It's not a rule exactly. When I was an undergraduate and had a spare hour and didn't need to rush to a practice room to frantically learn a part, I would go to the listening library--all LPs back then--and pick out a stack of records. Now, of course, I didn't have time to listen to more than one or two of them. So I got in the habit of listening to the first minute and if nothing grabbed me, then I would take it off and put on the next one. This is how I discovered Drumming by Steve Reich. I was reminded of this by reading how one reader uses the same rule about the first sentence in deciding whether to read escapist fiction--if the first sentence doesn't grab her, she just moves on. Now classical music is not escapist fiction, but if you want to survey a whole area of repertoire that you are unfamiliar with, this isn't a bad way to start. In fact, I think I did exactly this with some British composers way back.
So let's pick some YouTube clips and listen to the first minute and see if it grabs us. What unfamiliar repertoire shall we take up? How about the polka?
Here is my methodology: go to YouTube and type in "polka" followed by a single letter. I started with "a". Your milage may vary because I was doing it within Blogger Dashboard. This is the first thing that came up:
That's a Finnish a cappella vocal quartet singing a polka. Actually, not too bad, but by the one minute mark you have probably heard all of the musical material. So on to the next "polka" followed by the letter "b":
That is the Polka in B flat major by Antonín Dvořák that somehow manages to make 2/4 meter sound oddly like something else from time to time.
Ok, now "polka" followed by "c":
Now that's my kind of polka! Meaning that it sounds a lot like polkas I have heard in the past. This is the Polka in C for Two Harps by Jacques Press, performed by Christina Braga, Elizabeth Volpé Bligh, Gianetta Baril, Judy Loman and Ricardo Medeiros on August 3, 2012 at the Canadian International Summer Harp Institute (CISHI), Pyatt Hall, VSO School of Music. That stands for "Vancouver Symphony Orchestra School of Music."
Onward! Now "polka" followed by "d":
This is a French polka: "C'est une polka de l 'Aveyron.
C'est l'une des danses présentées par Lo Reviscol de Saint-Nauphary, à la Fête des danses de Montauban, le 6 octobre 2013." Montaubon is in the Somme in northern France.
How about "polka" followed by "e":
That was Lady Barbara e Chicco who are apparently Italian. The piece is "la polka delle fise."
Let's just do one more: "polka" followed by "f":
This is the Vilna Polka in F by Millenia who are, apparently an "Edmonton Ukranian Folk and Party Band."
Polka is pretty big in Canada.
So there you have it, a survey of the polka in under ten minutes from YouTube, the greatest resource in music education ever.
One of the nice things about polka performances is that there is almost no danger of anyone twerking!
I was originally going to title this "My 100 Favorite Books" after someone else's list. But as I got into it, I realized that that would take a long time to assemble. So I went with the short version (mind you, some of these are multiple volumes):
Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey
Plato, Dialogues
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
Dante, The Divine Comedy
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff and The Kingdom of Speech
Charles Rosen, The Classical Style and Sonata Forms
Joseph Kerman, Beethoven Quartets and Bach Fugues
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics
Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music
Richard Taruskin, Text and Act
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
Rainer Maria Rilke, Collected Poems
Theodore Roethke, Collected Poems
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
Robert Graves, Collected Poems
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker
Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey-Maturin historical novels
Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (in 11 volumes)
Wing Tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy
William Shakespeare: Complete Plays
Hm, now what would be a good musical envoi for this list? Aha, the ending of the excellent movie by Peter Weir on the Patrick O'Brian novels, Master and Commander, ends with a bit of delightful music making by Aubrey and Maturin. The tune is by Boccherini:
I'm coming to the end of my long, long read of Aesthetics by Monroe C. Beardsley. As I do I am pretty sure that I am just going to start reading it again from the beginning. Here is a very good paragraph on the deficiencies of psychological approaches to aesthetics:
The language of likes and dislikes is an important and useful language, but it is not the language of critical judgment. "Is it good?" cannot be reduced to "Do you like it?" (it is more like "What is your reflective judgement of it?") or even to "Will I like it?" (it is more like "Considering that it cost me money and effort to see it, or considering that I have already seen it and it would cost me time to study it further, will it worth my while to try and understand it?").
This seems so common-sense that it is puzzling how we have gotten so far away from it. But the heavy emphasis today on psychological approaches is a partial explanation, as are some political trends. We live in a deeply polarized society in which what everyone says is mistrusted because we nearly always suspect their motives for saying it. Objective truth is like one of those endangered species, clinging to existence by a fingernail!
Another odd thing is how people in the business, actual art and music critics, seem to have given up on the whole concept of objective aesthetic value. There are still a couple around, but most writers on art and music are either performing a promotional role or avoid aesthetic judgments entirely. I have run into one review recently that I would classify as untrammeled music criticism. It is by Arthur Kaptainis in the Montreal Gazette and is the second part of this article that begins by talking about Valentina Lisitsa. Here is a sample:
Become Ocean, the great bucket of bilge water that has won John Luther Adams a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition and a Pulitzer Prize for Music, was otherwise chugging redoubtably forward, getting louder, getting softer, sometimes hazarding a mild dissonance over the gurgling major triads, and doing, on the whole, Sweet Minim All.
It is my sad duty to report that this monumental exercise in nothingness for full orchestra goes on for 42 minutes in this fashion.
The acclaim that has greeted this silly exercise (as performed by the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot, not that this really matters) is a sad comment on the state of both American music and American music criticism.
Now there is someone that is not afraid to speak his mind! And yes, it is a sad comment because it seems as if what really won over the judges was the environmental program notes about rising sea levels. Is there anything that the "climate change" fanatics haven't corrupted?
The last time I talked about Become Ocean there were no clips up on YouTube so I couldn't share it with you. There still aren't. But there are several promotional "trailers". I will spare you and instead put up as an envoi today a piece whose aesthetic value was very important to the composer. At the time he wrote his Symphony No. 5, Dmitri Shostakovich was being condemned as a "formalist" in Pravda. The next step for artists who failed to toe the socialist realist line was often a trip to a work camp in Siberia (from which few returned) or perhaps a quick firing squad in Lubyanka prison as was the fate of one of Shostakovich's in-laws. So, the premiere of his next piece, the Symphony No. 5, was critical to his very life, not to mention his career. He had to, somehow, both fulfill the strictures of socialist realism (or appear to) and at the same time appeal to the taste of the Russian public. He did so so successfully that there was a half-hour standing ovation at the premiere. And he was not arrested and even outlived Stalin. Here is a performance by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic:
I've been a fan of the writing of Tom Wolfe for quite a while. He is an accomplished writer in two different genres: the novel and "new" journalism. He is 86 this year, so can we still call it "new" journalism? Tom Wolfe is particularly known for his spectacular account of the first American astronauts in The Right Stuff, which was made into an equally spectacular movie. His novel Bonfire of the Vanities was also made into a movie. Some of his most powerful journalism, or perhaps we should just say "non-fiction" was in the 60s and 70s when he wrote incisive exploration of the social changes in books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, one half of which is an article about a gathering held in support of the Black Panthers by Leonard Bernstein in his Park Avenue apartment.
I am more a fan of the non-fiction than the fiction. Though I enjoyed the recent novel I Am Charlotte Simmons about modern college life, I never did get through A Man in Full nor Bonfire of the Vanities. Believe it or not, I just now got around to reading The Painted Word, which is an account of the marketing and promotion of the New York modern art scene from the 40s to the 70s. Perhaps an indicator of how deeply this latter book struck home is the astonishing levels of vitriol that greeted it.
All this reexamination of the work of Tom Wolfe comes as a result of reading his latest book, The Kingdom of Speech, which was just released last month. It too has provoked a tsunami of negative reaction from the scientific and linguistic community as it deals with language, the theory of evolution and the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky.
Tom Wolfe performs an excellent service, I think. His work in both genres tends to do two things: first of it, it introduces particular special world or community (astronauts, artists) to a wider readership and second, he punctures hypocrisy and pretension. This has always been a necessary function of writers since at least the 18th century, but I feel it is perhaps even more important these days because the degree to which public opinion is, not to say shaped, but outright constructed according to the needs of the intellectual elite is astonishing.
I want to just say a brief word about The Kingdom of Speech before talking a bit more about The Painted Word. As someone who offers pretty consistently criticism of scientific studies of music and musicians, I have an awful lot of sympathy for Wolfe's venture onto this turf. Scientists are a kind of priestly class in our society, regarded as the keepers of truth and wisdom even when they venture outside the field of science itself and into the mysteries of music. Alas, often the result is what I call "scientism" or the misapplication of scientific techniques and methods to either answer oddly uninteresting questions or to answer questions for which they are inappropriate. Bear this in mind during the following comments.
There is an excerpt from The Kingdom of Speech here which will give you a good sense of it. The Wikipedia article I linked above will also link you to some of the critical reviews. The most negative and thorough review is the one in the Washington Post by Jerry A. Coyne. Given the author's position as a professional scientist in the field of evolution, his description of Wolfe's book as a mixture of sarcasm and ignorance is not unexpected. So, the scientists hate this book, just as the artists and art theorists hated The Painted Word.
Now I am certainly not one to either criticize or defend Wolfe's take on evolution (nor linguistics, though I have a bit more grounding there as I took a linguistics course at university taught by a couple of enthusiastic Chomskyans) but I do notice a certain weakness in Coyne's critique. Discussing the claim that the brain of hunter-gatherers has capacities far beyond any required by the environment and therefore impossible to explain through natural selection Coyne writes:
it’s not as if modern Westerners are born with the ability to produce the Principia Mathematica, airplanes and skyscrapers — these cultural inventions depend on millennia of accumulated discoveries, and no single brain could produce them from scratch. Just as a computer programming language, even if originally designed to help solve one kind of problem, can support an unlimited number of other programs, so the brain may have been selected with a cognitive tool kit that can be applied to endless new challenges.
Not ability, no, but capacity, yes. And I boggle a bit at the phrase "the brain may have been selected." Isn't there a missing agent there? Selected by whom and for what? The scientist replies "by evolution for survival." Well, that is the exact question. How does evolution, that is to say the change in heritable characteristics over successive generations, actually produce a brain with the capacity to write the Principia Mathematica (or the Iliad and Odyssey) in tribes of hunter-gatherers? As I only dimly grasp, the answer is "it takes a long time"? Isn't that the same as answering the question "how did Beethoven write the Symphony No. 5?" by saying, it took between 1804 and 1808?
Don't think that I am advocating any kind of Intelligent Design, though. Wolfe is a spectacular writer and this does not lead to a sober argument, though it may be persuasive. What I take away from the book is that there are different ways of looking at language. The scientists tend to think that it "evolved" (however that works) from bird or animal sounds. Wolfe says that language is the greatest invention of the human mind, enabling all of our other accomplishments. I think that description has a lot more juice to it! Plus, the bonus is that I think that means we can start ignoring all those silly articles on evolutionary psychology.
The Painted Word was as widely reviled by the arts community as it was enjoyed by the ordinary reader. Wolfe was called a fascist and too ignorant of art to write about it. But in the case of both this book and The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe's advantage is that he is indeed outside the circle of professionals. All professional institutions whether of linguists or evolutionary scientists or promulgators of art theory take as a fundamental priority the protection of their tribe from criticism from outsiders. This means that there are certain kinds of criticism, the ones that cut through layers of fakery and hypocrisy, that are usually never allowed to see the light of day. Hence the need for a Tom Wolfe.
As Wikipedia notes:
Outside the art community, some reviewers noted that however unpopular Wolfe's book may have been in art circles, many of his observations were essentially correct, particularly about the de-objectification of art and the rise of art theory.
Abstract art in the forms of abstract expressionism, pop art, op art and conceptual art, needed a "story", a way of selling it to the patrons. Whatever the means used (and Wolfe describes them in The Painted Word), the goal is to enable non-artists to understand and appreciate the art. A theory of non-representational art was just the thing needed, so they came up with one and this in time led to the art tending to be an embodiment of the theory, hence the title of the book.
Our great misfortune, as in "we composers in the 20th century", was that the "story" of modernism in music, connected as it was to the complexities of music theory (atonal chromaticism, 12-tone method, hexachordal combinatoriality) was pretty hard to sell to the ordinary music lover. And once they heard some of the results, it was even harder! So while contemporary art triumphed and led to the apotheosis of the 12 million dollar pickled shark in a tank, contemporary music became shunned in the concert hall and then we were steamrollered by pop music.
I'm not pretending to figure out exactly why this happened, but in fifty years or so, I'm sure someone will write a book on it.
Here is that shark in a tank (the artist is Damian Hirst):
And here is pli selon pli (excerpt) by Pierre Boulez:
The theorists managed to convince us (or enough of us) that modern art was "cool" but that same project didn't quite work with the music. Or did it? Comments?
Now that we have established the context in the previous post, we can look at Wagner himself. I am hampered a bit by not being a Wagner fan: I rarely listen to his music. But this provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate the objectivity of aesthetic judgment. What I mean is, that the tools of professional music criticism should allow me to set aside my personal bias against Wagner and give a more or less fair account of his music.
Let's start by listening to the first opera, Das Rheingold, of the four that make up his masterwork: Der Ring des Nibelungen. The opening is really spectacular, consisting of 140 measures of an E flat major chord! Philip Glass, eat your heart out:
It is doubtful that there has ever been a more ambitious musical work than Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner not only composed the longest, at around fifteen hours, piece in the repertoire, but he also wrote the libretto and had to have a special theater designed and built to perform it in. It also required some new instruments (Wagner tubas) and a new approach to harmony and orchestration. Not to say that there were not precedents. As David Goldman points out in this article, Why We Can't Hear Wagner's Music, Wagner was, ironically, particularly indebted to Jewish writers and musicians:
Wagner’s first anti-Jewish screed, the 1850 essay “Jewishness in Music,” claimed that Jews could imitate but never create. Given Wagner’s debt to Jewish musicians and writers, this was particularly twisted. In his first opera, Rienzi, Wagner emulated the work of the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, who in 1841 helped Wagner stage the premiere in Dresden. Wagner reserved especially venomous words for Heinrich Heine, from whose novella From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski Wagner copied the scenario for The Flying Dutchman, the first entry in the “Wagnerian” canon. Wagner also drew on a Heine ballad for his next opera, Tannhäuser. When Jewish musicians suited his requirements, moreover, Wagner happily employed them, entrusting the first performance of Parsifal in 1882 to the conductor Hermann Levi.
But Goldman, while delving into Wagner's techniques, does not give him enough credit for his musical achievements. The article is fairly long, but certainly worth reading. Here is an interesting passage:
That the old regime of throne and altar had fallen, Wagner’s generation could have had no doubt. Wagner told them to celebrate rather than mourn its demise, for in the Twilight of the Gods their impulses would be freed from the fetters of the law. As Nietzsche explained:
Whence arises all evil in the world, Wagner asked himself? From “old contracts,” he replied, as all revolutionary ideologists have done. In plain English: from customs, laws, morals, institutions, from all those things on which the ancient world and ancient society rests. “How can one get rid of the evil in this world? How can one get rid of ancient society?” Only by declaring war against contracts (traditions, morality). This Siegfried does.
Goldman goes on to mention the connection between the music of Wagner and the Third Reich, but that shouldn't distract us from observing the kind of impact he had on his 19th century listeners. The first performance of the Ring was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876. By this time the effects and consequences of the French Revolution had truly spread throughout all European society. Yes, the old regime of throne and alter had fallen. And what was to replace them? The new complete artwork of Wagner gives the clue: the old rules, customs, laws, morals and so on are all to be replaced by a vision of a post-Christian progressive paradise. To return to a theme of our previous post, this is a middle-class paradise, one with emotional, sensual appeal. Wagner cloaks this in a kind of pseudo-medieval mythology.
Musically, Wagner is, with the exception of passages in Die Meistersinger, writing against the clear boundaries of the classical forms. His music is all about sensuality, fluidity, long-delayed resolution and sumptuous orchestration. As Goldman points out, we are so far removed from the classical forms that Wagner's music has much less impact than it would have had in the late 19th century. Goldman writes:
Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon the depths of darkness, riven by dreams, it seems like the vertiginous imaginings of opium.” (Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil, meant this as a compliment.) The twenty-three-year-old Gustav Mahler, after hearing Parsifal, wrote, “I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled for the rest of my life.” For the first time in history, a composer lent his name to a cultural movement with ramifications far beyond music.
This kind of over-heated prose is typical of much writing about music in the 19th century--we see it applied to Beethoven as well. But I think the sociology of this is clear: looking at it from the musician's point of view, how are you supposed to attract an audience if you don't amp up the exotic impact of your music? Again, emotional, psychological and sensual elements are emphasized over the detached wit and charm of the Classical Era.
This discussion of Wagner is going to have to go to a third post and that will be delayed a bit. I am in the middle of moving and all my reference books are packed up and inaccessible. In the meantime, I am going to do some listening and you can as well.
David Goldman has another interesting article comparing Wagner with J. R. R. Tolkien.
Let's end with another piece by Wagner. This is almost his only non-operatic work, the Siegfried Idyll, a tone-poem for chamber orchestra. The performers are the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan:
Dr. Gene Beresin, a psychiatrist and Executive Director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says 50% to 60% of college students have a psychiatric disorder.
“What I’m including in that is the use of substances, anxiety, depression, problems with relationships, break-ups, academic problems, learning disabilities, attentional problems,” says Dr. Beresin. “If you add them all up 50% doesn’t seem that high.”
Uh-huh. I think all my BS detectors just went off! Why is it that just about everything emanating from our so-called intellectual elite is complete crap? First of all, the doctor is pathetically innumerate as is revealed in this paragraph:
Dr. Beresin says the suicide rate in college in astronomical. “A college student kills himself every day,” he says.
Let's do the math: if a college student kills themselves every day then that would come to 365 suicides a year. There are approximately 20.5 million college students in the US so that means that the rate of suicides, according to Dr. Beresin, is fewer than 2/1000ths of a percent. If by astronomical you mean "astronomically small" then, yes. But the doctor's numbers are likely wrong. The percentage for all groups is 0.126% with the highest rates found among middle-aged adult males. Numbers here.
Now when I was an undergraduate if some odd behaviour turned up the response was usually to ignore it or say "sounds like a personal problem" and then ignore it. I suspect that the more you acknowledge things like anxiety, depression and so on, the more you encourage them. Kind of like why San Francisco can't seem to figure out that the more services they provide for homeless people, the worse the problem gets. They don't actually teach logic any more do they?
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Now this is what I'm talkin' about: Portland Public Schools 'rap music' ban sparks allegations of racism. Dude, it's not racism! What about Eminem? They also ban religious radio stations and talk shows. So it is either a blatant attempt to control the political freedom of the students, or a weak attempt to instil some aesthetic discipline. They got some pushback and responded with this:
"We regret the way this was communicated. Our intent is to limit student exposure to religious teachings, profanity and violent lyrics," said Portland Public Schools spokeswoman Courtney Westling. "The transportation department will be revising its guidance to bus drivers shortly to be more inclusive of different genres of music."
Nah, ya got it all wrong! What you want is less jazz and more Rush Limbaugh! Oops, forget I said that...
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The Wall Street Journal has a major piece on streaming music, which has finally taken off. It seems to be working very well for the big acts and the casual listener. Depressing, isn't it?
Music executives say streaming is a way to make money off casual music listeners again, with potentially huge payoffs. A few years ago nonfans might have turned on the radio to hear a talked-about Drake song. Now they’re likely to stream, which generates royalties. “There are probably people who are streaming Drake who would never have bought an album,” says Dave Bakula, senior analyst at Nielsen.
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Slate explains that Hollywood needs to quit using the same classical pieces over and over. The video is interesting to watch because it points out just how many different films the same piece of music has been used in.
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Usually when I read something over at Slipped Disc I find myself having sympathy with one side or the other--a lot of posts spark a fierce debate--but after looking at this one and starting to read the comments I had the unusual sentiment of quite disliking the tenor of the original post AND nearly every comment on it pro, con or otherwise! This is a first.
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There's a lot of good basic wisdom in this piece in the Wall Street Journal by pianist Byron Janis.
Many things that I was taught I use in my own teaching. I acquired this particular insight from the legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz, with whom I worked in the 1940s: “Something is not right,” he would say. “Please think about it, then work on it. Bring it to me next week.” It put the responsibility squarely into my hands. At first, it was a difficult discipline, but how very much it helped me to grow and gain confidence. It’s important that talented students try to work out certain problems by themselves. Of course, the more talented the student, the more effective the results of that advice. This tells us something else about teaching—that it is a two-way street.
In my own teaching, I’ve taken Horowitz’s idea one step further. I end nearly every lesson saying, “If any of my interpretive ideas don’t feel right, please disregard them.”
During the course of my instruction Horowitz also made a very important point. “You want to be a first Janis—not a second Horowitz.” To that end, he never played for me during a lesson. But outside of lessons he would sometimes play for me, and during those incredible evenings in his home, hearing that great artistry at its very best, it was almost impossible not to have it influence me. I was fortunate that my gift for music was strong enough to survive, but it took me several years to become a “first Janis.” After my Carnegie Hall debut in 1948, he said to me: “You must now go on your own. You will make mistakes, but they’ll be your mistakes.”
One of my best recollections from my teaching years was when a very fine musician joined us for an ensemble piece. I asked him to take the lead in the rehearsal and was delighted when my students spoke up the first time he signaled a massive ritardando, asking him "what's the reason for doing that there?" He looked rather nonplussed as it seems he wasn't used to students having and expressing interpretive ideas!
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This past Monday was the [Update: 50th anniversary of the] last official public concert by the Beatles in Candlestick Park in San Francisco. A few years later they dragged their gear up to the roof of their London office building and played a few tunes, but the bobbies came by and told them they had to stop. Interesting comment by Ron Howard who is doing a documentary about the Beatles' tours:
Out of necessity, they’re inventing the stadium concert tour. It was because the police kept saying, 'If you play a place that holds 8,000 people, it means we’re going to have 38,000 people outside. You’ve got to play in bigger places.' So they sort of invented the arena tour before technology could support it, really."
“[Executive Editor] Dean Baquet and I have decided that the resources and energy currently devoted to these local pages could be better directed elsewhere,” Jamieson wrote, as he told the longtime writers that their services were no longer needed.
One area where the paper has decided to devote these resources and energy is in the hiring of a “gender editor” to lead a new “cross-platform, global coverage vertical on the topic of gender and identity.”
The 21st century is turning out rather differently than I had expected...
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Let's end with the BBC Young Musician winner Sheku Kanneh-Mason playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1:
The Guardian has a nice piece up on the seventeen-year old competition winner. He is quoted on the topic of elitism:
“Classical music is not elitist. The music itself is accessible to everyone. The real problem is the fact that it’s expensive and there is so little help from councils and the government.”
You bet. There is a nice anecdote about the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1. The great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was a friend of Shostakovich's and was very keen to have him write a cello concerto, but Shostakovich's wife kept telling him, "don't even mention it--if you do, he won't write one!" Then, finally, one day Shostakovich called Rostropovich up and said "come on over, I have a concerto for you." Four days later Rostropovich came back with his accompanist to play the piece for Shostakovich. When Shostakovich said "here, let me get you a music stand" Rostropovich replied, "no need, I have it memorized." In four days! He later said it was his proudest moment as a performer.
I haven't done one for a while, but I used to toss off brief posts on various composers, particularly ones that I thought might be just a tad over-rated. But there is one composer whom I have hardly written about at all, but who deserves a closer look. This is Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) whose masterwork, Der Ring des Nibelungen, has been called "the most influential art work of the past two hundreds years [sic]" but who remains a controversial figure to this day.
Richard Wagner is in the first generation of the great Romantic composers, all of whom were born right around 1810. These include Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869), Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856) and Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886). For a really brilliant and lengthy discussion of these last three, I recommend the book The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen. But you might also read the individual biographies at Wikipedia that I linked to above. Yes, this is the only music blog on the Internet with actual homework! I just want to save a bit of time by not rehearsing all the basic information about these composers.
What is so special about this generation at this particular time? The 19th century is a very complex era, historically, and there are enormous amounts of writing about it, but the crucial fact might be that the generation born, more or less, around 1810 was the first to be born into a post-Revolutionary world. Wikipedia says about the French Revolution that it was:
a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France that lasted from 1789 until 1799, and was partially carried forward by Napoleon during the later expansion of the French Empire. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy, established a republic, experienced violent periods of political turmoil, and finally culminated in a dictatorship under Napoleon that rapidly brought many of its principles to Western Europe and beyond. Inspired by liberal and radical ideas, the Revolution profoundly altered the course of modern history, triggering the global decline of absolute monarchies while replacing them with republics and liberal democracies. Through the Revolutionary Wars, it unleashed a wave of global conflicts that extended from the Caribbean to the Middle East. Historians widely regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history.
Prior to the Revolution, composers and musicians were typically employed by the Church and the aristocracy. If successful, they were guaranteed the patronage of princes, dukes and emperors and this gave a security and stability to their careers. Haydn managed to write one hundred and six symphonies not only because of his manifest talents, but also because of the wealth and patronage of the Esterházy family. He had, at his disposal, an orchestra, large and small concert halls and even an opera house, all at the Esterházy estate. The French Revolution was quite successful in erasing, or at the least diminishing, both the aristocratic class and the influence of the church. One of the intellectual leaders of the Revolution was Denis Diderot who has this quote attributed to him (though it is actually a paraphrase of something said by Jean Meslier).
“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”
That's clear enough! The consequences of the French Revolution were profound and widespread and not least upon the arts, music especially. The Revolutionaries were supported by composers who grew up under the ancien régime and their music, while glorifying the Revolution in a suitably brilliant way, was not fundamentally different musically from that which came before. Composers to note include Luigi Cherubini and Étienne Méhul. But as we move into the 19th century, the composers born between 1803 (Berlioz) and 1813 (Wagner) came into the post-Revolutionary world.
One obvious problem was, who would offer them patronage? Mozart and, towards the end of his life, Haydn, had shown that there was a market for public concerts and Beethoven took advantage of this as well. But all three relied mostly on aristocratic patronage. Even Beethoven, who is often called a "revolutionary" composer himself, was supported by a special fund set up by a group of aristocrats in Vienna. The big economic change in the 19th century was the growth of the middle-class music consumer. I say "consumer" instead of "patron" because that better describes the nature of the relationship. The nobility who had a keen interest in music, also tended to be highly educated in music and often, like Prince Nikolas of Esterházy or Frederick the Great of Prussia, were accomplished musicians in their own right. Some of this was true of the middle-class music lovers as well, which is attested to by the enormous numbers of pianos that began to adorn middle-class parlors. But they were more consumers than patrons and musicians and composers found that they needed to write and play music a bit differently to catch their attention. The emotive and sensational began to supplant the witty and charming.
Let's take a couple of examples. The first is a symphony by Joseph Haydn, that well-exemplifies the aesthetic values of 18th century music. This is the Symphony No. 96 in D major and the performers are The Orchestra of the 18th Century, conducted by Frans Brüggen.
This symphony is one of the "London" symphonies written for Haydn's tour. It was premiered in the Hannover Square Rooms, the large concert hall of which seated only 500 people. This was the main concert hall in London for a century. Mozart's piano concertos were premiered in the Lenten concerts in Vienna where the typical audience was around 120 people. In both these cases the majority of attendees were nobility.
Now, by way of contrast, let's listen to Berlioz's hugely influential Symphonie fantastique which was premiered in 1830. Wikipedia describes it as follows:
The symphony is a piece of program music that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless, unrequited love.
Let's listen. This is the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France & Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel:
This piece is always discussed in terms of its innovation and exotic program, but why don't we ask ourselves why Haydn didn't write something like this for Prince Nikolas? Actually, I can see the prince now saying, "my dear Joseph, why would you ever think I had any interest in your romantic adventures, with or without the addition of opium?" I think that crystallizes what was so successful in the Berlioz work: it was perfectly designed to appeal to the new middle-class music consumer. It was scandalous and seductive all at once. Instead of making an intellectual appeal, it makes an emotional, psychological and sensual appeal. The orchestration, harmonies and rhythms are haunting and alluring.
I suspect Haydn could have written something quite like this, if he had seen the point. Just listen to the introduction to his oratorio The Creation for example. This is Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt:
And now I find I have written a fairly long post, and hardly mentioned Richard Wagner! This will have to serve as the introduction and I will continue with Herr Wagner in the next post.
