Saturday Musings

Are we ready for coronavirus/music humor yet?

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The 19th century equivalent of the "album," a collection of songs that might be interrelated somehow or have a narrative, was the song cycle. Of ones by Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf, called "lieder" in German, perhaps the greatest is Winterreise, a cycle of twenty-four songs composed in 1827, the year before Schubert's death at thirty-one. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was perhaps the greatest lieder singer of all time and in 1979, accompanied by the great Alfred Brendel on piano, he made a film of the cycle. The last song, "Der Leiermann" is possibly the darkest song ever written.

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Here is a fascinating article on Furtwängler and Shostakovich, two great musicians who lived through horrific times and somehow provided a message of unity: Furtwängler and Shostakovich, Bearing Witness in Wartime.

Shostakovich the composer, and Furtwängler the conductor, possessed a genius for channeling the moment. On opposite sides of a devastating conflict, both served a great city facing extinction. A sincerely Soviet artist, Shostakovich practiced attunement to a mass of listeners: Spurning art for art’s sake, he prioritized his audience. Furtwängler pertinently insisted that he could only make music in the presence of sympathetic hearers. Equally significant was his baton technique: He notoriously eschewed clear downbeats. Rather than imposing a detailed interpretive blueprint, he bonded with his players in a transporting communal rite. Shostakovich’s symphonies say “we,” not “I.” It is the same with Furtwängler’s performances. This is what makes them feel empowering.

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 Philip Kennicot has a book out titled Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning and it is reviewed by Oliver Soden in The Spectator.

Were this a less good book than it is, it would be called How Bach Can Help You Grieve. As it is, Counterpoint serves very well, describing the American art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott’s intertwined themes: his reaction to the death of his mother, with whom he had a fractious and traumatic relationship, and his attempt to learn Bach’s Goldberg Variations, through which he considers the ability of the greatest music to ease us out of a senseless pit of grief.

This is a deeply serious and often affecting book, combining the ‘grief memoir’ with the genre created by Alan Rusbridger in Play It Again, an account of an amateur pianist learning Chopin’s Ballade No. 1. Kennicott’s two strands, of memory and music, become the first and second subjects of a book in sonata form, developed and recapitulated into a satisfying whole. He has written a voyage around his wounded and wounding mother, by way of an aria and 30 variations.

 There are few mentally healthier activities, I am sure, than sitting down and learning a piece by Bach. So I will wrap this up and continue my project of learning two Bach gavottes.

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Here are the Bach Goldberg Variations in the 1982 recording by Glenn Gould: