrate cultural trends, and those trends have changed over those years.

The 19th century first saw him as old fashioned, then he became a proto-Romantic, with his life deeply mythologized. The 20th century first saw him as a kind of porcelain doll, and after WWII, saw him as a polite precursor to Beethoven. In the 21st century, he has been the victim of countless historical-performance strictures that leave his music in a kind of inexpressive jog-trot strait-jacket.

The man sometimes considered the greatest composer of all time has been so mauled over by his biographers, fans and later writers and filmmakers that the legend has taken over from the fact.

So, the plot of Amadeus is only one of a myriad of distortions, legends, myths and factifications. The truth, as usual, is more interesting.

What are some of the worst Mozart myths?

— Mozart began writing masterpieces before he turned 10.

* Yes, he wrote music beginning before he turned six. But some of that music was arrangements of other composers’ work, some may have been outlined by his father for the boy to complete, and none of them are masterpieces, or noteworthy, other than for them to have been jotted down by one so young. The early works are generic. They get played, when they are played at all, simply because they have Mozart’s name attached.

— Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave.

* Although it’s often said he died so poor he was buried in a pauper’s grave, the fact is Viennese law required anyone other than an aristocrat to be buried in a common grave, after a funeral service at the church. It was a reaction to recent outbreaks of plague in the country. And Mozart wasn’t poor. He lived quite well, although, working in what we would now call a “gig economy,” he had his income ups and down.

But, over his last year, he earned 10,000 florins when an average laborer averaged 25 florins a year. It put him in the top 5 percent of the population of Vienna, according to H.C. Robbins Landon, author of 1791: Mozart’s Last Year. The man was no pauper, and his music was hugely popular, not only in Vienna, but across Europe. And when he died, he had a hit on his hands: The Magic Flute. He left his widow reasonably comfortable.

— Mozart wrote his music spontaneously, without effort.

* Mozart’s facility with music was remarkable, but there are plenty of sketches and studies for his music. The pieces without such preliminary work most likely had them at one time, but they don’t survive. His widow, Constanze, burned most of the sketches, not thinking that fragments had any value. Mozart even writes to his father about doing such preliminary work.

In 1787, he told the conductor of his opera, Don Giovanni, “It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I.”

— His middle name was Amadeus.

* He was baptized as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart but his parents called him Wolfgang Gottlieb (Gottlieb being German for Theophilus). He usually signed his name Wolfgang Amadé. It was only after his death that people began regularly calling him Wolfgang Amadeus, which is a Latinized form of Gottlieb.

— His music is simple, direct, easy to listen to, easy to perform.

* And at the time of his death in 1791, at a mere 35 years old, his music was considered difficult to play and demanded careful listening. Mozart asked a lot. When the progressive Emperor Joseph II famously told Mozart his music had “too many notes, my dear Mozart. Too many notes.” he wasn’t being an ignoramus; he was reflecting the general taste of his times. To understand this, we need to place him in context.

Some Context: The Classical Era

Something else we get wrong: It is usually said that Mozart and his contemporary Joseph Haydn wrote in the classical style, as if such a thing existed, and all they did was follow the rules. That’s got it completely backasswards. They didn’t write in the classical style; they invented the classical style. They were making it up as they went along.

Music history is taught as consisting of succeeding eras. The Renaissance gave way to the Baroque, which led to the Classical era and on to the Romantic, to Modernism and currently, Postmodernism. As if they were clearly defined and separate. And it is true that after about 1740 or so the heavily contrapuntal Baroque lost its hold on the ears of its listeners. They wanted something simpler, clearer, more charming and that wouldn’t be so serious. All those fugues and counterpoint of what was called “the learned style” gave way to homophony — that is, tuneful melodies and supporting harmonies. Something you could hum along with: Simpler and more direct.

This is sometimes called the Style Galant; it followed the Baroque the way Rococo followed in the visual arts. Composers such as J.C. Bach, Johann Joachim Quantz, Johann Stamitz, or Domenico Alberti published torrents of light, catchy three-movement sinfonias and bright concertos, to say nothing of keyboard music to be played after dinner by the daughters of aspiring middle-class burghers. I’m grossly simplifying this, but the outlines are true.

This is the kind of music both Mozart and his older contemporary Haydn produced in their younger days. Mozart wrote more than 20 symphonies in this popular style before the age of 17 and if they still get played it is because, again, they have Mozart’s name on them, and also, because they are full of great tunes. Mozart always wrote great tunes.

Haydn had his own orchestra, paid for by his boss, Prince Nikolaus Esterhaza, a ridiculously wealthy Hungarian nobleman, who loved music. Hidden away at the prince’s countryside palace in Esterhazy for some 30 years, Haydn developed on his own, inventing new ways to delight and surprise an educated audience who learned and grew along with the composer. The palace was far from Vienna. Haydn said, “I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.”

He basically invented the modern form of the symphony and the string quartet.

Prince-Archbishop Colloredo

Mozart, however, was truly cosmopolitan and after freeing himself from the employment of Salzburg’s prince-archbishop Colloredo, earned his crust as a freelancer in what was becoming a “gig” economy, living from commission to commission, and from concert to concert and opera to opera.

He learned a lot from Haydn, and joined him in making his music increasingly more complex than the usual run of gallantries. They added back counterpoint to their works, increased chromatic and harmonic subtleties. Mozart’s music, for instance, is always more complex than it sounds.

Mozart asked his musicians to do more than did other composers: to play higher, lower, more quickly; to play notes unfamiliar to their instruments or voices; to attempt unusual phrasings and colorations.

At the end of Act I in Don Giovanni, three bands play onstage at the same time, performing different music in three different rhythms, but entwining their harmonies so they mesh perfectly in a tour de force of compositional cleverness.

His music sounds simple and perfect and symmetrical, but you look at the phrase structure and it’s highly irregular. Normally, you expect 4- and 8-bar phrases, but you take a look at one of Mozart’s late scores and you see phrases of 4, 5, 3, 7, 8, 6 — but you would never guess it was so irregular just from hearing it. It always sounds smooth.

And although the surface of the music is always velvety and seductive, it’s frequently chromatic, introducing notes that shouldn’t belong. Even so graceful and simple a tune as the trio from the minuet in the popular Eine kleine nachtmusik manages to use 11 of the 12 notes in the chromatic scale. It verges on Schoenberg, though it sounds as simple as a nursery rhyme.

While Haydn’s metier was primarily instrumental music, Mozart shone in vocal music, and especially opera, where he brought psychological complexity to what is sung.

Mozart as Shakespeare

Mozart was the Shakespeare of music. No composer ever displayed a wider sympathy for the human condition or a greater breadth of musical style. At the bottom of his music is a profound humanism, which is all the more obvious in his best operas — The Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni.

Of all the great composers, Mozart also is the easiest to love. Bach may be more sublime, Haydn wittier, Beethoven more in-your-face and Schubert one of the few who could write melody to equal Mozart, but Mozart remains the most accessible. He speaks directly to us, because he is the most humane.

That quality underlies all his major operas: His plots are filled with three-dimensional people, not the stock characters of most other operas. No hero is flawless, no villain unredeemable.

The miracle is that it isn’t just the libretti that convey this complexity, but the music itself. It gives us the subtle psychological undertow.

Mozart understood all of his characters well. None of them is tossed off as inconsequential. He imbues each character with definitive musical qualities.

So that Don Giovanni’s ebullient life force is expressed in his headlong “Champagne Aria,” with barely a moment to inhale. Or the Queen of Night’s rage in Magic Flute, when she launches into Baroque arabesques and arpeggios in her showpiece “The vengeance of hell boils in my heart.”

Even in Figaro: Has adolescent horniness ever been better expressed than the “amorous butterfly” take the hero sings about the love-struck Cherubino?

All these characterizations are built on the composer’s willingness to accept without judgment everything that is human. Perhaps that’s why nobody ever wrote forgiveness better than Mozart.

Each of his major operas has a scene of forgiveness in it, and it’s usually the turning point of the action, when a character recognizes the frailty of human nature. Such forgiveness is not bestowed from a feeling of superiority but from shared compassion.

It’s not that we believe the Count in Figaro will now be faithful to the wife who forgave him, but that we know she will always forgive him, because this is what it means to accept the human condition.

But the particular mood Mozart raises in such moments also is carried into his purely instrumental music: The slow movement of his Piano Concerto No. 18 is the echo of such a moment in Figaro. It sighs, and we sigh with it.

Such genius, whether Shakespeare or Mozart, can’t be explained. You just accept that it is.

Don Giovanni

Mozart’s Don Giovanni has been called the perfect opera. It ingeniously balances comedy and drama, music and theater, the aristocracy and the peasantry, the past and the future.

It was first performed in 1787 in Prague, where the composer was a musical superstar, and told the story of the seducer Don Juan (Don Giovanni in Italian).

The story is simple in outline: After he kills the outraged father of one of his amorous conquests, Don Giovanni is tracked down by his victims. When he hides in a cemetery, the statue of the dead father miraculously asks him to dinner and, later, when the don shows up, the statue drags him to his judgment in hell.

But Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, took what was a traditional story of sin and punishment and made it into a paean to the life force. Technically, Don Giovanni is still the villain, but Mozart and da Ponte made him such an engaging and vital presence that in the end, when he refuses to repent, despite the demons that surround him and the brimstone that burns, he actually rises to the heroic. Is he hero or villain? Or both.

This is where the Classic past meets the Romantic future: The cautionary moral tale of the past turns into the Byronic hero of the upcoming 19th century, and Mozart is in the avant-garde.

Digression I: Rake with a Quill Pen

Opera is a collaborative art. Mozart’s music is great, but so was the libretto written by Lorenzo da Ponte. Da Ponte was born a Jew in Venice in 1749, was ordained a priest and opened a brothel with his mistress, where he entertained the clients by playing violin in his priest’s vestments. He was the perfect choice to write the libretto for Mozart’s dramma giocosa, Il dissoluto punito o sia Il Don Giovanni (“The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni”).

Da Ponte was a friend of the infamous seducer Casanova and was forced to flee Venice after a trial for sedition, settling in Vienna, where he wangled a position from Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor. When he was asked how many plays he had written, he answered, “None, sire,” to which the emperor replied, “Good, then we’ll have a virgin muse.”

He wrote libretti for dozens of lesser operas by lesser composers, such as Antonio Salieri, before landing a job writing — or rather rewriting — Beaumarchais’ popular play The Marriage of Figaro as a libretto for Mozart. He also wrote Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte before being shown out of the city by the police.

Da Ponte’s post-Mozart life is hardly less interesting. After marrying (quite a trick for a priest), he moved to the United States, where he failed as a grocer, became friends with Clement Moore (reputed author of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas), who helped him gain a faculty post at Columbia College (now Columbia University), where he was the first faculty member to have been born a Jew.

In 1828, he became an American citizen, died 10 years later, had a grand funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

The Pop Star

Mozart’s time was the late 18th century. He was born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1756 and was one of the great child prodigies of all time, picking up the violin when he was four and composing by the time he was five. His first opera was written when he was 12.

He was trooped across Europe by his father, playing for the amazed aristocracy and gathering gifts of money and jewels.

He outgrew his boyhood cuteness but grew to be one of the most prodigious composers of all time: He wrote 22 operas, 50 or so symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 17 settings of the Roman Catholic Mass. His complete works take up 170 CDs in one current set.

And he became enormously popular.

Mozart was the pop artist of the time. People wanted to play and hear that music so much, they transcribed the music for all kinds of ensembles. Every town had a wind band and they played arrangements. Every little village in Belgium or Bavaria could play arias from the latest Mozart opera, the way halftime marching bands now play show tunes.

Mozart makes fun of this phenomenon in the finale of Don Giovanni, when the don has a dinner in his castle, with a band playing the latest hits from operas, including “amorous butterfly” from Figaro.

He dismisses it: “I’ve heard this piece too much, he says. We laugh because it shows Mozart could take a joke. And that only makes him more human.

Digression II: Mozart and Haydn

The era from about 1770 to 1810 is called “Classical.” It’s the age of music defined by two names: Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart.

They were the twin colossuses of the time: one witty and bright, the other deeper and more melodious.

But the two men were very different. Haydn brighter and more brittle sounding, with an emphasis on what the 18th century valued as wit, making in-jokes in his symphonies and working simple themes into complex textural patterns that his audience recognized with pleasure — they got the joke.

Mozart’s music is darker, more chromatic, with a more blended sound, and he focused his attention on grace and style.

If Haydn is the brain of 18th-century music, Mozart is the heart.

They valued each other above anyone else and recognized each other’s genius. Mozart learned more from Haydn than from any other source. Haydn said Mozart was the greatest composer alive.

To many, Haydn and Mozart sound alike. They are very different but shared a musical language. So, how do you tell them apart?

One wise old professor explained his simple test: “If you can remember the tune after it is over, it was Mozart.”

Reason and order

The 18th Century is called “The Age of Reason,” although sometimes I think it may be said ironically, since, after all, it was also the age of Rousseau, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. But the overall tenor of the era was one of rationality and balance, of a just God in his heaven keeping proportionality in everything human and cosmic.

In German-speaking lands, it was the Aufklärung, the “clearing up,” and prompted enlightened rulers, such as Joseph II in Vienna, to downplay religious fervor, mindful of the chaos of the Thirty-Years War, and promote scientific enquiry and philosophy. Coffeehouses rose filled with debate and Freemasonry became fashionable. Mozart became a Freemason, and his final opera, The Magic Flute, was a Masonic allegory, of sorts.

There were certainly many points of view, but the general sense was one of moderation in all things. Don’t go overboard. Keep an even keel. Music followed suit: nothing too extreme, but nothing too simple-minded, either. It was a perfect walk between opposites.

And the major musical innovation of the era was the rise of the Sonata-Allegro form. It was the primary organizing principle for Haydn and Mozart and held sway in various permutations for the next century and a half. It is usually taught in a technical way: first theme in the home key, second theme in the dominant, followed by a development section and rounded off with a recapitulation of the two primary themes, but now both in the home key. But that is not why the form became so dominant. That is like describing an angel as having wings and white robes, without ever noting it is a messenger from God.

The point of the sonata form was to establish an order, in terms of recognizable melodies, to then disrupt the order by breaking up the tunes into bits, rearranging them, and playing those pieces in a hodge-podge of shifting key-centers, leaving the listener with no firm ground to stand upon, and then reasserting clear order once again, so the universe is set right. Order – disorder – order reaffirmed.

Once you understand the metaphor of the sonata form, you will never again be hoodwinked by the academic palaver. The music is about the primacy of providential order.

This is a metaphor that has provided the foundation of much of art. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies are all about disturbed natural order that has to be set right. Opera plots are almost all about illegitimate threats to the way things are supposed to be. It is the mega “A-B-A” of countless poems and novels.

The form made such satisfying intellectual and emotional sense that it ruled western instrumental music almost until now. Those composers who didn’t write sonata form wrote in protest to it. Take a side. It was that influential.

L’Envoi

It is nearly impossible to write words about music. One tends to write impressionistically and metaphorically about what one hears, but such language become like trying to describe color to a blind person.

The result is that when most people talk about their favorite popular music, they talk about the lyrics. The music is barely mentioned. In fact, most popular music contains scant little actual music at all: just a few familiar chord changes under a meandering set of melodic intervals. You may mention the beat, but that, too, tends to drone on monotonously through the song.

You could, if you wanted to, talk about the music, but it would take specialist vocabulary that would convey almost nothing to the lay reader: “The composer used the Neapolitan relationship to modulate from B-minor to A-flat major while dividing the treble from the bass line in hemiola.” There, does that mean anything to you? Two against three?

One reads scores rather than text to understand what is going on, but even that does not really tell you what you are hearing, only how it was done.

And so, when writing about Mozart, almost everyone falls immediately into biography. We can tell you fascinating things about his family, his sister, he relationship with his patrons or the order in which his symphonies were composed.

But the ear can hear how, in sonata form, we hit the comfort of the home key as the recapitulation calms down the churn of the development. It is something instantly felt through the ear — if you are paying attention. But how to write about that in the Jupiter Symphony or the K. 545 piano sonata comes a cropper. Just listen. It’s obvious.

One can say that Mozart blends his wind instruments while Haydn tends to keep his winds distinct. It is true, but you have to hear it to understand. Mozart’s recapitulations are usually a return to order, while Beethoven uses his recaps (in his mature work) to take the music to a new place, a “new normal” that means we have moved through the development from Point A to Point B. Mozart’s melodies tend to be step-wise, as a human voice might sing, while Haydn often jumps around because fingers on a keyboard can do so.

These are swooping generalities, and there are plenty of exceptions, but they are attempts to write about the music rather than the historiography.

The only recommendation is to listen to more music, lots of it, and absorb what you can, so you can distinguish the difference between a sonata form and a rondo, between an English horn and a bassoon in its upper register. Hear it and pile it into your trove of experience. It is the sounds that are made that is the music. Words get in the way.

And pay attention. Music isn’t a warm bath you slide comfortably into, but a conversation the composer is having with you.

La vie de Bohème

December 31, 2024

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When I see photographs of myself in my 20s, I am deeply embarrassed. I seemed to be play-acting in some fictional version of the life I believed I was living, or wanted desperately to be living. I clearly thought I was ripe for la vie de Bohème.

I am probably not alone in this. From the onset of adolescence, most of us, I believe, are trying to figure out who we are, and believe — quite wrongly as it turns out — that we have some choice in this.

For me, as for quite a few in my generation, coming of age in the Eisenhower years, the banal middle-class life was something we wanted to escape. The world of art and artists — or poetry and poets — seemed so much more vital, so much more real.

It was in the air. Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, came out in 1960, when I was 12 years old. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was released in 1957. In the same year, Alan Watts produced his Way of Zen. All of these things presented a way of life that seemed to this unformed New Jersey boy so much more real — so much more important — than buying annual new school clothes at the Paramus mall.

“What are you rebelling against?” “Whatya got?” Maynard G. Krebs.

My parents were reasonably intelligent, but they were not college educated and they were not readers. I thought at the time they were intolerably boring. I read everything I could get my fingers on, including books that were way above my puny ability at that age to comprehend. I thought bourgeois respectability was the enemy, and in a fit of juvenile delinquency, I would stuff paperbacks from the book rack in the local drug store into my pocket and make off with them. I thought I was so daring, so rebellious. By real-life standards, it was pathetic; the real thugs in my town were Mafia kids and all the books I took were literary:

John Updike’s The Centaur; Malcolm by James Purdy; John Knowles’ A Separate Peace; The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth; A Death in the Family by James Agee — you get the picture. As I look back on it now, I’m pretty sure that Everett, the pharmacist, knew what I was doing, but recognized that they were likely books that would never sell anyway in suburban New Jersey and that I would benefit from reading those books more than he would from keeping them dusty on his book rack.

I bought a subscription to Evergreen Review and another to Paul Krassner’s The Realist. And just to go the extra length of high-school pretentiousness, I also got a subscription to Les Temps Moderne, although I knew no French. But, it was Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine and I knew he was important. I was desperate to join the grown-up world of truly important things — not like the pep rallies and gym classes of high school.

The attraction of the bohemian life were all too apparent to me then, and all through my college years and into my 20s. It was a fantasy enriched by exposure to literature; actual bohemians were sparse on the ground in Bergen County. The tradition of poor scholars, thumbing their noses at conformity is long, and goes back at least to the Roman poet Catullus. I found a used copy of Francois Villon’s Testament and then, there was Goethe’s Faust and Puccini’s opera, La Bohème.

As I headed off to college, I imagined myself as one of those louche students, full of sex and alcohol, but also drunk on great books and music and art. Of course, there were others there who shared that vision and we became friends, like Rodolfo, Marcello, Shaunard, Colline, Mimi and Musetta.

Or so we imagined ourselves. I was filled with an exaggerated sense of art and literature, but lagged in classwork. I’m sure I read more than my curriculum required, but rather less of those texts assigned in class. After all, textbooks were dull and Dostoevsky was not.

We knew we were “special,” and that we would become, if not famous, at least important. My best friend and I self-published a slim volume of our poetry and titled the thing 1798, after the year Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads. Their poetry changed the climate for literature for the next hundred years; we expected ours would do the same. Being important was important to our yet unformed selves.

Rae, Aime and Alex

After graduation, with a first wife, I lived that sort of poverty, in a cheap rental apartment on the second floor of an old house, entered from stairs rising up the outside, and heated with a single kerosene stove in the living room and we ate from a book titled Dinner for Two on a Dollar a Day. I had a job paying minimum wage as a clerk in a camera store, and I found living on no money intoxicating. My first wife found it less so. A punctuation mark in the bio. Full stop.

Sandro and Mu; me and S; Cap’n Billy and Tiggy

Later, and with the succeeding unofficial wife, we lived in a duplex. I still worked in the camera store, and she was a cashier in a supermarket. We managed to save enough money to buy gear to hike the Appalachian Trail. We quit our jobs and took off for the woods. When we discovered that goal-oriented hiking (making the required miles per day to reach the next lean-to) was less glamorous than we thought, we gave up in northern Virginia and returned to Greensboro.

After that came some time on unemployment benefits and meeting up with fellow bohos in local bars, betting quarters on air hockey. Being poor was never a problem: It was exotic. We were still sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and having friends over for feasts, and at least once a year, with friends, renting a venue and holding a masked ball where we waltzed into the wee hours of the next day.

Ursus, Colin, and Spider in Seattle

But then, she left to get married and I was pole-axed. I hadn’t known. I gave up everything (well, except my books), and moved from North Carolina to Seattle, where I lived with my old chum, Ursus, who was then a bicycle messenger in the city. I was offered a spot in the coal bin in the basement, and lived more vie bohème on a mattress on the concrete floor. Being jobless gave me time for a lot of reading.

I eventually got a job at the zoo, and became crazy about a zookeeper I fell for, but depression wore me down.

And so, I moved back to the South and lived with my 1798 co-author and his wife. They gave me a room in their old farmhouse, with its only heat being a wood stove in the kitchen. I did the cooking and maintenance work while they went to work. A few daylong pick-up jobs and I earned a total of $900 for the entire year. It seemed sufficient. This was truly la vie de bohème.

My second official wife invited me to visit in the Blue Ridge and eventually, I moved in with her and her teenage daughter. Still no job, still poor as a midge and happy as a clam. But I was now over 30 years old and never had a real job. It was beginning to wear thin.

I mention all of this because I recently watched a 1992 film by Finnish moviemaker Aki Kaurismäki called La Vie de Bohème and based on the 1851 novel Scènes de la vie de bohème by French author Henri Murger, which, in turn, was the source for Puccini’s opera.

Henri Murger by Nadar, 1857

It is in many ways a brutal and heartbreaking film, mainly because, unlike the opera with its young heroes, flush with romantic enthusiasms, the movie shows us a more realistic vision of bohemians, now in their 40s, and looking pretty sad. It’s fine for 20-somethings to live their fantasies; but given greying hair, paunches and ratty clothes, at 40 living such a life seems like utter failure. Not only in career, but more important, as persons. They have not found who they really are, but have worn holes in the soles of who they try to be.

These are people who had grand ambitions when young. They were going to be writers, thinkers, painters. And they each now do piecework on commission for a few dollars and do their best to avoid creditors and landlords. When our writer falls in love with a worn-looking 43-year-old Mimi, he finds himself deported to his native Albania. When he sneaks back much later, he finds Mimi is dying. It’s all much as in the opera, only everyone is at least 20 years older.

But the love between Mimi and her man is so much more real and touching, because it is adults who need each other rather than youths living out some romantic fantasy, and Mimi’s death, in the hospital, is an actual death rather than a dramatic set-piece. Life has stomped on the youthful delusion.

For me, it was my second marriage, which lasted 35 years, until my wife’s death, that turned me into who I was rather than who I played at being. It can be a long process to something approaching reality.

I don’t know if any of us can ever know who we really are, but we all know who we think we are. Most of us, as we get older, grow closer and closer to who we truly are; when we are young and full of ourselves, we live a mythologized sense of ourselves. A much more important sense of ourselves. We are going to change the world. In truth we are ordinary.

As one grows older, the graph plotting the importance of one’s internal sense of self, the mythology of autobiography begins to tail off, dropping down the chart, while the realization of who we truly are begins to climb, and there comes a point — for me, it was in my mid-30s — when the two lines cross. For some it marks the “mid-like crisis” and one can choose to attempt to grasp after the myth and buy a sportscar, or one recognizes that the actuality is more solid, more real, and more meaningful than the fantasy.

The young sense of self is a choice — a mask you wear or a role you play — and maybe you try to live up to it, but it is always a pose. The longer you hold on to it, the more you feel like an imposter. Who you are is not a choice: It is a given, and it can slowly reveal itself over time as you give up the pose. Maybe you give up the pose out of exhaustion, maybe out of a seeking of self-knowledge. Either way, it is why older people often feel so much more comfortable with themselves, so much less worried over what “others think.”

And for me, I have given up rebelling against the bourgeoisie. I have never joined in. I have too many books. But let them be who they are and let me be me.

I like Tchike

November 10, 2024

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When you have ideas where your ears should be, you can be such a self-righteous moron. My Tchaikovsky problem is a case in point. I wasted years not listening to his music. What I thought closed my ears to what I might hear.

When I was a boy, longer ago than even your parents can remember, the music of Tchaikovsky was easy to love — all those sweeping tunes and swelling fiddles. His music was, in that antediluvian age, pretty well ubiquitous. Concert halls played his symphonies, pianists conquered the Soviet Union playing his piano concerto, and supermarkets offered LP specials for 49 cents with grocery purchases. And that is where I was first exposed to the Nutcracker Suite, played by an anonymous orchestra and conductor (Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite was on the “B” side).

My parents bought successive volumes from the supermarket and I became exposed to “The World’s Greatest Music,” including Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Brahms Second, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and all of those now-familiar war horses a friend of mine used to call “The Loud Classics.”

A few years on, as puberty hit, it was music like Tchaikovsky’s that spoke to me, with its pile-driven emotional excess and immediacy. My insides swelled with powerful feelings. That sort of “heart-on-sleeve” thrum speaks to those newly activated hormones.

But then, unfortunately, I became smarter, learned more, read what critics had written. I discovered that such music was trivial, shallow, showy and unserious and learned how wrong I had been. My taste turned to Beethoven’s late quartets and Bach’s unaccompanied violin works. That was serious music.

This is something that happens to many of us when we are becoming adults and presume to take on more grown-up tastes, pretending to understand more than we actually can. Ideas about the music supersedes what we actually hear.

And so, for the next 40 years or so, I disdained listening to much Tchaikovsky. Occasionally I would spin the Pathetique on the record player. It, after all, had a second movement in 5/4 time. Like Dave Brubeck.

Looking back, I realize that the musical culture was traveling much the same route as I was taking. Music that had been pilloried for being too “modern” and “dissonant” became more mainstream. One could hear Bartok or Stravinsky in the concert halls, played alongside Beethoven and Sibelius. And musicians and conductors, grown up in the same era as I did, shared much of my taste. Tchaikovsky slowly became out of fashion. Astringent drowned out lush.

It was still played, of course, but less frequently, and by orchestras and conductors more simpatico with Modernist esthetics than the tired old Romanticism. Stravinsky had stated, in no uncertain terms “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” And Toscanini has said Beethoven’s Eroica was not about heroism, but about “E-flat.” (Neither man actually believed their own words, and their music and music-making prove that, but their words proved highly influential).

Toscanini also said, “Tradition is only the last bad performance.” But tradition is the very heart of any classical music — music handed down from one generation of masters to a younger generation. Whether it is Indian classical music, Japanese Noh flute playing, or Pablo Casals teaching Bernard Greenhouse (of the Beaux Arts Trio) and Greenhouse teaching Paul Katz, onetime cellist of the Cleveland Quartet) it is tradition that defines it.

Orchestras and conductors who had learned their art before the 20th century and continued the traditions up through, perhaps 1970 or so, had the music in their old bones, understood how it was meant to go, and how the musical arguments played out in the notes. But the older musicians died out and the younger generation taking charge had a more “objective” view of the music. A tradition was dying.

You can hear this by comparing any Tchaikovsky symphony recorded by Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) or Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) with the same performed by Andris Nelsons (b. 1978) or Vladimir Jurowski (b. 1972). The younger players play the notes clearly and cleanly, even with excellent musicianship, but notes and music are different things. The younger generation grew up with Stravinsky or Prokofiev and had no problem with their complex scores. It was a shift in sensibilities. Younger musicians can breeze through Le Sacre du Printemps perfectly, while many old recordings show esteemed conductors fumbling through, missing accents and here and there. It’s a new tradition. (And I’m not even talking about “historically informed performance practice.”)

But in the 19th century music, the older conductors knew much the younger generation had no grasp of. They knew how the music “went.” What it was saying.

The true divide between the old and new were the World Wars and millions of dead. And especially after the genocide of the Second World War, it was no longer possible to believe in such old ideas as nobility or heroism. And music about such things no longer rang true. Listen to the version of Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes performed by Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, from 1978 and you hear all the notes, and certainly there is excitement. But listen then to the 1929 performance by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Willem Mengelberg, and you hear music that believes what it is saying. There is an earnestness to it, a fervor, that feels second-hand in the Masur recording. The difference between a hero and an actor playing a hero.

And so, I and the generations that grew up with me and after me no longer had the stomach to hear such “universal” emotions as Tchaikovsky tried to evoke in his music. Nothing universal could be trusted anymore, and the grand statements of fate and tradition were dumped.

I remember when teaching, a student pushed back on something I had said. “It’s all relative,” she said. “Nothing is true. It is your truth or my truth, but nothing is universally true.” It was a common belief for her generation. And given the “truths” espoused by various institutions that were shown to be mere self-serving hypocrisy after Watergate, after “I did not have sex with that woman,” and most of all, after Auschwitz, it was hard to fault her.

But I replied: “There is one truth that is universal. You will die. I will die. All living things will die.” That, I said, is the starting point for all art. After that, we look for anything else that we may make art from. Second truth follows from the first: The people you love will die, and many of those will die before you and you will suffer loss. How do you react to that loss? Yes, some Victorian pieties seem like sentimental claptrap to us now, but the impulse behind them is very real, and we can react to that reality.

And so, when I hear Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, I feel deeply in my psyche the sense of death and loss inherent in the harmonies and melodies, and I am moved. Deeply moved. If the stylistic idiosyncrasies of his age are not ours, the underlying emotions are.

It is incumbent upon us, as listeners (and readers, and theater audiences) not to be deaf to the content of art. Yes, some music is meant only as divertissement, as Mozart serenades or Schubert ländler, but the more ambitious pieces — symphonies, operas, even ballets — are responses to the larger questions. Not only death or loss, but the subsequent propositions built from those original two: What is happiness, what is narrative, what is rhythm and physical movement and how does it all reflect the experience of being alive?

If you listen to Tchaikovsky’s music with ears instead of ideas, you hear not only emotions both bright and dark, but extraordinary melody and harmony, often rather advanced for its time, and unparalleled brilliance of orchestration.

Even so minor a piece as his Nutcracker ballet is built from absolute crystal gems of sound combinations. Pure genius.

The disdain so many now feel for the music of Tchaikovsky, or, for that matter, Rachmaninoff, or others of their era, is, as far as I am concerned, unearned, and merely an expression of ignorance. One should never cut oneself off from such delight, pleasure, and the emotions evoked. One should never close off one’s ears to music, or let ideas about the music take charge.

Es ist genug

April 20, 2024

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Is just being alive enough? It is a question I have been facing, with continued difficulty, ever since I retired a dozen years ago after 25 years as a newspaper writer.

For all those years, and for the many years before, I held jobs that contributed, in some way — often small, even negligible — to the business of society. I had a sense of being productive. This is not to make any major claim about how important my production was. It was admittedly quite minor. But it was a contribution.

Doing so was a part of my sense of self, that being a productive member of society was not merely a way of occupying my time, but was actually a moral duty. If I were slacking off, I would be harming my society. And even worse, harming my immortal soul (something I don’t actually believe in).

This is not something I thought much about on a conscious level. In fact, when I do think about it, I realize it’s quite silly. Society gets along quite well without my input. But it is buried deep down somewhere in my psyche that I must be productive.

The opposite of being productive is being lazy. And I can’t help but feel that laziness is a moral failing. I have tried to excavate my brain to discover where this sense comes from and I cannot be sure.

The easy answer comes up, “Protestant work ethic,” and it is true that I was raised in such an environment. But religion has never played an important part of my life. As I have said before, I have no religion; I’m not even an atheist.

But somehow, I seem to have been injected with this guilt about not always doing something. Making something; teaching something; selling something; performing something.

It is true that my grandparents, on both sides of the family were quite religious. My father’s parents were even infected with a kind of Lutheran religious mania. They went to church three times a week, prayed constantly, and when they were young, before World War II, my father and his siblings were not allowed to listen to the radio, to music or to dance. In fact, this church-craziness led my father to promise never to inflict this kind of joyless religion on his children.

And so, although we all went to church on Christmas and Easter, it was only to make my mother’s mother happy. She was religious in a more normal way, and was always kind and loving. But I and my two brothers managed to escape our childhoods without any religious sentiment at all.

Or so it seems. While I have no supernatural beliefs — the whole idea of a god or gods seems pointless — something of the culture seems to have leaked in.

For all of my 25 years at the newspaper, I averaged about three stories per week. I always felt as if I were slacking off and that I should be writing more. My editors constantly told me I was the most productive member of the features staff. But it never felt that way. Even on vacations, I took daily notes before going to bed, and used those notes to write travel stories for the paper when I got back to the office.

Before I retired, I used the computerized data base to check on my output and discovered I had written something like 3 million words during my tenure. If an average novel is about 90,000 words, it means I wrote the equivalent of more than 30 novels in that time. My last project for the paper was a 40,000 word history of architecture in Phoenix.

And so, when I left my job, it was like stepping off a moving bus, racing to a halt and trying to keep my balance.

My colleagues at the paper bought me a blog site as a retirement gift, and I began writing for it instead of the newspaper. At first, I was writing an average of three blog posts per week, unchanged from my time at work.

I have slowed down greatly since then, and am now aiming for about three posts a month. I don’t always make that many. But I have written more than 750 blog entries in the 12 years since I left the newspaper. which is still more than one a week. And I also write a monthly essay for the online journal of the Spirit of the Senses salon group of Phoenix. That’s an additional 103 essays, each averaging about 1500 words. Blog and journal, it all adds up to about an additional million and a half words written since giving up employment. Old writers never really retire, they just stop getting paid.

And none of this is paid work. I write because I cannot not write. When I am not blogging, I am writing e-mails. Old-fashioned e-mails that are more like actual letters than the quick one- or two-sentence blips that constitute most e-mails. Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Nilsen?

But that all brings me back to my original concern: Is just being alive enough? Can I in good conscience spend an hour or two sitting in my back yard and listening to the dozens of birds chattering on, watching the clouds form and reform as they sail across the sky dome, enjoying the random swaying of the tallest tree branches in the intermittent wind? Thinking unconnected thoughts and once in a while noticing that I am breathing?

In 1662, Lutheran composer Franz Joachim Burmeister wrote a hymn titled Es ist genug (“It is enough”) that Johann Sebastian Bach later wrote into one of his more famous cantatas. It is notable for including a tritone in its melody. And, in 1935 Alban Berg incorporated it in his violin concerto, written “in memory of an angel” after the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler. It is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful musical compositions of the 20th century. Es ist genug.

I remember reading that in India, the idealized life is understood to be a youth of play, and adulthood of work and an old age of seeking spiritual truths. That one is meant to lay down one’s tools and contemplate what it has all been about. And I take some comfort in the possibility that, at the age of 76, it is now my job no longer to produce, but to absorb all those things that were irrelevant to a normally productive life. To notice my own breathing; to feel the air on my skin; to recognize my tiny spot at the axis of my own infinitesimal consciousness in an expansive cosmos. To attempt to simply exist and to feel the existence as it passes.

Covering your budget

March 3, 2024

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When I was a young and poor college student and wanted to buy a classical music LP, I was faced with a choice. Most of the biggest names in the field recorded for one of the major labels: Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Columbia, RCA or Angel (aka EMI). And those disks were pricey.

In some cases, I would just have to suck it up and spend more than I really should have. But there was an alternative. There were budget labels, offering their records at cheapie prices.

Most were sub-labels of the pricier brands, as Seraphim sold older versions of Angel releases, or Victrola from RCA and Odyssey for Columbia. And Vanguard Everyman. And there were some bottom of the barrel labels, with really poor recordings of Eastern European, and Russian musicians, such as Melodiya and Urania. Those sounded awful.

And their album covers were usually cheaply designed, or copies of how the premium brands showed themselves, with photos of the conductors or musicians, or with pretty landscapes. After all, classical music was serious. It was art.

But then came the Baroque revival, and instead of Beethoven symphonies, we were offered Vivaldi, Telemann and Monteverdi madrigals. The Sixties were in full swing, the budget labels dove into bright, colorful, more lively album covers, often with whimsical illustrations.

These were Nonesuch recordings and the Vox budget label, Turnabout. My collection was full of them

There were two labels in particular that went for the comic and the hip. Westminster and Crossroads. The created memorable cover art, but took very different paths.

Westminster Records began life in 1949 as a high-end audiophile label, but by the time I came to know them, they were a low-end budget brand, and their covers were as simple and unadorned as the “plain brown wrapper” that used to hide racy novels. Those red covers, with a horizontal black line were easy to spot in the record store bins, and for those of us on a limited budget, an instant look-see. The performances were generally very good, if by musicians more noted more in Hungary or Poland than in Carnegie Hall. They were dependable. I owned bunches.

But, the label was bought out by ABC-Paramount and by 1970, they began marketing their back-issue catalog with sometimes ridiculous and campy cover art. To attract the kids, I guess.

They included a Beethoven concerto with a busty brunette, whose busts were those of the composer, strategically placed. Or Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite with a faux Georgia O’Keeffe cow skull, or — my favorite — a Barbarella knock-off of cheap sci-fi for Gustav Holst’s Planets.

(Click on any of these images for a clearer look)

These covers are now collector items for a memorable gallery of time-stamp art. I have gathered images of well over a hundred of these gems, and thought I should share a few of them.

Westminster sold the 1968 Hans Swarowsky Nuremberg Ring Cycle with Carnaby Street Valkyries, Rhine Maidens and Norns.

And there was the two-disk recording of Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, coming out hot on the heels of the Franco Zeffirelli film starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. Could this cover be a coincidence? See the image at the top of this column. The album folds open to give us the whole picture (Love those socks).

Then, there is organist Virgil Fox’s “Greatest Hits,” with the baseball player; traditional Italian songs with, of course, just the kind of mafiosi who regularly croon such tunes; and to round out the ethnic stereotypes, there is Albert Ketelby’s In a Chinese Temple Garden. Subtlety is no object.

Then, there’s the sex and death contingent. Although what a cast-off bra has to do with Mozart is hard to tell. Tosca, though, surely liked to show off her décolleté, although I am unaware she ever had a tattoo. The obvious follow-up is a requiem.

For some reason, the recording of Baroque flute and harpsichord sonatas shows us a bassoon and cello. And if you are going to have opera without words, you need a horned helmet and bandaged mouth. And there’s the merry widow drinking wine on a coffin.

Haydn’s clock symphony, some Beethoven trios (apparently for teddy bears), and Bach cello sonatas.

An American in Paris, selling risque pictures, a lipstick Bolero, and a gang of Russians selling us Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.

Judas Maccabaeus was known as the Jewish Hammer, so, OK. The William Tell Overture has its connotations, and the Skaters’ Waltz is obvious.

Pictures at an Exhibition needs a camera; Porgy and Bess share a disk — and eyeglasses — with an American in Paris; and, if the composer is Matthew Locke, you clearly had no choice.

There are many more, just as hokey, corny, and campy. As I said, I have about 130 of them in my files.

But, it is the other label I really like better. Crossroads was a subsidiary of Epic Records. Epic dealt mostly in popular music and jazz, but in the late 1960s, they licensed reams of Supraphon recordings, mostly recorded with Czech musicians, and sold them under the Crossroads label, with often quite witty cartoon album art. The level of performance was top-notch, with some of the world’s best soloists and orchestras.

I have gathered about 70 Crossroads album cover images, and offer a few here.

The Prague Madrigal Singers recording of Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes was the perfect performance, light, with a happy amateur feeling of a group of friends singing together. Other recordings I have owned were too operatic and artsy for Brahms’ gemütlich bourgeois lovesongs. And the cover art perfectly reflected the tone of the performance, and of the music Brahms wrote:

Unfortunately for me, this performance has never shown up on CD and I long ago got rid of all my LPs.

Many of the other Crossroads releases have subsequently been rereleased on other labels, including the original Supraphon recordings. But the album covers of the CDs never quite match the joie of these LP covers. It is also obvious that these came out about the same time as the animated Yellow Submarine movie. The style is unmistakeable.

There’s a bit of Hokusai’s Great Wave in this Debussy. More Yellow Submarine for unknown classical-era composers and Someone has to vacuum up all the dropped notes.

There is, of course, a lot of Dvorak and Smetana in these Crossroads releases.

But it’s not all Czech. Here’s some Franck and a great Schubert “Trout” quintet. And even some of the musicians are not Czech. There are Germans, too.

The covers are a delight, even for heavier music: Dvorak’s most Germanic symphony, Bartok raucous Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the deep slog of going through Brahms’ string quartets.

Villa-Lobos, Milhaud and others; Schubert’s giant op. 99 Trio; and 18th century Bohemian composer Jan Voríšek, apparently having his tooth pulled.

Listening to the Loud Classics on earphones; two Brahms violin sonatas (you cannot find a better performance than the great Josef Suk and pianist Jan Panenka; I owned this LP for years — a delight); and Haydn’s “Chase” symphony.

The tradition of budget recordings continued into the CD era, with some super-cheapie labels, such as Pilz and Laserlight, and there was a deluge of rare repertoire items that came out on Naxos, before that label went upscale. And the classical music recording industry has just about collapsed with fewer new recordings, but a raft of back-catalog items being issued in budget boxes by Sony, Warner, and Brilliant, often for as little as a buck a disk.

And now that I am retired, I find myself back in the same situation I was when I was newly graduated from college and making $50 a week at a retail store (well, not quite that bad off), and I find myself again stocking up on piles and piles of budget issues.

Click on any image to enlarge

It’s not all the same

February 21, 2024

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No, classical music doesn’t all sound the same. In fact, sometimes it’s hard to find any relationship at all between the far corners of the field. What do Gregorian Chant and Karlheinz Stockhausen have in common?

When someone complains that “it all sounds the same,” you can be pretty sure that the reason is simply lack of exposure. A sample group too small to generalize from. So, I thought, as a followup to my previous blog entry about classical music, I should try to stretch the boundaries of the subject, to stretch out the definition tightly from end to end to see how far it spreads.

If you listen to the items on this catalog, you will find music so different as to be hard to assign a common category.

In the previous blog entry, I attempted to move from one suggestion to the next in the most contrasting way, from, say, Renaissance polyphony to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — a clear jerk from one mode of hearing to the other.

This time, I hope to provide some framework to see how what we call classical music, or art music, developed over time. You may object that about half of the music comes from the 20th- and 21st-centuries, but that is only being fair: You should remember that the Rite of Spring — which is the traditional mark for the beginning of Modernism in music — is actually closer in time to the death of Haydn than it is to us today. Twentieth Century music is no longer new — it is classical.

(I’ve chosen a single piece from each of the large clumps of music history, varying both style and genre, including keyboard, chamber, vocal, choral and symphonic. From each period, I have supplemented the examples with two contrasting pieces for further listening.) Beginning with:

Vivaldi: Gloria in D Major, RV 589

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) wrote at least three settings for the Gloria, but this one is the version everyone remembers, with its chugging motoric drive and its brassy fanfares. It is built from 12 short movements split between choral numbers, solos and a duet for soprano and contralto.

Its catchy opening “one-TWO-three-four, one-TWO-three-four” with its octave leaps, returns later to unify the work. The Baroque era ran from roughly 1600 to 1750, although styles evolve slowly and overlap. It’s not like everyone stops writing one way and begins writing the new way. This piece, from 1715 lasts about 30 minutes and exemplifies the energetic forward motion of the Baroque.

Alternates:

J.S. Bach (1685-1750), The Goldberg Variations (1714), a set of 30 variations on a repeating bass line, for keyboard; and George Friedrich Handel (1685-1759), Musick for the Royal Fireworks (1749), a suite for a large band of wind instruments, for outdoor performance during a famous fireworks display meant to celebrate the end of the War of Austrian Succession. The crowd loved the music, but the fireworks caused a building to burn down, blinded a soldier and injured several others. Later performances often added strings to the wind band, with no further reported injuries.

Haydn: Quartet in D major, op. 64, no. 5 “The Lark”

It is often said that Joseph Haydn and Mozart wrote music in the classical style (roughly 1750-1828), but in fact, they created the classical style. If Haydn didn’t singlehandedly invent the symphony, he made it what we think of today; and he did the same for the string quartet — music for two violins, viola and cello.

This is music generally less cluttered or fussy than the earlier Baroque, and seeks a kind of modest tastefulness, along with, in Haydn’s case, a witty sense of humor, as in the imitation bird calls at the start of this quartet, which was written in 1790 and has the usual four movements: an opening allegro, a dance movement, a slow movement and a jaunty finale.

Alternates:

W.A. Mozart (1756-1791) Serenade No. 10 for 13 Winds in B-Flat, known as the Gran Partita (1781), which, in Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, he has Antonio Salieri react by saying, “It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.” Or Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat (1816), which is a really tuneful symphony built on Haydn’s model.

Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is the perfect Romantic composer, the greatest piano virtuoso of his time, and a matinee idol that all the ladies were in love with — something of which he took great advantage. His music, as in this 1855 concerto, is filled with all the wild emotion that the classical era avoided: over the top, loud, brash, and with a solo part for the triangle — it scandalized its first audiences. The jangle of the triangle was considered bad taste — but bad taste is the goal of much Romanticism. Audiences loved being scandalized.

Alternates:

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) wrote a cycle of songs, telling a sad love story, called the Dichterliebe, or “A Poet’s Love,” in 1840, and includes a song claiming over and over, “I’m not angry,” to some of the angriest music ever. Clever. Or Bedrich Smetana’s (1824-1884) Moldau, an orchestral portrait of the Czech river (now usually called the Vlatva or Voltava), which is a perfect example of the Romantic Nationalism that swept over Europe. Great tunes.

Debussy: Images for Piano, Book II

In the late 19th century and the 20th century before the First World War, music went through several changes. One of them is a rejection of Romantic excess, and the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) came up with his own style — usually called Impressionism — of ambiguous tonality, exotic scales, and an approach to the piano that was soft and non-percussive.

He wrote a great deal of piano music, including the famous Clair de Lune, but I’m offering the three pieces in his Images, second series (1907): Cloches à travers les feuilles (“Bells through the leaves”); Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (“And the moon descends on the temple that was”); and Poissons d’or (“Golden fish”).

Alternates:

Some composers went in the opposite direction, with larger orchestras, more chromatic harmonies of profound longing, in what is often called Late Romanticism, or Post-Romanticism. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) often added voices to his orchestral music, or wrote orchestral song cycles, such as his Songs of a Wayfarer (1885). Richard Strauss (1864-1949) used huge orchestras and explodes out of the gate with Don Juan (1889), a musical version of a Don Juan more idealistic than lecherous. It is an avalanche of sound, with a huge six-horn signature that, in live performance, you feel through you fundament as much as hear with your ear.

Janáček: Sinfonietta

Now we are ripe in the 20th Century, and Leos Janáček’s Sinfonietta (1926), a five-movement piece for huge orchestra, including 25 brass instruments. The first movement has 10 trumpets alone, playing a hair-raising fanfare.

All five movements are built from catchy tune-bits, extended and repeated. And although the music is clearly modernist, I’ve never come across anyone who didn’t instantly love the Sinfonietta.

Alternates:

French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was imprisoned by Nazis during World War II, and in prison camp, wrote his Quartet for the End of Time, for piano, clarinet, violin and cello (the instruments available in the camp). It is a hugely idiosyncratic piece, written to Messiaen’s own music theories, but can be overwhelmingly emotional in a good performance. And for the double-dip experience of atonal music, try Alban Berg’s (1885-1935) Three Pieces for Orchestra (1914), for something like what people used to call “modern music.”

Penderecki: Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima

Classical music, or art music, is still being written, and responds to life in the current world. We live in a post-Hiroshima age, and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) summarized the feeling in his 1961 string-orchestra piece, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, although you may have some difficulty recognizing it as string music made by violins, violas, cellos and double basses. It shrieks of the horror.

It masses its 52 string players in tone clusters and dissonances, various vibratos and odd bowings, for 8 and a half minutes, that is not meant to be beautiful, but to evoke intense emotions. It is, nevertheless, beautiful. (Remembering Tom Robbins notion: “The ugly may be beautiful; the pretty, never.”)

Alternates:

Minimalist composer Philip Glass (b. 1937) also reacts to the modern world in his film score for the Godfrey Reggio film, Koyaanisqatsi (1982). The modern world is a crazy world, as the film and music underline, but with quite a variety of minimalist techniques. The horrors of war fill Henryk Gorecki’s (1933-2010) Third Symphony (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) (1976), in which a soprano sings Catholic laments and words by victims of the Nazis, all to music so slow and so inexorable as to be almost a force of nature. Its 1991 recording by the London Sinfonietta sold more than a million copies. Gorecki, surprised at the popularity of such a sorrowful piece of music said, “perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. something they were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them.”

Epilogue

Of course, this diversity is among the European tradition of art or concert music. Most cultures have their own classical musics, such as the sitar or sarod music of India, the Chinese opera music, and Japanese flute music. Each is a tradition handed down from master to student and carried forth, with development and variation. That is what makes it classical.

If I were to think of a purely American classical music, it would be jazz. It, likewise, has a wide range of styles and sounds, from Louis Armstrong through Duke Ellington and down through Ornette Coleman.

But it is what we call classical music in the West that I am best familiar with and love. And writing this has given me the chance to listen once more to each of the pieces I’ve written about, and more joy me.

Acquiring an acquired taste

February 7, 2024

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Occasionally I get asked (OK, once) where should I start listening to classical music. Classical music is something that a few people as they age past Top 40 songs, come to believe they should begin to know, the way they should read Proust or watch foreign films.

Philip Larkin mentions the drive in his poem Church Going: “Much never can be obsolete,/ Since someone will forever be surprising/ a hunger in himself to be more serious.”

I have been listening to what is called classical music for 60 years, and my first thought is that classical music does not exist. Not really.

What is called classical is a combination of old church music; popular music that has been around so long, it no longer sounds like the pop music we know; and music meant to entertain, first, a class of aristocrats who could afford to pay for it, and then an aspirational middle class that took up the buying of tickets.

It wasn’t until late in the 19th century that anyone really considered such music “classical.” And only in the 20th century that most symphony orchestras were organized to play what in the past had just been music, but was now given this new label.

Until then, most concerts consisted of new music mixed with a few old favorites (much like modern pop music — they wanted to hear the hits). And so, old standards became classics.

Not all of the old standards were heavy and serious. Mozart wrote tons of divertimenti to be played as the count and countess ate lunch. It was only meant to sound nice, with catchy tunes. Yes, some classical music is meant to evoke deeper thoughts and emotions, some even meant to change lives.

But there is pop music that is serious, too. Consider the Beatles’ A Day in the Life, or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. They aren’t always short.

And so, when you ask about classical music, you aren’t asking about a single thing. If you were to open up that can of worms and try to learn what classical music has to offer, you will have to recognize that no one thing can suffice. Nor any one style; nor any one century.

If there is anything that marks music as classical, it is its length. Most tunes last three or four minutes, while a symphony can run anywhere from a half-hour to 90 minutes. The popular music is meant to put a tune in your head and you like it (or not) and may sing it to yourself as you wash the dishes. Such music is usually meant to be absorbed passively.

What is called classical tends to be more like a story, even a novel, with multiple characters and changing moods, so where you start is not where you end up. It is music you pay active attention to. It goes somewhere and you have to pay attention to notice the plot.

The story told in music, though, is not one that can be translated into words. It is one you listen to as it unfolds in musical terms: the melody changes, sometimes broken into pieces, the harmony turns grim or lilting, sometimes the melody might be played half-speed, or faster, or even upside down. These are all part of the musical story-telling.

So, what do I say to my friend asking advice on how to start listening to classical music?

The complaint I hear often is that classical music all sounds the same. It doesn’t. And so, I want to offer examples both of the stories and of the diversity. And I want to start off with a symphony with the clearest, most direct “story” to tell.

If there is any single place to begin, it is with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or, more formally, Symphony in C-minor, op. 67, first performed in December, 1808, in a freezing cold concert hall in Vienna, along with a host of other new works by the composer, making for a concert lasting more than four hours. For all that music, the orchestra — a pickup ensemble paid for by Beethoven himself — had only a single rehearsal to work out the kinks. In one of the pieces played that evening, the orchestra got lost and had to stop and begin the whole piece all over again.

But that Fifth Symphony eventually became iconic — the single stand-in for all of symphonic music.

It begins, as almost everyone knows with the heavy tread of the dah-dah-dah-DUMM. Those four notes are played over and over through all four movements of the symphony, sometimes straight, sometimes altered, sometimes as a drumbeat underneath another tune. I once counted in the symphony score more than 700 repetitions of dah-dah-dah-dumm. That works out to once every three seconds of music from start to finish. It’s almost OCD. It’s no wonder the notes are often compared with hammer blows.

The symphony is in the minor key, a key of angst, anger, uncertainty, which Beethoven underlines by having the music stop outright several times after we hear the four-note motif. As Peter Schickele said, in his comic sportscast of the symphony, “I can’t tell if it’s fast or slow, because it keeps stopping.”

But it picks up steam to an intense, driving rhythmic motor, all in that relentless C-minor. It blasts you over the head with it. The first movement (of four) lasts, in most performances, only about five minutes, but you may very well be worn out by all that hammering and minor-keying.

The second movement is a relief from the drive of the first, but the dah-dah-dah-dumm is often there, heard beating away in the bass line. The third movement starts with an ambiguous arpeggiated melody in the basses, but then brings back dah-dah-dah-dumm as a main theme, with the drive of a forced march. The movement doesn’t really end, but rather morphs into a chaotic repeated note pattern that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, until … until… it does — and it explodes into a big, brassy blast of C-major — the major key the entire symphony has been trudging toward for all its length. The feeling is absolutely triumphant. The spirit soars.

And yet, if you listen carefully, you will recognize that those happy, brilliant tunes are actually a metamorphosis of the dah-dah-dah-dumm, buried in a longer, rising optimistic melody. And at the very end, Beethoven drives home that C-major with 25 bars of pounding C-major chords in the full orchestra. You know you have reached the finish line with the last long-held chord. Having won it, he’s not going to let go.

The story the symphony tells is from anger and angst into triumph and joy. It is this long development of an idea that marks what is called classical music as different from popular music.

And even in classical music that doesn’t have the symphony-long coherent story to tell, each movement has its own plot and narrative. The most common narrative in classical music is presenting a theme or two, or three, in order, then mixing it all up, taking them apart, replaying them in foreign keys and disruptive orchestration, and then, finally, bringing them back in something like their original form so that you have a satisfying feeling of having returned home after a journey. Roughly half of all classical music is built on this pattern — with infinite variations.

It is the surprise variations from the standard pattern that often delights music listeners. But to get the variants, you have to have become familiar with the expectations. It is hardly different from knowing the general plan of a TV sitcom, and being delighted when the show gives you a turn on your expectations. In a modern sitcom, you almost always have a main plot, a secondary plot, and a third, smaller background action, and they alternate in your attention, but are all wrapped up by the end. Same with a symphony or sonata.

Next, about classical music all sounding the same (I have my own ignorance, too: For me, all pop music sounds the same). I have come up with a list of five classical pieces to spread the parameters. Each of these pieces can be found on YouTube to be listened to for free.

Orchestral music is what most people think of as classical music. But there is so much more.

Let’s start with some choral music. Before the late 17th century, most art music was vocal, and most often for the church. What instrumental music there was was usually improvised, rather like jazz.

So, first, listen to Spem in Alium by English composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). It is a 40-part motet setting the Latin text “I have never put my hope in any other but in thee, God of Israel.” (Spem in alium — “Hope in other”). It was written about 1570 for a combined eight choirs of five voices each.

It starts with a single soprano voice, adding others until, about three minutes into the piece, the entire five choirs all burst forth in a glorious racket. It is quite sublime.

Then, let’s go the other direction. In 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (“The Rite of Spring”) was premiered as the score to Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for the Ballets Russes in Paris. That premiere famously caused a riot. Stravinsky fled the theater in fear for his life. Or so he claimed — one never knows just what to believe in a self-mythologizing artist.

The music is rhythm torn apart, pounded home as part of what Leonard Bernstein called “Uncle Igor’s Asymmetry Machine.” It tells the ballet story of primitive Russian society and its ritual sacrifice of a young woman who dances herself to death. With its riotous dissonance, pounding percussion, and extreme orchestration, it remains perpetually modern.

But we should not forget chamber music — music for a small group of players, often just two, such as violin and piano. César Franck’s Violin Sonata in A-major is about the most tuneful sonata ever written. He wrote it in 1888 as a wedding present for the famous violinist Eugene Ysaye.

Its four movements borrow tunes from each other, and so although the movements are quite distinct emotionally, they are all tied together by the memorable melodies.

And I cannot forget song. Most of the great composers also wrote songs, though they are nowadays called lieder, which is just the German word for “song,” but gives a higher-toned, more prestigious ring to the name. But they are songs nonetheless.

The greatest of these classical song-writers is undoubtedly Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Poor all his life, and hardly recognized as a great composer by any but his closest friends, he was a gushing fountain of melody. His song Erlkönig tells the story of a father and son riding through the night on a horse, stalked by the evil elf-king who wants to take the boy. The child screams in fear, the father tries to protect him, and the goblin tries to seduce the kid away. It is a frightening song, but full of tremendous melody.

This should give you some sense of the incredible range of the art music of Western culture. And a start in classical music.

Next: A look at the changing eras of classical music

RIP PDQ

January 18, 2024

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Professor Peter Schickele has died, and there is one less star twinkling in the sky.

Schickele, who was the creator of PDQ Bach, was 88 and had been ill.

I have a long history with PDQ Bach, and I will miss his music and wit terribly. He came from a notable line of musical satirists and clowns, including Spike Jones, Anna Russell, Victor Borge and, of course, the Hoffnung Festival in Great Britain. But, at least initially, his target was Baroque music in particular.

At the beginning of what was called the “Baroque revival” in the 1960s, Schickele devised PDQ as a way to parody some of the excesses, cliches, tropes, and habits of the newly popular historical style. His first concert was in April of 1965 at Town Hall in New York. I did not attend that one, but in December of that year, he brought the program to Philharmonic Hall, and I was there for the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, and the Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons. Schickele was there as narrator and explicator; he arrived late at the hall, and swung onto the stage, Tarzan-style from the balcony.

It was one of the funniest things I ever saw or heard.

“In general, the dance music of PDQ Bach suggests that one of his legs was shorter than the other.”

The cantata — “Scholars are unaware Iphigenia ever was in Brooklyn” — has Orestes “being chased … by the Amenities” and he sings the sorrowful aria “Who knows what it is to be running? Only he who is running knows,” followed by “Run-running knows, run-running knows, ru-u-u-u-u-ning running knows.”

It was all a bit goofy, but made fun of things familiar from Baroque music. (Anyone familiar with actual Baroque opera will realize this “running knows” isn’t that much sillier than the real thing.)

The Hardart was a vast instrument made up of bells, whistles and gongs, each tuned to a different pitch, and with little windows on its front from which you could get pie. The second movement was a theme and variations, but “the variations have nothing whatever to do with the theme.”

I was a teenager then, and attended the concert with my high-school girlfriend, who became a professional bassoonist, and, in fact, later played with Schickele in PDQ concerts, and even occasionally appeared with him on radio interviews promoting concerts.

We came the next year to the second season of PDQ Bach, then at Carnegie Hall, to hear The Seasonings, The Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments, and Eine Kleine Nichtmusik.

In fact, through marriages, break-ups, divorces and remarriages, I attended a PDQ Bach concert every year for more than 20 years. Schickele took his act on the road, and wherever I was living, whether Greensboro, N.C., Seattle, Wash., Norfolk, Va., or Phoenix, Ariz., Schickele found his way and I found a ticket.

In Norfolk, I caught up with him backstage after the concert and we talked about my bassoonist ex-girlfriend. Unfortunately, she wasn’t part of the Norfolk performance. I would have loved to catch up.

PDQ Bach always functioned on two levels. Even those who knew little about classical music could enjoy the slapstick and the bad puns; but anyone with familiarity with music history could catch the often sophisticated in-jokes.

Schickele in Phoenix

I, of course, bought all the albums, and later, CDs. The last time I got to hear a PDQ Bach concert was in Phoenix in March, 2001, when Schickele and the Phoenix Symphony performed Oedipus Tex with Michèle Eaton as Billie Jo Casta, and Schickele as Tex. The program also included Swing Sweet, Low Chariot.

As his career-shtick progressed, Schickele widened his target to include the Classical era, giving the treatment to Mozart and Rossini with such things as The Civilian Barber, and The Abduction of Figaro, and into the Romantic era, with a parody opera, Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice.

Schickele and his sidekick Robert Dennis famously gave a sportscast of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “I can’t tell if it’s fast or slow because it keeps stopping.” In one live performance of this, in the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was still an issue, the “game” began with what started as the National Anthem. Half the audience stood up, hand over heart; the other half, self-righteously in protest, sat motionless. Except that the arpeggiated beginning of the anthem ended immediately with a descending arpeggio ending after a couple of bars. The whole thing took less than five seconds. Everyone in the audience, standing or sitting, was caught red faced.

He took on contemporary music, also, with Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach turned into Einstein on the Fritz. and Koyaanisqatsi became Coy Hotsie-Totsie.

The titles of his schlamperei are enough to draw whoops, especially for anyone familiar with the originals. Among them: Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra; Fanfare for the Common Cold; Goldbrick Variations; Hindenburg Concerto; Liebeslieder Polkas; No-no Nonette; Notebook for Betty-Sue Bach; Royal Firewater Musick; Safe Sextet; Schleptet in E-flat; The Short-Tempered Clavier; Traumarei for Unaccompanied Piano; The Triumphs of Thusnelda. Wikipedia lists more than a hundred titles.

In fact, he had leftover titles, ready to attach to newly “discovered” works: Rosenkavalier and Guildenstern; The Passion According to Hoyle; the Half-Nelson Mass; and Famous Last Words of Christ.

The Hoffnung Music Festival in London lasted for only seven concerts. PDQ Bach lasted from 1965 through 2015 (with a break in the 1990s) and encompassed 20 albums, 2 video recordings (many more on YouTube), and the definitive biography of PDQ Bach, titled The Definitive Biography of PDQ Bach.

I should mention that Schickele was also a serious composer, with many works published under his own name, and wrote the film score for the 1972 movie, Silent Running.

So, it wasn’t all tomfoolery. But even his parodistic work is well crafted and full of memorable tunes. PDQ will likely last a very long time.

I will miss hearing new works and weird concerts.

Birds, beasts, and bugs

December 16, 2023

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French composer Camille Saint-Saens was smarting from a concert tour in Germany that didn’t go over well, and so, in 1886, he withdrew to small Austrian village and wrote a short piece about music critics, which he called Personnages à longue oreilles, or “Characters with long ears,” in which the critics bray in imitation of asses — “hee-haw.” It is barely 45 seconds long, but it seems to have given him a bigger idea.

And so, he wrote thirteen accompanying short, mostly comic, compositions, each describing another animal, and had them played privately as La Carnaval des Animaux, or “The Carnival of Animals.” He wrote his publisher in Paris that he knew he should be working seriously on his Third Symphony, but that instead, he was having “such fun.”

Yet, fun wasn’t what he wanted to be remembered for. He was to be a serious and honored composer of five symphonies, many concertos and 12 operas. And so, he refused to allow the Carnival of Animals to be published until after his death.

The irony is that, along with his Danse Macabre and the Bacchanale from his opera Samson et Dalila, what he is best remembered for, and most loved, is this 25-minute-long musical menagerie. In fact, his best-known piece is undoubtedly The Swan, for cello and piano, the second-to-last section of the Carnival.

Many of the pieces parody famous music by other composers and popular songs, but I want to pick out, in particular, the second section, Poules et Coqs (“Hens and Roosters”), which gets its main theme from a 1726 piece for harpsichord by Jean-Philippe Rameau, called La Poule (“the Hen”), from his Suite in G from his Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin.

You can see the similarity, even in these few bars.

But that set me off on a search for other music about or imitating animals. It’s not just “Old MacDonald” and his “oink, oink, here and an oink, oink there,” but in fact, a long history of musical animals. Some famous, some obscure.

Of course, such animal imitations go back to prehistory, if we believe the musicologists, who tell us that they often feature in folk songs, from all around the world. “Old MacDonald” is only one of them in English. But there are Chinese songs, Turkish songs, Swahili songs, all with animal noises as part of their lyrics.

But I was most interested in Western art music, after the invention of musical notation and printing, where the music could be tracked down and maybe even listened to (on YouTube when available).

The earliest I found was from the middle of the 13th century, a ditty called Sumer is icumin in, with its lyrics “lhude sing cucu,” which have been set to various tunes, most of those I have heard include a melodic line that imitates the falling third of the cuckoo birdcall.

No doubt because the cuckoo’s call is so distinct and so clearly a falling third, it is about the most frequently used birdsong in classical music, as we will see (followed by the trilling of the nightingale).

Indeed, the next entry is Par Maintes Foy, by 14th century composer Jean Vaillant, which not only has the singers call out the cuckoo and the nightingale, but also the goldfinch, starling and quail. “Lire, lire, lirelon,” Toowee, toowee, toowee.”

But it isn’t all birds. In 1505, Josquin de Prez, perhaps the most famous of all early composers, published his El Grillo, which has its singers imitate the sound of a cricket.

Clement Jannequin (11485-1558) wrote Le Chant des Oiseaux (“Song of the Birds”) with a blackbird singing “Ti-ti, pi-ti;” the nightingale trilling on “Frian, frian;” and the cuckoo again doing his “Cu cu, cu cu.”

Pierre Passereau (1503-1553) wrote Il est Belle et Bon, in which a wife praises her husband for being so compliant and even feeding the chickens, which she then imitates “co co co co da.”

In his Book of Ayres with a Triplicitie of Musicke, from 1606, John Bartlett published a madrigal called Of All the Birds That I Do Know, in which words get repeated in a way that clearly evokes the chatter of birds. “Of all the birds that I do know, Philip my sparrow hath no peer … Philip will cry still, ‘yet, yet, yet, yet, yet, yet.’”

As we leave the vocal Renaissance and enter the more instrumental Baroque age, we begin having fiddles and hautboys imitating various birds and beasts.

Sonata Representativa (1669) by Heinrich Biber dedicates a movement each to imitations of nightingales, cuckoos, frogs, hens and roosters, quails and cats. Written for violin and continuo, it alternates short interludes with sections depicting animal sounds. After a Preludio, a Nightingale on the violin sings four eighth notes repeated and a long trill over a pedal; a Cuckoo hits repeated fast eighth notes making the usual cuckoo sound; then come Frogs with an appoggiatura of dissonant seconds, sounded together, and resolved upward, over and over to make croak; Hens cluck with upward portamento; quail have a repeated dotted rhythm “dah, da-dah;” a Cat comes mewing portamenti in nursery-rhyme-like tune; then all is rounded off with a march.

Georg Phillip Telemann wrote his Alster Overture, with a fourth movement imitating “Concertizing Frogs and Crows.” There is also a swan in another movement.

Of course, the most famous and familiar sounds come from Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In the opening movement of the four concertos, we hear the squawking of birds. In the second movement, he has dogs barking, and in Summer, the slow movement has the strings buzzing around as a swarm of flies.

But it wasn’t only the Seasons: In his Flute Concerto, op. 10, no. 3, “Il Gardellino,” he has the flute imitate a goldfinch.

The keyboard is well represented, too. In addition to Rameau’s La Poule, there is Louis-Claude Daquin’s The Cuckoo and Francois Couperin’s Le Moucheron (“The Gnats”), to say nothing of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata No. 30 in E-flat, known as the “Cat Fugue,” with a tune that imitates a cat walking distractedly up a harpsichord keyboard (an early version, I guess, of Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys).

Then, there’s Georg Friedrich Händel’s Organ Concerto No. 13, known as “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” from 1739, with birdsong in the second movement.

There’s no counting the birds, beasts and bugs in the music of Franz Joseph Haydn. He loved a good joke, and among his 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets (to say nothing of his 41 piano trios, 52 piano sonatas, and 126 baryton trios — not counting the additional 36 baryton works for that obsolete instrument with other pairings) you can find Symphony No. 82, “The Bear;” Symphony No. 83, “The Hen;” String Quartet op. 33, no. 3, “The Bird;” Quartet op. 50, no. 6, “The Frog;” Quartet op. 64, no. 5, “The Lark.”

And in his magnum opus, The Creation, in Part 2, describing Days 5 and 6 of the biblical creation, he has the orchestra imitate multiple birds and animals, including an eagle, a whale, a stag, lowing cattle, and even a worm.

As we move into the Romantic 19th century, the animals are truly fruitful and multiply, beginning with the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which ends with a cadenza that quote quail, nightingale and cuckoo.

So, let’s make a quick list — as quick as it can be with such a long zoo parade. There is Schubert’s song, The Trout; Robert Schumann’s Papillon and the Prophet Bird; the braying donkey in Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Chopin’s Etude, op. 25, no. 9, known as “The Butterfly Etude.” Not forgetting that it was said that Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” was inspired by the composer watching his dog, named Marquis, chasing its tail.

Cats screech over and over in the Cat Duet, attributed to Gioacchino Rossini (jury’s out on the authorship).

To continue: There are birdsongs in the woodwinds in Bedrich Smetana’s Bohemian Woods and Fields; The Flight of the Bumble Bee, from the opera Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov; The Lark by Mikhail Glinka; the Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; the “Dying Swan” and the “Dance of the Cygnets” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; and The Swans of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius.

In Scandanavia also, we have, but Edvard Grieg: The Butterly; Little Bird; The Pig; The Horsefly and the Fly; and Cow Call. And from his contemporary Norwegian composer The Hare and the Fox by Harald Saeverud.

Serge Rachmaninoff’s Etude Tableau, op. 39, no. 2 for piano is called “The Sea and the Gulls.” Enrique Granados wrote The Maiden and the Nightingale. And Richard Strauss caused some grumpiness and consternation in his staid German audience when, in the middle of his tone poem Don Quixote, he has the orchestra imitate a herd of sheep. But Strauss was no stranger to vulgarity: It is one of his strong points.

Which brings us up to date with Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, which gives us, in order: a lion; hens and roosters; wild asses; tortoises, the elephant, kangaroos, fish in an aquarium, personnages a longue oreilles; a cuckoo in the woods; birds in the air (aviary); pianists practicing scales; fossils; the swan; and a finale that brings back many of the menagerie.

But it’s not over yet. As we move into the 20th century (and the winding-up of the 19th), there are some very beautiful evocations of nature and the animals in it. Such as: Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. Or the fourth movement of his North Country Sketches, called “The March of Spring: Woodlands, Meadows and Silent Moors.”

Ralph Vaughn Williams gave us one of the most beautiful violin show-off pieces in his The Lark Ascending. He also put some swarm sounds in the overture to his ballet The Wasps. Edward Elgar wrote for voices a very peculiar piece called Owls: An Epitaph. Pianist Leopold Godowsky gave us, in his Java Suite, a movement called “Chattering Monkeys.”

Claude Debussy wrote Poissons d’Or (“Goldfish”) in his Images, Book 2, no. 3; and his counter-Impressionist Maurice Ravel wrote Oiseaux Triste (“Sad Birds”) in his Miroirs. Paraguayan guitar virtuoso Agustin Barrios wrote Las Abejas (“The Bees”).

Ottorino Respighi took music from early composers and reworked and orchestrated it in his Gli Ucelli (“the Birds”), with movements called “The Dove,” “The Hen,” “The Nightingale,” and “The Cuckoo.” But he goes one better in his Pines of Rome, by including an actual sound recording of a real nightingale. (Tape recorded animal sounds return later in the century.)

Whole chapters might be given over to Gustav Mahler, who began his very first symphony with cuckoo calls, and inserted all sorts of animals, birds, and natural sounds into his music, including cow bells in his Sixth Symphony and a donkey braying in his Third, so say nothing of the sleigh bells in the Fourth, fish in his song Saint Anthony of Padua Preaches to the Fishes. They show up again in his Second Symphony. Nature is never far from the surface in Mahler’s music.

But more than in Mahler, bird song is everywhere in the music of Olivier Messiaen. The man was obsessed with bird sounds. He used them often as the source of his thematic material (I hesitate to call them tunes), not simply transcribed, but often lowered in pitch, slowed down radically, or even played upside down or backwards.

His 1958 Catalogue d’Oiseaux (“Catalog of Birds”) is a collection of 13 pieces for piano, each of which is based on the call of a different bird, running from the Alpine chough, the Eurasian golden oriole, the blue rock thrush and the tawny owl, through the woodlark, Cetti’s warbler, the common buzzard and the Eurasian curlew. The whole catalog takes just short of three hours to perform.

Then, there is the Petites Esquisses d’Oiseaux (“Small Sketches of Birds”) from 1985, six short piano pieces, about 2 minutes each, that picture blackbird, skylark, thrush and robin. The L’Abîme d’Oiseaux (“Abyss of Birds”) is one movement from the Quartet for the End of Time. Le Merele Noire (“Blackbird”) is from Le Reveil des Oiseaux (“Dawn Chorus”), La Fauvette des Jardins (“Garden Warbler”) — on and on through his works, the birds are the foundation of his music. A devout Catholic, Messiaen saw birds and their song as emblematic of the beauty of God’s creation.

Although, to be honest, it is usually hard to hear the music as bird calls, since they are so transformed by the composer. You kind of have to take his word for it.

It’s hard to keep up with Bela Bartok, also. He wrote many short piano pieces, some of which bear the names of animals. But there’s The Diary of a Fly (Mikrokosmos vol. 6, no. 42), and the famous Bear Dance from his Ten Easy Pieces.

But he is best known for the several “Night Music” pieces, from his Out of Doors suite for piano; the slow movement of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; and the middle of his Piano Concerto No. 3. Wikipedia lists some 20 compositions where Bartok employs his Night Music, which imitates the sounds of a Hungarian summer evening, with insects chirping, birds singing and frogs croaking. The effect can be miraculous.

(Duke Ellington wrote his own versions of night music in his Queen’s Suite, with movements called “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” “Lightning Bugs and Frogs,” and “Apes and Peacocks.” I mention it here because, really, Ellington is classical music.)

Igor Stravinsky has elephants dancing in his Circus Polka, and nightingales warbling in his Chant du Rossignol. It has been reported that his Rite of Spring contains quotations from Russian folk songs about animals. I’m taking the musicologists’ word for that.

Sergei Prokofiev has his own menagerie in Peter and the Wolf, and Malcolm Arnold attempted to add animals to Saint-Saens’ zoo with his own Carnival of the Animals, written for the comic Hoffnung Festival in 1960. His additions are: The Giraffe; Sheep; Cows; Mice; Jumbo; and Chiroptera (Bats) — the last of which is a joke, since the musicians “play” so high in frequency that “only bats can hear it.” The audience hears silence until a final tinkling on a bell.

Several 20th century animal-musics were created as humor or jokes, including The Monk and His Cat from Hermit Songs, op. 29, no. 8, by Samuel Barber; The Cat and the Mouse by Aaron Copland; the Promenade (Walking the Dog), written by George Gershwin for the Fred Astaire film, Shall We Dance, and The Procession of the Cats on Solstice Night by Bohuslav Martinu.

Then, there’s Ferde Grofe’s On the Trail from the Grand Canyon Suite, with its clopping hooves and braying donkey.

The Critics

Francis Poulenc took on the grasshopper, bear, lion and roosters for his Les Animaux Modèles, a ballet from 1942 based on the fables of La Fontaine.

I mentioned earlier Respighi’s recorded nightingales in The Pines of Rome. Alan Hovaness famously used recordings of the humpback and bowhead whales in his And God Created Great Whales. (George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae does not include actual whale songs, but uses electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano to imitate both whale songs and seagulls.)

And in 1972, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote his Cantus Arcticus, subtitled Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, which uses recorded sounds of birds from northern Finland against a symphony orchestra.

This list does not exhaust the trove of animal-inspired concert music, but it is what I could dig up without spending two years on a doctoral dissertation. It is a tradition that continues, both in a simple vein, as with Sally Beamish’s Songs from Hafez, which reference the nightingale, the peacock and the hoopoe, and the more avant-garde work, such as Chris Hughes’ piece for cello and bird recording, Slow Motion Blackbird, which repeats the blackbird call for six minutes, slowing down each bar of music 5 percent (without changing pitch) until it is a slow, almost unfollowable adagio.

Most of this music is easily available, either on commercial recordings or through a YouTube video. Chirp chirp.

Ouroboros: Infinity

Music to cry for

December 8, 2023

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Classical music critic David Hurwitz recently posted a YouTube video on works that “reduce me to a quivering puddle of emotional resonance.” He cited 10 compositions that seem to work, no matter how they are performed (although, they can be ruined by a miserable performance).

“The crying can be sadness; it can be happiness. Usually for me it’s a confrontation with something which is so beautiful … it just seems to get to the heart of the universe and makes me weep. What can I tell you? It happens.”

He then invited his viewers to submit their own lists of works that bring on the waters. A subsequent video addressed those lists.

Such lists usually come in round numbers: “Top Ten,” or “The Hundred Best,” etc. But when I made my own list, I realized I could go on for quite some time.

I begin my list with the sarabande in J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 5 for unaccompanied cello. It is a ridiculously simple composition, barely more than a hundred individual notes, almost all unrelieved slow eighth-notes, but notes that plumb the deepest depths of innigkeit — that profound sense of inner subjective experience, of aloneness from the world, contemplation of things beyond words.

The tears come, not from sadness, but from a sense of being left to your own thoughts in the darkness, the knowledge that, no matter how much you love or engage, there is always an awareness of separation. An aloneness we share with everyone else on the planet.

I’ve heard the sarabande, and the suite, countless times, both live and on recordings. The one that always does me in is the version played by Pablo Casals in 1939. Casals was the person most responsible for the resurrection of the score, after he found a forgotten copy in a used book store in 1889, when he was 13 years old. He waited until he was 60 before recording them. There is some fuzz and hiss to the old 78rpm recordings, but the depth of Casal’s playing speaks through it all.

The sarabande has struck many as special, even among the whole of Bach’s works. Cellist Paul Tortelier called it an “extension of silence.” Yo-Yo Ma played it on Sept. 11, 2002, at the site of the World Trade Center, while the names of the dead were spoken, on the first anniversary of the attack.

Second on my list is the final chorus of Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew, Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder, which expresses grief over the death of Jesus on the cross. That chorus transcends religious doctrine so that I, as a non-believer, can internalize the sense of loss, of death, and grieve along with them. “We sit down in tears,” they sing, with a section that also asks for “peace, sweet peace.”

I first head the chorus as film-score music for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Neorealist retelling of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, a dour black-and-white version, almost word for word from the Bible (and how peculiar that the most successful Christian film should come from a homosexual Communist atheist, but with reverence for the humanity of the story; no Cecil B. DeMille hokum and claptrap for this one).

Grieving is one cause for the waterworks in listeners. How can you not feel the intense sadness of Dido as she faces her own death in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, in the section known as Dido’s Lament, “When I am Laid to Rest.” It is a ground bass (repeated bass line), over which she sings “Remember me … remember me.” It is heartbreaking.

Alban Berg used his entire Violin Concerto to express mourning over the death of Manon Gropius, daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, who died of polio in 1935 at the age of 18. Berg dedicated his concerto “To the memory of an angel.”

It begins quietly on the violin’s open strings, builds to an angry climax, and reaches a point of cosmic acceptance with a quote of J.S. Bach’s chorale, “Es ist Genug” (“It is enough.”)

After all the turbulence of the anger, the simple hymn, albeit harmonized in a very 20th-century way, seems like the peace of the angels, a calm in the universe. I, for one, cannot listen to the concerto without tears streaming down my cheeks.

Although it is written in his idiosyncratic 12-tone style, the Berg Violin Concerto is never simply noise: Even those who hate modern serial music love this concerto. It is music, not theory.

These several pieces work because, while they are expressing their grief over a specific death, they also subsume the rest of us. And there is music which expresses not individual grief, but Weltschmerz — “the sorrows of the world” — that sense that all lives have an end, that life is suffering, that “no one gets out alive.”

The work that seems to hit everyone in the gut with this is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Originally the slow movement of a string quartet, Barber orchestrated it to create the version known best.

The music is simple, barely more complex than a Gregorian chant, but builds slowly to an overwhelming climax, then silence, then a short peroration of calmness and repose. Never a dry eye.

The only problem with the Adagio for Strings is that it has become so popular, played at the funerals of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco, Albert Einstein, and Barber himself. It has become de rigeur for public tragedies such as Sept. 11, The Charlie Hebdo attack, the 2016 Brussels bombing and the Orlando nightclub shooting, and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, and in 2020 for the victims of the Coronavirus. To say nothing of how many movies it provides a trigger for emotions, as in Platoon, The Elephant Man and Lorenzo’s Oil. So that, for some, it can no longer be heard innocently, but only with irony, as in its appearance in Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and South Park.

But so far, the Adagio has proved bulletproof. It always works. Emotions pour out. The music is powerful.

And talk about Weltschmerz: Another concerto brings out the emotions almost instantly, and that is Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Unlike most classical music concertos, it opens with the solo cello playing widely spaced E-minor chords, ringing sad and hollow, followed by a short cadenza before the orchestra ever plays a note.

Elgar wrote it in 1919 in distress over the death and destruction of the First World War. It is a musical evocation of the famous lament of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” It is hard, with our distance from the events, and after the Second World War and the horrors of the Cold War, to fathom what a psychological wrench that first cataclysm was for the world, and how much it was clear that everything anyone knew had changed utterly and forever. So much was lost. Elgar’s concerto puts that sentiment into music.

That sense of loss is personal as well as civic, and you sense it in the greatest of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, “Im Abendrot.” It is a song for soprano and orchestra that conveys such a sense of longing and loss that even without the words, the orchestra alone can bring out the tears.

In it an old couple stands on a hill looking at a sunset, a lark flies off into the twilight and the words by German poet Joseph von Eichendorff, say, “Wie sind wir wandermüde — Is dies etwa der Tod?” “How weary we are of wandering — Is this perhaps death?”

There is something of the same feeling (and similar orchestral lushness) in Gustav Mahler’s Der Abschied, the final song of the cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, “The Song of the Earth.” The half-hour song tells of the beauty and permanence of nature and in the brevity of the human life. Even for a Mahler nut like me, who loves pretty much everything the man put on paper, Der Abschied is the single most beautiful and heartbreaking thing that composer ever wrote.

“O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens – Lebens – trunk’ne Welt!” “O beauty! O eternal loving-and-life-drunk world!” And the voice finally shrinks down to near-silence repeating the word “Ewig,” “forever…” over and over until it and the orchestra dissolve in emptiness.

Mahler himself asked whether the music should even be played. “Won’t people go home and shoot themselves?” he asked. The thing is that the highest art may tell the most dismal tale, yet the beauty of the telling is life-enriching and leaves us weeping but full of joy.

Mahler gave us also a song of such inwardness and reflection in the Rückert Lieder, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” a setting of a poem by Friedrich Ruckert. “I am become lost to the world, with which I used to waste so much time. It has for known nothing of me for so long, it may well believe me dead.” The slow tread of the song, with its repeated incomplete upward motive, leaves you floating between earth and sky.

That Mahler song may not be the deepest expression of giving up on life. That honor has to fall to the final song in Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, “Winter Journey.” The cycle of 24 songs by German poet Wilhelm Müller collectively tell the story of a romantic young man spurned in love, who travels in suffering through a winter landscape, telling of loneliness, heartsickness, futility, fate, and finally, in Die Leiermann, “The hurdy-gurdy man,” finds an image of utter hopelessness.

“Barefoot on the ice, he sways to and fro, and his little collection plate remains empty. No one wants to listen to him; no one looks at him. … He plays and his hurdy-gurdy never stops.” The piano accompaniment repeats the same figure over and over, with no sense of forward motion, and the singer sings his words over and over with little variation. This is psychological depression at its peak expression. “Strange old man, shall I go with you?” The implication is that the Leiermann is simply Death itself.

But I may be giving the wrong impression. While music of woe may bring on the deepest emotion, so, too, can music of joy and beauty. There is a reason people cry at weddings. When any emotion, from grief to ecstasy, fills the interior space, it can swell and overflow, and the overflow valves in the human being are the eyes. The emotional pressure in the body swells until it cannot be held in check. Tears of joy, tears in the face of beauty.

I remember the words that playwright Peter Shaffer put in the mouth of Antonio Salieri in his play, Amadeus. Salieri overheard the adagio of Mozart’s Gran Partita for winds.

“Extraordinary!,” he says. “On the page it looked nothing! The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns — like a rusty squeezebox. And then, suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.”

It is an astonishing thing about beauty, real beauty, that it can sit beside the horrors of the world, the miseries, the deaths, the wars, the hatreds and injustices, and make you pause, fill you with emotions and remind you that no matter how bad things are, you still cling to life. The beauty can not excuse the suffering, but in some inexplainable way can somehow balance it. Beauty can stop time and fill you up to overflowing.

Shostakovich wrote his 13th symphony, setting the Yevtushenko poem, Babi Yar, about the 1941 massacre of more than 30,000 Jews by Nazis at Babi Yar, near Kiev. It is a powerful poem denouncing anti-Semitism and the horrors of war and hatred (and a warning about Soviet anti-Semitism). The following movements of this choral symphony take on bitter humor as antidote to bureaucracy and tyranny; the hunger of food shortage; the use of fear by totalitarians; and finally, the difference between amoral careerism and the need for artists to express truth.

This finale is introduced by a flute duet of such sweet delight, such soothing calmness, that although it cannot gainsay the horrors, it somehow balances them. The music itself, while beautiful, is nothing special in itself, but coming as it does at the end of this explosion of the miseries of the world (and especially Stalin’s Soviet Union), is such an unexpected release, it seems a miracle, and with the pressure taken off, at least momentarily, it can only be felt and expressed by its audience in the immediate explosion of waterworks.

Now, all I have to hear is the flute bit, and I instantly recall all that went before, and I weep uncontrollably.

That sense of beauty as counterbalance is the overwhelming sense you can get from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which gives us 15 to 20 minutes (depending on performance) of stillness in the universe, a slow pulse that seems more cosmic than corporeal. It comes after a terrifying first movement and a relentless scherzo. The world then, after flowing through turbulent rapids, empties out into the calm ocean of the adagio. The release is overwhelming.

It is also the slow motion of the finale of Mahler’s Third Symphony, which, after earlier movements titled “What the flowers in the meadow tell me,” “What the animals in the forest tell me,” What Man tells me,” and “What the angels tell me,” ends his symphony with a half-hour movement, “What Love tells me.”

It is marked “Langsam — Ruhevoll — Empfunden,” (Slowly — Peacefully — Deeply felt,” and moves at a slow tread, first in the strings and building, a half-hour later, with trombones and brass and a final chord that can last to eternity. Conductor Bruno Walter, who knew Mahler and conducted the premieres of both his Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, said of this movement, “Words are stilled — for what language can utter heavenly love more powerfully and forcefully than music itself? The Adagio, with its broad, solemn melodic line, is, as a whole — and despite passages of burning pain — eloquent of comfort and grace.”

The Swiss critic William Ritter said it was, ”Perhaps the greatest Adagio written since Beethoven.” Another anonymous critic wrote about the Adagio: “It rises to heights which situate this movement among the most sublime in all symphonic literature.” At its premier in 1902, Mahler was called back to the podium 12 times, and the local newspaper reported that “the thunderous ovation lasted no less than 15 minutes.”

That sense of time standing still reaches a much quieter apotheosis in the slow movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. With subtle cross-rhythms and a melody that seldom rises above a mezzo-piano, it is entirely hypnotic. The beauty of it brings me to tears almost even just thinking of it.

And there is the sublime beauty of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, a choral work that lasts a mere four minutes in just 46 bars of sighing chromaticism and sotto voce music, and, as one critic put it, is “capable of leaving the listener just as moved as might an entire five-day long cycle of Wagner’s Ring.”

Some of these may work their magic only on my ears, some seem to work for everyone. And there are times when the listener may be too tired, to caught up in other things, or a bad meal or just in a sour mood, when such music can pass by almost unnoticed. And there are times in a concert when I am so tuned in, that almost any music, played well, may bring on the waterworks.

But for me, this music almost never fails. The music triggers some empathetic response, and the emotions shiver to life. I am human; these are human feelings; these emotions are what make us human.

Music can do that better, and more immediately, than any other art.

—Richard Nilsen

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