Musical Explanation 3/21: The Book of Job

In two nights begins Purim, the holiday based upon the Book of Esther, which is allegedly based on an event in the 5th Century BC (OK... BCE...), but clearly well predates Judaism itself. What is Purim but the Vernal Equinox festival? The Jewish Carnivale, the Jewish Mardi Gras, the Jewish Holi, the Jewish Nowruz, the Jewish Higan. Somewhere around March 21st, every corner of the world seems to have a holiday that moves us from the suffering of winter to the burgeoning life and worldly romance of spring. Every major world religion seems to have a festival around this time of year when death is transcended, and life, be it temporal or eternal, begins anew. Nearly every one of these holidays seems to have colorful costumes, plenty of alcohol, special foods and deserts only eaten at this time of year.

Judaism is not a religion of particularly transcendental death. It is a religion that prizes life and survival above all things, and it should come as no surprise that this Vernal equinox holiday is not about spiritual renewal, but about the survival of the Jewish people.

But why do we survive? What purpose is there to life? What meaning is there to the trials we pass, the difficulties we undergo, the tests we have to take? I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Judaism, on this score, is a little inadequate. Judaism, above all other things, is a religion of ethics. It distracts us so busily with concerns about our conduct in the here and now that the purpose of such good conduct seems almost secondary.

The closest thing we have to an answer is in the Book of the Bible that directly follows Esther. The Book of Job, or Iyov in Hebrew, is the book that faces up to the fact that as a religion, we're not much concerned with the purpose of life. Judaism, a religion that has an answer handy for every ethical and legal question under the sun, has no ready answer to the question of 'why.' Christians and Muslims alike can bask in the smile of salvation's grace, but the afterlife is of such negligible concern to Jewish texts that who can blame us for getting a reputation as a depressed people? In the Torah alone, we have 613 laws, and we have thousands of years of commentary upon them which explain everything about how we are to comport ourselves to the world, but as to why we should comport ourselves this way, the Sages, the Prophets, Yahweh himself, is almost completely silent.

On Yom Kippur, there is a part of the service known as the martyrology, in which a medeival German-Jewish poem recounts how the Romans killed the great Rabbis at the end of the Bar-Kochba era (138 AD... ok... CE...) in ways that would curdle the blood of even the most saintly Christian martyrs - claiming that the Emperor Hadrian decided to kill Judaism's greatest ten rabbis as punishment for the ten older brothers of Joseph having sold him into slavery. At the end of the poem, the angels cry out "Is this the reward of Torah?"

In the siddur I grew up with, the translation told us that God responded "The road to justice is often filled with affliction and pain." When you learn what it really says, you realize that this is a hilarious and deliberate mistranslation. What God actually says is "This is my decree. Accept it or else." Or else what? He'll kill the angels too? He'll destroy the world? Our Yahweh is, as always, sublimely touchy about people questioning his quixotic judgement.

But it can't be denied, this is the cry that Jews have had to make from time immemorial. In every age, there is a cry such as the angels made, and a cry such as Iyov makes to God in Chapter 3 of his Book.

3 After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.

2 And Job spake, and said,

3 Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.

4 Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.

5 Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.

6 As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months.

7 Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.

8 Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning.

9 Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day:

10 Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.

11 Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?

12 Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck?

13 For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,

14 With kings and counsellors of the earth, which build desolate places for themselves;

15 Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver:

16 Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.

17 There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.

18 There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor.

19 The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.

20 Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul;

21 Which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures;

22 Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?

23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?

24 For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured out like the waters.

25 For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.

26 I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.

This operatic soliloquy of despair, this foundational moment in the history of human thought, is more powerful to me than all the Shakespeare in existence. As I've often said on this blog, I love Shakespeare, but I don't get Shakespeare. Maybe it's a cultural thing. I would imagine that as a culture, high tragedy and romance is a bit alien to Jews. Why is everything in Shakespeare so... dramatic? Everything about Shakespeare: the fascination with great men and royal intrigue, the rhetorical bombast, the obsession with sexual jealousy past every other human concern, the cynical nihilism, the unconcern with morality, feels a little off from life as I've experienced it.

The Bible is about people like me: little people, outsiders, weirdos. It's about how people far too isolated to ever appear in a Shakespeare play can still find their voice and place in the world. Even if I disagree with an enormous amount of what's in the Bible, I still 'get' its concerns much more than I get Shakespeare.

What's extraordinary about the Book of Iyov is not Iyov's suffering, which, let's face it, the Bible obviously distributes to its characters as though it costs God nothing but a penny to make his subjects writhe. What's extraordinary is its acknowledgement that doubt is completely natural to have, and its acknowledgement that God may be at best indifferent to our suffering, and at worst, we may be His plaything.

There is no true explanation in Judaism of why the world is the way it is. There is only the reality that the world is what it is. At no point does God defend His conduct, He simply says after the manner of a celestial hipster: "You wouldn't understand it." As is an omnipotent being's prerogative, he dodges the question with some of the world's most sublime poetry that would not feel out of place in Walt Whitman or Herman Melville. This is just the last quarter of it when God fixates on the Leviathan - a whale-like creature whose presence is peppered throughout the Bible as a metaphor for the incomprehensible enormity of the divine:

41 Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

3 Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?

4 Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

5 Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

6 Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?

7 Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

8 Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

9 Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?

10 None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

11 Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him? whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine.

12 I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion.

13 Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can come to him with his double bridle?

14 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.

15 His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.

16 One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.

17 They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.

18 By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.

19 Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.

20 Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.

21 His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.

22 In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him.

23 The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved.

24 His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.

25 When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves.

26 The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.

27 He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.

28 The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble.

29 Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.

30 Sharp stones are under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire.

31 He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.

32 He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary.

33 Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.

34 He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.

The identification which so many millions for 2,700 years have had with Iyov is not simply because of the idea that virtue will not be rewarded, but that in the eyes of many, suffering is indicative of vice. Islam implies exactly that very strongly - often stating in the Koran that suffering is a result of not sufficiently submitting ( the word 'Islam' itself means submission) to the will of Allah. In Christianity on the other hand,  suffering is so paramount that suffering is a virtue in of itself.

But whether Christianity or Islam hold the more correct interpretation of suffering, it can't be denied that the human brain is far more hard-wired to believe something like the Islamic interpretation. So many millions in the world, of so many different beliefs, equate virtue with heroism - the strong are virtuous not because of deeds but because they are strong. We see extremely modern incarnations of this idea in everything from Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn - the strong do not equivocate and need not humility, they neither admit to weaknesses nor need they search for them. Excepting perhaps Odysseus, every ancient epic hero from Achilles to Beowulf to Aeneas to Siegfried to Gilgamesh seems to equate strength with moral uprightness. In the same way, evil is automatically equated with weakness, with duplicity, with misfortune itself. Evolutionarily, this is surely explicable considering how difficult survival was for the vast majority of human pre-history. But in an agricultural and literate era, when there was more time for contemplation, when virtue was not related to the glamor of the hunt, perhaps we required new rules for what constituted good and evil.

The presence of Iyov, much more than Odysseus, shows a new kind of human consciousness. Evil and misfortune are not necessarily equated with each other. We do not necessarily deserve whatever suffering we experience, but whether our lives are owed to God or natural phenomena, we cannot comprehend the cosmic plan that makes us live as we do. Even if I find Islam's interpretation of suffering to be heartless, and find in Christianity's interpretation a convenient excuse for exploitation, at least those religions have explanations. Judaism remains completely janus-faced in the face of suffering. The closest it comes to an explanation of suffering is in Iyov, and its explanation is not only Miltonic in its anger at God - but positively Bergmanesque at its agony at God's silence. And when we get to chapter 23, Job seems to speak for us all, wanting a justification for the ways of God to Man, but never getting one. It may be Biblical, but it thoroughly, utterly, essentially in all senses, modern:

1  Then Job answered and said, 2  Even to day is my complaint bitter: my stroke is heavier than my groaning.* 3  Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat! 4  I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. 5  I would know the words which he would answer me, and understand what he would say unto me. 6  Will he plead against me with his great power? No; but he would put strength in me. 7  There the righteous might dispute with him; so should I be delivered for ever from my judge.

8  Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: 9  On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him: 10  But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.† 11  My foot hath held his steps, his way have I kept, and not declined. 12  Neither have I gone back from the commandment of his lips; I have esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary food.‡§

13 But he is in one mind, and who can turn him? and what his soul desireth, even that he doeth. 14  For he performeth the thing that isappointed for me: and many such things are with him. 15  Therefore am I troubled at his presence: when I consider, I am afraid of him. 16  For God maketh my heart soft, and the Almighty troubleth me: 17  Because I was not cut off before the darkness, neither hath he covered the darkness from my face.

ET: Almanac

“Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.”  - Eric Hoffer

Musical Explanation 3/20: Shostakovich 13th

June 2000. I am 18 years old, much of it is still too painful to write about and probably will always be, but I am emerging from the most bizarre six months of my life. Trapped 300 miles from home in the kind of place that that kids like me should never be trapped, and driven nothing short of delusionally mad - the walls of reality totally shattered, the pieces of which I will never entirely be able to reassemble.

In a way we were all assured we'd never be from the safety of upper-middle-class Jewish Baltimore, I was a first hand witness to the one thing, the single thing, which Pikesville Md. was built to prevent - how ideology, yet again, could drive our worlds mad. It was the very end of the twentieth century, and in our infinitesimal way, we in Woodstock, Connecticut were first-hand witnesses to a G-rated version of the century in which literally billions of men, women, and children experienced far more than nearly anyone reading this ever will - numbering among them my Bubbie and Zaydie, and even they far less than hundreds of their relatives, including their three-year-old daughter, who experienced the ultimate twentieth century fate.

Try as I might, these little scribblings of mine could never do justice to the admittedly small ways I saw ideology corrupt the souls and sanity of hundreds - showing a hundred kids whose anger that could never be quenched a way in which their bullying could be completely respectable, and turning another hundred kids into guinea pigs, turning kids who simply needed a little extra care and love into tortured animals.

Even with the provisos I put in place, this will no doubt seem like an absurd hyperbole of what those years were like. Particularly if you were one of the bullies, you'll think this nonsense. Perhaps if you were one of the bullied, this description will seem all too familiar and perhaps not go far enough. If you spent some time as both, and I at least spent a bit on the other side of that ledger, you will forever be haunted by the ways you were turned into the very thing that so recently caused you agony. I spent my final year at Hyde doing my best to convince myself that their lies were true, all the while doing my best to privately conceal the encyclopedia of psychotic delusion that grew in my head like a cancer after January 2000, and has not completely let me alone now for more than fifteen years afterward. I wish there was a way, any way at all, to make Hyde answer for this. I have no doubt that many people who came through its doors experienced much worse effects of their time even than I  Of course, I know as well as anyone, to compare Hyde to the Soviet Union or a fascist state is absurd in just about every conceivable way. Hyde tortured its students - and yes, it was most definitely torture by any humane legal definition. But Hyde never killed any of its students. Nevertheless, had the law sanctioned it, to this day I have little doubt that many there could convince themselves such an act was for the greater good.

I am not a good enough writer, nor will I ever be, to explain how ideology corrupts people into believing the most insane things, so for a moment, I will turn this post over to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was in June 2000 that I could return home and get to the Meyerhoff, in so many ways my spiritual home from the time I was four years old, to hear Yevgeny Yevtushenko read his poetry, and to hear 13th Symphony of Shostakovich which set his poems to music. Music, art, as always in my life, saved me. Sanity stared me in the face, and over time, I was ready to look back.

Our orchestra's new music director, the Russian alchemist Yuri Temirkanov, was on the podium, and the message he transmitted to us that night screamed to us and scorched the ears. In the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews came to Baltimore, replacing the dying-off Holocaust survivors with a whole new generation of foreign-seeming Jews whose haunted looks darkened the streets. How many hundreds of those Soviet Jews were in the audience that night? How many of them saw the ghosts of the dead and broken they left behind? How many of them remembered the terror they lived with every day?

It was so much more than a concert. It was communion. It was clarity. The century of death was over. The century of terror was about to begin, but at least this century's giving us a fighting chance. The scars will always be there, but whether we are Holocaust Survivors or Soviets whose brothers and sisters were sent to the Gulags, or their spoiled grandson who experienced far less than a percentage point of their horror, we are still here. We can still bear witness, and the bastards cannot stop our protests.

This post was supposed to be about this weekend's BSO concerts...


(Yuri conducting it, starting 22 1/2 minutes in. But too low a level and without English subtitles...)

ET: Almanac

In college my favorite English professor warned me that Wallace Stevens would become greater and greater in the mind of the reader as you get older. God god was he ever right...

Peter Quince at the Clavier 

                                         I

Just as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the selfsame sounds

On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;

And thus it is that what I feel,

Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,

Is music. It is like the strain

Waked in the elders by Susanna: 

Of a green evening, clear and warm,

She bathed in her still garden, while

The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb

In witching chords, and their thin blood

Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

                                              II

In the green water, clear and warm,

Susanna lay.

She searched

The touch of springs,

And found

Concealed imaginings.

She sighed,

For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood

In the cool

Of spent emotions.

She felt, among the leaves,

The dew

Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,

Still quavering.

The winds were like her maids,

On timid feet,

Fetching her woven scarves,

Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand

Muted the night.

She turned—

A cymbal crashed,

And roaring horns.

                                           III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,

Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried

Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain

Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame

Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines

Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

                                             IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind—

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

So evenings die, in their green going,

A wave, interminably flowing.

So gardens die, their meek breath scenting

The cowl of winter, done repenting.

So maidens die, to the auroral

Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings

Of those white elders; but, escaping,

Left only Death's ironic scraping.

Now, in its immortality, it plays

On the clear viol of her memory,

And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Musical Explanation 3/18: The Big Lebowski at the Senator

Between the ages of 19 and 23, I probably saw The Big Lebowski at least four dozen times. I had one friend who probably saw it twice as many. A few years later, we went to the Arlington Drafthouse to see The Big Lebowski in the theater with a few other friends who were fanatical about this movie - complete with a bar that served discounted White Russians and a costume competition which my friend won not only by dressing like Walter Sobchak in the Larry Sellars scene, but also doing Larry's homework!!! He literally quoted the scene verbatim at maximum volume and whipped the crowd into a frenzy. It was one of the most excitingly absurd things I've ever seen in my life.

For a certain kind of Dude of my generation: homely, underachieving, disorganized, misunderstood by the larger world, The Big Lebowski is more than a movie. It is a religious touchstone. It is a movie which told us that no matter what absurd frustrations we get mixed up in, they're not that important, and we can zen our way through to the other side. Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar eats you. 

I've never been a huge fan of the Coen Brothers. There is something about their moviemaking that is strangely diffuse - technical exercises that go to enormous efforts to show how sadistically little they care about their characters. In the case of No Country for Old Men, it became a downright exercise in sadism. Alfred Hitchcock would make us squirm in our seats to watch people avoid death, the Coen Brothers made us squirm just so we could watch the protagonist be hunted down like a varmint. Inside Llewyn Davis made us try to watch a mediocre folk singer who was not only a bad human being, but not a particularly interesting one. Even comedies like Burn After Reading delight in an anti-social sadism.

But then there are a few partial exceptions to this rule: A Serious Man, O Brother Where Art Thou, Fargo, and that pinnacle of Western Civilization, The Big Lebowski. Lebowski came out the year after Fargo. Fargo was a very fine movie, but let's face it, it's not as great as Siskel, Ebert, and every other critic in America told us it was; but when Lebowski was released, critics couldn't forgive it for not being Fargo.

As beloved as Fargo's become, The Big Lebowski is entirely another order of beloved. It is the kind of comedy the Coen Brothers should have spent their whole careers making. It's incredibly funny, but it's not a laugh riot after the manner of the Farrelly Brothers or Zucker Brothers. If anything, it's funny after the manner of studio comedies from the 30's to the 60's.

For all its hundreds of profanities, Lebowski is something much more old-fashioned than would appear. The very plot itself is loosely based on the Howard Hawks movie: The Big Sleep (penned by, of all people, William Faulkner). But while The Big Sleep seems to come by its labyrinthine incomprehensibility completely naturally, The Big Lebowski is the definition of mannered. Everything about it is deliberately surreal in a manner that tells you that they want, in their typically sadistic way, to disturb you out of any sense of familiarity.

But whereas No Country for Old Men or Inside Llewyn Davis are exercises in bleak, Lebowski is an exercise in delight. The confusion of the dialogue flows like music, nearly every line is not only quotable and clever, but delightful in precisely that way that one delight piles on top of the next. For once, we're meant to enjoy a Coen Brothers' Movie.

Of course, I see Lebowski much less than I used to. I've pretty much stopped drinking, and there isn't much sense in watching The Big Lebowski if you're not as drunk as The Dude. The last time I saw it, for once it seemed impossibly mannered and arch in a way it never seemed when I wasn't sober. This time, the second time I saw it on a giant screen, it was much much better, but it was still a very different experience. Seeing it on the big screen, you can see what so many critics missed in the movie. The filmmaking, as always with the Coen brothers, is impeccable. Not a hair on the frame of a shot out of place, and yet such pains in filmmaking point up just how trivial the movie is.

This is not a movie meant for the theater. This is a movie meant for a dingy, smelly, dimly lit apartment - the kind of apartment most college kids live in. If the immaculate visuals draw attention to themselves, you might forget that the spirit of this movie is the exact opposite of those visuals. You can completely disagree with all those critics, as I still do, and still think it would be an even greater movie if it weren't quite so well made.

But maybe the great visuals are a sign of deeper meanings. If you wanted, you could give so much more mythical weight if you took it seriously - you could think about how Walter and The Dude represent the two sides of The Sixties, about how the "Big" Lebowski represents all that's most hypocritical in Capitalism, about how The Dude could be seen as a martyr-like figure - perhaps stylized to look like Christ himself, about how Walter Sobchak could be seen as cinema's ultimate incarnation of neoconservatism and how he seems to prefigure everything from the Iraq War's rationale to the Tea Party, about how the nihilists eerily carry The Dude's Buddhist essentialism to its logical conclusion, about how Maude Lebowski and the Dude represent the two sides of the Bohemian world uniting, about how Brandt could be the 'Big' Lebowski's son and represents the kind of sycophantic Young Republican who inherited the world, about how Jackie Treehorn represents a lost Golden Age of American eroticism, about how Bunny is the dreams of the American heartland perverted by Hollywood. Perhaps The Cowboy/Narrator is present to make us ponder these mythical implications.

But that would ruin everything about why this movie is so beloved. Let's allow these supposedly deeper meanings to exist beneath the surface. Part of the enjoyment of The Big Lebowski, and part of the character of The Dude and those of us who aspire to be more like him is the ability to know that deeper meanings exist, but it defeats the point of life to look for them too hard. Life exists to be enjoyed, not endured. Would that we in the audience, and would that the Coen Brothers, could take that lesson more to heart.

ET: Almanac

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

- Reinhold Niebuhr: The Irony of American History

Musical Explanation 3/16/16: Dudamania

It must have been six years ago that a friend of mine who works at the Kennedy Center notified me about a public afternoon rehearsal by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra at the Kennedy Center for only $15. I went in not knowing if this was a rehearsal or a performance - not speaking Spanish, and too far away from the stage to hear anything anyway.



The truth was that they barely needed rehearsal. It was basically a more affordable public performance made available so that a small but sizable chunk DC's Latino population could afford to attend. I was one of the only white person in attendance. But regardless of the audience, I had never heard an orchestra quite like this. It wasn't simply the sheer barrage of sound, it was the weight. The bass instruments of the orchestra were so resonant that they seemed to emerge from the bowels of the earth. The string sound wasn't simply beautiful (how could it be in the Rite of Spring) or passionate, it seemed to come at you in waves. Percussion played at full blast, but they did not simply dominate, they seemed perfectly shaped. As with all the great conductors, it was a kind of alchemy. Nobody really knows what a great conductor does that separates him from a merely very good one, but you instantly know a great conductor when you hear what he can draw from an orchestra. But then, there is a level past the merely great, the transcendent conductors whose performances bring us to a primal level of artistic mystery. Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer were clearly great conductors of the early 20th century who could move audiences to tears and awe, but neither was capable of providing the out-of-body experiences which one gets in the performances of Wilhelm Furtwangler. There were great conductors of the late-20th century like Carlo Maria Giulini and Rudolf Kempe, but neither of them could make time itself stop the way Leonard Bernstein did. Our own time is filled with great conductors like Ivan Fischer and Riccardo Chailly, and great Russian-trained conductors like Mariss Jansons and the elderly but still great Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, but intelligent and moving as their performances can be, none of those four can electrify in the way Valery Gergiev can.



There is something primal and sub-intellectual about such musicians that rubs many music-lovers the wrong way: Furtwangler, Bernstein, Gergiev, but also Willem Mengelberg, Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, Albert Coates, Charles Munch, Victor De Sabata, Nikolai Golovanov, Hermann Scherchen, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Georg Solti, (young) Sergiu Celibidache, Rafael Kubelik, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Yuri Temirkanov, Christoph Eschenbach, Michael Tilson Thomas, Rene Jacobs, Simon Rattle, Manfred Honeck, Marc Minkowski, Teodor Currentzis, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel. In each case, there is something about their approaches which some music lovers simply find too exciting. There are inevitably accusations of shallowness, vulgarity, narcissism, and pandering. It's very difficult to believe today that musicians as intelligent as Bernstein and Furtwangler were accused of shallowness, but for most of their careers, they were accused of such things all the time. What these musical Beckmessers never understood was that their intelligence was at the service of their musical instincts, which inevitably led them to places the intellect would never fathom - sudden speedups and slowdowns, held notes, impossibly fast or slow tempos, exaggerated dynamics, wholesale reorchestration. The public, even the intelligensia, thrilled to their approaches. The only people who truly disapproved were the musical elite of their days, who inevitably found fault because they spent too much time with music and not enough time in the wider world. Their very musical intelligence works against them, and their ascetic heads become scandalized by the vulgarity they hear that would otherwise thrill their hearts. Perhaps these accusations are sometimes earned, but even if they are, are these accusations earned so often as they're leveled? This is the price paid in performance by any performer willing to dare everything. Once upon a time, such accusations of vulgarity and shallowness and narcissism were leveled upon the conducting of personages as august as Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner.



Occasionally, a conductor comes along who manages to make something so exciting within an acceptable intellectual framework, and when such a figure as Arturo Toscanini or Carlos Kleiber comes along, the approval they earn is absolutely universal. Later generations learn from their examples, and the music scene became/becomes inundated with a profusion of mini-Toscaninis and mini-Kleibers. In the wake of Carlos Kleiber, we have so many conductors, some truly great, who are so clearly influenced by him - the podium manner almost synonymous with interpretive dance, the fleet tempos, the rubatos so subtle that they're almost not rubato, the micro-managing way they shape phrases, the ear for every possible nuance and detail: Ivan Fischer, Manfred Honeck, Franz Welser-Most, Paavo Jarvi, Markus Stenz, Teodor Currentzis, Vladimir Jurowski, Kirill Petrenko, Daniel Harding, Andris Nelsons... If a conductor has to take a model from which to derive their style, Carlos Kleiber is as good of one as you'll get. The problem such an approach is that it inhibits their ability to become their own original musical personalities. Some, like Nelsons and Honeck and Stenz (and Currentzis on another level entirely), can make their own ideas shine through an approach that is in some senses derivative. Others, like Harding and Welser-Most and K. Petrenko, elicit extraordinary playing, but sometimes seem to interpret music in a manner that can almost be generic.



And because Dudamel is so different from an interpreter who interprets with urbane, Kleiberian, sophistication, there will always be a kind of criticism against him that carries a sour aftertaste of classism and xenophobia. A proper European musician of 2016 would be mining the score for every implied meaning, not wringing the music dry for every expressive drop.



Dudamel is a musician less concerned with nuance than sweep. He does not approach large-scale works like the Mahler Symphony no. 3 I heard on Sunday in New York with the nuance of chamber music, the way Claudio Abbado would. He approaches such an enormous work as the enormous public statement it is meant so clearly to be. There was certainly nuance in this performance, anyone who heard the light second movement of that Mahler 3 would marvel at , as they would the beautifully muted string playing at the beginning of the final Adagio. However, subtlety is not Dudamel's primary aim, because his primary aim is so clearly vividness of experience. The same unbelievable Dudamel sound which I heard in DC six years ago from those Caracas musicians was present when I heard him in New York from the other orchestra he currently directs, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The solar plexus fortissimo at the end of the trombone solo near the work's beginning, the braying horns and blaring yet perfectly balanced brass in first movement's parade music, the awe-inspiring storm music at the two-thirds point through the first movement, absolute E-Flat minor shock at the end of the scherzo, the profoundly moving explosion of E-flat major joy two-thirds of the way through the final Adagio. These were experiences utterly unavailable in the performances of more intellectually minded Mahlerians concerned with good taste and coherence like Abbado and Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez. And yet the vividness comes through completely at the other end of the dynamic spectrum too: the magically distant posthorn solo in the scherzo, the unbelievable lightness and detail he elicited all throughout the second movement (which demonstrated once and for all that he can Kleiber with the best of them), the incredibly moving string playing at the beginning of the Adagio.

These were all expressions of an utterly original musical personality. Like so many original musical personalities, he occasionally does things that are inexplicable except to musical instincts that are occasionally as fallible as all of ours are, but music is not an intellectual experience. Music is so much deeper than intellect. Those who demand intellectual coherence from their music are turning themselves deaf to the power of the unbridled musical imagination. They do not trust anything too exciting, too primal, too visceral.


(His Mahler 3 ten years ago, it's grown since then. Broader tempos, ruder sounds, but all the same excitement.)

Perhaps the reason for this is that music is not a revelation for them, but a refuge. In their minds, music is not a place to embrace life, but to turn away from it. To approve of music-making that is too exciting is to invite the larger world in, a world in which they would be just one voice among many. Music-making capable of challenging both the cognoscenti and the masses requires something more than intellectual coherence, it requires the imagination unbound by coherence. In such music-making, loudness must be louder, softness must be softer, tempos must be faster and slower and more flexible, phrasing surprising. It demands interpretation in which the unexpected, the surprise, the vivid, is the rule and which predictability is the exception. Music-making which puts us squarely in touch with the mysterium tremendum is far too transcendent an experience to be bound by intellectual strictures. Whether these cognoscenti follow the intellectual diktats of Cage or Hogwood,  Boulez or Celibidache, Adorno or Scruton, music is inevitably (and ineffably) larger than their imaginings. You can try placing music in a straightjacket of interpretive good taste, which Toscanini and Kleiber did, Reiner and Szell, Karajan and Leinsdorf, Haitink and Abbado, Gardiner and Christie. But music is larger than these conductors made it, it follows no coherent rule of thought - it exists before thought and after it. To place music in the realm of coherence is to close oneself off from the possibilities of what music can be. An artist like Dudamel, and those like him, are a living rebuke to everything for which they stand. Such people will always be with us, and if one doesn't stand up to them, they will ensure that the truly original among us appear less frequently.

ET: Almanac

There were long periods when art did not seek out the new but took pride in making repetition beautiful, reinforcing tradition, and ensuring the stability of a collective life; music and dance then existed only in the framework of social rites, of Masses and fairs. Then one day in the twelfth century, a church musician in Paris thought of taking the melody of the Gregorian chant, unchanged for centuries, and adding to it a voice in counterpoint. The basic melody stayed the same, immemorial, but the counterpoint voice was a new thing that gave access to other new things--to counterpoint with three, four, six voices, to polyphonic forms ever more complex and unexpected. Because they were no longer imitating what was done before, composers lost anonymity, and their names lit up like lanterns marking a path toward distant realms. Having taken flight, music became, for several centuries, the history of music.

All the European arts, each in its turn, took flight that way, transformed into their own history. That was the great miracle of Europe, not its art, but its art become history.

Alas, miracles do not endure for long. What takes flight shall one day come to earth. In anguish I imagine a time when art shall cease to seek out the never-said and will go docilely back into the service of the collective life that requires it to render repetition beautiful and help the individual merge, at peace and with joy, into the uniformity of being.

For the history of art is perishable. The babble of art is eternal.

- Milan Kundera: The Curtain

Musical Explanation 3/15: Mahler 3 and Messiaen's Turangalila: Two Visions of Ecstasy

Mahler already speaks to us a little more fustily than he did a generation ago - to program a Mahler Symphony in our day is barely more daring than programming Brahms or Tchaikovsky. He holds few terrors for orchestras or conductors, and it's been a good fifty years since he challenged any preconceived notion of what concert music should be. In an era that routinely sees jazz and rock performed in Carnagie Hall and the Philharmonie and the Concertgebouw, what offense can symphonies containing century-old Bohemian street music give? In an era too ironic and pessimistic even for Mahler's cynical neurosis, perhaps the still more nihlist and ironic music of Shostakovich speaks to our volatile times more than anything else currently played in the concert hall.

But if Shostakovich is our present, then our new frontier is Messiaen, and in less than a half-century, I predict that Messiaen's orchestral works will be as popular as Mahler is today. Messiaen is our expanded musical consciousness - mingling within it the rhythms of Africa and India, the tone colors of East Asia, the harmonies of the Middle East and Hollywood scores, the systemization of advanced mathematics. In our era dominated by global interconnectivity and the twin obsessions of sexual freedom and religious prohibition, Messiaen's erotically charged religious mania, his relentless curiosity about the musical world, his ability to synthesize every worldwide musical influence into a completely unique musical voice, speaks to our immediate future as nothing else does. 

From Mahler and Bruckner and Shostakovich, Messiaen inherited the torch of writing metaphysically charged music for the orchestra, but Messiaen has little in common with those forefathers except the breath of their ambition. From Stravinsky and Bartok, Messiaen inherited the torch of looking beyond the immediate music of the concert hall to folk music, music of other traditions, music that's foreign to us and broadens our horizons of what music can be. From Messiaen, it's only a short step to African, East Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern composers emerging from the developing world to write music that eclipses even the composers of Europe and America. 

Turangalila is not a word in any language, it is two words compounded from Sanskrit "Turanga" and "Lila", fused together like a compound German adjective. When put together, it translates roughly to 'The Love Song and Hymn of Joy." When viewed with Western ears accustomed to joy and love represented by major keys and soft tones, there is very little here that equates to our conceptions of love and joy. What's represented here is something far more primal than Western manners allow for. Is it a love song for Yvonne Loriod, his student whom the deeply Catholic Messiaen loved could not marry or even sleep with because his wife was in an insane asylum? Is it a recreation of the story of the unconsummated love between Tristan and Isolde, which Messiaen so long identified with? Is it a song of joy for the world emerged from World War II? Is it a song of divine love and joy? Is it an evocation of an orgiastic pagan ceremony that celebrates the senses? Is it all of those and much more? 

These were some of the questions which occurred to me on Saturday night when I came to David Geffen Hall (until recently, Avery Fischer Hall) at Lincoln Center to hear the New York Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The reviews of the concert were absolute raves, and the raves were mostly deserved. This performance was one of the loudest things I've ever heard in my life - Salonen did what he could to make the work dance, but the "conductor-proof" New York Philharmonic wasn't quite sharing in his invitation. Instead, they offered us the awesome sound of the world's brashest orchestra at full cry. There are no words for the awe these sounds generate in the listener. I could imagine a more agile, more balletic performance (such as the one I linked to), but I cannot imagine a performance that better unleashes the full heaven-shaking power of it.

The next afternoon, I returned to Geffen Hall to hear an even more extraordinary performance of my favorite orchestral work, Mahler's 3rd Symphony. I've written so extensively about Mahler 3 that I have very little to add except about the performance, which I hope to write about tomorrow. All I can say about Mahler 3 is that it articulates a complete view of the world, created by the will to life and bound together by love itself. I once came up with a list of music that articulated an entire worldview, and somehow it didn't occur to me to put Turangalila into that list. I now wonder if Turangalila not only belongs on that list, but on something much more rare - a work that articulates its own unique view of the Cosmos itself. Mahler's Third Symphony is a view of the world from the vantage of the turn of the 20th century - influenced by the metaphysical philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the musical gigantism of Wagner. Messiaen's Turangalila is a view of the world from the vantage of 20th century at its midpoint. The metaphysical search for the 'thing in itself' has bifurcated - the hard physical realities of science and outer space share the stage with dogmatically religious impulses. Philosophy both seems superseded by science and astronomy, and simultaneously traced all the way back to its religious origin. The mathematical formulae of the highest university share the stage with the primal musical impulses of Indian and African ritual ceremonies. It's almost as though the former work begat the latter, and both express the time in which they wrote as no less ambitious work ever could.  

ET: Almanac

Man's fundamental instinct is desire to dominate. He wants to rule over things dead and alive, bodies and souls, future and past. All the many and varied activities to which he devotes himself are oriented to that end. Domination is the secret force which helps him to outgrow the limitations of his animal nature, and to this passion he owes the increasing spiritualization of all his vital impulses.

But nature and life go their own way according to superhuman laws. On one side is obtuse matter, with its passive and yet insurmountable resistances; on the other, the world of the soul, intangible and strange and inscrutably complicated. And above it all is destiny, that directorial force innate in all occurrences, which never concerns itself about man. Everything evades him; he is surrounded by shadows and riddles. The physical and the spiritual world stand under the same law of impenetrability.

What is he to do, then? Ruling is his foremost necessity in life, and it lies in the nature of every organism to obtain its necessities in all circumstances either by force or, failing this, by cunning. Thus it came about that man thought out a ruse by which to satisfy the basic depths of his will: he invented art.

"Reality" withstood him. The world of the body was too hard for him and too inert in its massive immobility, and the world of the soul too light and insubstantial in its problematical intangibility. That is why the cry arose in him: Away from this rigid reality, away from the world of things as they are! He conceived the ingenious idea of leaving those intolerant and obstinate realities to themselves and constructing a new world of his own above the other. This newly-created world was his property, his unlimited, sovereign domain, which he could shape according to his will. In this kingdom, his own free creation, he might hope at last to be a complete tyrant. Art became the sublimest form of his will to power.

But at this point the oddest thing sometimes happens with the artist. There is, after all, something stronger than himself: that formative power which created this whole kingdom of his and dominates it. His art is more than he is: for he is a helpless individual organism, a man as other men, but it is a terrific natural force. And with horror he begins to realize that his curious ability to create has made him more dependent. His "births" stand there, released from his will. And gradually there grows within him a dislike and hatred of this art, and he fights against it. Then, when clever folk come and say to him that this is contradictory, since in fighting against art he is fighting against himself and the whole meaning of his life, he might reply to them:

True, I hate art, just because I am an artist. You others may love and admire it, but I am bound to curse it. For you, it is an "inspiration," but for me a doom. I wanted to achieve domination and freedom through it, but it is the same art which has made me entirely unfree. It is the super-tyrant in me. Gradually, without my noticing, it has grown up and swelled into a powerful, terrible creature that is alien and hostile to me. I wanted to make images after my own wishes, and ideals after my free sovereign whim. But art never inquired about my wishes and ideals. The people who come and go in my poems are not creations of my will. I wanted to create a world of beauty, and there grew up before me a world of truth. I wanted to construct a world of happiness, and there arose a world of damnation. My figures were not subordinate to me, they were never my compliant creatures. They stood there like their own lawgivers, endowed with autocratic vital forces, and they frightened me, for that was how I had conceived them. And therefore I now fling my curse at art. It is the hereditary enemy of my life. It has set itself above me and robbed me, destroyed me, split me in two halves. It is the monster in me. Lying is human, but my art will have the truth and again the truth. Faith is human, but my art brings doubt. Blindness is human, but my art is the power of seeing. I did not know that the gift of seeing was so terrible a thing. Everywhere the artist bores passages, digs up subterranean things into the light. With his doubts he hammers at everything. He asks: but is greatness really great? and is goodness really good? and beauty beautiful and truth true? Why has he, and he alone, this frightful mission? He is, after all, a man like other men, with the instinct to believe, and the wish to believe; why, then, was he given this horrible function of seeing, being forced to see? I cannot see that the artist has reason to love art. Far rather would I have been a simple peasant; who thinks everything is equally big and good, equally true and beautiful. I will make haste and try to turn into one. But I fear it is too late.

But I retain my hatred. Who else, indeed, could hate art so profoundly, have to hate it, as we artists? Surely not you semi-artists! You amateurs and artists by accident. You may love art, for you have never suffered through it. For neither, for that reason, does it belong to you. For only those things through which we suffer most deeply, only those belong to us.

Egon Friedell: A Cultural History of the Modern Age, Volume III

Musical Explanations 3/8/16: It's Harnoncourt's World

I have no idea what called me to music when I was barely old enough to be sentient, but as I got older, I wonder if it was the giants who could convey musical meaning in words that kept me coming back. Memories of David Zinman's Casual Concerts, Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts and Norton Lectures and PBS documentaries, Simon Rattle's Leaving Home documentaries, Michael Tilson Thomas's Keeping Score videos, watching Isaac Stern teach Chinese students in From Mao to Mozart, Itzhak Perlman's and Yehudi Menuhin's various videos, Daniel Barenboim's School for the Ear, speeches and witticisms from Thomas Beecham, Carlos Kleiber's conducting technique and rehearsal footage (ditto Bruno Walter's & Sergiu Celibidache's & Gennadi Rozhdestvensky's, and I'm a little ashamed to say, Herbert von Karajan's), Pierre Boulez's writings (I'm even more ashamed to say that...), the essays of Ian Bostridge and Alfred Brendel, Andras Schiff's lectures on the Beethoven sonatas, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's masterclasses. Perhaps I went far too under the spell of musicians who could convey meaning in words, some of these musicians seemed almost more articulate in speech than they were in music, but what was so exciting about them was their ability to convey music's 'world behind the world', this world of spirit and hidden meaning. When you hear these people talk about music, you begin to believe that this world is really there and not just something a few of us misfits make up in our perhaps too fevered imaginations.

But inevitably, among the most inspiring of these figures were the 'early music' gurus. I have my sometimes grave doubts about the scholarship of what they purport, but perhaps more than any other musicians, they convey me the undiscovered country of music - recreating a mythic past, plausible or not, that utterly enriches our understanding of what music can be. It's easy enough to call them dogmatic, many of them are certainly guilty of that and they should never be absolved of their sins. But whereas a modernist like the late, and indeed lamented, Pierre Boulez, gave us dogmas that created a climate of intellectual fear in which less new music was performed than ever before, the early music gurus opened up the possibilities of music. Even if new music had utterly deserted the concert hall, music pre-Beethoven suddenly found itself with far more space than it ever had since the era in which it was composed. Works like Beethoven's Eroica and Handel's Messiah which we thought we knew backwards and forwards were given a shot in the arm, the possibilities of their meaning spread out to us completely afresh. When compared to this contribution, who cares if the scholarship itself was a little dubious?

At the very center of this revolution was Johann Nikolaus Graf de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt. I mention his full name to give a sense of what Nikolaus Harnoncourt meant to us, and to history. Only a nobleman could have the credibility to take this noble music of the holy masters, and create something so proletarian from it. Before Harnoncourt, music was something so sacred that you risked terrible approbation by mussing it up. The sounds of Mozart and Beethoven were to the point of sheen. A Bernstein or a Solti who didn't treat it with proper reverence was inevitably accused of vulgarity or pandering to the masses. But in a sense, this old style of performance was the ultimate form of pandering. In the old record stores, popular music was supposed to appeal to our bodies, but classical music appealed to our souls. Popular music would disappear, but the eternity of classical music was proven, and will remain long after The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Duke Ellington disappeared.

Well... it's now 2016. The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Duke Ellington have not disappeared. If anything, they've proven to be no less eternal than the old masters. Meanwhile, we have to wonder. Classical music was once popular too. Shouldn't we bring back some of its old popular appeal? Shouldn't classical music appeal to our bodies as well as our minds and spirits?

Nikolaus Harnoncourt was the zero point of this new conception of classical music. It begins with him. Every music lover who loves this music lives in his world - whether its in support or in opposition to him.

How do you begin to do justice to such a consequential and imaginative performer? Like any performer who has so much documentation of his work, a lot of it is not as great as his reputation. But there is so much material that the extraordinary is unbelievably present. I can't begin to claim that I've heard anywhere near all of it. But let me give you at least a sampling of what's amazing about him.

Bach Magnificat: I don't know if the problem is me or him, but some of Harnoncourt's Bach has not worn as well on me as I had expected. It's nothing less than very good, but in some ways that's the problem. From the standpoint of 2016, it's neither fish nor fowl - creating early 20th century performances on 18th century instruments. It has neither the grand spiritual passion of earlier Bach performances or much of the vitality or intimate beauty of later Bach. Both approaches were created to suit the particular instruments on which they're played. In the late 60's hearing Harnoncourt's approach probably seemed like an earth-shaking tremor, but while Harnoncourt's Bach lacks the weaknesses of both approaches, it also lacks the glories. A 2 or 3 hour journey with Harnoncourt through the B-Minor Mass or one of the Passions can be a long journey indeed. The half-hour Magnificat on the other hand, basically a 30-minute super-cantata in Latin rather than German,  is perfect for him. Listen to the opening and closing movements, or the trio of soloists before the finale, and try not to feel a twinge of the profoundest joy well up in your heart.  The Magnificat, as few other Bach pieces do, needs both a raucous sound and grandeur, and by splitting the difference between Bach as he was performed by those before him and Bach as he was performed by those after, Harnoncourt gives a Magnificat unmatched.

Bach Cantata no. 29 Celebrity minded composers like Mozart and Beethoven would not feel at home in the DIY semi-obscure music scene of a place like Baltimore, but a DIY genius like Bach or Haydn (or Harnoncourt) would feel right at home here. Bach's cantatas are not really conducted. All you need is a few gifted musicians and you'll find a cantata that fits your instrumentation. Nevertheless, you have to mention the Bach cantatas in any list of Harnoncourt's great performances. Along with his friend Gustav Leonhardt, Harnoncourt recorded the first ever set of the 200-odd cantatas by Bach that still exist. Like any set of 200 anything from a great genius, the cantatas of Bach range from the incredible to the indifferent. One of the functions of Bach's cantatas was that they were  like a laboratory in which he could incubate larger experiments. I don't know which came first, but parts of this cantata can be found in the third partita for solo violin and B-Minor Mass.

Haydn Symphony no. 31: Nikolaus Harnoncourt, an Austrian Count by birth, had a sure way with Bach and Monteverdi and Beethoven, but for me, even if for no one else, his true greatness picks up with Haydn. I'm not sure Harnoncourt understood or even liked a lot of German music - he never played Wagner or Richard Strauss. But in the great Austrian composers - Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, and yes, Johann Strauss - he was a king. Under other conductors' batons, this is classical music. In Harnoncourt's hands, this is Folk Music. Harnoncourt did not do the greatest set of London Symphonies (93-104 - that's Minkowski and no doubt Fey will join him when he finishes), it was hampered by the presence of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, a great orchestra that's far too polished for this music. It required his home ensemble, the Concentus Musicus Wien, to give a true sense of just how weird this music is - a Wes Anderson movie in sound. Here, among all those conductors who conduct Haydn as a powdered wig pleasure, is a conductor who makes Haydn sound as strange as what's on the page. Just to give one example among many, no one can ever equal those deliberately obnoxious raucous hunting horns in the Hornsignal Symphony (#31), nobody even comes close. Listen to all the various effects in the finale of the Symphony no. 8 which are supposed to evoke a thunderstorm. Or listen to this amazing moment  a minute from the end of the Symphony no. 60 when the violins retune in the movement for seemingly no reason at all. All these effects which sound quaint in the hands of less imaginative conductors not only sound more bizarre under Harnoncourt, but more inevitable too.

Haydn: Mass in Time of War Harnoncourt was a devout Catholic whose brother is an eminent Catholic theologian. Unlike so many composers who ignore the church music of the great masters they champion, Harnoncourt invested himself fully in the sacred sides of his chosen composers. Church music can be dull, it can also be sublime. Anybody who misses the sacred music Haydn wrote at the end of his life is missing some of the most sublime of all music. Mass in Time of War is exactly what it sounds like, not just with trivial war effects, but makes you feel a full dose of the collective fear and suffering, and the hope that eventually we get to lead a better life.

Mozart Gran Partita I may be the only person to think this, but the center of Nikolaus Harnoncourt's achievement is Mozart. When you hear Harnoncourt perform Mozart, you realize that you might have missed a full half of his personality. This is, easily, my favorite recording of the gorgeous Gran Partita. What I love about it is that it completely preserves the beauty of the soft passages, but nevertheless knows that kid gloves have their time and place and should not exceed them. Within a span of seconds, the beauties of Mozart's lyricism are contrasted with absolutely raucous party music in the loud passages. It's as though until Harnoncourt, an entire half of Mozart's character was completely missing, waiting for a musical archeologist to unearth him to us.

Mozart's Instrumental Oratorium Some of Harnoncourt's ideas are a steaming pile of bullshit. None moreso than this idea that Mozart meant for his last three symphonies to be an oratorio for instruments only. I can certainly believe that Mozart meant for these three symphonies to be played in the same concert, but no matter how much Harnoncourt insists that there's a thematic connection between the three, I'm pretty sure that he was the only one who heard it. But then again, never (at least in my experience) has everything else about these three symphonies been played with the dynamism, the understanding, the completeness that we hear in this version. Every bar, every phrase, every accent, means something. This is, for me, as close to definitive a performance of these three works as we get in this unideal world. If it gets this kind of performance, maybe Harnoncourt was right.

Mozart: Requiem We're still awaiting a 'definitive' performance of this unfinished work. But in my experience, never has a conductor gotten us closer to the bony hand of death than here. Mozart's Requiem should freeze your blood and terrify you with the impending reality, but most performances don't do that.

Mozart: The Abduction from the Seraglio Harnoncourt was a truly bizarre opera conductor. Other 'historically informed' conductors would take Mozart operas much faster than the typical romantically-informed performances. Harnoncourt would take the operas even slower. A Mozart opera under Harnoncourt could sound downright Wagnerian. But go back to the scores, the speeds Mozart specifies are often positively glacial and Harnoncourt is perhaps the only conductor to follow them to the letter of the law. When you hear Figaro or The Magic Flute under Harnoncourt, the happy-go-lucky composer we all love is almost completely gone, and so is momentum. In its place is a composer of far greater gravitas. Is it Mozart? I have no idea, but in its way it's still a revelation. Harnoncourt is one of the few superstar conductors who's performed and recorded Mozart's less mature operas like La Finta Gardiniera and Lucio Silla (not to forget, all the symphonies, even the ones he wrote when he was six or seven years old), so it's not like Harnoncourt is doing this with any lack of knowledge. But then... there's this recording of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail. All it takes is listening to the first fifteen seconds to know that you're in for something completely different. This is the only performance, still, that takes all that Turkish music at face value. It also has a very funny Matti Salminen as everybody's favorite offensive ethnic caricature, Osmin.

Beethoven: Symphony no. 8 I was deeply disappointed to learn that Harnoncourt was planning on rerecording the Beethoven cycles before he died. Harnoncourt's Beethoven is rightly celebrated, but I can't help thinking that there's a still higher plane of musical interpretation to which his famous symphony cycle set never quite made it. I wonder if Harnoncourt himself didn't agree, he expressed reservations about Beethoven in interviews, whose music he avoided for the greater part of his career because of how the Nazis exploited it in his childhood. People love Harnoncourt's Beethoven because it squares the circle of conductors like Norrington and Gardiner whose Beethoven was like a systemic shock. Harnoncourt gave us Beethoven with the rougher sound of a smaller orchestra period brass and percussion, but fundamentally maintained the tempos and smooth string sound of old. It's another example of Schoenberg's famous dictum that the middle road is the only one that doesn't lead to Rome. All that said, there are some wonderful highlights. One of the great things about those late 80's/early 90's period cycles is that they forced listeners to take the 'little' symphonies nearly as seriously as the 'big' ones. None were more effective in that regard than Harnoncourt's, whose combination of moderate tempos and raucous force gave symphonies like the 2nd, 4th, and 8th a weight which perhaps no other conductor still ever matched.

Beethoven: Choral Fantasy But this is my favorite of the Harnoncourt Beethoven recordings - it's perhaps the strangest piece in the whole output of Beethoven's middle period. Pierre Laurent Aimard is not my favorite pianist, but working with Harnoncourt seems to put something in his water which, for once, makes him compelling in music before 1900. It also does justice as perhaps no other performance does to Harnoncourt's great insight into Beethoven. Harnoncourt himself was an aristocrat, but he leaves all the aristocratic dignity of Bohm and Karajan at the door - leaving beauty of tone behind and being completely fearless about creating the rudest sounds. When you hear Harnoncourt's solar plexus fortissimos, you hear a Beethoven created for the underclass about whose plight he cared so deeply. This is Beethoven to be played in the street, not in the concert hall. In this performance, the Choral Fantasy becomes like a parade that more and more people gradually join.

Schubert: Symphony no. 2 My favorite Schubert symphony. I can't point to any particularly special contribution to music or the history of performance here, except to say that it's thoroughly delightful.


Bruckner Symphony no. 4 Harnoncourt clearly had no patience whatsoever for the marmoreal turtle creeps of Bruckner conductors from a generation earlier (Celibidache, Giulini, Wand, Karajan...). The spirit with which they conducted Bruckner was profoundly un-Austrian - so concerned with the spiritual world of Bruckner that it completely forgets the physical world and the dance rhythms which clearly motivated so much of his composition - however elephantine those dances can occasionally seem. Such a conception is utterly untrue to the earthy, rural roots of this unsophisticated Upper-Austrian peasant. Bruckner was not a contemplative man or a deep thinker, he was a man who unquestioningly loved God with both body and soul. Perhaps this rendition is a little too unreflective - I could use more flexibility in the more reflective passages, but this is Bruckner that is far truer to the religious ecstasy which no doubt inspired Bruckner so greatly.

Johann Strauss: Emperor Waltz Except perhaps for Carlos Kleiber, has any conductor of the New Year's Concerts made these dances dance so nimbly? Perhaps Harnoncourt was even better than Kleiber. Kleiber was a bit hyper-active in this music, not quite able to simply relax and draw forth those melodies for maximum smile. Harnoncourt could match Kleiber's electricity thunder for thunder, but who else can get these melodies to sing with such ease?

Johann Strauss: Peasant's Polka: Just listen. Pure Austrian/Polish dance rhythm and...


Smetana: From Bohemia's Woods and Fields: Harnoncourt was clearly Austrian to the marrow, but Prague was right next door and he had fine sympathy for a lot of composers from the Central European provinces: Smetana, Bartok, especially Dvorak. His reading of Ma Vlast is incredibly different, but it's the reading of a master who has all sorts of insights that would never occur to Czech conductors closer to the source of tradition. I could include his fascinating reading of The Moldau here, but this movement from Ma Vlast is even more powerful. Harnoncourt puts nature itself under the microscope. The little minerals he finds in this piece are pure proto-Sibelius.

Dvorak: The Water Goblin One of the great semi-surprises of Harnoncourt's output was that he was perhaps the greatest conductor of Dvorak who wasn't also a Czech. In 2002, I heard him conduct the New World Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic, and many details of that performance will be etched in my mind forever. It's not quite idiomatic after the manner of Talich and Kubelik, but who cares? Harnoncourt has everything a Dvorak conductor needs, dramatic immediacy, an ear for riotous color, an indulgent love of melody and melancholy, and the ability to relax and let orchestras bloom with beauty.

Dvorak: Slavonic Dances Dvorak's music is folk music, almost popular dance music at times, and it needs a conductor utterly unafraid to put across the visceral thrill of his sounds. In my experience, only Rafael Kubelik gets to this level of excitement with Harnoncourt's frequency and utter spontaneousness. This is exactly what great musicmaking sounds like.

Musical Explanation 3/7/16: A German Requiem at the BSO

Stenz did it again!

I was crying, the soprano was crying, the principal second violin was crying. It was the most beautiful, life-affirming performance of Brahms's German Requiem I ever expect to hear. For the twenty-four hours after this concert, I've been listening to little but this piece which seems so morbid in so many other hands, and I realize now, never have I ever heard a performance of it this good, either live or on record. Nobody, not Klemperer, not Blomstedt, not Gardiner, Masur, Norrington, Bruno Walter, Herreweghe, Schuricht, Furtwangler, Saraste, Bychkov, Sawallisch, Shaw, Karajan, Giulini, dear departed Harnonourt - not a single conductor in the history of recording has gotten closer to mining this monsterpiece for every single expressive nuance than did this modestly attended live performance in Baltimore.



That's not to say that it was a perfect performance. It was, unmistakably, too fast. I hardly blame any conductor for taking a work at too fast a clip when conductors for at least a hundred years have tried to make this piece as ponderous as possible, but over and over again, I found myself thinking that the impact was dulled by the fact that Stenz insisted on being so fast that certain details skated breathlessly over. And yet, within the fast tempos were a seeming infinity of slow-downs (retards) and phrase bends. At the end of the second movement, Stenz seemed to slow the tempo by 30-40%, and the result was the most unbearably moving crescendo on the words 'Eternal Joy.' Had I been the only person in the audience, I would have probably allowed my blubbering wreck of a self to emit verbal sobs. In the third movement, a la Furtwangler, he started the retard to the last note measures before it's marked in the lead up to the famously fermataed D-major chord, which he made the chorus hold onto for nearly seven seconds (I made sure to count). This is just two particularly obvious examples, but it's the kind of surprise Stenz repeated dozens of times.

Even if Stenz was not ideal, lots of other things were: bass-baritone Eric Owens and lyric soprano Lisette Oropessa, were as ideal for as two non-native German speakers could ever be. But the greatest wonder of all was neither the conductor nor the orchestra nor the soloists, it was the chorus - the University of Maryland Concert Choir, an ensemble literally comprised of a hundred American choral scholars - the future music educators of America. Intonation was perfect, diction was perfect, dynamics were expertly varied, pronunciation was as stunningly close to perfect as a chorus of Americans will get in German. But all that would be nothing at all without their overwhelming sincerity of expression, the kind of earnestness and care we all lose by the time we're thirty and just trying to get by in life. Watching them alone was enough to put me in tears, watching an impressively multi-racial group of future music teachers and knowing that if they can do this, the future of music in America is a lot more secure than we worry it is.

Not just in the concert hall. I can reliably get twenty-five people to come to parties at my house, but I can't get anybody to reliably come with me to Baltimore Symphony concerts. But once again, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because by two minutes in I was a tear-stained, mucus-sludged wreck, and remained so for the next hour.

Brahms is *my* composer, or, at very least, the composer whose ethos I feel most within my own. What I love most in Brahms is that simple genuineness of his that so many people mistaken for severity. To be sure, there is severity aplenty in Brahms, but it's the kind of severity that can only be offputting to people who feel the need to be pandered to. Brahms's lack of ostentation is almost ostentatious. He never turns his back on old models that are proven to work, but never flinches from their limitations. His work contains all the heroic Beethovenian gestures of transcendence, but never pretends that heroism and individuality are a cureall. His work operates on the same level of microscopic detail and care of craft as Bach, but Brahms's craft, unlike Bach's, is never motivated by religious mania or the greater glory of God. His music has just as dizzyingly playful an array of musical effects as Mozart has, but Brahms, unlike Mozart, never pulled any punches about the darkness of human nature. He has all the melancholy and heartbreak of Schubert, and contrary to popular belief he's almost as fecund a melodist, but unlike Schubert he has an infinite arsenal of other effects than melody. His music has all the outsize emotionalism of Schumann, but unlike Schumann, he never wears his emotions on his sleeve, and thus his emotions are even more complex.

Does this make Brahms the greatest of all? Well, probably not... I probably love Brahms above all other music, but we all need an occasional pander. The fact that Brahms was so concerned with the fundamental questions means that we never had an opera from him, because what operatic subject can possibly match his seriousness of purpose? In real life, Brahms had a fantastic sense of humor, but hardly ever do we hear that humor in his music. For all the high spirits in his music, Brahms views music as the most serious possible business. Every note seems as though he poured over it for years before he wrote it down. No instrument ever draws attention to itself, every musician, every instrument, every note, is there to serve the musical message. There is nothing in Brahms that doesn't plumb the metaphysical depths of music. If you aren't ready for something that forces you to look within your most serious self, stay home.

And since there is no easy answer in Brahms, either musically or metaphysically, his music will never strive for a gesture in which he doesn't believe. In his German Requiem, whose title he always hated, he assembles a small compendium of Biblical quotations about death. Rather than the traditional Latin Requiem Mass which puts the emphasis on the soul's afterlife and the judgement of sinners, the emphasis is on the living - a modern emphasis for the agnostic on those still left behind. "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted", the text begins with this quote from the Gospel According to Matthew.

There is no mention in this text of damnation, no judgement of how we live our lives. All Brahms wants to do is assure the listener that their loved ones are now in a better place. It's an understanding of the afterlife much closer to the Jewish 'Olam Ha'Ba', an all-inclusive heaven, then to the Christian idea of an exclusive heaven from which sinners are barred.

It is, furthermore, the exact opposite of the Verdi and Berlioz Requiems. The Verdi and Berlioz are vast theatrical tableaus that exploit the vividness of the afterlife's imagery to paint the liturgical equivalent of operas. Brahms's requiem, like Faure's, sees seems to view such extreme sonic pageantry as hollow. Rather than treat an ancient text so frivolously as to make a pseudo-opera out of it (glorious as both Verdi and Berlioz's requiems are...), Brahms finds a new way to mourn that gives the comfort and awe that the traditional Requiem seemed to have done in centuries past.

Brahms chose the title 'A German Requiem' because it was a requiem assembled not from the text of the Latin liturgy still prevalent in Catholicism, but because he chose his texts for the German-translated Bible of Martin Luther. While Brahms was not religious, I don't doubt that he took a bit of pride in being a cultural Protestant who knew his Bible very well, and in the 19th century, many people still considered Protestantism the height of sophisticated thought. While Catholicism was still mired in beliefs and traditions that seemed 500 years out of date, the flexibility of Protestant churches meant that Protestants were able to move forward with the times. In the mid-19th century, a Protestant from Germany could consider himself the height of sophistication and tolerance. But in later years, Brahms deeply regretted the nationalist overtone of his title because as he grew older, the nationalism of Germany began to run amuck, first under Bismarck, and then moreso under Kaiser Wilhelm II. He rather suggested a much more fitting and eloquent title: A Human Requiem. This requiem is not meant to appease an angry God or to fill its listeners with fear, it is meant to console real people with real problems, and make the loneliness that accompanies losing people a little easier to bear.

As I heard Brahms's most life-affirming of Requiems, I couldn't help but think to myself how lucky I've been. I lost a youngish grandfather very early in life, and everyone agrees that the premature loss of Morris Witow was a disaster in all kinds of ways for our family. But after the early 1990's, my family unit has stayed almost completely as it was. As I heard this music yesterday, part of the reason it had such a powerful emotional pull over me was the realization that we cannot last too much longer together as we have for so long. No matter how in shape and healthy my Bubbie seems, she's 95 years old, and even if - God forbid - we lost her tomorrow, it could never be considered a tragedy. My Dad is now seventy, my Mom is sixty-five, and their peers are starting to die off. I have no idea what my immediate family will look like in ten years, but for worse or better, the chance that it will look as it always has is quite small at best. Brahms's requiem is a requiem that tells us no matter whom we lose, there will always be consolations to those of us remaining in dear life.

Musical Explanation 3/5/16: Why Listen to Bruckner...

It's been a relatively dark week. On Tuesday, I pushed myself well past the limits of exhaustion to try to record a piece that's been ringing shapelessly in my head for five years, in the hopes that what I could put into sound was anything like what my ears heard. Against a painful ulcer that's simply crying to get me to return to a healthier diet and wreaking a bit of havoc on my vocal chords, I sang ten different voice parts and played twenty-two parts on my violin for eight hours. I recorded two-and-a-half minutes of what will probably be a six-to-seven minute piece. The last minute of what I recorded is very good, but getting there is rather as mediocre as most of what its ne'er-do-well creator has thus far done in music. What brought me back from severely frayed nerves and feelings of mediocrity was, as so many times before, the ecstasy of Bruckner.

Music lovers in my highly semitic family always warned me off of composers they deemed too Teutonic - Wagner is a bete noir of theirs that, to a much smaller extent, remains a bete noir with me. But to dislike Bruckner, as they do, is to miss one of music's chiefest joys. I can't help the fact that most Bruckner performances completely miss the beating heart of the music in an effort to make a fetish out of orchestral smoothness and the pseudoprofundity of slow tempos, but I can say that such an approach should be lethal to any music lover who seeks depth of expression rather than the appearance of it.



What makes Bruckner so unbelievably moving is not his religious conviction, but the absolute humility his conviction inspires in him. Schubert wrote songs and chamber music about affairs of the heart, Beethoven wrote symphonies and sonatas about affairs of the self, Mozart wrote operas and concertos about affairs, but Bruckner wrote his symphonies and motets about affairs of the soul. His music speaks of a simple, stoic, almost peasant-like, acceptance of the cosmic order which we more ego-minded modern souls cannot understand. When I hear his music, I hear a kinship with my grandparents, who came from the Polish countryside, and like Bruckner when he came to Vienna, were forced from their rural European abode into a modern, more epicurean, world which they were completely ill-equipped to understand.

The more superficial parts of my social life are (or at least were) chock full with a whirlwind of people who claim that they want to live lives more like the world from which my grandparents hailed, but haven't the foggiest idea of what it entails - pseudo-hippies and much too cheerful modern incarnations of the prophet, Jeremiah, who rail against modern life in precisely the kind of way which demonstrates how thoroughly addicted to modernity they are. I can't tell you how many people I know who claim without a second thought that we humans would all be better off if we spent more time in nature - as though going back into nature will rid us from the fears and anxieties of modern life. What they're describing is the exact opposite of nature, it's the version of nature you find on Hallmark postcards.

They may think that they're going back to something natural, but there is nothing less natural than standing in the middle of un-trampled upon nature without any fear that nature will not trample you. They're either unwilling or too stupid to understand that animal existence spent billions of years evolving to the point that nature finally doesn't rule us all with an iron fist.



No matter how far away civilization appears to take us from nature, we are all manifestations of nature, and nature's built a homing device in each of us that can make any of us act with completely natural brutality if someone stands in nature's way.  How can you possibly make sense of Donald Trump unless you perceive nature activating its homing device on a region of the world that's moved too far away from it? Donald Trump and his movement is the raging animal who tries to tear apart America's civilization from the inside. An animal doesn't know that he's destroying anything, and he doesn't care. Put a bull inside a house and the bull will destroy every piece of furniture and every decoration on the walls. All a bull sees of a human house is impediments to where he goes. Meanwhile, a country that shames any person who says anything to offend people (be this person a politician or celebrity or colleague or friend or family member), is the national equivalent of a china shop, and you don't need a bull to destroy a china shop, all it takes is one dog without a leash. It's almost inevitable that the same people who talk about the natural world as though it's simply a pleasant backdrop over which they can live their lives are the ones who want to suppress the human side of nature and make this gloriously ugly race of ours into something cleaner and less interesting.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Bruckner...

Life would be easier if the attitude we carried with us from pre-modernity is one like Bruckner's, a stoicism and humility which reminds us that no matter what life gives, God and/or the universe will carry on indifferently to us, because one day we will return to them. The would-be Wagners who narcissistically use nature as a tool for their personal aggrandizement inevitably find that nature will never be satisfied with being a mere supporting player in our lives. Over and over again, it's the primitivists who tell us that the world would be a better place if we're lead back to nature, but nature necessarily demands civilization's breakdown.