Haydn, Symphony no. 80

 This is one of the best performances I have ever heard of one of Haydn's best symphonies:

Lost and Found

I just started re-reading the Iliad by Homer. I don't re-read it as often as the Odyssey, but every few years. I have the translation by Robert Fagles which comes with a good introduction, pronunciation guide, maps and so on.

The Iliad is around 600 pages and it is amazing that it likely started out as an oral composition, only later written down when the Greeks adopted a version of the Phoenician alphabet. That means that originally the Iliad (and the Odyssey) were performed from memory. That would be a remarkable feat. Still, there are a few people around who have large chunks of Shakespeare from memory.

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and the Old Testament are the foundational documents of Western Civilization and they exist today because they were faithfully copied over and over by generation after generation of scribes for the last three thousand years. We are also pretty lucky in that a selection of Greek tragedy and comedy were also copied along with pretty well everything Plato wrote and a good selection of Aristotle. Individual works by Herodotus and Thucydides also survived. But, the sad truth is that it is estimated that ninety percent of classical literature is lost. For good, unless some of it turns up in the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls.

One particularly keenly felt loss is ninety percent of the poetry of Sappho. But we can be grateful for the survival of a very large chunk of the poetry of Catullus which I just started re-reading in this edition:

Catullus is the lyric poet of Roman sexuality and the closer you look at that mosaic the more troubling it becomes! But what I want to recount is just how fortuitous the survival of much if not most of his poetry was. He was born around 84 BC in Verona and died around 54 BC. He was a friend of Cicero and other leading figures and widely renowned as a poet. After his death he was admired by later Roman poets but then disappeared from history for a thousand years. All that we now have, enough to fill two hundred pages, comes from a manuscript that had lain in the Cathedral Library of Verona since at least the tenth century. It was discovered in the 14th century and the story goes that it had been used to wedge a barrel of wine which was responsible for frequent lacunae in the text. This manuscript went missing, but not before two manuscript copies were made. They are the only sources of Catullus' poetry except for a few quotes in other writers. Poem 18 is an illustration of both Catullus' humor and his bawdy:

18

I dedicate, I consecrate this grove to thee,

Priapus, whose home & woodlands are at Lampsacus;

there, among the coastal cities of the Hellespont,

they chiefly worship thee:

their shores are rich in oysters!

Here are three contemporary settings of Catullus sung in Latin:

A great composer passes: Sofia Gubaidulina

From the New York Times obituary:

The Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on Thursday at 93, was that rare creature: an artist both fully modern and sincerely spiritual. “I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,” she said in a 2021 interview.

That is hardly a universal worldview these days. The era of Palestrina and Bach, who aimed to glorify God with their work, is centuries past. Music that is adventurous, religious and great is unusual in our secular time, and some of the most significant was written by Gubaidulina.

I started a long series of posts on Gubaidulina, but I never completed them. I think this is the first one: Approaching Sofia Gubaidulina. And here is the part one of the long series.

Let's end with a quotation from Gubaidulina that appears at the very beginning of the Kurtz biography:

It is not my desire to express an idea, but to give

expression to the spiritual form of an emotion

steeped in life itself.

It does not matter to me whether or not I am modern.

What is important is the inner truth of my music.

I have no doubt that women think and feel differently

than men, but it is not very important whether I am a

woman or a man. What matters is that I am myself and develop

my own ideas strictly toward the truth.

--Sofia Gubaidulina

The New York Times piece, a pretty good survey, ends with this comment:

Gubaidulina made music that manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident that it’s irresistible. She kept on writing until a few years ago; her 90th birthday was celebrated with recordings and performances around the world.

Let's end with her lovely piece for guitar: the Serenade in an excellent performance by Marcin Dylla:

 

 

Today's Listening: Takemitsu, How Slow the Wind

 

Another terrific Haydn symphony: no. 24 in D major

 

Quotes from all sorts of places

Moon and the Pleiades go down.

Midnight and tryst pass by.

I, though, lie

Alone.

--Sappho (c. 630 - 570 BC)

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth

is capable of converting it into a fact.

 --Honoré de Balzac

'Animal spirits' are the spirits of the anima, the soul, within the human body.

They govern our higher actions.

--François Rabelais

...all great violinists, with the exception of Paganini, have always been Jews.

--Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavić

Perhaps not all. Here is the very fine violinist Shunske Sato playing the Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 by J. S. Bach:

The Virtues of Music

Here's an awkward question for you: what virtues do particular pieces of music celebrate? It's awkward for several reasons, of course. What do we mean by virtue, first of all? Then, since music, instrumental music at least, is famously abstract or vague as to what meaning it communicates, how can music celebrate virtue? I'm afraid I'm going to deal with those questions rather briefly.

The virtues and vices are characteristics exhibited by moral agents and include things like honesty, cruelty, tenderness, exuberance and so on. I'm being very selective here as I'm picking ones that we might be able to discern in music. Music, it has been argued doesn't really exhibit garden-variety emotions so much as the moods and atmospheres associated with them. Music can't communicate honesty, for example, but it certainly can communicate forthrightness. It can't be cruel, but it can be agonizingly dissonant. it can't be tender, but it certainly can communicate the mood of tenderness. For more on this see Peter Kivy on music and the emotions in various texts.

If we take an empirical approach it isn't very difficult to discern specific moods in pieces of music. A Haydn symphony, for example, will often have a dynamic and rhythmically complex texture with dramatic harmonic shifts in the first movement. The virtue exhibited here is that of dynamic conflict and movement towards a goal. The second movement might feature tender expression, the third dance-like vigour and the last sheer exuberance. Put it all together and we have a nice summary of European civilization at a particularly flourishing time. The music communicates the virtues of an outward looking society that has overcome some difficulties and looks forward to meeting other ones.

This is all a vast generalization, of course--a grotesque one to some people, I'm sure. But really, it is all there in the history books and the music. If we move one or two hundred years later we find an entirely different atmosphere of inwardness, doubt, despair and so on. And the history books offer some reasons as to why.

Comments, objections?

UPDATE: If one is looking for an example of the symphonic expression of doubt and despair, a good example would be a symphony by Allan Pettersson: