What Beauty Is

We live in a very confused and profoundly hypocritical time in which nobody seems to be clear about anything. So sometimes it is a very good policy to look back at the foundation of civilization to see what was thought then. Of course that means Plato or Aristotle. For Aristotle beauty was essentially "harmonious order." These days we seem fixated on the idea that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or "beauty is subjective." But of course, "harmonious order" is not subjective and while it is perceived by someone it is not in that someone. Beauty is not subjective. It is objective. Harmonious order.

Of course what constitutes harmonious order is intricate, complicated, viewed differently at different times in history and involved with what is trying to be expressed, not to mention its relationship with the Good and the True. So what might seem simple is actually not. But Beauty is definitely not ugly, bad or some kind of lie. I suppose it is unnecessary to point out that current aesthetic practice is antithetical to beauty which is unfortunate because it means that instead of being surrounded by beauty in our daily lives, we are surrounded by ugliness.

Sculpture at Trafalgar Square

That's not a current vision of beauty, that's just aggressive ugliness. It harmonizes well with current architecture, but not so well with the traditional architecture that surrounds it. It would go well with this kind of architecture:

Obama Presidential Center

We seem to have completely lost any intuitive aesthetic sense.
 

This Summer at Salzburg

Yuja Wang at Salzburg

Sadly I wasn't able to attend the Salzburg Festival this year, but we have a pretty good overview from Jay Nordlinger at the New Criterion.

The playing of a late Schubert sonata by Arcadi Volodos is almost as regular at the Salzburg Festival as Jedermann, the play by Hofmannsthal. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was one of the founders of the festival, in 1920. Every year, his Jedermann—a treatment of the medieval English morality play Everyman—is staged.

Volodos, the Soviet-born pianist, does not play a late Schubert sonata every year, but almost. Does it make any sense to refer to “late Schubert,” given that the composer died at thirty-one? I think so. These are profound, transcendental works in the final stage of a brief but magnificent composing career.

In the very first Salzburg Festival I atttended, as a student, Alfred Brendel played all the Schubert sonatas in several recitals.

In recent years, Teodor Currentzis, the Greek Russian conductor, has become a fixture at the festival. This summer, he led his Utopia Orchestra, and its associated choir, in a concert, which included the Brahms Requiem. He also led them, and other forces, in an opera: Bizet’s Carmen. Was it Bizet’s? That is probably a matter of dispute.

The overture, I have never heard better. The music exploded off the instruments—in a stylish, agreeable way. Unrushed, it had exceptional verve and allure. Currentzis is a conductor like few others. He wakes a person up, and shows the hidden possibilities of the music at hand. (Leonard Bernstein did much the same.) Currentzis goes without a baton, sometimes fluttering his fingers, in the Furtwängler manner. In the opera pit, he had some of his players stand, when they were playing solos.

One of the finest concerts I have ever seen at Salzburg was Currentzis conducting an all-Rameau evening.

Like András Schiff, Yuja Wang, the Chinese pianist, did not announce her program in advance. She wanted to allow for spontaneity or to create mystery—or something. Unlike Schiff, she never announced her program at all—from the stage or anywhere else. She simply sat down at the piano, looked at the computer tablet on her music rack, and played one piece after another. She played twenty-one pieces in all, over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes, with no intermission. She might as well have been at home, playing through some of her favorite things.

The pieces came in no discernible order. They certainly did not come in the chronological. To begin, she played pieces by Satie, Chopin, Scarlatti, Glass, Gubaidulina, Ravel, and Adès.

Unlike in North America, nobody chats with the audience at Salzburg, something I am grateful for. 

 One of the operas in concert this summer was Der Prinz von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg), by Hans Werner Henze, composed in the late 1950s. Henze was a German who died in 2012 at the age of eighty-six. His opera is based on a play by Heinrich von Kleist, written in about 1810. The story involves war, honor, clemency. Henze meant his opera to be a statement against militarism, but interpretation is up to the individual. Der Prinz von Homburg is a political drama, a family drama, and a psychodrama.

Henze’s score is an outstanding example of his musical intellect. The music sounds like the story, from singers and orchestra alike. It is composed in “tonal-sounding atonality,” to borrow a phrase from Lorin Maazel, the late conductor. It is often fantastical, dreamlike. Every page of the score is marked by intelligence.

These are little bits from four concerts in the Festival. When I go for three weeks, I go to fourteen or fifteen concerts. This is still just a mere sampling of the Festival which comprises some one hundred and sixty concerts. The Vienna Philharmonic is the "house" orchestra for all the opera productions but they also do five concerts of which the last time I was there I attended a transcendent Bruckner 8 conducted by Ricardo Muti. There are several guest orchestras, including this year the Berlin Philharmonic, Le Concert d‘Astrée, Budapest Festival Orchestra, ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Utopia (Currenzis' personal orchestra), Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. There were also nine opera productions. Recitals included Yuja Wang, but also Grigory Sokolov, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Evgeny Kissin, Arcadi Volodos, Alexander Malofeev, András Schiff, Igor Levitt and a violin and piano recital by Isabelle Faust Violin and Kristian Bezuidenhout Harpsichord. Pretty much all the A-list pianists in the world.

There are lots of other things as well, lieder recitals, a whole Mozart series every weekend by the Mozarteum Orchestra, some very creative chamber music, choral concerts, live theater and so on. You can't possibly attend them all.

The schedule for the 2027 Festival comes out in December.

What I'm Reading Now

I haven't done one of these since July when it seems I was reading a host of books. Lately, just a few, but lengthy ones. First up the book that some have called the greatest novel of the 20th century:

Including the annotations, about 1,200 pages of fairly difficult prose with occasional bits in Latin, Gaelic, French, Italian and German. A parody of all literature since Homer. Honestly, the only novel that is even vaguely like this one is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman that I read last year. And I have to read Ulysses again pretty soon. Wow.

Including the endnotes, just under 1,300 pages. A few years ago they released a movie with the same title about two hours long. That is a kind of aesthetic fraud--to do proper justice to this long and intricate narrative you would need a movie 50 hours long! A fine and enjoyable story of adventure and 19th century society.

At only 200 pages a mere wisp of a novel compared to the others. This is the third book by Ishiguro I have read and each one impresses with its lapidary clarity. But at the same time, I feel I have to re-read them because there is so much below the surface.

The only American novelists I really enjoy are Tom Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. I had a terrific professor for the English Literature course in first-year university and he assigned The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber which, along with Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony, has stuck with me ever since.

Let's have a little musical envoi. Despite all the compositions he has written in recent years, some of my favorite pieces by Leo Brouwer are the early ones like Elogio de la Danza. Here played by the young Spanish guitarist Mabel Millan. (But yes, she does end with the wrong chord!)

Passing Thoughts

There is a tendency to underrate the intellectual work of our predecessors, particularly in the 19th century--at least in some areas. Karl Marx seems to be inexplicably popular, but if you look at the five-volume book Modern Painters by John Ruskin it rather makes more recent work in the field look truncated, dwarfish and perfunctory. The same is true of the three-volume (in English translation) Johann Sebastian Bach by Philipp Spitta which, again, renders trivial our recent one-volume treatments. Recent scholarship on great artists seems to assume that no-one has much time to read and, on top of that, is not very bright. Of course the exception, in music at least, is the work of Richard Taruskin which no-one could accuse of being superficial or condensed. Here is Julia James Davis talking about Ruskin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt4Ev0R9e-c&t=291s

* * *

Here's an interesting thought: freedom is much more important than democracy. Perhaps one of the underlying problems of Canada is simply that rather than adhering to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" our motto is "peace, order and good government." Nothing about freedom there! Why have philosophers always been skeptical of democracy? Perhaps because a large, democratic jury of Athenians condemned Socrates to death in 399 BC for, well, too many questions.

* * *

Has there ever been a pianist with trills as fine as Grigory Sokolov?

* * *

Twenty-five years ago today I was visiting friends in Victoria, BC and turned on CNBC to see nothing but a cloud of smoke and dust. I'm not sure we have even now realized all the implications of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

* * *

I'm about 4/5ths of the way through Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most popular novels of the 19th century and over 1,200 pages. There is a 2002 movie adaptation. But really, is it even faintly legitimate to claim that a two-hour movie can in any way tell the story of a 1,200 page book? Even the Wikipedia entry gives the most perfunctory summary of the plot which is intricate beyond belief.

* * *

Oh, what the heck, let's have some more Sokolov, this time with a Haydn sonata.

The Problem of Beauty

 I am no longer a professional musician, nor am I working on creating music as a composer. But I am still someone deeply involved with music as a listener. So I find aesthetic disputes fascinating. I grew up with, on the one hand, the narrative of modernism and the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. On the other hand, I was completely captured by the music of J. S. Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and later on that of Monteverdi, Couperin, Rameau, Josquin and many others. Ok, so the great thread of Western music has been woven into Western culture for the last thousand years at least. That Stravinsky, Schoenberg and people like Messiaen, Shostakovich and even Steve Reich sound rather different does not mean that they are outside the great river of the art music of Western music. At least, that is how I feel.

But now we are in a kind of transitional time in which there is a movement that is looking at a lot of the current architecture and visual art and saying, sorry, this is simply crap and ideologically corrupt. Looking at some of the art one can see their point. Music that is simply silence or a construction of noises or that gives the impression of a brutal attack on ones senses seems perhaps like a mistake in the same way that displaying a urinal as a work of art or a white canvas or a goat with a spare tire around its abdomen or a skull covered with diamonds seems like, not a mistake, but some kind of aesthetic fraud.

Here are two conservative commentators taking that view (of course, Blogger refuses to embed):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9dbnjHx67Q

While sympathetic to their view, I can't quite share it. For one thing, I struggle with the whole idea that Beauty comes from God. Though I certainly share the ancient Greek view of the transcendentals, Truth, Beauty and the Good. The skepticism about some modernist approaches is not a new thing, see the book on architecture by Thomas Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House.

But the situation, especially as regards music, is formidably complex. Why do I want to say the the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and others is still great music even though it is not always beautiful? I think that great art is always in some way an encounter with Reality and sometimes it can be a harsh encounter. Great art includes works like the symphonies of Shostakovich, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, Ulysses by James Joyce, the black paintings by Goya, the tortured canvases by Van Gogh and lots of other examples.

Here is the thing, I'm not citing recent contemporary visual art and sculpture because I don't know it well enough. I am quite sure that, especially in recent decades, there has been a lot of fraudulent art created. Some of it is obvious, all the AI pop music, for example, but a lot will only be obvious after a hundred years. This is why it is perfectly easy to identify the great music from the first quarter century of the 20th century because it was a century ago. Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire are acknowledged as great works by everyone. They confront Reality.

All genuine artistic judgements have to be on a case by case basis as each work of art, great ones at least, is unique. This is why arguments in this area often tend to become sterile and pointless. You can't generalize. And, of course, this is always what ideologues do.

Comments?

Today's Listening: Sokolov, Bach, Chaconne

 

Today's Listening: a stunning Zapateado

 

I don't know who John Davisson is, but this is about the finest recording of Rodrigo's Zapateado that I have heard.

UPDATE: as a bonus, here he is playing Yamashita's transcription of Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition and making it sound almost like guitar music.

Sorry, just the first two sections.