Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931)
Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (Symphonie cévenole), op. 25
composed: 1886 (age 35)
first performance: Paris, March 20, 1887 (Marie Bordes-Pène, Orchestre de Concerts Lamoureux/Charles Lamoureux?)

I don’t have the date of this photograph but based on other dated photos, he looks to be about the right age here. The headline on his newspaper says “L’Art Moderne,” which is pretty cool. Though it does seem likely that either he or the photographer rigged that up on purpose.

#13:

475.

1. The fact of this piece being on the “Essential Canon” list.

When the Medtner concerto came around, I said “If nobody knows a piece, it’s definitionally not in the Essential Canon, quality be damned,” and I stand by that. But in this case, though the quality of the piece may in fact be lower, I have more sympathy for the inclusion of an obscure work, because there was a time when it wasn’t obscure.

Monsieur d’Indy does not make even a single appearance in the 1001 Recordings list, and recordings of his works — not to mention performances — are truly few and far between. Even in this, the Era of The Long Tail, d’Indy manages to be decidedly obscure. And yet I’m almost certain that his was one of the lucky names on the “timeline of classical music” poster that my piano teacher had on the wall. Almost every classical musician knows that Vincent d’Indy is a famous composer — but nobody knows his music. How can this be?

A strange thing about classical music culture — about any “museum” culture — is that because it’s all about the past, there’s no clear criterion for what’s obscure and what’s mainstream, despite the fact that these concepts are central to the way the subject is discussed. As I said the other day, Wozzeck is obscure if you’re asking the population at large, but it’s mainstream if you’re asking people who are into classical music. (Heck, Don Giovanni is obscure if you’re asking the population at large.) L’incoronazione di Poppea is obscure if you are asking people who aren’t into pre-baroque music, mainstream if you’re asking people who are. But this starts to get silly. If you’re into Johannes Ockeghem (d. 1497), the Missa prolationum is totally mainstream.

The only reason I’ve heard of the pieces just mentioned is because they’ve been included in histories I’ve read, which means that someone thought they were relevant from a historian’s perspective. They are thus “mainstream” for music students. But this has all become a sort of an abuse of the concept of “mainstream.” Whatever Missa prolationum is to me — mainly: something that I’ve heard of — it’s certainly different from being essential to me, or culturally prevalent in the present day. (Of course, no classical music is actually prevalent in the present day — except for Carmina Burana and Flight of the Valkyries). The problem is that the distinction has been blurred between history and culture. Which, as I’ve said elsewhere, hasn’t been good for culture.

The question is, what does it really mean to claim that something is canonical? Is it a claim about the current consensus, the past consensus, or (what it usually seems to be) a claim about what the consensus should be and would be, if only we weren’t living in such benighted times?

At [the very old, very monied American university I attended], there is a concert hall built around 1914, in which a hall-of-fame of inscribed composers’ names runs overhead. The list is rigged so that the composers appear in approximate chronological order, but also so that HAYDN MOZART BEETHOVEN SCHUBERT CHOPIN fall directly over the stage. We students occasionally poked fun at this frieze for its irritating, inflated implication that “this is a temple and these are its gods” — but most of the snickering was reserved for the fact that the list ended with “… TSCHAIKOWSKY FRANCK BRAHMS.” Franck, eh? We would chuckle about how the smug old-schoolery of 1914 had shot itself in the foot: Franck, it had become clear in the intervening century, does not belong in that company, not at all. Who listens to Franck anymore? And who really likes it when they do?

Probably the unlucky person who had to come up with the list of names back in 1914 figured that Franck, who’d been as dead and adulated as Brahms and Tchaikovsky for more than 20 years, was a safe bet as an all-time great because he had followers (Chausson and, in particular, d’Indy, who was still alive and going strong), and followers mean a future. The “Franck school” would surely continue to be seen as the great turn-of-the-century movement in French music. Debussy had his admirers, sure, but where could that kind of gimmicky experimental stuff really lead? Besides, inscribing a living composer’s name on the walls of the temple would be sacrilege; it would demean the frieze by associating it with actual, flawed human beings.

So Franck’s name went up on the wall. But then, of course, starting just minutes after the gold leaf was set, the 20th century took culture by the hair and swung it around a few times until its neck was good and broken. In the process, all kinds of bits and pieces went flying into oblivion, and the Franck school, sadly, was among them. Even now, almost 100 years later, the scavenger hunt to pick up all the scattered fragments (and make them available for download) still hasn’t completely located the remains of Vincent d’Indy.

So: is d’Indy in this list because if it weren’t for the flaying of the canon (1914–1989) he might well still be in it? Or is he just in this list because historical music is music history, and music history tells us that Vincent d’Indy was, in his day, a prominent composer? I think the latter, but I am sympathetic to the logic of the former.

If any piece of d’Indy’s ever looked like it was going to make it into orbit, it was this symphony, which apparently maintained a place in the third-tier repertoire rotation well into the 20th century. It may even still have had some life in it after World War II, at least among French conductors. But at some point it finally bowed out. Rest in peace, Vincent d’Indy’s greatness.

But lo, what’s this? Culture’s skin has been stitched back on, its broken neck repaired with a couple of bolts, the corpse zapped with some kind of eerie blue lightning, and now it breaks free from its restraints and lumbers about — alive! Alive! It’s come back from the dead! “ME POST-POST-MODERN!!!” it bellows. “ME LOVE ART!!! ALSO SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE!!!! AND IPHONE!!!! ALSO GAUGIN!!! AND HONEYMOONERS!!! VINCENT D’INDY KIND OF AMAZING!!!! ALSO MORTON FELDMAN!!! AND MOZART!!! NEW STAR TREK MOVIE GOOD TOO!!! OMG YOU MUST TRY SPIDER ROLL!!! WHERE YOU WANT TO GO TODAY????”

Doesn’t it bring tears of joy to your eyes, to know that our long cultural nightmare is over?

2. This piece itself.

Admirable but flawed. Its flaws — “quirks” might be a kinder term — are a part of the same personality that gives it its appeal, and couldn’t be edited out if you tried. Like a sculpture made of pockmarked, pitted stone; if it had been carved of some smoother, more delicate stuff, it would have to be a different shape and would create a different impression: it would become some other work. This work is pockmarked and how could it be otherwise? The form and texture and substance create a sense together, and they share, among them, an imperfectness.

That in itself puts limits on how prominent this piece might ever become; it is an “interesting” piece and thus will always be off the most beaten path.

The piece is something of an experiment in instrumentation; it tries to incorporate the piano into the orchestral texture in a role that is prominent but several notches less so than in a concerto. I’m not particularly impressed with M. d’Indy’s accomplishment in this regard. He mostly seems to use the piano as though it were a loud harp, which isn’t really what it is. The percussive quality of the attacks isn’t really taken into aesthetic account, I don’t think, and many of his devices just don’t read well at all — like the instrument’s first entrance, where it bubbles out of the depths, thoroughly muddying the bass melody it’s supposed to color. Too much of the piano part, in my opinion, is standard filigree: arpeggio, scale, and repeated-note business, which no doubt requires careful practice but isn’t particularly interesting to the player, the composer, or the listener. The burden is really on the conductor, in this piece, to make the meaning and sense come to the fore.

And the sound engineer. The orchestration is full of odd colorful touches, but the intricacies are inconsistent and not always well-judged. A good deal of it gets swallowed up and ends up just sounding mushy, at least on the several recordings I was able to find. But it’s possible that some recording studio cheats to isolate the instruments could turn the piece into a delightful, flowering soundscape, which is how I bet Vincent imagined it.

The piece takes a “naïve” outdoorsy folk tune — it sounds like Hobbit music to me — and derives some of the material in each movement from it, audibly and directly. The symphony is also, as a whole, an attempt to do justice to the mountain-dwelling, nature-basking, stream-rippling spirit of the tune. On the most superficial level, this means sparkling waterfall arpeggios in the first movement, pastoral repose in the second movement, and bounding rabbits or something in the third movement. These sorts of things feel pretty stock, and in some ways, all the busy learnedness of the symphony pales next to the touching naïveté of the simple tune it is struggling to emulate and magnify. The tune is heard naked in the opening measures, and they’re probably the most memorable part of the whole piece.

But there is definitely a touch of beauty threaded through the work. It’s a little elusive, but there is something sensitive and real in there. And yes, it — whatever it is, down there in the poetic subconscious — has something to do with being out in the fresh air on a mountain. The piece is fluid but not limp; it has purpose. Quietly. That took some familiarity for me to hear.

The first movement is based on a proud-sounding “this fresh air does wonders for the constitution” type theme with a strong contour (up, then down!) but unfortunately no particular melodic outline to speak of — and then a nice flowing-grace-and-lightness 2nd theme very much a la Saint-Saëns. I have warmed to both of these, but the introductory ur-theme is still more effective than either.

The second movement is the best. The melody is lyrical and songlike but spun out in irregular conversational phrases; poetry in a flexible meter. This is where d’Indy comes the closest to achieving something of his own in the flavor of the folk tune. The chromatic B theme falls nicely in between fairy-tale and genuine uneasiness. On the first few listens, I thought I could do without the bombastic recapitulation, but having gotten to know it better, I see that it’s not so confident as it seems (the snaky second theme is lurking under it) and I’ve come to enjoy the whole course of the movement. I also like the watery pool where the movement finally slows to a stop: the sparkles that close the movement are in a sense completely gratuitous, and that’s what makes them particularly vivid for me.

The third movement is built over a bouncy diminution of the main melody, which never fails to sound lame to me, but the swooning second theme is pretty catchy 19th-century-style, and once the march-of-the-dwarfs-y snippet of movement 2 appears, the whole ending is peculiar good fun.

In the coda (around rehearsal letters U through X) there’s a metrical eccentricity. A new condensed version of the melody is heard in 8th notes, first in 2/4 and later in 3/8. In between, it’s heard twice as 6 bars of 3/8 plus 1 bar of 2/4. Over this, the composer writes “Même mouvement. (Les croches conservent toujours la même valeur.)” In other words, the 8th notes are constant. If performed that way, as written, there is a fun juxtaposed-meter effect, where the melody from the 2/4 section continues to recur, but the accompaniment begins to syncopate playfully against it, in 3/8. The single inserted bar of 2/4 is a temporary reconciliation between the two elements, but eventually the new 3/8 feeling wins over. This is catchy and propulsive and leads very satisfyingly to the climax.

But in all 4 of the recordings I heard, performed by people who should most certainly have known better, instead of keeping the 8th notes constant as requested explicitly on the page, the conductors keep the bars constant through the meter change, which means that when it launches into 3/8, there’s just a relaxed triplet feeling, and the 2/4 insertions come off as either a hiccup or a place where the record skips — which is a weird and intriguing effect, but clearly not the one d’Indy had in mind. Why would there be a hiccup in the music at that point? That obviously doesn’t make any sense! And yet Charles Munch and Paul Paray just forge ahead. I found this bewildering.

I mean, am I crazy? Those guys probably knew what they were doing, right? Even though it sounds bizarre, and even though it says something else in the score? I think niceties of rhythm and meter just weren’t top priorities for several generations of musicians. I don’t know why, but that seems to be the way it was.

Incidentally, this experiment in metrical modulation reminds me very much of the similar metrical experiment at the end of the Saint-Saëns symphony, composed the same year, which was also badly negotiated on most recordings. The Saint-Saëns is obviously the closest genetic relative to this piece that we’ve seen thus far, but I also hear some relationships to the much later Ravel concerto, both in particulars (compare the opening themes) and in the general textural impression. But Ravel’s is endlessly smooth and charming, whereas d’Indy feels a fair bit mustachioed and professorial.

But however odd and dated the essence of the thing, it is also sincere, intelligent, and heartfelt. I really did like it, by the end. I’d gladly listen to more d’Indy. But I’d go to the score sooner, next time. This little pocket of musical style really is more lost than others, and I don’t totally trust performers to know what it’s about.

Dubal said to try

C. Collard, Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, Janowski: Erato 2292-45821-2-ZK
Henriot-Schweitzer, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Munch: RCA 09026-62582-2

Nope, didn’t hear those, though the samples of the latter that I heard just now sounded better than anything I did hear. I heard

François-Joël Thiollier, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland/Antonio de Almeida (1994?) (1st movement here)
Louis Nagel, Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra/Rico Saccani (date?) (tracks 1–3 here)
Marguerite Long, Concerts Colonne/Paul Paray (1934) (which I found here)
Robert Casadesus, New York Philharmonic/Charles Munch (1948) (which I found here)

None of these is completely satisfying. The musicianship is more thoughtful on the older ones, but the crackly sound is a real impediment in trying to navigate the orchestration. I guess I’ll recommend the Munch one because there it is for the downloading, and it’s lively. And I’m obligated to boost the New York Philharmonic.

Scores! Including the full score and the 2 piano score.

This felt like a really awkward, clumsy draft, this entry, but right now I’d really like to be able to think about something else rather than feel obligated to go back and edit. [Your wish is granted.] Hooray!

Classical Canon random selection #12:

124

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Opus 15: Piano Concerto (No. 1 in C major)

composed: 1795, revised 1800 (age 25, 30)
[although recent scholarship suggests composition may have been as early as 1793, age 23]

published: 1801
first performance: December 18, 1795, Redoutensaal, Vienna
[recent scholarship, again, thinks perhaps that concert featured the “Concerto No. 2,” and this one was actually premiered in 1796 on tour, in Berlin, Pressburg (Bratislava), or Pest (Budapest)]

dedicated to Princess Barbara Odescalchi (née Countess von Keglevics)

That’s two Beethovens in a row, if you’re counting.

I have a whole bunch of these Classical Canon pieces to respond to but I’ve been held up because I just don’t have much to say about this one. But that’s okay, right? Isn’t it okay not to have much of a response to something?

I guess. But the obligation to write is supposed to be my incentive to up the ante. When you put some shoulder into in it and push upstream against lazy, duck’s-back indifference, you almost always find something. Not finding anything is usually just a symptom of passivity. So going with my shrug feels like a cop-out, even if it’s sincere.

But some things are more shrug-worthy than others.

When we say that something has made no particular impression on us, what we mean is that the impression was already made on us, earlier in life, by something else. Everything makes an impression on a blank-slate newborn, but as the impressions build up, the mind begins to construct categories, and then subcategories, and so on and so on. And then it finds itself here, as me, listening to a piece and thinking, “yeah, this just sounds like some classical-era music,” and then trying to listen closer, and thinking, “yeah, this just sounds like a classical-era piano concerto,” and then — let’s skip to the finish here — “yeah, this sounds like an early Beethoven piano concerto.” That’s a sub-category in which there are only two items. And yet it still feels like a category and not an identity.

A talking point that I’ve brought out in several conversations past: how many Road Runner cartoons are there? Yeah, Wikipedia says 45, but that includes a bunch of latter-day nonsense; the ones you’d ever see on TV end around 40, and that includes a whole series of shoddy, cut-rate ones from the 60s. The Chuck Jones ones, which are the only ones you actually think of when you think of Road Runner cartoons, number only about 22. The point is: some fairly small finite number.

Yeah, believe it or not, I’ve used this as an example before. So, it’s not a great one; so sue me. I still think of it when I think of this issue of type versus exemplar. There is no amount of specific familiarity with those 22 cartoons that I could gain and not still think of Road Runner cartoons as a type, an unbounded set. Or so I suspect. I’m not going to try.

I have come to accept that in listening to music, I am personally most sensitive to kinetic qualities: how much energy it’s exhibiting and how, what happens to movement, whether it’s gathering force or dissipating, smaller impulses driving larger ones, etc. My memory of music I’ve only heard a few times will frequently trick me by replacing harmonies, melodies, or rhythms with other ones that “accomplish” the same thing, kinetically, because that’s what I’ve identified as essential. That kind of awareness comes without any thought or effort, and is quite full. But for me to become sensitive to the particularities of line, or harmony, or form, beyond their most aggressive features, requires either strenuously willed attention, or a score to concretize everything so I can work with my eye and not just my flaky ear.

Or I have to hear a piece many, many times, until every detail has wormed its way into my memory. But that kind of knowledge feels a little superficial in its own way — when you care about some accidental squeak on a recording as much as you do about the sequence of notes, your familiarity is not specifically musical. John Cage would say otherwise, but I think he’d be wrong. You can become very familiar with a recording of a person’s voice speaking in a language you do not understand; that’s different from becoming very familiar eith the text being spoken. Objectively and cognitively different in type, not just character. Being able to hum my way through a piece still doesn’t mean I “get it,” just like being able to walk the route to elementary school didn’t mean I knew anything about the geography of my hometown.

Without evidence to the contrary, I’d assume that everyone experienced music this same way: motion and texture above all, then tunes, then everything else. It just feels so inevitable to me. But I know it’s not so. Beth, for one, remembers melodies very accurately after only one or two listens, and is amazed how often I — “a musician!” — sing back melodies incorrectly, subconsciously recomposing phrases in ways that feel to me “functionally equivalent” to the originals. To her ear there’s nothing “equivalent” about it; I’m just getting them wrong, period. But her memory for accompaniment and rhythm seems to be vaguer than mine.

It seems likely that these kinds of predilections are determined by the musical languages to which we are exposed as children, just as our ability to distinguish phonemes seems to correspond to the language we are brought up speaking. An English speaker has a hard time learning to hear and speak Mandarin vowel sounds (right?) but no baby brought up speaking Mandarin has any serious problem. Maybe. On the other hand, people’s precision of enunciation varies greatly within the same culture. Beth’s brother, who grew up in the same household, lets all his phonemes melt together without apparently hearing it or caring; she doesn’t. So there’s probably some genetic component as well. For what it’s worth, I know many fine musicians who are terrible mumblers, and many actors who can very attentively and carefully mimic speech patterns but not musical ones. Yeah, I know, that’s a whole other bicycle of fish.

I personally grew up hearing a mix of classical music, theater music, and pop — and most importantly, of course, TV — but pretty idiosyncratic selections from each. Most people with classical music in their lives seem to have been exposed to various composers and pieces approximately in proportion to their general cultural prominence, but my exposure was mostly based on what my father’s casual, eclectic interest happened to have focussed on in any given month. I heard Mozart and Beethoven, but only a few pieces by each. I probably heard more pieces by Bartok than by Mozart. There was no obvious way for me to know that the five or six Mozart sonatas that I knew were actually to be understood in the context of a whole coherent musico-linguistic culture circa 1785 in Austria, whereas Bartok came from a time of iconoclasts — he was surrounded by influences but no true contemporaries. In my childhood, I recognized that each composer had a personality that united their pieces, but otherwise each piece stood alone. The fact that Mozart and Beethoven had sort of similar styles, all things considered, was if anything a count against them both. Why write more of that kind of stuff when we already have the 10 pieces that I know?

Pop music was similar. I never sought it out and never put on the radio, so I just heard the albums my parents bought and listened to — a couple every year but not a lot more. Plus the extra copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that they let me play on my Fisher Price turntable. As with classical, I didn’t have a full enough spectrum of material to form a sense of a shared language. Other than the basic chords and rhythms, each band seemed to be coming from its own universe. The only genuinely whole musical “culture” I knew was the TV, which probably accounts for stuff like this being in my brain today.

The point of this digression is that I think whatever strengths my musical mind developed were those that were useful in distinguishing this range of musical fragments from one another. The musical culture to which I and nobody else belonged (well, except maybe my sister, for a while) was the one which contained a few isolated pieces by the Beatles, and Bartok, and Mozart, and the theme for the evening news, and only a few hundred other things.

Every spoken language emphasizes different kinds of discrimination — our American-English ears don’t seem care too much about a lot of vowels, but we place greater emphasis than the rest of the world, it seems, on distinguishing our “R” from other sounds near it — and the same is true for musical cultures. Beethoven and Mozart wrote for listeners who were apparently expected to care very much about the character of line, even at a very small scale. Most of their listening was presumably to virtuoso vocalists whose elaborate flourishes were the point. Even after a bachelor’s degree and several decades of attentive listening, my ears almost always just hear “music that believes in flourishes,” which is sufficient to distinguish it from, say, the 3-2-1 Contact Theme, and mostly disregards the specific flourishes, just like we all mostly disregard the difference in character between the decorative gook growing on the front of the one dollar bill (classical, leafy, modest), and the decorative gook growing on the back (baroque, sinuous, alien). We just see “dignified, intricate old-timey decoration.” And part of us always will, no matter how many design classes we take.

I must accept that before I put on my “18th-century-make-believe” helmet and hunker down hard with a score — and even afterward — I am going to hear Beethoven in competition not with Albrechtsberger and Hummel (who?) but with Debussy and Prokofiev and “Theme from the Jetsons” and “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”

This problem is — OBVIOUSLY — the main reason why classical music is hard to popularize nowadays, but nobody wants to talk about it because there’s no solution other than to give up on all but a very few pieces from any given era.

One of my esteemed music professors once played a Bach “surprise” cadence on the piano and ostentatiously savored how wonderfully spicy and shocking it was, and then bemoaned the fact that today most people need to be beaten over the head to elicit any sense of surprise, and attributed it, with an Ivy League shake of the head, to “the coarsening of our culture.” Which is, at face value, actually a very good metaphor for what’s happened, but he didn’t mean it that way — he meant that these horrible people today are getting more and more vulgar and lowdown, ugh. I said that I thought it was simply because we’ve been exposed to contexts where that chord isn’t shocking at all; that if we heard that very same chord progression in a work by Schoenberg, we would have been principally struck by how uncharacteristically bland and rote and old-fashioned it was. These things are all contextual, and we aesthetes and aficionados are all play-acting, to a degree, when we pretend to live in those contexts, whereas the coarse people around us who admit not to being surprised by a totally characteristic “surprise” are just being honest. And he had absolutely nothing to say to that. We just went on to something else.

I think. It’s possible my memory has distorted the moment, to make me more of a lonely prophet of sincerity in a vale of pretension. Thanks, memory!

This is all to say that this piece is hiding behind some other pieces from around 1800 that I already know, and won’t come out no matter how much I coax it. Here, kitty kitty. Even if I commit the whole thing to memory, will it ever really come out?

My recent entries here have been long and dull and it’s because I haven’t been writing as much lately. Juices need to be gotten flowing. A lot of this is, I suspect, like reading the loop-de-loops of someone getting a dry pen started.

So I’m going to be bold and just end it here. Wait, what about, like, Beethoven’s Concerto No. 1? You can listen yourself if you want. It’s a decent but unremarkable piece based on decent but unremarkable material. It’s not in the 1001 Recordings list and more power to them. I think David Dubal just wanted to list all five concerti because Beethoven’s such a damned demigod.

Honestly, it’s better than this entry lets on. You might like it.

Dubal told me to listen to:

Fleisher, Cleveland Orchestra, Szell: CBS M3K 42445
Schnabel, London Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sargent: Pearl PEA 9063
Arrau, Dresden Staatskapelle, Davis: Philips 422149-2

I hit the Schnabel, not the others.

I listened to
Murray Perahia, Concertgebouw Orchestra / Bernard Haitink (1985)
Artur Schnabel, London Symphony Orchestra / Malcolm Sargent (1932)
Rudolf Serkin, Philadelphia Orchestra / Eugene Ormandy (1965)
Melvyn Tan, The London Classical Players / Roger Norrington (1988, on period instruments)
Sviatoslav Richter, Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Munch (1960)

Man, that’s a lot! Who knew. I don’t remember which ones I liked; it was a long time ago.

Maybe someday my conscience will come haunting me and I’ll force myself to have more thoughts specifically about this piece, but that seems highly, highly unlikely.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Opus 10 no. 3: Piano Sonata (No. 7 in D major)

composed: 1796-8 (age 26-7)
published: 1798
first performance: unknown – surely in Vienna c. 1797-8.
dedicated to Countess Anne Margarete von Browne

111. #11.

Here he is, in as young-looking a portrait as I could find. I don’t know the provenance. This may not be a completely authentic image, and the age portrayed may not be exactly 27, but my intent when I put portraits on here is just to offer an aid to the historical imagination, and I think this fits that bill nicely. I can readily imagine this young fellow being escorted into the salon where I’m attending a little party of the very rich, sitting at the pianoforte, and playing something brilliant. The talk of the town!

Admittedly I’m sort of picturing a 19th-century Proustian salon rather than an 18th-century Viennese one, but the principle is similar. I imagine. Maybe it’s not.

This piece: A piano sonata, and an early piano sonata, so a work that I might well have known from my childhood practice of starting at the beginning of the book and playing through until I got bored. But I think I skipped this one most of the time, or it never made much of an impression. I was familiar with what it looked like when glanced at on the page, but much less so with what it sounded like.

Listened to it a whole bunch of times, played it a whole bunch of times, then listened to all of the recordings in a row and called it done.

This is a fine piece. The first movement is neatly put together. The first time I put my hands on it, it seemed a little clonky, but all the transitions of tone have come to seem quite charming and elegant now that they’re in my head. The form of the exposition is a little rounder and more thoughtful than it seemed at first – the descending four-note motive became a lovely icon of goodwill once I was put on to it, and the whole movement now seems to me like a clean little piece of public speaking on the subject of those four notes: soft enough for a general audience, with jokes etc. And short.

The second movement is weepy rather than profound, but a nice rich weepiness, if the pianist is good. Ahead of its time – or a model for things to come – by a decade or more. Each episode adds something. These sort of movements (song-like, with several refrains and several episodes) tend to feel too long to me, but this one doesn’t, at least not now that I have the refrain under my belt. As always, being able to sing along makes all the difference.

Delicate decoration in Beethoven often seems to be etched with a stiff hand. I guess most of Beethoven seems to be etched with a stiff hand. But the underlying sturdiness prevails, once you get past the surface and find your way to the heart of the material. That means many listens. In this case I was able to get there rather more quickly, 1) because it’s a short and straightforward piece, and 2) because it’s a piano piece and I was able to play it myself.

The minuet is so exactly and entirely of the type – the type being Beethoven piano sonata third movements – that it is hard for me to think of it as having its own personality. But maybe that’s a misplaced priority anyway. The type is an excellent type. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Just went and listened again to remind myself. Actually it’s very distinctive, in several different ways over the course of the movement. The problem is not that the material lacks character in itself – it has plenty of it, very satisfyingly so – the problem, and it’s no problem at all, is that the overall effect is the same as any other minuet movement. The amount of charm + grace + humor + lightness = 1. The components can vary but the sum must be the same. Perhaps this is the definition of “genre?” Well, not quite. One wants individuals within a genre to be distinguishable. Of course, this is entirely distinguishable – it’s just my memory of it that has a hard time tearing it away from its parent class. Prior to typing this paragraph my inclination was to say that that’s okay, and I still agree – that’s okay.

Fourth movement, dramatic pauses, an L.v.B. specialty. Just listened to it now – I’m feeling fairly in touch with my musical self right now as I write this, so it seemed like a good time for one last visit – and suddenly I feel like I understand the wherefore of Rondo form. Previously I had thought of it just making sense the way stripes make sense – because they keep coming back, alternating with each other. Now in this piece I can hear the obvious lapse into looseness in the episodes – the jazz between the refrains – and a dynamic of charisma and showmanship becomes apparent. Of cool, almost. Especially in the extremely satisfying forward impetus of the second section of this refrain – like a bird in flight – bursting out of the dramatic pause section, which is like a little playacting. A different kind of cool, but still recognizably a form of being cool; the performer/composer is offering up a lively personality, rather than just a lively piece.

Beethoven gets credit for bringing the individual into music, for setting down the foundation stones for a century of Romanticism – but what if we try not to think about the 19th century vibe and just construe his emphasis on the individual as an emphasis on himself, on his charisma? To me this seems fruitful – it’s second nature from our living pop music culture. (Which you could say is also Romantic but that’s stretching the notion of Romanticism – to me, “Romantic” suggests Doré and does not suggest Madonna.) Madonna’s songs are all about how Madonna is singing them. It certainly gets pointed out that technical virtuosity was built into composer-performers’ works as a way of showing off, but I’m not sure I’ve read very much about the actual personality of the work being part of the public personality of the performer.

To hear the fifth symphony as emanating from within the scowling bust of Beethoven is a different thing, a necessarily historical thing. I’m talking about Beethoven writing piano pieces so that when he sat in front of an audience and played them, they would be impressed by their encounter with this man and this performance, rather than with this music per se. Just like at a Justin Timberlake concert – the material has been composed to serve a very particular purpose. This is obviously the case with Liszt and his imitators, but a lot of that music never gets played anymore, whereas Beethoven gets played all the time but fairly divorced from a charisma-informed tradition. Or, when it is within a charisma-informed tradition, it’s the charisma of the performer, who might well not have a congruent charisma to Beethoven’s. Thus the “meaning” of the piece is lost or abused, a square peg shoved into the round hole of the museum-respectful silence and the jacket with tails and all that.

A certain (no names, please! it’s the internet!) renowned professor of mine in college was particularly known for his Mozart interpretations, and I had to agree that he had a particular knack for getting at the soul of Mozart at the piano, when I saw him do it in person – and the reason was that his charisma was, one felt, very much congruent with Mozart’s. One felt that this man with this personality would indeed have wanted credit for the personality on evidence in the music – not credit for the ability to sniff out and deliver that personality, like an actor, and like so many “great performers” – nor credit for being “good lord, the great Mozart incarnate,” though I don’t doubt he had a bit of a taste for that – but credit for the same degree of sensitivity, the same intelligence and elegance, the same turns of phrase, the same dumb jokes, as Mozart the man would have. It’s easy to say, “well, wouldn’t we all,” but no, I daresay we most of us wouldn’t. My own personal ideal for how people will perceive me is nothing at all like the music of Mozart, nor of Beethoven for that matter. Sometimes in fact I have let myself muse on the question of whether I would want a given piece of music to “represent me.” No clear winners yet but I’ll let you know. Certainly myspace users agree that identifying yourself with a piece of music is a good way of projecting a kick-ass image. Myspace users and everyone else I know.

Why is our culture so obnoxious and superficial about identity formation? In “High Fidelity,” Nick Hornby, or John Cusack, says “What really matters is what you like, not what you’re like.” I think part of the point of the book/movie is that this is less true than the character believes, but I’m not totally sure. “High Fidelity” is certainly popular with people who are cozy with that idea as expressed. So let me just put on record that, no, it’s not true. What really matters is what you’re like. People who are proud of what they like want to believe – and want others to believe – that they are like what they like. But one glance at the D&D convention should have put that idea to rest long ago. Yet still we go on smugly listing our favorite bands, like it will save us from anonymity and mediocrity. It won’t! To possess something is not to resemble it. I said once that I would write about this someday. Maybe that’ll still happen.

The point here is that if you’re a composer/performer, you can lay claim to the idea that you are the music with more clout than if you just have it playing on your myspace page. This is why rock stars get, as they say, all the girls – the illusion that they are what they sing is much stronger when they write it. And when they actually sing it. Not clear why Beethoven didn’t get all the girls – it might be because of the particular image he chose to project. It might also be because he was a jerk to everyone. Liszt obviously had the girl-gettage routine down pat.

Early edition but not the first. The first said “pour Clavecin ou Piano-Forte” on the title page. I can’t find a better picture of it than this.

The score, in various editions.

David Dubal just gives listening recommendations for “The Complete Piano Sonatas”:

Arrau: Philips 432301-2
Schnabel: EMI Classics CDHH 63765
Kempff: Deutsche Grammophon 429306-2
Ashkenazy: London 425590-2

but I sure didn’t listen to those, because they weren’t currently available at the library the day I went looking for this piece. I listened to Murray Perahia, 1985; Emil Gilels, 1980; Maurizio Pollini, 2002; Artur Schnabel, 1935. They were all perfectly fine as I recall, but Schnabel’s interpretation seemed to me to get inside the music’s head the most convincingly. Oh, so, wait, I did listen to one of the recommended recordings, didn’t I.

The 1001 Classical Recordings list doesn’t include this piece.

More than seven months passed between drafting this and posting it!

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose), Op. 59
Kömodie für Musik in three acts
libretto by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal (1874-1929)
composed: 1909-10 (age 45-46)
first performance: Königliches Opernhaus, Dresden, January 26, 1911 (Margarethe Siems (Marschallin), Karl Perron (Ochs), Eva van der Osten (Octavian), Minnie Nast (Sophie), Dresden Opera/Ernst von Schuch)

And there they are. If you can’t read those little captions, that’s Strauss seated at center, Hoffmannsthal with moustache behind him, Schuch seated at right, and then a bunch of other guys. Photo taken on the day of the dress rehearsal, I believe.

429. #10.

I have many many serious reservations about this work, but the fact must be faced that Richard Strauss was some kind of a genius. A genius of what, exactly? Hard to say. Not any of the things that people generally want to be geniuses of – but a genius of something.

Going through this score is like going through computer code. I marveled at the fluency of the programmer. Strauss once bragged that his skill at musical illustration was such that he could compose a knife and fork and differentiate them. I don’t doubt it. Representational conceits that for other composers would sustain whole works are here casually tossed off and discarded after a single use; he truly doesn’t care. He’s got a million more where that came from.

In another knife-related comment, Strauss said that setting the text of Rosenkavalier was for him “like spreading butter.” The very image of fluency – but what makes his spreading so amazing is how thick this butter is. Every bar in this massive score – and there are several thousand of them – is a display of cleverness. Not just of wit, but of an opulent, overabundant cleverness; of one cleverness wedded to another cleverness through a third feat of cleverness, and so on. Strauss’s scores are like dripping palaces of cleverness.

Which takes me to the flip side: what every bar of this opera is not a display of is taste. I’m not talking about the fact that the overture depicts the leads having sex, with remarkable specificity (one can, if one wishes, clearly tell the knife from the fork). That kind of breach of taste doesn’t bother me at all; I actually love that part. What I’m talking about is the lack of proportion and perspective. It seems clear to me that the libretto was constructed with ample consideration for pacing, for the subtleties of drama as they would be experienced on the audience’s time scale, but that the score wasn’t. Strauss seems to have worked his way through the text, spreading his lavish butter as he went, trusting that it would all add up. But even over the course of a single chunk of a single scene, it often doesn’t add up. Or rather, it adds up to too much. Too much business. Too many footnotes per page. High cholesterol, gotta cut back. That the opera is typically done with cuts – fairly hefty ones – reflects awareness of the problem on the part of opera-land, but the problem is too pervasive to be nip-and-tucked away.

Strauss is brilliant at the vertical, boorish about the horizontal. There, I figured it out. That’s what he is a genius at: the vertical. Every image is finessed to perfection, every character and relationship and nuance and color of a moment somehow condensed and turned into a neat little contraption. Unfortunately, listening to a performance is a bit like being barraged with neat little contraptions; one wants to protect one’s head.

Is all that cleverness supposed to be subliminal or front-and-center? There’s just no winning this one – if I’m expected to watch for the story and just be buoyed along on the music, it’s much too busy, aggressive, and distracting. If, on the other hand, I’m supposed to notice and appreciate all the intricacies, there’s just too much to take in at the speed of performance. One way or the other, the music has cleverness to spare, and it should have been spared.

As with a lot of Late Romantic music, much of the drama in the score sounds to me like silly putty being stretched gooily and then snapped clean, in violent and endless alternation. And a three-and-a-half hour listening experience of random silly putty is not a gratifying one. There’s nothing gooey on the page or in Herr Strauss’s magical contraption workshop, but it comes out awfully gooey in practice – it’s the sound of details that were composed on the wrong scale, being wrung out in real time.

Film composers tend to deprecate “Mickey-Mousing,” because it glorifies the surface rather than the substance, which, in all but the most comic-balletic cases, is unflattering and unhelpful. Strauss steamrolls his butter right over that principle. It’s all Mickey-Mousing. Even when he’s not Mickey-Mousing the action, he’s still Mickey-Mousing the thoughts, Mickey-Mousing the meaning. He obviously feels things and knows things about the world, and he can write music to jerk your tears, but the interface between those two capacities is pure Mouse.

Exempli gratia. At the very beginning, after some confused sweet nothings in bed with the Field Marshal’s wife, our young hero Octavian whines that he doesn’t want it to be daytime yet, and shuts the blinds in protest. This little moment doesn’t mean anything more than that in itself – it’s just a part of the “morning after” scene. In reality, or in any movie or play, the line in question (“Why does there have to be day? In the day you belong to everyone, instead of just to me. That window needs to be closed”) would probably be delivered with an understated humor. Or it would be, at most, mock-whiny, mock-frustrated, a moment of playacting in the middle of the scene’s deeper flow. What then does Richard Strauss do? He sets this line as a series of high-pitched, trumpet-like outbursts for the singer (to remind us that this is our impetuous, childish young hero), over a complicated accompaniment made up of several layers of signifiers: a horn call sounding a note of dismay and agitation (i.e. Octavian’s displeasure); a phrase from the preceding love music (i.e. the intimate scene that is being interrupted); and a cacophony of literal birdcalls in the woodwinds (i.e. the undesired morning outside the window). At the moment that Octavian declares his intention to shut the window, there is a surprise harmonic shift, a sung high G, the sudden entrance of basses and bassoons, and a tremolo chord in the strings; in other words: big drama. For what, Richard? He is shutting the window! You picked all the wrong stuff. Everything you composed into the moment was not only already in the libretto but was already visible and audible on stage. It’s exactly the stuff we don’t need music about. This isn’t even music for the cartoon version — even Mickey Mouse was occasionally allowed to decide to close a window independently from the tyranny of the underscore — this is the music for the radio play version. For a radio play with no sound effects. And, if possible, no actors. This is music to complement nothing; it does not play well with others.

Strauss has composed everything but the drama. The kitchen sink he has. In fact the kitchen sink was his top priority.

He did subtitle it as a “Comedy for Music,” so maybe he was acknowledging his selfishness. It’s for music more than it’s for you.

As for the libretto: on the one hand, it’s a completely mannered display of pretentious nostalgic fondness for things I do not personally love – it is an inbred opera “about” Mozart operas, for rich people who like stories about richer people. It’s purposefully, knowingly full of all that 18th-century crap – wigs and slave boys and stockings and titles and so on and so on. In fact, Hoffmannsthal goes so far as to invent some 18th-century crap that never existed. The whole concept of the “Rosenkavalier” (a noble messenger who presents a bride-to-be with a traditional, ceremonial silver rose) – it’s something he concocted to be just as sissified and twee (and, to the intended audience, delicious) as all the historical crap. Also, apparently, the German of the libretto is fantasy-antiquated in a way that he invented. The opera is “retro,” but it is not a pastiche, and it’s not ironic, and it’s not simply nostalgic or kitschy, and it’s certainly not “post-modern” – Hoffmannsthal has some other kind of attitude toward all this stuff. And though that attitude is a little self-congratulatory and too-clever (like the music), I can’t deny that it is, at least, genuinely sophisticated and intelligent. It’s just not my silver-edged, gilded white china cup of tea.

Neither is it my cup of tea that the young hero is played by a woman wearing the proverbial trousers. This choice is either an affectation, linking us back to the grand tradition of ridiculous bent-gender stuff in operas, or an aesthetic choice made by people for whom the sound of several high female voices intertwining is so exquisite that they’re willing to suspend all sorts of disbelief to get it. I am not such a person. The transcendently beautiful finale yada yada yada doesn’t do a lot for me because, though the orchestra is playing something pretty, it’s sort of ruined by all those high voices going at once! Not the most pleasant sound. I don’t understand opera-land’s fixation on people singing high notes. To me, highness of sing doesn’t correspond in any way to intensity of emotion. If anything, the further from speaking tones a singer gets, the less it feels to me like the product of a human being. And I thought the whole point of putting them on stage acting out stories was because they’re human beings!

But I do have a good deal of respect for the way the libretto is written. Its ambitions in terms of psychological subtlety are admirable. Opera usually offers only the biggest, dumbest sort of emotions. Here the camera seems to be in a bit closer on the characters; the work tries to register real social relationships and not just plotted relationships. At least, when it’s convenient to do so. It’s a little erratic.

Also, as mentioned, no matter how open and sympathetic and grown-up you are, it’s very hard to watch the lovers interacting and not be constantly thinking, “but that’s not a man!” So that tends to takes some of the edge off it.

There are one or two reasonably catchy waltz melodies in there, which would seem to be the main reason that this opera is such a perennial favorite; rather silly considering the huge ratio of everything-else to catchy-waltz in the score. In 3 though the everything-else may be. For my part, I think Strauss’s leitmotifs are better material than his “tunes,” but he rarely puts them to really satisfying musical ends, so despite all the interesting melodies, you still end up waiting eagerly for the moment when a character sings two-fifths of an actual song. “Mit mir” is a pretty amusing little number, I’ll admit.

I still have, pushed to a burner so far back that it may have fallen off the stove entirely, a potential entry about John Williams and movie music that I started writing three years ago. Listening to Rosenkavalier I was struck by how this is the source for so many aspects of the Hollywood school of composition; orchestrally, harmonically, motivically, and representationally. It has both the sound and the spirit, even superficially: Octavian’s theme is like Indiana Jones’s German cousin. I already knew that Strauss’s orchestra was a big part of the Hollywood sound, but previously I only knew his tone poems; what was most striking here is how his dramatic technique (which I was impugning above) was also carried over into film. Film scores, as with Rosenkavalier, are not made up of self-contained formal pieces of music – they are just butter spread over the length of a work, like a long mural. This technique creates its own characteristic sense of not-quite-form, which is what that other entry was going to be about, and which is what I recognized here.

There is genius in there, and there’s maybe a brilliant opera in there too, but it’s strutting around affectedly in a giant, nerdy, obnoxious marshmallow suit. If you can picture that.

Gonna break this up with some art. Here’s a link to a painting of the original production – looks like the end of Act II. And here below is a photo of the “presentation of the rose” scene in the original production. I bet it looked better than this in person.

Dubal’s recommended recordings were Karajan and Bernstein. I couldn’t find copies of the Bernstein, though I’d still be interested to hear it. The Karajan was fine, but it’s the top pick because of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, I think, and I’m not one of these people for whom singing voices are the principal consideration. Tempi matter more to me, in a way. The one I ended up putting in the most time with was the Solti recording, which is the 1001 Classical Recordings pick. I listened to it several times – well, acts one and two and the very end of act three. There’s a chunk in there, when the police show up, that I just couldn’t make myself care about, and I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I watched the Solti 1985 DVD all the way through; the Kleiber 1994 DVD I didn’t make time for more than the first 20 minutes before I had to return it to the library. In those 20 minutes, though, it seemed like it might be slightly better.

The piano-vocal score, online. The full score is more interesting but nobody seems to have posted it yet.

Enough with this entry! This has been rotting here forEVER. A year, I think. I know, it’s completely overgrown and dull. But if you think it’s tedious, think how I feel. Ugh. I really need to make the process of listening, writing, and posting much faster. Like, I should post my thoughts about a thing as soon as I have those thoughts, which usually are the day I encounter the thing. Not a year later, out of a sense of ingrown obligation, after it’s all had time to fester and get boring. Not even google cares at this point. Sorry, google robots, to make you read all this.

DVD:
Kiri Te Kanawa (Marschallin), Aage Haugland (Ochs), Anne Howells (Octavian), Barbara Bonney (Sophie)
The Royal Opera, Covent Garden / Georg Solti. Stage production directed by John Schlesinger. Kultur 2029. 1985.

Felicity Lott (Marschallin), Kurt Moll (Ochs), Anne Sofie von Otter (Octavian), Barbara Bonney (Sophie)
Vienna State Opera / Carlos Kleiber. Based on a stage production by Otto Schenk. Deutsche Grammophon NTSC 073 0089. 1994.

CD:
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (Marschallin), Otto Edelmann (Ochs), Christa Ludwig (Octavian), Teresa Stich-Randall (Sophie)
Philharmonia Orchestra / Herbert von Karajan. EMI 5 56113 2. 1956.

Kiri Te Kanawa (Marschallin), Kurt Rydl (Ochs), Anne Sofie Von Otter (Octavian), Barbara Hendricks (Sophie)
Staatskapelle Dresden / Bernard Haitink. EMI 7 54259 2. 1990.

Regine Crespin (Marschallin), Manfred Jungwirth (Ochs), Yvonne Minton (Octavian), Helen Donath (Sophie)
Wiener Philharmoniker / Georg Solti. Decca 417 493-2. 1968.

Highlights (in English):
Yvonne Kenny (Marschallin), John Tomlinson (Ochs), Diana Montague (Octavian), Rosemary Joshua (Sophie).
London Philharmonic Orchestra / David Parry. Chandos CHAN 9302. 1998.

Rosenkavalier-Suite:
Wiener Philharmoniker / Christian Thielemann. Deutsche Grammophon 469 519-2. 2000.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra, with Harp and Piano
composed: 1947-8 (age 48)
first performance: New York (and NBC radio), November 6, 1950 (Benny Goodman, NBC Symphony Orchestra/Fritz Reiner)

Random number 586 off the master list. This is our ninth selection, for those who are counting. Which didn’t even include me, until just now, so surely no one.

I love this picture – from 1947 – and think it complements the piece nicely. The piece is like walking out into the backyard and feeling pretty good about things. But still keeping an eye on that cat.

I could have given you this picture of a later performance of the piece, but for illustrative purposes, the era is much more important to me than the occasion.

Is this Aaron Copland’s best piece? I remember listening to it one day on my iPod – on a train, I think, which always helps music seem vital – and thinking, “this has got to be Copland’s best piece.” But is it? It doesn’t have that essential seriousness shared by most of his other works that I would put in the running – the Second Symphony, the Piano Variations, the Piano Quartet – nor does it have the cinematic breadth of sentiment of stuff like Billy the Kid or Appalachian Spring that most people would probably point to.

What it has, what leaped out at me that day, is a sense of comfort, and, as a result, truth. The rhythm of it, the inner life of it, is relaxed in a way that seems real and unforced; actual happiness rather than a show of happiness. There is no false drama in it; it emotes at the scale of life.

The first section passes like a fine afternoon, the central cadenza paces around like the cat in the yard, and the last section has some fun in the same setting; maybe friends came over and you set up the badminton net.

Copland took several famous shots at composing “the sound of America,” and this isn’t one of them, but all the same, I think this is where he really gets it right. In the opening section, I hear an America that I recognize; a country without cadences or climaxes, the sweet, mild song of disinterested birds. Beauty too familiar to be called beauty, yet there it is anyway. We are in a hammock, and the sky is blue, and maybe the grass is a little brown but oh well. When emotion swells, to the degree that it does, it is just that: the play of emotion over a moment that hasn’t changed, like the shadows of clouds. The hammock isn’t even swinging. I find this music very touching, not because it is stronger than life but because I have actually lived it.

In the cadenza, I am touched by the same authenticity. Usually a cadenza like this for a monophonic instrument – with motives tossed this way and that, slowly as though being improvised, then worked into a frenzy, ideas alternated and dropped and picked up again, loud like there’s music playing and then soft so it’s almost like praying – feels like something out of “101 Great Audition Monologues.” I.e. a contrivance, a sales pitch; range and contrast purely for the sake of your money’s-worth. The clarinet cadenza here isn’t that. It’s just a cat. Or a thought. It goes through its changes but it isn’t claiming anything or asking for attention. Something is happening that is different in rhythm and delivery from what came before, but not so different in soul. Clouds are still passing over the moment and not the other way around.

Maybe this contented, contemplative spirit of non-event doesn’t quite last all the way to the very end – there has to be a climax, naturally – but it lasts quite a way into the fast section, where the bounding tenths in the bass (and elsewhere) are the same as the ripples of gentleness that opened the whole piece. The fast part doesn’t break with the placidity; it is, if I may, high-energy placidity. It is a dance of relaxation, like the badminton set, which is after all just a step away from the hammock.

The “jazzy” theme epitomizes the wonderful spirit of this piece. It has absolutely nothing jazzy whatsoever about it except for an attitude of nonchalance. (And a couple of flatted notes. And a couple syncopated notes too, if you’re really counting.) My point is, the piece isn’t capturing anything about the world of jazz music; it’s just connecting to a similarly populist sense of ease and satisfaction. It’s feelin’ all right. But it is not out at a club. It’s just at home.

The ending, then, is the only part where this piece brings me back to the concert hall, to the land of concerti and virtuosi and glissandi. But we’ve been brought there gradually and, at least until the very last moments, the enthusiasm doesn’t need to be manufactured; it finds its way naturally.

Yes, the piece may just be lemonade. But it’s a very fine lemonade – just the right temperature, just the right sweetness, tartness, mellowness, crispness – and that is far more admirable, soulful, and significant a thing than the mediocre steaks of so much classical music.

Dubal recommends

Stoltzman, London Symphony Orchestra, Leighton Smith: RCA 09026-61630-2
Drucker, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernstein: Deutsche Grammophon 431672-2

He notably does not recommend the performance by Benny Goodman (for whom it was written) with Copland conducting (Columbia Symphony, 1963). I’ve seen a number of places where this performance is criticized as clumsy and lifeless. But to me, this is the perfect performance. Goodman’s nervous affectlessness and Copland’s merely competent direction are exactly what this deeply unpretentious piece need. The undeniable blandness of the recording, to me, perfectly evokes the breezes and the birds of the beautiful, indifferent American day I’ve been referring to all along. Performances with any suggestion of spectacle or charisma per se are going against the grain. At least as I hear it. Copland called it “the best record I ever conducted” and I’d like to think it was because he heard his own music the way I hear it.

I’ll admit, I didn’t listen to too many different recordings this time around. Didn’t get the ones above – just listened to the Copland/Goodman version and also to Charles Neidich, I Musici de Montréal/Yuli Turovsky (1999), which restores several very high passages toward the end that Benny Goodman asked Copland to revise because they scared him. It’s immediately clear that the original passages make more compositional sense than the replacement versions, so this is a worthwhile listen, but as I’ve been saying, I find this piece’s lack of traditional charisma to be its source of grace, so I have no need for the “whoa” notes. I’ll grant Neidich and Turovsky that for a “sassy” interpretation, theirs is pretty well-judged. Unlike a version by Richard Stoltzman that I heard (streaming online, I forget where), which arrogantly and tastelessly affected “jazzy” without any affinity at all for Aaron Copland’s supreme avuncular squareness.

This is quite copyrighted so no pdfs of the score for download. There’s no need, though, because it has been posted online in more than its entirety, by reputable institutions. Here’s 113 pages of sketches at the Library of Congress – absolutely fascinating if you take the time – and here’s the original manuscript full score at Juilliard. (It’s Flash, so I can’t link you straight to it, but click through and it’s where you’d expect.)

Incidentally: 1001 Classical Recordings recommends the Goodman/Copland recording. So once again I like their style. And the Medtner concerto wasn’t on their list, which, much as I like the piece, I can understand.

Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951)
Concerto no. 2 in C Minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 50
composed: 1920-27 (ages 40-47)
first performance: Moscow, March 13, 1927 (Moscow Conservatory Orchestra?/Alexander Medtner)
dedicated to Serge Rachmaninoff

I know it’s not the greatest picture, but I had to use it because this is apparently March 8, 1927 – i.e. the Tuesday prior to the Sunday of the premiere – and was taken at Moscow Conservatory, seemingly on a stage, so this may well be the piano on which the premiere was soon to be performed. That’s of course Medtner at the piano. The other two guys are nobody important.

No. 633. Strange, somehow, that this of all pieces should have turned up so early in the random playlist – it’s an off-the-beaten-path piece that happens to be a particular favorite of mine, and its coincidental inclusion in The Essential Canon of Western Music is a bit of Medtner advocacy on Dubal’s part that very arguably has no place here. If nobody knows a piece, it’s definitionally not in the Essential Canon, quality be damned.

I learned the word “lapidary” from reading a description of Medtner’s work, and that really is a fine word for it. Every detail feels worked – in the good sense of having been cared for and refined, not the bad sense of having been tortured out of all naturalness. The feature of Medtner’s music that grips me most, in fact, is precisely that it is simultaneously very worked and very natural. The achievement of grace through great effort is inspiring; and to be able to hear both the effort and the grace is aesthetically very satisfying. That may come close to a definition of artistic beauty, in fact. At least for me.

It is further inspiring and fascinating to me that Medtner didn’t just subscribe to the principle of artistic grace through toil, but actually articulated and espoused it in a book. Even the titles and texts of his works themselves frequently make explicit reference to his underlying quasi-devotional philosophy, wherein the sacred essence of music – delivered to us from somewhere divine, above and beyond – must be treated with the humblest respect and a tireless, monk-like dedication. Lots of artists have said stuff like “I am just a poor servant of the muse, just a vessel for something greater than me,” but it usually comes off as a weak misdirection from their throbbing egos. Medtner, I think, actually lived by his words, which would explain why he was able to seem arrogantly self-serious about his music despite having no stomach at all for actual self-promotion – a failing that probably accounts for his outsider status in the Canon. Unlike the comparably-gifted Rachmaninoff, who gritted his teeth and played his greatest hits at sold-out concerts all the way into the sunset, Medtner apparently couldn’t accept that quality and sincerity weren’t the only criteria for success, and let his fame and reputation slip away, until in his final years he came to completely depend on the charity of a small circle of admirers in London.

Medtner’s book, The Muse and the Fashion (now wonderfully available online) spells it all out in prose, and made a very powerful impression on me when I first read it. Yes, Mr. Medtner, compared to your serious, devoted, layered craftsmanship, most “modern” music does seem like lazy, self-indulgent permissiveness. His totally stubborn, reactionary aesthetic philosophy made perfect sense to me, to my great surprise. I can get there and feel it the way he felt it, and it takes a while to shake it off. There was a year or two where I didn’t really have any desire to play any music other than Medtner’s; everything else seemed to be, to some degree, shirking responsibilities or missing opportunities.

The spell eventually dissipated. There are many other paths in music, and I can follow them too, gladly and without reservations. But spending that time in Medtner’s mindset expanded my aesthetic outlook rather than contracting it, I believe. Being open to absolutely anything the art world throws at you – the criterion of no criteria – is a relatively easy direction to stretch. Maintaining principles is much harder. Medtner was wrong to believe that what he saw as “muse” was universally true and what he saw as “fashion” was universally false; but he was surely right that it was true for him. The time I spent immersed in Medtner’s music convinced me of the importance of making an equivalent distinction for myself, derived from my nature, nurture, culture, and whatever else.

For every person, some things are meaningful in a way that others aren’t, and one must always strive to know the difference.

This Piano Concerto No. 2 was the first piece of Medtner’s that I actually heard on a recording – I had previously played my own way through the Sonata op. 22 – and I remember that when I first put it on, I intended to make a game of seeing how many listens it would take for me to “get” the piece. Nowadays I could probably parse the first two movements after only a few tries. At the time, I felt almost immediately that, though I liked many of the “sounds,” I was clearly in over my head. After two furrowed-brow listens, I gave up and resorted to getting the score. (The standard online source seems to have gotten a little more stringent about Russian copyright, of late, so at present you can’t download the score pdfs anymore, but who knows what the future holds.)

With the score in hand, it fell into place readily and was dazzling to me. On the blind listens, I had a tough time just making sense of the hard-kicking opening rhythm. What was it, exactly? Seeing it in the score I remember getting very excited: it’s a pop syncopation! And not classy pop, either! It’s a big legit piano concerto based on “The Price is Right”! My ear had been unable to hear the rhythm for what it was because the cultural dissonance was too great. And yet, once known, the “pop” rhythm is still perfectly in keeping with the rest of the piece. Medtner, whose music is seen as deeply conservative, was actually far, far ahead of his time in using heavy syncopations and other rhythmic quirks as an integral part of the musical fabric. In fact I can’t think of any other “serious” composers since who have really followed his lead. Lively irregular rhythms have been fair game for art music since Stravinsky, but lively regular rhythms are so strongly associated with pop musics that nobody seems to be able to shake the connotation, or seems interested in trying. John Adams and company might throw in a little “Price is Right” syncopation every now and then, but that post-minimalist aesthetic very intentionally claims a closer kinship to pop culture than other art music; the sheen that half-reflects “The Price is Right” is part of the program. Not so, obviously, with Medtner. Nobody is using these rhythms the way he did: as pure, abstract musical materials that happen to be blessed with charismatic vitality.

Though: I remember my surprise on realizing that some of the distinctively propulsive “Hollywood adventure” rhythms in a John Williams score (Star Wars or the like) were in fact syncopations borrowed from pop, or at least from pop-ified marching bands/drum corps. They had been put to an entirely unrelated use in drastically different garb, which made them sound like a whole new species. More evidence that pop rhythms are just itching to get out and do other things! Cue my dad saying, “maybe you should try to write the kind of music you’re describing.” Yes, Dad, maybe I should, but not until I’m done with this entry, okay?

Okay.

The first movement is a big, beautiful, romantic concerto movement exactly the way you want it: showy yet rigorous. The exposition dishes up a healthy helping of thematic material, all of it tasty, and then immediately sets to work doing tricks with it, juggling it all together, before the development even starts. It’s a joyful little quasi-sonata in itself, and the “ta-dah!” that ends the exposition feels like it merits applause, since so much has been accomplished already. If it were in the home key, it might seem like a genuine ending. But then, with some grinding, moaning chords, something truly sticky enters the mix for the first time and a long elaborate development becomes necessary to clean it up. The considerable cadenza that stands in for most of the recapitulation is fantastically well-written – full of flash and boom, but all of it in the service of an intelligent argument; there’s nothing inflated or gratuitous about it. (And yet even so, he apparently felt obligated to offer an optional cut, halving the cadenza, which is a real shame because many of the recordings take it.) Then the movement ends with one of Mr. Medtner’s favorites, a spooky wind that blows away all the little bits and pieces of material.

He wrote many pieces called “fairy tale,” and this concerto shares their sensibility of dignified fantasy. The spirit of the thing is like the lavish, inherently serious fantasy illustrations of the “golden age” – Parrish and Rackham and whoever (Bilibin in Russia might be more relevant here). But Medtner’s fairy tales are even more refined than the illustrators’, to the point where they have absolutely nothing to do with childhood: the music carries only the inner essence of fantasy, absolutely freed from any connotation of immaturity. That wry wind that blows away the themes at the end of the first movement is a wind from a fairy tale, but it’s no joke. It’s not nostalgia either. It is genuinely itself and must be reckoned with, as formidable as any shout of fate out of Beethoven.

Second movement is based on a very pretty slow melody that schowcases another Medtner specialty – his ability to build a long, compelling “sentence-y” theme out of ruminative development of a short “motive-y” theme. The music mulls over the opening phrases and in the process finds that it has spun out something much longer and more sweeping. This multilayered activity is the sort of thing that is very moving and beautiful when you are paying attention to it and yet can totally disappear when you aren’t. Medtner’s music tends to sound well-built, conventional, and unremarkable when one surfs over the details, because the scale on which he is lapidating is fine – and this is, I grant, a sort of weakness, but an inevitable one given his technique, and well worth the tradeoff… at least as long as an attentive audience can be ensured! Which, I guess, didn’t always work out for him. If you aren’t genuinely aware simultaneously of each phrase as it happens, of the established motives, of the theme as a whole, and of the harmony shifting under them, you will just hear some moderately pretty music, because the real beauty is in how elegantly these elements are held in tension and symmetry with one another. Such music is a bit like a magic square – it’s easy to see a huge magic square and shrug because, sure, it all seems to work out. Experiencing wonder requires one to feel the individual elements and become aware of the immense control necessary to hold them all in perfect relation.

This bizarre metaphor applies better to a fugue, actually. But it’s true of any art that is based on, as Stephen Dedalus windily says, the “formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.” Such relations are easy to shrug at once they exist, and some superficial relations are genuinely easy to rig up in a jiffy, but the best kind are not at all. Such relationships are, in a sense, themselves the work of art. If you can think that way, and can take the time to get to know something that way, you will like this piece. I think you will actually like his Concerto No. 1 better, but it’s not in this Canon.

K.S. “Leon” Sorabji, whose criticism is so much better than his music, said something – hm, can’t find the quote online – about Medtner’s music (I think specifically this concerto) feeling wonderful under the pianist’s hands, “like sinking one’s fingers into the pile of a deep oriental rug” or something to that effect. Once again I have used quotation marks completely undeservedly. Anyway, it’s true. Even the fingerings are lapidary; the mechanics of performance are beautifully, gratefully choreographed. It’s possible that my impression of the work as a whole takes this sort of behind-the-scenes refinement too much into account. I usually tend to think that looking at the score and touching the keyboard are just a shortcut to the same appreciation I would eventually arrive at through pure listening – that, if anything, the backstage route tends to blind me to some of the richness of a work by flattening it. But “richness” and “murk” can be dangerously similar; I’m just not sure which is the less sensitive way to approach a piece. Anyway, I’ve seen this piece naked and there’s no unseeing it now. And, I guess I’m saying, it looks great naked.

Third movement is the most formally idiosyncratic; it calls itself “Rondo” but it isn’t, really. Well, sort of. Oh, now, in the act of making myself write this, I think I finally get what the deal with this movement is. Thanks, my website.

The movement, I now see, seems to be conceived as an ambitious hybrid of rondo and sonata forms. It is an attempt to let both forms carry out their characteristic functions simultaneously. The rondo “refrain” is actually made up of two distinct subjects that more or less correspond to sonata themes, and most of the “episodes” consist of cameo appearances by melodies from the first two movements, recast as dances. At the end of the “exposition” there is a spooky-sad interlude, very much in the vein of the “fairy tale” pieces, which serves as an “episode” but also creates the psychological justification for the “development.” A fugato incorporating the refrain material serves as a traditional signal that we are in the development; then the second half of the development is based on material from the first movement and so does double-duty as an “episode.” The next reappearance of the initial theme is thus able to function both as a refrain in the rondo and as the sonata recapitulation. A partial reappearance of the first episode, from early in the movement, creates sonata symmetry even though the material has no clear sonata function in itself. Then a very brief cadenza leads to a manic coda, in which all the material from all three movements is stuffed into a phonebooth and then blown out of a cannon. It looks fantastically clever on the page; in practice, most of the detail disappears and it just sounds like a big “hoorah,” which is also a perfectly fine way to end a piece.

So I just walked myself through it, but up until right now, I have simply enjoyed this final movement as a house party to which the other movements have been invited, and that has been plenty for me. Walking through the rooms and seeing everyone dancing is perfectly enjoyable, in this case, even if you don’t notice the floor plan. I guess now I’ll have to see if having noticed the floor plan changes my appreciation for the piece.

David Dubal’s recommended recording is

Demidenko, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Maksymiuk: Hyperion CDA 66580

and that is mine as well. That is the recording that I heard first and the one I have continued to listen to over the years. It is, notably, one of the only recordings that features the uncut version of the first movement cadenza. The performance is satisfyingly energetic, and the recorded sound is attractive.

The composer’s own performance (Philharmonia Orchestra / Issay Dobrowen, 1947) is quite good despite the loose orchestra, and worth hearing through the crackles for its obvious historical significance. This time around we also listened to

Geoffrey Tozer, London Philharmonic Orchestra / Neeme Järvi, 1991.
Abram Shatskes, USSR Symphony Orchestra / Evgeny Svetlanov, 1959.

They’re all fine.

Somewhere I have a scan of the first edition cover. I used to put those on here. If I find it, I’ll include it at the top. AND REMOVE THIS SENTENCE.

Man, I have so many of these classical canon pieces still to write up.

(Joseph) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Concerto pour la main gauche, en ré majeur
composed: 1929-30 (ages 54-55)
first performance: Vienna, January 5, 1932 (Paul Wittgenstein, Vienna Symphony Orchestra/Robert Heger)

Not sure of the year here – might be 1928. Anyway, it’s around the right time. And just look at him! How could I pass up this photo?

535.

There are those who criticize Ravel for his fastidiousness, who accuse him of being cold and artificial because of his craftsmanship – surely the same people who feel that the Coen Brothers’ movies are too attentive to craft to be heartfelt.

But we must give the dapper, sexless collector of automata his due.

Those who submit the criticism that hyper-rigorous craftsmanship is incompatible with sincere sentiment are those who listen for craft. A child is incapable of thinking this thing, about Ravel. A naive listener hears only what music conveys, not how it conveys it. Watching a movie while thinking about moviemaking opens you to pitfalls that do not lie in wait for the viewer who watches only for the story.

I am, at this stage of my life, capable of both modes of observation. But we must remind ourselves that it is not the artist’s fault if we are thinking about his workmanship. It should be a matter of principle that exquisiteness of craftsmanship is never a fault, no matter how gleaming to the eye that seeks it out. That eye must retrain itself not to be such an aficionado, and to be a mere enthusiast for a change.

I wrote a essay in metaphor on this theme, once, before the broomlet days, but I don’t know where it is now. The gist was that appreciating art analytically, with attention to the workings, is like the mechanical nightingale. One is tempted into replacing the real live nightingale of just enjoying things directly with the intricacies of the mechanical one, but, like the emperor, one eventually comes to need the original, which is both more commonplace and more mysterious.

I wobble back and forth over this line when I listen to Ravel. Sometimes I can picture the man smoothly bringing a cigarette to his mouth, sitting in his immaculate study with his pant legs crisply creased; but sometimes I can picture flowers in bloom, waterfalls, and so forth. My favorite subjects to picture while listening to Ravel are fish in aquariums, or trains traveling through fields, or snow seen through windows; i.e. the beauty of the natural world observed from within the comforts of civilization. The quintessential European worldview, yes? Mr. Ravel seems to have had equal affection for both the fish and the aquarium, in his music. I can relate to that and don’t see any reason to act superior to it. You should be so lucky as to have so fine an aquarium.

Someone who sits around all day perfecting his handwriting, but has nothing to write, is a nerd. Ravel was manifestly not a nerd. He happened to have excellent penmanship. Because his music is so thoroughly good, it provides us an opportunity to relish fine penmanship. And I relish it!

I don’t know what story we’re supposed to hear in this concerto – something about war? man’s struggle? is the pathos of Paul Wittgenstein’s one-handedness a subtext to the music? Thought: perhaps Prokofiev’s utter disregard for the pathetic-heroic implications of a one-handed concerto was what turned Wittgenstein off to his piece, which is actually quite excellent on its own terms. But as I say: I don’t know what story we’re supposed to hear in the Ravel, but I hear something bigger and better than just the spirit of man rising above war (or amputation).

The beginning to me is like some primordial wash, the same birth-out-of-the-misty-void that you get at the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth or Das Rheingold or whatever else; the theme that grows out of it is imposing and impersonal. Most of the pianist’s material is a related spirit – he doesn’t sound to me like a protagonist, just a different mirror on the same impersonality. For the majority of the piece, we sit back and watch as grand and mysterious things happen; we are looking out the window at grandeur, at canyons and cliffs and nature booming – and in the middle section, at the dance of things in all its kooky ominous strangeness. The only real contrast in perspective comes with the timid, fragile second theme in the sad-fairy-tale mode. We are still observers but now we seem to have turned inward, to something private; the child within. The theme is almost too delicate to sustain itself in the face of the other material when it first appears. In the cadenza at the very end, the climax and heart of the piece arrives when the childlike theme is finally given the space to breathe and show itself… but then it must fall gracefully back below the waves for good, because nature is undeniable; the canyons and cliffs rise up again, and for the first time reach a triumphant chord affirming that, yes, the impersonal world out the window is the way things really are. We go out on chords that I can’t hear as anything other than crashing waves; the camera has been thrust through the window, out of the intimate human space forever.

Whoa.

Yes, I really do hear that, but having put it into words, it seems awfully purple. But that’s the joy of music, isn’t it, that it allows us to experience feelings inwardly that are unacceptably gauche in the outer world.* The internet being a queasy medium between those.

If Ravel’s worldview is the world seen from a cozy train – which is absolutely what I hear in the other, two-hand piano concerto – this piece, to me, is about accepting that eventually, one way or another, we have to get off the train. I can’t right now think of another work of his that so baldly announces what seems to frighten him, though I’m not thinking very hard. La Valse is also about luxury and nostalgia coming to a bitter end, but it’s more of a sardonic puppet show; Maurice is not implicating himself. But here in this piece I feel like he’s taken the little Maurice from L’Enfant et les sortilèges and, instead of returning him to his mother’s sweet embrace at the end, tells him that his childhood is now over and life is short, and leaves him looking out at the endless sea.

If someone shows me a letter now in which Ravel writes, “the left-hand concerto depicts the absurdity of war and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity,” I’ll say, “oh.” Even so, I like my way a lot better.

Probably it depicts nothing. But the philosophical shape suggested above is what moves me, even as I drum my fingers along to the catchy part.

Though I said it sideways earlier, I’ll just say it here explicitly: Ravel’s craftsmanship is second to none. There’s not a bar of this piece that you can’t savor in its deliciousness.

Picks from the book:
Cortot, Paris Conservatory Orchestra, Munch: Pearl PEA 9491
Paik, Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Bertini: Orfeo 013821
Fleisher, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Ozawa: Sony Classical SK 47188

Didn’t get those. My favorite recording of this piece is still Krystian Zimerman with The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez, 1996. I’ve had it since it first came out, listened to it many times, and can’t help but miss its restraint and polish when I listen to any other recording. I did find plenty of moments to enjoy in each of the others I heard, though: Robert Casadesus, Philadelphia Orchestra / Eugene Ormandy, 1947; Leon Fleisher, Baltimore Symphony / Sergiu Comissiona, 1982; Michel Béroff, London Symphony Orchestra / Claudio Abbado, 1987; Samson François, Orchestre de la Societé des Concerts du Conservatoire / André Cluytens, 1959. And a live performance by Fleisher on youtube.

The sheet music site finally came back to life after a long hiatus of self-pity, and both a two-piano reduction and the full score are available here, or at least will be when they get around to it. Legal for download… as long as you don’t live in the USA.

* Get it? Gauche? Unintentional but I noticed it on my read-through. Yes, I do read these. Usually.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Opus 54: Symphony No. 6, in B minor
composed: 1939 (age 33)
first performance: Leningrad, November 5, 1939 (Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Evgeny Mravinsky)

Shostakovich on the right of course, and on the left is Evgeny Mravinsky, the conductor of the premiere (and of the best recording, see below). The photo is apparently from 1937, so a couple years prior to the sixth symphony, but close enough. This image has clearly been been given the old Soviet once-over.

590 on the big list.

Shostakovich wrote music in which the point isn’t particularly musical, it’s dramatic or quasi-literary. It’s the sequence of events that is significant; the events themselves seem to bore him a bit. A good deal of what he writes just functions efficiently. It’s as though his technical facility was too great for him to get very excited about mere notes; the meat is in the storytelling. He seems always to be saying, “it’s obvious enough what this moment is – it’s just what it sounds like; happy music or ugly music or whatever – the real question is, what comes next, and why?” Perhaps this is why his music is oddly popular: because “okay, what comes next?” is a very easy way to listen, readily available to everyone.

Yes, oddly popular: I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of people who have made room in their personal playlists for only a very few classical composers, and have chosen Shostakovich as one of them. I can enjoy Shostakovich but he wouldn’t go on my short list, for that very same reason; it’s music, but it’s not very music-y.

Generally, when program notes are written in phrases like “the tutti allegro gives way to a desolate flute solo,” they give no real understanding of the music’s meaning until you hear the actual notes. But with Shostakovich the emphasis is shifted and such descriptions often can give a good idea of the piece. In the first movement of this symphony, for example, the particular notes the flute plays are of no very great interest – the important thing truly is that it is “a desolate flute solo.” At least that’s how I hear it. I might compare it to Magritte; the execution is just a necessary adjunct to the concept.

That all said, I do like this piece. I’ve heard the much-more-famous Fifth Symphony a couple times – but only a couple – and have to admit it doesn’t mean a lot to me, whereas this one seemed interesting from the first hearing, and over repeated listenings became quite satisfying and involving.

The first movement is the work’s center of gravity: a weighty, slow, serious landscape, and very long. “A spacious Largo, one of the composer’s greatest utterances,” Dubal calls it. I’m not familiar with quite enough of the composer’s utterances to speak confidently on this point, but I suspect he probably overstates the case. Like I said last time, we can’t let the seriousness-addicts run the show. To me, the punchy, zany, vulgar third movement makes a stronger impression than the first, every time – and apparently I am in agreement with the composer on this one, who said he was proudest of the third movement. Not to say that the first movement isn’t a worthy and effective piece of work. It is. Once I was finally able to make formal sense of its 15 minutes of slowness, the piece opened itself up to me and became a consistently satisfying journey. One that I still enjoy taking.

But finding that form was difficult, and required many listens and eventually a copy of the score. It’s a sonata form, as you might expect, but the thematic material, which usually demarcates the form, here actually obscures it, by appearing out of turn and mutating unexpectedly. So that it may benefit future first-time listeners (all others, please skip!), here’s how I hear it: the declamatory first ~2 minutes are introduction. Strings with pizzicato bass mark the start of the first subject proper, which lasts for ~3.5 minutes. The motif of the second subject appears during the big climax of the first subject, but the second subject proper starts after that, quietly, again introduced with pizzicato bass. It lasts for ~4 minutes and meanders thoroughly, with little overt use of its own theme. The exposition ends with the strings quietly filling out a wide minor chord. The development starts immediately with an ominous tam-tam strike, and proceeds for ~2 minutes. Desolate flute solos, etc. The mysterious nugget at the core of the whole movement comes at the end of the development, with a prolonged shimmery trill and a sad, strange series of chords floating by. This is a fantastic, poetic moment, and if it needs 15 minutes of cushioning to make it sing properly, so be it. Once that’s played out, you’re dumped directly into the recapitulation of the first subject, which is now much more direct and clear. It lays relatively low and wraps up the movement on its own; the second subject just puts in a ghostly cameo appearance as a tag.

To the curiosity-seekers who just read that paragraph despite the warning (I don’t know who you are, but I can guess!), I want to say: though it may just sound like analysis for analysis-lovers, I truly cannot imagine anyone really knowing and liking this piece without breaking it down mentally that way, or another similar way. You don’t have to use those terms – or any terms at all – but you do need to have a roadmap. 15 minutes of undifferentiated sound would have no appeal at all; some scheme of differentiation is crucial, and the better the scheme, the more rewarding the experience. The above is simply the most rewarding scheme I was able to find. If you really can’t even begin to conceive of listening that way, you are missing out. But most people who claim they have absolutely no affinity for the idea of musical form just don’t have any experience thinking about it consciously; in practice, they still listen the same way as everyone else. I used to use the metaphor that explaining which parts are which in sonata form is like explaining which parts of the TV broadcast are show and which are commercials. “They alternate in an A B A B pattern.” Crucial information for comprehension, but not nearly as abstract as it sounds in the telling. But that’s not a great metaphor. If I think of a better one I’ll tell you.

Before I proceed, another general comment on Shostakovich: The “quasi-literary” technique described above ends up creating the strong impression that in some way, something is being said. In a painting, if the sitter is holding a pear and behind him out a window you can see a ruined windmill with a stag looking at it, and tiny in the distance there’s a tree being struck by lightning, and in the shadow behind one of the curtains you can see a servant but the servant is blindfolded and wearing an army uniform, you can’t help but think, “what does this mean?” Sometimes there are answers on the placard. But sometimes there aren’t answers anywhere. Sometimes the suggestion of hidden meaning is simply its own aesthetic reward. I believe that is – or at least must necessarily be, for us – the case with Shostakovich.

There’s not really anything inherently mysterious or symbolic about a pear or a tree being struck by lightning; they suggest “meaning” to us because we feel that it is the artist, and not the work itself, that demanded their presence. Or some hidden scheme that escapes us. The chair is there because a seated portrait demands a chair. A pear less so; some other force, then, must have demanded it.

This crazy painting is a totally improvised example and doesn’t exist, by the way.

Anyway, Shostakovich’s music works on the same principle. It is surely Shostakovich himself, and not Euterpe,* who demands this desolate flute solo, who is luring the orchestra off the road and into the wilderness, who is playing these quizzical unexpected chords. Something in his mind demanded this. And so it must mean something, we think. An air of muffled mystery hangs over almost everything I’ve heard by the man.

But: I think all this excited talk about his music containing secret political messages is silly. “He tricked the Soviets into thinking this was a happy piece, but listen closely! It’s not actually that happy!” Shostakovich always had a stiff touch – even his genuine “light music” tends to sounds somewhat clench-jawed. So it’s no surprise that his “pro-” music sounds a little “anti-.” And it’s beyond debate that he was feeling, to put it mildly, frustrated and oppressed. So yes, it’s obviously the case that his happy Soviet music is not actually that happy, for one reason or the other. But that’s not half as interesting as people make it out to be. The reason people get excited about it, I think, is because of the sense of enigma that arises in his music. People want to believe that this political/biographical info is the secret that the music promises. But that’s silly. Just listen to the climax of the first movement, described above. This is music that expresses the feeling of an enigma, rather than merely expressing some as-yet-unidentified feeling (ooh, maybe political dissidence???) enigmatically. No?

Then again I may be wrong. Perhaps he did in fact have private meanings for every damn musical event in everything he wrote; maybe that enigmatic climax was composed as a representation of some particular memory, or even, ugh, of something as generic and huge as the sinking of his weary soul under the Stalinist regime. But even if that’s the case, we still have to give it up. You can hear it as whatever you like, but you can never get it “right.” Music is not a crackable code.

And no, I personally don’t think it’s even worth believing it’s an actual code – he’s too obviously enamored of the aesthetics of code-iness. In his Symphony No. 15 he throws in actual quotations from Rossini and Wagner and I think from his own works. Didn’t tell anyone what they meant to him. That’s the act of a man who thinks that things that seem like codes are valuable and satisfying in themselves. Meanwhile, Edward Elgar’s Enigma, which he explicitly identified as having a hidden element, sounds 100% non-enigmatic. The sound of an enigma must be cultivated, and Shostakovich cultivated it like mad. Let’s please not waste too much time trying to shove a key into a painted keyhole in a trompe-l’oeil door; it’s embarrassing.

Okay, gonna wrap this up now. Second movement is a scherzo and third movement is a galop. They have in common that Dmitri sets unremarkable material going at a fast clip and then pokes and prods it, under high pressure, to make various surprises suddenly bubble out. In the second movement there is an exciting central episode (trio?) that sounds like an airplane dogfight from a movie. Which is fine by me. The third movement is a sort of run-on sentence ballet, a Rossini overture that has too much nervous energy to let any of its material repeat or develop – it just spews out phrase after phrase of dizzy cliche, careening around corners until it emerges as a vulgar, raucous fight song or something, and finally bashes itself on the head until it stops. I picture Daffy Duck playing football. It’s really a lot of fun; I have listened to this movement twice in a row on a several occasions.

Commentators tend to fixate on the I. VERY SLOW AND LONG, II. FAST AND SHORT, III. FAST AND SHORT form of the symphony, saying it’s lopsided and peculiar, but I have no problem with it at all. If it’s an experiment, it works just fine. If you feel that the first movement’s weight is never quite counter-balanced, that just adds to its enigma. If you feel that it is counter-balanced, then we don’t have a problem here.

What does it add up to as a whole? Shostakovich apparently said of the sixth symphony that he “wanted to convey in it the moods of spring, joy, youth.” I don’t know where to begin with that. Did he want us to pity him?

Actually, I think he made that statement before he finished composing, so plans may have changed.

Dubal’s picks:

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernstein: Deutsche Grammophon 419771-2
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Mravinsky: ICONE 9404

I didn’t hear the Bernstein, but I did hear the Mravinsky (on a different release) and it’s fantastic. By far the best of the recordings I heard, and I heard quite a few. You only need to hear one recording of this piece and it’s that one.

I also heard WDR Sinfonieorchester/Barshai (1995), Concertgebouw Orchestra/Haitink (1985), Moscow Phlharmonic Orchestra/Kondrashin (1972), Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra/Jansons (1991), National Symphony Orchestra/Rostropovich (1994), USSR State Symphony Orchestra/Rozhdestvensky (1983), and Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Mravinsky (1972), which is not nearly as good as their 1965 recording recommended above.

This is #808 on the 1001 Classical Recordings list, which singles out a specific recording for each work. They too name the Mravinsky 1965 recording.

Just to recap our other selections in terms of the 1001 list:
1. Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1 is combined with Cello Sonata No. 2 as #361 on the list; they recommend the recent Isserlis/Hough recording, which now that I’ve heard it is probably my favorite too.
2. Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony is #448; they recommend the Boston/Munch recording that I liked.
3. Tchaikovsky Capriccio Italien isn’t on the list, which seems right to me.
4. Beethoven Violin Concerto they have Mutter with Berlin/Karajan. I’d listen to that.
5. Brahms Paganini Variations is also not on the list, which is fine by me. So far their track record is good. But I’m going to stick with the Dubal list for now.

Sorry, can’t link you to a score this time. Not in the public domain yet.

* Muse of music, duh.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Opus 38: Variations on a Theme by Paganini
composed: 1862-3 (age 29-30)
published: 1866
first performance: Zürich, November 25, 1865 (Johannes Brahms, piano)

Scores are here: Book I and Book II.

Remember how we were listening to The Essential Canon of Classical Music a year ago? Yes, we’re still doing that. I just haven’t kept up with it. Number 312 on the list. We were listening to it exactly a year ago this month.

This is an interesting case.

Dubal quotes James Huneker telling us that the variations “are also vast spiritual problems.” This seemed silly to me while listening. The piece was obviously a basically technical proposition, for the composer as well as the performer.

But then when the variations started turning up in isolation on my iPod’s shuffle – each one is individually tracked in the Kissin recording – they began to come to life as distinct pieces, extremely tiny though they each are. The through-line of the variation form became something wistful and nostalgic – because each little piece that whips by while I’m on the subway is tied poignantly to something else, something not contained in itself, and none of them quite embodies it completely (or consummates it completely, in whatever sense it might).

Heard in series, their proximity to one another (and to the theme) detracts from their individuality. This is a bit of a paradox of variation form. By inserting some arbitrarily long hiatuses between them, I’ve been able to hear them as something more than technical. Maybe they’re not “vast spiritual problems,” but I can sympathize with the sentiment – there is, at least, something yearning and pained about them. There is the sense that they have put up some resistance, some struggle, in their irreversible journey away from the theme toward their individual selves, but that they’ve reached a bittersweet acceptance.

Still, the slower, more tender variations remain more interesting than the fastest, most difficult ones, many of which have an aridity to them that I don’t think can be performed away. Let me mention that this set is exceedingly – I daresay excessively – difficult. I usually like to play through any piano piece to get a little closer to it, fudging the hard parts, but this piece resisted even the roughest stumbling through – it’s ALL hard parts. I could see what everything was, but frequently couldn’t even make a noise that reminded me of it. The demands in terms of leaping and strength are maybe the highest I’ve ever encountered. And for what? It’s fair for a composer to take pride in the sophistication of his work, but the raw difficulty is, if anything, a count against him – a better composer could have found a more idiomatic way of creating effectively the same sounds. Difficulty is only of value to the show-off performer, and even then, only if it actually appears difficult. This piece sounds easier than it is; what could possibly justify that?

If Brahms’s principal objective here was to investigate technical possibilities for the piano, I’m not at all impressed – his devices are extremely inefficient. Compared to someone with an actual gift for pianistic technical invention, like Rachmaninoff, he’s downright clumsy – elsewhere as much as here, but here he puts that clumsiness nakedly on display. If his objective was to compose music that just happened to be technically challenging, I think he got the proportions wrong. That said, there’s still definite musical value here – it just took me a little while to feel it.

Speaking of Rachmaninoff, his more famous variations on the same theme share with the Brahms an emphasis on brilliance, but otherwise the pieces go in very different directions. On the whole, Brahms’s are rather more serious, but only a seriousness addict would say that his is the better work. Of course, classical music is a bastion for seriousness addicts and it’s often their opinions that influence the formation of would-be canons like this one. Rachmaninoff’s all-around better-made crowd-pleaser is on the list too, of course.

I know, just because the pieces on the same theme doesn’t make this comparison fair.

Dubal suggests:
Bachauer: Mercury 434340-2
Michelangeli: Arkadia 903
Biret: Naxos 8.550350
Rodriguez: Elan 2200

Four suggestions! Nope, didn’t hear any of those. We heard Michelangeli, on the second of his “Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century” sets, but I gather this isn’t the same as the recommended recording. It’s not complete either, and he shuffles the order. Also heard the Evgeny Kissin recording, which is, no question, excellently played, and is the recording that was kind enough to break the variations into tracks so that I could think about them individually. But as a whole I felt he made the whole thing seem too easy and smooth to attract much attention. The most immediately satisfying recording, though I only listened a couple times, was the Julius Katchen recording, which had a bit more drama to it.

Grove’s Dictionary says:

By comparison with almost every other keyboard work of Brahms, the Variations on a Theme by Paganini (op.35) place an emphasis on extreme virtuosity. (Clara Schumann called them ‘witch variations’ and regretted they were beyond her capacity.) The more didactic nature of the set is suggested by its principal title: ‘Studies for the Piano’. As with the études of other great composers, however, including Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, technique is always allied with powerful and widely ranging musical expression.

Yeah, they’re obligated to say that last bit. But trust me, these are no Chopin Etudes. I just don’t feel like this was Brahms’s game. His strengths were elsewhere.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Opus 61: Violin Concerto

composed: 1806 (age 36)
published: 1808
first performance: Vienna, December 23, 1806 (Franz Clement, soloist; the composer conducting the Theater an der Wien orchestra)
dedicated to Stephan von Breuning

145. This is the biggest cultural gorilla so far, and I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard the whole thing before. No, wait, not ashamed. Just not proud.

Beethoven’s music, in my experience, is for the most part not superficially very attractive. To enjoy it I must travel inward, and that takes repeated listening. During which slow process I had many conflicting thoughts about the piece, most of them inane. The best one I think was this:

Beethoven gets credit for plumbing the depths with music that feels totally unadorned, made up of very simple materials. The bareness puts us directly in the presence of the mystery of all music, a mystery that we can more easily gloss over when music is busier and provides more distraction. Beethoven harnesses the inherent strangeness of melody and harmony, of all musical sound. “Strangeness” is here interchangeable with “profundity.” That fact is interesting in itself.

They say that Beethoven’s music expresses the aspirations of the human spirit, and it certainly seems like Beethoven himself thought of it that way, but to me the emotional impulse in a piece like this is as abstract as the beauty of architecture. Musical elegance might remind one of life, but the principal appeal is the mystery of its non-signification, of elegance being its own reward. Elegance detached from being. As I said here, the peculiar status of musical things that are neither objects nor signifiers of other objects. Beethoven – especially in this piece – dispenses with most gestures toward human life and language, and leaves us alone in the room with only the unblinking sphinx face of musical beauty itself.

This could be said about Bach, too, but the beauty in Bach is of intricate woven patterns, like a geometric tessellation. Beethoven has nothing particularly geometrical about him; he superficially seems always to be saying fairly childish human things. Except that humans would never actually say them. In this piece, who could possibly be initiating that queasy four-note figure that follows the first melody? Certainly not a person; not even some personification of “fate.” The notes sound to us like real fate, like an actual message from the universe, because they are music and music never quite seems to come from people, when we are given the room to reflect on it. Beethoven’s skill is for leaving the room, for stepping aside.

I say all this as a partial explanation of what people seem to find in Beethoven, but I myself don’t always find it. Often the simplicities sound to me exactly like things humans would say, particularly humans around 1810 with bad senses of humor and no social skills. Sometimes I feel rather uncharitable indeed toward Mr. Beethoven. Maybe all this glorious sphinx-faced profundity is just the unintentional result of a composer with a striking lack of natural talent applying himself with incredible intensity to sterile materials. But beside the fact that that’s near-sacrilege, it’s also hard to reconcile with Beethoven’s increasing knack for achieving that “deep” effect as he matured. It would seem that he did in fact know what he was achieving. Nonetheless there is a mysteriously fine line between sphinx-like universality and cloddish sterility, and it is not always immediately obvious to me which side of that line I’m listening from. We are presented, in liner and program notes, with the fact that the Violin Concerto was not considered successful during Beethoven’s lifetime, that it was criticized for being bland and repetitive, as one of those “just goes to show how wrong people can be” tidbits. For my part, I can hear exactly what Beethoven’s hopelessly history-bound contemporaries were talking about. It’s an awfully repetitive piece with a lot of conventional busywork for the violin. I can also hear that it is potentially compelling in a certain expansive, sepiatone way. On rare occasions I can even hear it as profound. At least the first and second movements. But that impression is still a relatively rare and fragile one, susceptible to being sneezed away. Considering the scope of this piece’s reputation – the most noble of all concerti, or whatever – I still feel like I haven’t quite made contact. But I’ve listened many times.

I think Beethoven is a great deal less universal than the guidebooks tell us.

Comments: My favorite part of the whole work is the ominous centerpiece of the first movement’s development, when we seem to be suddenly below decks, in the quiet heart of a creaking, slowly rocking ship. The first and second themes in the first movement are oddly similar in character, making for a certain degree of monotony. There’s also a to-me-gratuitous third repetition of much of the exposition, which doesn’t help matters. The second movement is one of those Beethoven specialties where solemn repetition and decoration makes a simple idea increasingly uncanny. I know some find this movement a very deep example of that idea, but to me this has a very mild effect compared to some of the piano sonatas.

I think there’s something about being aware of the constant challenge of intonation, on the violin, that tends to yank me out of the ethereal realms, so to speak. It is an instrument that sounds like hair, whereas I want music built this way to sound like stone. This is perhaps why my favorite recording of those I heard – and this is more sacrilege – was the recording of the piano concerto arrangement that Beethoven did the next year. The piano is much more impersonal, much less susceptible to human wavering, which this piece doesn’t seem to have a place for. Also, Beethoven wrote cadenzas for that version, which he never did for the violin version. The Kreisler cadenzas that I heard repeatedly (I think I heard Joachim and Auer cadenzas too) are nothing special, if you ask me, whereas the Beethoven piano cadenzas (with timpani!) are bold and wacky and well worth hearing. The obscure Piano Concerto Op. 61a was a much more endearing companion, to me, than the great Beethoven Violin Concerto Op. 61. But maybe I just haven’t heard the right recording yet.

In lieu of a photo of Beethoven at age 36, here’s an evocative 19th-century illustration I found of Beethoven thoroughly nestled in an unearthly pastoral. This picture amuses me but I also feel that its rich oddness is in some ways entirely apt.

Dubal said:

Heifetz, NBC Symphony Orchestra, Toscanini: RCA 60261-2-RG
Kennedy, North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tennstedt: EMI Classics CDC 54574
Grumiaux, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Davis: Philips 420348-2
Menuhin, Philharmonia Orchestra, Furtwängler: EMI Classics CDH 69799

The Grumiaux release is, as you can see from the link, long forgotten, but the recording is now available as this. I was able to obtain, as it turned out, none of those, so I’m willing to believe that my ambivalence about the piece is simply due to not having heard a good enough recording. I’ll continue to seek out new versions. The ones I heard are below. As I said, my favorite was the piano one, but among the violinists, I’d have to go with Heifetz.

This thing where I find all the album covers and put them here is getting tedious. Follow the links to amazon and see for yourself what they look like.

Maxim Vengerov, London Symphony Orchestra / Mstislav Rostropovich. EMI 3 36403 2. 2005.
David Oistrakh, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra / Kyril Kondrashin. BBC BBCL 4127-2. 1965.
Itzhak Perlman, Philharmonia Orchestra / Carlo Maria Giulini. EMI 5 66952 2. 1980.
Jascha Heifetz, Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Munch. RCA 09026-61742-2. 1955.
Isaac Stern, New York Philharmonic / Leonard Bernstein. CBS MYK 37224. 1959.
Bronislaw Huberman, National Orchestral Association / Leon Barzin. Arbiter 115. 1944.

And the piano version:
Jenő Jandó, Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia / Béla Drahos. Naxos 8.554288. 1997.

Scores here currently include the full score, two piano/violin reductions, and a 4-hands arrangement.