When Facebook Becomes Blogging

We are living in an era when everything about democracy's basic building blocks: its apparatus of intelligence gathering, economic capital, economic regulation, government departments, and most importantly, intellectual debate, have worn very thin and decadent. We've grown so democratic that we apply democracy to facts themselves, to giving the option to both right and left to reject statistical findings that hundreds of thousands of experts, even millions, have collected with greater knowledge and accuracy than ever before in human history. Companies are no longer properly regulated and grow as powerful as nation states themselves, governments are controlled by prosperous minorities who feel they have no need to provide for people who don't benefit from the system, intelligence agencies and political ministries and cabinets are increasingly subordinated to political agendas rather than the welfare of those they govern, and political debate is locked away in ideological certainties that exclude the possibility of reasoned disagreement because those who disagree are simply unable to understand because of the innate evil in their character rather than being simply and tragically misinformed.

Like every political system before it, liberal democracy failed to evolve flexibly enough to fit its times, just as Great Power Monarchies did in the 1880s and 90s, and thus we increasingly stand teetering on a precipice of a collapse, and in a generation that's exactly what we might have in a rain of blood just as the imperial powers collapsed into World War I, or absolute monarchy collapsed into the French Revolution. The centrally planned technocratic authoritarianism of China will be shielded from it just as democratic America was shielded from World War I, and the liberal monarchy of England was basically shielded from the French Revolution and Napoleon.

But just as happened in the generation before World War I and the French Revolution, part of a system's dismantlement is that as the Right increasingly consolidates its power, the Left becomes increasingly unmoored with all kinds of un-thought through radical notions that do nothing to liberate people but plenty to kill them. There is no point to the increase of liberty if you're already dead.

When I see Jeremy Corbyn, I see where America is soon headed. The English government, European governments generally, provide all the social services that turn American liberals green with envy. All the social services that, if Western Europe were operating with America's purchasing power, could keep the world stable in near-perpetuity. Even after Thatcher and Blair, even after all the French Gaulleists, both of whom tried to dismantle its achievement, none of them could do it. It's called falsely called Social Democracy, but is really just how a liberal democracy should properly function as Roosevelt and Keynes envisioned it. But for some people, it's never enough. They see that some people want to dismantle it, they panic, and they'd sooner blow up the whole thing to start over rather than accept that no achievement is a utopia and no achievement can ever be completely stable. There will be plenty of Americans who fall for that viciously dangerous lie just as lots of Brits and French have, and among people I know, I feel as though I can identify which will fall for it right down to person to person.

Jeremy Corbyn is not Bernie Sanders. The Bernie Sanderses (and Jim Callaghans) of the world make leaders like Corbyn possible, but Corbyn may well be an English Hugo Chavez. Somebody whom in better circumstances would be dismissed as a small town mediocre political agitator, there are thousands of them, and in less stable times, dumb luck deposits one those mediocrities into a leadership role. Capitalism teeters on the verge of a collapse from the hubris of people who exploit it and governments who fail to maintain it properly, and rather than blame it on the evil in human beings, it's inevitably alleged to be the fault of the system itself.

Ever since 2008, we've been on the brink of a depression still worse than The Great Recession. It's coming. The world is increasingly dominated by just a few companies, the collapse of any one of could cause it. With the ever larger specter of automation, with the ever advancing specter of ecological catastrophe, this is all possible very soon. The far left will crow that they saw it coming a mile away. Otherwise sensible people will marvel at their prescience; just as their parents and grandparents marveled at conservatives’ prescience that Reagan’s weapons buildup would end communism, and that accelerated civil rights legislation would cause urban decline. In one dimension, they all have a kind of truth to them, yet they egregiously ignore the entire context. The pendulum always swings, and whichever fanatic’s side it favors at the moment get to say they were always right without the world laughing them out of debate forever.

In the coming years, leaders like Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Melanchon, or whatever their updated American equivalents turn out to be, will seem like an ever more appealing alternative to the Trumps and Pences and Putins and Netanyahus and Orbans and Erdogans and Dutertes's. Just as a hundred and two hundred years previously, people with even the slightest intellectual or radical bent will sign onto their agendas, and the conflict between the two immovable sides will probably sign the death warrants of millions. Every debate we're now having will seem completely insignificant.

You'll all do what you do regardless of what I say, but you don't get to say you weren't warned.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Every detail of the McCain funeral was fascinating. It was like that first scene in The Guns of August in which the all the Kings of Europe came together in an imperial parade right before World War I. It felt like a final gathering of the Old Washington and showed both why we're going to really miss it when shit hits the fan and also why it had to die. Lots of talk about patriotism and the importance of bipartisanship at the same time that Henry Kissinger, looking more and more like a reflection of his soul, was somehow up there talking about honor and wasted lives and missing those who've left us and nobody took his cane to whip him with it. Joe Lieberman, his jowls six inches still lower than when he left the Senate, interrupting a personal reflection on his BFF to natter on for five minutes about McCain's commitment to Israel. W. still looking like he couldn't believe he got through the speech, and a quietly but unmistakably withering Obama cutting through the bullshit to deliver a message that this establishment dug its own grave.

It's not that Obama hated McCain or vice versa, but McCain represented the American past, and Obama still represents a potential American future. McCain represented both what was good about the past and why it has to become the past. Lots of people on the left want to call McCain a racist, probably because he once said he'd earned the right to use the G-word about the Vietnamese, but I doubt most of them even knew that. They probably don't have evidence except a reflexive belief that all Republicans are; but however McCain felt about the Vietnamese, he was still the driving force behind the normalization of relations between America and Vietnam. They say he was a warmonger, but war is an inevitable part of life, and the wars McCain backed were fought far away and with relatively small casualties. Now the wars may be fought on our shores rather than elsewhere. They say he took too hard a line with America's enemies, but Obama's refusal to treat the Russian threat seriously was a colossal blunder, and anybody who hasn't realized that yet is reflexively defending Obama from criticism rather than seriously analyzing the situation. They say he was a modern imperialist, and this charge has some weight to it, but imperialism has always existed, and eventually every attempt to eradicate it completely rather than minimize it resulted in totalitarian states.

The idea that McCain had no accomplishments is somewhere between ignorance and lunacy. If his accomplishments were not more concrete, it says far more about what he was up against than about him. McCain and Feingold were the only senators in our lifetime who ever successfully and productively reformed campaign laws. He fought a crusade to take on big tobacco and nearly won it. He's the only major Republican presidential candidate since the 60's to not kowtow to the Religious Right, and not only did he not kowtow to them, he stood up to them! He was the only major Republican to propose bills to fight climate change, and he did so multiple times. He voted against Bush tax cuts twice, he exposed Jack Abramoff's corruption, he and Ted Kennedy almost passed a bill to legalize illegal immigrants, he sponsored nearly a bill a year to end the Bush Administration's torture practices. And let's not forget, just a year ago, he stopped an attempt to kill Obamacare. Over and over again, McCain stood up for so many values progressives claim to cherish, and he did it from a place where no one else would dare. So however much left-wingers hated him, right-wingers hated him more.

McCain made compromises to keep his fights going, we all do. McCain, like everybody else, is a product of his time and place, and his time and place was in denial about the full extent of the rot. Had McCain not chosen Palin, the path to a President like Trump would have been just as clear - maybe for 2020 rather than 2016, but it would have happened, and the Trump of a different timeline might have been a would-be-dictator three times as smart. Look at America right now, there's too much hatred, too little compromise, too much anger, too much humiliation, too much evil to hold the demons back.

The old Washington, like every institution that lives more than three minutes, is built on compromises. Nobody but babies get what they want more than 30% of the time, and some of the compromises are truly terrible, like allowing members of the Nixon White House - who prolonged the Vietnam war by six years and two million lives - to be treated better than Mussolini. But it was not the compromises of the old Washington that brought us Trump, it was the 25-year refusal of conservative Republicans to allow for compromise, and the state of denial the rest of Washington has been living in the entire time that the country is fine. The only people with whom you cannot work are the people who refuse to compromise. Their utopian promises of a better world can only be built over the corpses of the people who will fight them, and they may well lose. Every movement that does not allow for dissent is a movement that we can't include. McCain, like everybody else in Washington, failed to cut off the sickness, and the cancer has now metastasized to the entire government.

Fanaticism is a drug, the more outrage you feel, the more you crave it. Supposedly, the fanaticism which fought equal rights on every front had gone away. It never went away, it just became more insidious, more easily couched in conservative phraseology, and therefore more easily distributed through mass media. You can't technically hear white superiority or male superiority in terms like small government or personal responsibility or states' rights, but somehow, both the Right and Left could smell the hatred in those terms - the only people who didn't were the Centrists. They were living too comfortably in the suburbs, making too much money, prepping their kids for colleges nobody else could afford.

We now live in the uncompromising discontents of the world which the McCains collaborated with. Meanwhile, the Obamas fought to end it so they could save it, and by doing so, save us. There is no more Obama Presidency, and no one President, not Obama, not Lincoln, can undo everything in eight years which legislators and companies have been trying to implement since Obama was just a community organizer. We are the one's we've been waiting for, and now it's up to Democrats to do the work of two parties - to do the work and make the arguments both for gradual extension of liberty and the accelerated, until such time as there are powerful Republicans again who believe in liberty at all.

INEP #25: Werther, Onegin, and Darcy - Beginning

So a few dozen of you, if you really care, might have asked where your once faithful correspondent has been. The answer is, he's been practicing violin, he's been addicted to duolingo and is trying, in his usual overly ambitious way, to learn four different languages simultaneously - and has so far progressed enough that he can at least say 'apple' in all four; and he's been searching his mind for a podcast format that would bring him and you the best possible results and satisfaction, only to draw the conclusion that he should keep doing this podcast exactly as it is without the slightest possible change.

But most of all, he's been reading, trying to learn the secrets of writers much better than he'll ever be, trying to figure out where his old fictional podcast, the podcast he was really passionate about making, perhaps mistakenly passionate, went off the rails, and trying to learn from the old masters how to make a coherent narrative and actually read the books he's always pretended he's finished, and occasionally never started.

So I want to talk in this podcast about three very similar characters from three truly cosmic masterpieces. Some books are Masterpieces with a Capital M. You approach them with awe, but it's almost impossible to approach them with love. Goethe's Faust is a great example of that.

The neglect of Goethe in our era and place is one of the great scandals of modern intellectual life, because more than any writer I can think of, Goethe is exactly what we need right now. Is Goethe as boring as his reputation? Well, the only answer I can give from personal experience that has integrity is... often. But Goethe's peaks are so high that he's worth the valleys.

Goethe wrote 80 books, so it's not like I can give any kind of comprehensive overview of his work or define it in any truly meaningful way. But I can certainly contrast his two most famous works. One is a legendary and thin-aired Himalaya of World Literature - which, of course for those in the know, is a term Goethe invented. The other is one of Germany's most beloved books, a book whose reputation he could never live down because everyone wanted him to write another Werther, but Goethe, as genius must, was always evolving, always searching for new avenues of interest and expression to add to his storehouse of knowledge and reevaluate his wisdom. More than any more proper philosopher, he was perhaps the truest thinker the modern world ever had; the reason being that he was unencumbered by any system at all, and rather left his theories messy, half empirical, half Cartesian, and a third half metaphysical, and rather than fit them into neat proscriptions of any straightforward theory, he hedged his bets, never settling on any fixed truth as any one who values the truth ultimately must.

B. How, by embracing the spiritual world, Goethe was the central figure in neutralizing religious dogma's stranglehold, and how he did so.

C. Goethean Evolution and how we Americans have a fixed sense of identity rather than a continuously evolving one.

D. How we have to recapture some of the interconnected metaphysical outlook of the 19th century Europeans and be content to evolve or else we will not see the connection between the dots that can solve the existential crises of the 21st century: mass extinction, bioterror, nuclear proliferation, ecological catastrophe.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I finally couldn't take it anymore and I defriended a few Brit socialist Corbynistas - a few of which were genuinely eminent intellectuals - after being dared in his facebook feed by one of them for anyone to do it if I had anything at all nice to say about Jonathan Sacks. I guarantee the dude doesn't know a single other person who might have something nice to say about Rabbi Sacks, so I had no reason to wonder whom he could have ever been speaking. At least I had a few Corbynistas cramming up my feed to whom I occasionally addressed in recent days. I don't even like a lot which Sacks stands for, but Sacks is pretty much the exact locus point of modern Judaism. If a person isn't an antisemite before he says that he can't be friends with a person who has anything nice at all to say about Rabbi Sacks, he's definitely an antisemite afterward. I really unloaded on the dude and I blocked him before I could get any response. I'm sure the response I got was as blisteringly personal as I gave. I'm not sorry to have done it. It never stops being amazing how smart people can be such idiots and it wouldn't matter that the guy is a maniac but he is beginning to accumulate real prestige and power in music, much more than I ever will. I'm just a pygmy whose name shows no signs of getting any bigger, so I don't know how somebody that eminent could feel so provoked by me. I was quite fascinated by him, not just because his writing on music is better written than just about anybody's who had saner beliefs, but because he really does love classical music even if his love can be as warped as Klingsor's ( look him up...), and that's extremely rare in my generation. When you're an American of our generation, living among so many classical musicians, experts even, who seem to have such little love for it, see no value in what they do, and want to gleefully slam the door on the entire classical tradition, it's incredibly refreshing to talk to the few knowledgeable people of my generation who don't seem like they think the whole thing is completely useless. And furthermore, in spite of his Marxism he lives a kind of glamorous jet set European lifestyle full of bildung and kultur that a pointy egghead like me always dreamed of having, not filled with sailboats or paragliding, but concerts and museums and books. The hypocrisy was both kind of hilarious, and also quite reassuring that somebody, anybody in the world at all, could still do it on an academic's salary.

But what a fucking price to pay for it. The inability to relate at all to anyone not exactly like him, the surrender of every independence of mind because everybody's intimidated to voice thoughts outside the party line. As jealous as this clearly enormous ego of mine is, I also pity these people. They have more privileges than anyone would ever know what to do with, and it's never enough. They have to live with so much repression that even just a few negative words about what they believe drive them to such enormous rage that they can't even be friends with people who disagree. And for guys like that, all their outrage is purely abstract. It's not like they are ever personally affected by all the newspeak they spout; one way or the other, their position at the top of world society is completely unassailable. At least I put up with reading their crap about Corbyn for a period of years. How fragile can people be?

I'm sure I have more to say about this or related topics later, this will do for now...

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

Conservatism will always be with us. It is as natural to the human condition as the urge to liberality, the urge to make all things socially just and equal, and the urge to submit one's will to an authority figure. We all have those urges somewhere within us, and we all have to live with those who choose to respond to different parts of our native selves than we do, and we have to respect those who make incorrect worldviews into something with which people can live.

McCain was the example in our time of Aristocratic Conservatism, a conservatism of duty and public service which believes that the privileges he inherited required him morally to give back to a country which gave him so much. This is the conservative tradition of Eisenhower, Adenauer, De Gaulle, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Bismarck, Disraeli, and Edmund Burke, which now seems to be taken up by Merkel and Macron. It's a conservatism that only opposes the extension of freedom because the extension of freedom for those who are not free may dramatically curtail hard-won freedoms of others. McCain's conservatism knew that there was no world in which the upper class could ever be threatened by those beneath them unless those beneath them were provoked to do so. It is the conservatism we need from our Republicans. When allowed to flourish, it can be of enormous welfare to the un-prosperous in already prosperous societies, when allowed to die out, the conservatism which replaces it can destroy the lives of millions.

We are all thrown into this world with people with whom we could not disagree more strongly. Our only option is to respect those people with other opinions who are not so fanatical in their beliefs that they chase an extreme version of them. Without them, there is only a liberalism that curdles into revolution, and a conservatism that desiccates into tyranny.

Idea for Podcast Series: The 'Greatest Generation' of Composers

No, it's not the actual greatest generation. Even if that existed, this might not be it, and even if it were, how can one prove it? There is no 'greatest' anything in art, one can't quantify quality, one can only talk about various kinds of greatness. Perhaps people can objectively value one kind of greatness over another as being more essential to our quality of life, but even if we could, how do we quantify an essence?

Perhaps the only way to do so is by its uniqueness. And in the sense of what is unique, this period of composition - composers born between 1855 and 1885, is in many ways the most unique for reasons which we can get further into over these dozens of episodes. The basic thesis is this: 'absolute music' was so important to the life of the middle class over the long 19th century that this music, with its definite rules of tonality and sonata form, with its millions of amateurs who mastered instruments and learned to be musically literate just as they were literate in any language, accumulated ever new ways to be complex and unique until the invention of the electronic recording, which completely changed our relationship to music. Musicians and music lovers who did not remember a time when we could listen to music without playing it thought of music differently, wrote music differently, played music differently, listened to music differently. The era from which they emerged was a long and glorious sunset. With the dawn comes the excitement and hope for ever new possibilities, but also the necessity of re-learning from scratch everything we once thought we knew. 

Each of these podcasts will be no more than an hour long, with many recorded illustrations:

Unfinished Beginnings: Mussorgsky

Unfinished Beginnings: Bizet

Elgar the Pilgrim

Imperial Elgar:

Unimperial Elgar:

Verismo:

Verismo: Cav and Pag 

Verismo in Puccini:

Modern Puccini:

Mahler: Origins

Mahler: Originality

Mahler: Vienna

Mahler: Farewells

Mahler: The Anxiety of Influence

Debussy: Musical Stasis

Debussy: Musical Color

Debussy: Musical White and Black

Debussy: The Anxiety of Influence

Strauss: The New Poem

Strauss: The New Poem II

Strauss: Operatic Radical

Strauss: Operatic Conservative

Strauss: Collaborator and Mourner

Janacek: A Different Modernity

Janacek: Folklorist

Janacek: Slavophile

Janacek: The Power of Speech

Janacek: Old Man in Love

Delius in France

Delius in Germany

Delius and Fenby

Sibelius: Voice of a Nation

Sibelius: Ainola - Retreat to the Forest

Sibelius and the Gods

Sibelius in the Theater

Sibelius: The Road to Silence

Nielsen: Psychology

Nielsen at War

Nielsen: Tonality, Clarity, Strength

Busoni: The Piano Transcriber

Busoni Goes Home

Busoni's Faust

Busoni: That Piano Concerto

Koechlin: Forgotten Genius

Koechlin: Pantheist

Koechlin: Time Becomes Space

Koechlin: The Jungle Book

Koechlin: Hollywood

Schmitt: Imperial France

Joplin: American Bach

Joplin: Treemonisha

Beach: American Women

Price: African-American Women

Taneyev: The Russia that Was

Glazunov: The Russia that Was II

Arensky and Ivanov: The Russia that Was III

Zemlinsky: The Dwarf

Zemlinsky: Viennese Eros

Schrecker: Viennese Eros II

Schmidt: Viennese Eros III

Mystic Holst

Rural Holst

Choral Holst

Vaughan Williams at Cambridge

Vaughan Williams in France

Vaughan Williams's Women

Vaughan Williams in the Home Office

Vaughan Williams: The Lion in Winter

Reger: Variations on the Classical

Reger: Variations on the Baroque

Scriabin: Divinity

Scriabin: Ecstasy

Scriabin: Fire

Scriabin: Toward the Flame

Rachmaninov: Gold Watches and Hypnosis

Rachmaninov: Voluntary Exile

Rachmaninov: Involuntary Exile 

Ives in New England

Ives in Concord

Ives in New York

Ives in the Transcendent

Ives: The Anxiety of Influence

Ravel: The Apache

Ravel at the Opera-Comique

Ravel and His Mother

Ravel at War

Ravel: Le Jazz

Falla and Albeniz

Falla: Spanish Phantoms

Falla's Musical Puppets

Schoenberg: An Irritating Young Man

Schoenberg: Free Classical

Schoenberg: Other Planets

Schoenberg: The Twelve Commandments

Schoenberg: Arnie in America

Schoenberg: Arnie and Adolph

Respighi in Rome

Respighi in History

Respighi in Concert Mode

Bartok: No Hungarian Rhapsodies

Bartok: Rejected Love

Bartok: A Little Night Music

Bartok's Children

Bartok: East Meets West

Bartok in America

Bloch: Judaism Speaks

Bloch: Time Becomes Space

Bloch and the Quartet

Foulds: Forgotten Genius

Foulds: Mystic Researcher

Foulds: The World Requiem

The Kodaly Method

The Kodaly Voice

Szymanowski in France

Szymanowski's Men

Szymanowski in Poland

Stravinsky: Firebird

Stravinsky: Petrushka

Stravinsky: The Rite

Stravinsky: Leaving Russia

Stravinsky: Here Time Becomes Space

Stravinsky and God

Stravinsky and Gods

Stravinsky vs. Schoenberg

Stravinsky: The Anxiety of Influence

Villa Lobos and Bach

Villa Lobos and Brazil

Villa Lobos and Europe

Villa Lobos and the Guitar

Bax: Englishman Gone Irish

Bax: English Institution

Berg: Old Vienna

Berg: Wozzeck

Berg: Lulu

Berg: The Memory of an Angel

Berg: The Anxiety of Influence

Webern: Here Time Becomes Space

Webern and Science

Webern: Brevity is the Soul of...

Still need places for: Magnard, Dukas*, Bridge*, Suk*, Godowsky, Enescu*, Gliere, Kalinnkov, Liadov, Medtner, Myaskovsky, Stenhammer, Alfven, Wellesz, Casella, Braunfels, Albeniz*, Granados

History of the Symphony - Episode 5 1/3rd - First Half

Q: What's the world's longest viola joke?
A: Harold in Italy

https://youtu.be/q4VtR8E_isk?t=10m4s

It seems a little pathetic to attribute such earth-shaking world-importance as I'm about to to that piece by Berlioz that everybody regards as somewhere between an enigma and a joke; a symphony for viola and orchestra. But Harold in Italy is a seminal work in the history of music, because it is the moment when classical form truly came undone for good, and there was no putting it back together.

In the first movement of Harold in Italy, the main theme is stated at the beginning, and it's never stated entirely again. That chaos that erupts at the beginning of the finale's of Beethoven's Ninth and the Hammerklavier Sonata has now invaded the etched-in-stone format of opening movements. Toward the end, you get the first four notes of the opening theme, over and over again in a canon, but no complete restatement, instead, the whole thing snowballs and disintegrates. What holds the music together is no longer form, but pure energy and imaginative fantasy that lets formal relationships of the notes get pasted randomly to the musical canvas like a collage.

So Harold in Italy, Berlioz's Symphony no. 2, which was supposed to be a viola concerto that began as a commission for Paganini, who had just acquired a viola and was looking to show his prowess on the deeper string instrument, is neither symphony nor concerto in any meaningful way. It's not even a Symphonie Fantastique, it's just Fantastique.

Berlioz memorably recounts his first meeting with Paganini after an early performance of the Symphonie Fantastique in his memoirs. He noticed that a man had stayed behind after the enormous ovation had ended:

...a man with long hair and piercing eyes and a strange, ravaged countenance, a creature haunted by genius, a Titan among giants, whom I had never seen before, the first sight of whom stirred me to the depths. 

About the Symphonie Fantastique the man.

...uttered glowing eulogies that thrilled me and moved me to the depths. It was Paganini.

I would imagine that Paganini, said to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for his violin prowess, wanted a demonic concerto in the manner of the last movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, but Berlioz was too true an artist to ever repeat himself. The two of them announced to the Parisian public a massive partnership so ambitious that there was no way it could succeed: a work for orchestra, chorus, and viola, called The Last Moments of Mary Stuart - the Queen of Scots who was executed in 1587 by order of her sister, Elizabeth the First of England.

But Berlioz would not follow anything but his own inner voice, and the voice that called to him was Byron. When Paganini looked at the viola part with all its rests, he abandoned the commission. Paganini wanted a part in which he was playing continuously - this may have not just been ego on Paganini's part; his business model was to go from town to town with his orchestral parts in tow. could ever have been feasible The orchestral parts of his many works for violin and orchestra had to be easy enough to sightread because Paganini was often in any town for no more than one night and there would be no time for rehearsal. Harold in Italy is almost precisely the opposite of the kind of work Paganini wanted. How either could have ever thought a feasible partnership could work between two titanically egoed geniuses with such different working methods is impossible to know.

We already spoke of Byron's probable influence on the waltz in the Symphonie Fantastique. Byron was clearly a model for Berlioz - not so much for Berlioz's music but for Berlioz's artistic persona which he puts forth in certain works of his both musical - like the Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy and the Damnation of Faust, and literary - you see this in both his criticism and his autobiography. The writing of Lord Byron, like Hemingway or Whitman or Goethe or the Beats was not just writing - it was the embodiment of a whole persona, a way of looking at the world. People talk about Paganini and Liszt as being the original rockstars, but Byron is a much more apropos incarnation. It is impossible to overstate his influence upon his time. He was as widely read as Shakespeare during precisely the same period when Shakespeare's eminence among all writers was cemented for all time. Shakespeare is widely loved for portraying every kind of human, whereas Byron portrayed only himself, and that was enough for people to find him as significant as anything in Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet.

The Byronic persona is two-faced on the one hand a glamorous and excitable gallant and wit who is excited by the world's possibilities; on the other hand a world-weary traveler who's seen everything, read everything, yet is impressed by nothing. He has an air of mystery that women seemed to find terribly erotic, women surrounded them like flies, and they treated women like flies.  He's a brooding romantic hero embodied by the kind of antiheroes you read in the Brontes in the form of Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester, or in Pushkin in the form of Eugene Onegin. Perhaps even Captain Ahab is the Byronic hero who lived on to the mid-19th century, driven mad by living on so many years past when he should have died.

The Byronic persona can't help but be a reflection of his era, in which great hopes were lifted up, only to be completely dashed. Lord Byron was about fifteen years older than Berlioz, and already dead by the time Berlioz wrote the Symphonie Fantastique. Byron was born in 1788, so he wasn't old enough to remember the French Revolution, which happened right as he was born, but he couldn't help but be shaped by the great hopes of that era when all men might finally look upon one another as equals, only to be crushed in a maelstrom of death by French chaos, then Napoleon's dictatorship, then his emperorship, then his waging of war across Europe. At so many moments of those twenty-six years, it seemed like freedom was just out of reach, and yet every moment when it seemed that humanity would ascend to a nobler plane of existence, existence seemed to cease for another million people.

In his autobiography, Berlioz spoke of his time in Italy after winning the Prix de Rome. He found Rome incredibly disappointing. To Berlioz, the Italians were masters of every art except music - I'm sure that if the deeply atheist Berlioz had looked a bit more deeply into the music of the Catholic Church, he'd have found something to inspire him. But rather than spend the preponderance of time in Rome, Berlioz went on a series of rural sojourns. Here's a passage from Berlioz's autobiography about a trip to Sardinia:

My fellow passengers, who were all Italians, told endless stories, most of them wholly incredible, but very interesting. One had fought in the Greek War of Independence, and had known Canaris intimately (Canaris being the key figure in the movement to liberate Greece from the Ottoman Empire). We pestered him with questions about the revolutionary hero whose glory seemed to have flamed itself out as quickly as the flame of his own fireships. A Venetian, an underbred fellow, who spoke abominable French, avvered that he had commanded Lord Byron's corvette during the poet's adventurous excursions in the Adriatic and the Grecian Archipelago. He gave us a minute description of the brilliant uniform Lord Byron had insisted on his wearing, and the orgies in which they had indulged; and his modesty did not prevent him from repeating the praises which the illustrious traveler had bestowed on his courage. During a storm, Byron invited the Captain to play ecarté with him in his cabin; and the latter deserted his post and accepted the invitation. While they were playing, the ship gave a lurch, which upset both table and players. 

"Pick up the cards and go on"

"With pleasure my lord."

"You are a brave fellow captain."

So when Berlioz says 'upset both table and players', I'm pretty sure he means that Byron and the Captain vomited, and that Byron was not in the least upset by it. Berlioz, far more than a number of other composers who've left just as much literary output, seemed like excellent company, but Berlioz related a number of times in his memoirs that he viewed the Italy trip as a colossal disappointment. It's conceivable that on this trip he particularly came to identify with the disaffection of Lord Byron.

I haven't read Childe Harold all the way through, it's long, and epic poetry is not exactly a passion of our generation; but Childe Harold is fundamentally a poem about trying, and failing, to forget one's woes in a hail of travel and pleasure - which is fundamentally what Berlioz wished to do while he was in Italy.

If one takes a few quotes from Childe Harold, perhaps you can find a rough musico/poetic equivalent to them in Harold in Italy. They may not line up completely with Berlioz's descriptions, but some musicologists believe Berlioz tacked on the descriptions after he wrote the work.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfin'd;/No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet/To chase the Glowing Hours with Flying feet.”  (LSO/Davis/Zimmerman up to 6:00)

“I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me: and to me/High mountains are a feeling, (Bernstein/NYPO up to 2:40)

There was a sound of revelry by night,/And Belgium's capital had gathered then/Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright/The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men./A thousand hearts beat happily; and when/Music arose with its voluptuous swell,/Soft eyes looked loved to eyes which spake again,/And all went merry as a marriage bell./But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!  (Munch/BSO up to 13:26)

Ironically, by the time Harold in Italy was premiered, Paganini had two months earlier retired permanently. Four years afterward, Paganini, already sick with the throat that would kill him two years later, finally had opportunity to hear Harold in Italy. So moved was he apparently that he forced Berlioz to the stage, where he kissed Berlioz's hand to the overwhelming cheers of the crowd. The next day, a letter came to Berlioz in which Paganini declared Berlioz the undisputed heir to Beethoven, along with a bank note to cash 20,000 francs.

Paganini would not hear the work Berlioz's Symphony no. 3, the Symphonie Dramatique: Romeo et Juliette, dedicated to him, and which his generous contribution obviously financed. Paganini died shortly after its premiere, but present at one of the first three performances was a little-known German composer and poet from Leipzig whom, until he heard this revelatory synthesis of music and Shakespearean poetry, was almost completely undistinguished. His name, if you haven't guessed, was Richard Wagner, and he owed Berlioz nearly everything. He'd just moved to Paris from Riga, capital of Latvia, to flee creditors, and did not speak any French at all. But even at that moment, he already knew he was Wagner, he just didn't know how to be Wagner until Berlioz showed him the way.

You hopefully recall from the last class how Berlioz wrote the Symphonie Fantastique as a document of his manic passion for Harriet Smithson. By the time Berlioz wrote Romeo and Juliet in 1839, the two were married for five years in a marriage that was, to put it mildly, tempestuous. Harriet Smithson was perhaps the great actress of her age. The very presence of women on the stage was severely curtailed right up until Smithson's generation, and many people in both London and Paris saw the eloquence of her Ophelia and her Juliet and realized what great they'd be missing were the onstage presence of actresses curtailed. But by the mid 1830s, Harriet Smithson had a broken leg that kept her off the stage for a year while both her mother and sister depended upon her for support. Berlioz had already sent her passionate love letters for roughly five years which she ignored completely until a mutual friend took her to a performance of Leilo, a lesser-known work by Berlioz which is a kind of sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique. Smithson then realized it was about her and fairly soon thereafter, the two became lovers. Even at the time of their marriage, she was rather ambivalent about it, and both the Smithson and the Berlioz families warned against the union.

Just two years after the wedding, Smithson had to end her career due to health concerns. She grew ever sicker and more overweight, while Berlioz's career was taking off like a rocket. The ensuing issues of jealousy were inevitable. By 1840, Berlioz took up with a soprano named Marie Recio who would eventually become his second wife. Poor Harriet Smithson would live on until 1854, paralyzed for her final years on the left side of her body, barely able to move or speak.

Harriet Smithson was not just the muse that drew fire in Berlioz's heart and loins but the vessel that brought Berlioz to Shakespeare. Once again, it's ironic how Shakespeare captured Berlioz's imagination because Berlioz did not speak a word of English. Until the time of the Romantics, Shakespeare was particularly unpopular in France. French drama was extremely formal and idea based. It was grounded in the '3 unities' which Aristotle maintained was important for all drama: that it all take place in 24 hours, that it all happen in the same place, and that there be no subplots. Shakespeare breaks all three rules in just about every play. To this day, the most famous French playwright is Moliere, who lived roughly fifty years after Shakespeare, and Moliere greatness is in how he mocks the upper-class. Shakespeare has a gallery of characters from all classes, but about the lower classes, Moliere has barely anything to say at all. Shakespeare's vocabulary was roughly 28,000 words, but the vocabulary of the great French tragedian, Racine, was only 4,000. Racine's poetry is written in the strictest Alexandrine form - twelve syllables in every line, further divided into six and six whose words cannot cross to the other side, with rhyming couplets at the end of every twenty-four syllables. Shakespeare wrote in blank iambic pentameter,

Voltaire, 18th century intellectual minister of classical-age Europe wrote of Shakespeare:

"France has not insults, fool’s-caps, and pillories enough for such a scoundrel. My blood boils in my own veins while I speak to you about him … And the terrible thing is that … it is I myself who was the first to speak about this Shakespeare [in France]. I was the first who showed to the French a few pearls which I had found in his enormous dunghill."

France had always been synonymous with elegance and harmony, but it had just known the bloodiest European events in 250 years. Elegance and inner harmony could not portray what the French were feeling in their hearts.  French artists of so many forms - Balzac, Delacroix, Gericault, Hugo, Daumier, Gautier, Stendahl, Daumier, were creating a new kind of art in which their creations exploded onto their pages. Many expatriot artists came to France in search of that same freedom - Chopin, Liszt and Wagner among them but also Goya spent his last few years in Bordeaux, Turner came to France every ten years for inspiration, Wordsworth of course was formed by his years in France after the Revolution, Constable's paintings were popular in France decades before he ever became a hit in England.

Shakespeare is many wonderful things, but classically proportioned he is most certainly not. An era which prizes surface refinement would find Shakespeare a barbarian, but an era which glorifies emotional depth would find in Shakespeare the poet for all time.

Berlioz later recalled his first encounter with Romeo and Juliet in a letter:

… the burning sun, the balmy nights of Italy, to witness the sight of that love swift as thought, scalding like lava, urgent, eternal, vast, and pure and beautiful like the smile of angels … it was too much. By the third act, fallen shattered to my knees … , hardly breathing, and suffering as if an iron fist had grasped my heart, I proclaimed with utter conviction: ah! I am lost.

Berlioz was not more Berlioz until his encounter with Shakespeare than Wagner was Wagner until his encounter with Berlioz. There are many Shakespeares, but for Berlioz, Shakespeare was passion, sublimity, and freedom. There was no musical form which could contain him any more than Shakespeare could be contained by the traditional forms of drama. 

Unless, of course, one could say that Berlioz created his own form - a kind of drama of the theater in which the orchestral instruments were the characters and their players the actors. If the Symphonie Fantastique seems to resemble the symphony in passing, or at least Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony if no other yet composed, then Berlioz's Symphonie Dramatique is a one-off in music history. No composer of note ever tried to follow Berlioz's example. Not even Berlioz himself ever did so. 

Like the players of Hamlet's play-within-a-play, or the title chapters of novels before the 19th century, the entire story and action of the play is related to the audience by a literal chorus, singing mostly in unison in a manner that resembles Gregorian Chant for a full five minutes. It would be one of the weakest passages in any great work of music if it were not a deliberate attempt to be as boring as possible. Excepting a fugue to convey the violence of the Capulet Montague feud, Berlioz takes his time immersing us in the full world of his imagination. 

For the first twenty minutes, we have no idea precisely what Berlioz has in mind. But after fifteen minutes of not particularly interesting singing, we suddenly hear the violins enacting the sighs of Romeo alone in the agony of love, which quickly turns into his ecstasy. And just when you think this Berlioz/Romeo surrogate might come to some resolution between these two states of being, perhaps the way a more classically minded composer like Mozart might, he comes within hearing distance of the Capulet ball, which he draws ever closer to. And what in a more symphonic work would be a chance to work the music back into equilibrium becomes an orgy of manic overstimulation. 

We literally run the gamut in these twelve minutes from the desperation of a mind too left to its own devices to the desperation of a mind too left too mobbed by activity. In this movement we hear both the uses of minute harmonic steps and dissonances to convey a manic state of mind, both in its most positive and negative emotions, without the example of which the contrasts of Wagner would be impossible. We also hear those dissonant harmonic tensions which  express private agony against an outward facade of public gaiety, without the example of which the contrasts of Verdi would be just as impossible. 

The only point to the singing is to be a framing device. The real action, as always in Berlioz, is to be found in the orchestra. Berlioz wishes in Romeo et Juliette to convey the inner experience of the play, one would be tempted to call it his inner experience, except that it's an experience clearly shared by so many millions for four-hundred years. It's a love letter to Shakespeare, perhaps memorializing that first encounter with Shakespeare for all time which so many people have, or that first flash of doomed young love which Romeo and Juliet recalls for so many. 

If Berlioz has a weakness, it is not his composition technique - when you're an artist of vision like Berlioz's, the lack of technical inhibitions can be a great strength. More on that anon good nurse. Berlioz's great weakness was a human one: he was a romantic, and his view of the world was not particularly adult. He believed in, he demanded, grand passions, and his inability or unwillingness to portray the world of the mundane meant that he was unable to portray human beings as they truly are. One of the more obscene moments in any opera is in Les Troyens, a feast of great drama, in which Berlioz devotes a full act to the mass suicide of the Vestal Virgins who want to avoid capture and doubtless much worse. And rather than play it for the pathos it deserves, perhaps as Mozart would, Berlioz plays it for heart-stopping excitement. And exciting it surely is, but it's not particularly compassionate. Even in Berlioz's most passionate love music, he did not reach as deeply into the heart as a Mozart, a Schubert, a Brahms, a Dvorak, a Mussorgsky, a Janacek.

Berlioz was not interested in the human condition so much as he was interested in the human condition's elevated states. It's perhaps a very Greek concept in that perhaps he didn't view the  human condition as interesting in of itself so much as he viewed humans as interesting because they are temporary vessels for eternal concepts like love, awe, anger, fear, beauty. And in that spiritual sense, he was not all that different from certain rockers of the late 60's like the Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, the Who, that were clearly more out to inflame their audiences with blitzkriegs of passion and electricity than to console them, as perhaps The Beatles were.

So on that note, we're going to skip the love music for this class and come back to it in the next class. Instead, I'd like to go straight to my favorite moment in the Queen Mab music. Mendelssohn already provided an extraordinary precedent for how to portray fairies in music.  (up to 0:45) It was sort of a given that Berlioz would not stray too far from that model. Mendelssohn was a friend of Berlioz, they hated each other's music something awful but they were both very literate men who could talk books as well as music, so it was a given that Berlioz knew Mendelssohn's music, and with the example Mendelssohn set, Berlioz would not generally stray too far from it. (Boulez/Cleveland up to 1:32)

But now let's hear my favorite passage in the whole piece. It starts with a trill that suddenly goes flat, a musical gesture that Wagner borrowed wholesale in Die Meistersinger when it was time for the antagonist Beckmesser to tune his guitar, and then comes music of a seraphic halo that Mendelssohn wouldn't have thought of in a million years.  (Ozawa/Boston to 4:13)

Only Berlioz had the genius to come up with these orchestral colors, but Verdi learned from this passage, and made his own versions of these colors again and again, here's just one example from the beginning of Act III of Aida. 

So I'm going to play you the last two thirds of the Queen Mab scherzo now, because I want you to get a still better sense of what made Berlioz such a quantum musical leap from everything before him, and you'll hear that by the sheer unpredictability of every moment of the Queen Mab scherzo. Even in the greatest composers in the generation before Berlioz, Beethoven and Schubert, your ear can pretty much guess what's coming next. In Berlioz, from one second to the next, you have no idea what's coming. The music of Berlioz is not better than Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert, but it is larger, not only in terms of its sheer size, but also in terms of the imagination it takes to create these works. Perhaps it ultimately takes greater imagination to form the iron bars of musical classicism into anything memorable at all, but we'll never know, because Berlioz's musical imagination is just so obviously present in a manner that no composer before his was, and perhaps no composer has ever since.  (Toscanini/NBC)

There's one last point I want to make about Romeo and Juliet. Since pretty much all the best music in Romeo and Juliet is pretty much orchestral, and often the orchestral music is played on its own without the choral sections on either side, we don't need to talk about the choral sections except for the scene before their reintroduction of the chorus, for Romeo and Juliet's final moments, which Berlioz dramatizes as though the orchestra is retelling it because music can conjure the vividness of the scene far better than singing about it ever could. The whole of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet is a space, a soundscape, in which you're meant to conjure those moments in your head when Shakespeare's magic cast its narcotic spell. Unlike Prokofiev's ballet, this is not a narrative retelling. There's no sense of a true plot - this work is all about atmosphere. Berlioz's is a series of tableaux in which the magic of favorite scenes is recreated, perhaps even augmented, through music. In these few minutes, we hear not Shakespeare's poetry and the characterization thereof, but the consciousness itself of Shakespeare's characters, their feelings and thoughts. And the way Berlioz does it is by that same conversational orchestral recitative, adrift without any musical material that has any motivic meaning whatsoever, that Beethoven used at the beginning of the last movement of his Ninth Symphony.  (up to 1;16:16)

Berlioz's final symphony comes from 1840, the Symphonie Funebre et Triumphale. More and more, writing symphonies caused Berlioz's creativity to hit a brick wall. If the quality of Romeo et Juliette is incredibly uneven, then the quality of this symphony is downright questionable. There's hardly a single great artist that doesn't have a couple clunkers in his output, and this is Berlioz's. Let's just listen to the end of this symphony with its optional choral ending, which, to me, is of a badness whose enormity is too vast to apprehend.  

What a piece...

This symphony was a grand commission from the French government to commemorate the victims of the 1830 revolution - which is the particular revolution Victor Hugo portrays in Les Miserables. The word 'gloire' occurs five separate times in the text, 'gloire et triomphe' occurs four. Lots of stuff about the angels welcoming the soldiers to heaven. It feels more than a bit like a Shostakovich propaganda piece, composed with even less effort. Wagner though, wrote to Schumann that in that movement there are passages so 'magnificent and sublime they can never be surpassed.' Wagner, for all his genius, was clearly a man whose judgement sometimes failed him. Those in the know can hear in this passage lots of echoes of Wagner's once incredibly popular six-hour opera, Rienzi, which is now almost never performed while the ten operas which follow it, what's generally known as 'The Bayreuth Canon', for all their inestimable difficulties to produce well, are still performed with ubiquitous regularity.

One can also understand Berlioz's inability to locate the sublime within his imagination when you realize that the piece is a compromised version of what Berlioz had suggested to the French government five years earlier. In 1835, Berlioz suggested a project far more properly Berliozian in its grandiosity. A seven movement ceremonial piece for the French government with the properly orotund title: "Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des hommes illustres de la France" -Funeral music festival in memory of the illustrious men of France. More on that in a moment.

Perhaps the limitations of this piece had more to do with the paltriness of its quality than any limitation in Berlioz's imagination. You might have noticed that this symphony is clearly a piece for that 19th century creation which inspired so much insipid music we've barely heard since World War I, the wind band. The reason wind band music took off as it did in the 19th century was that musicians could march in soldierly formation, and therefore music could be written in which the rhythms of soldierly marching were so internalized that they could accompany public military drills. Furthermore, military music can therefore not have cellos or double basses because one can't carry an instrument which is both that heavy and that delicate. There's a very funny visual joke in Woody Allen's movie, Take the Money and Run, in which he plays cello in a marching band and has to pick up a chair and move forward every three seconds. The problem with wind band music is that unless you think of war as an inherently glorious thing to be celebrated, there is nothing in wind band music to particularly fire the imagination which you can't earn better with a more flexible and diverse combination of instruments - with more flexibility of tempo and rhythm and mood. The one place where wind bands are particularly omnipresent and popular is in scholastic American football, which, many people over the years have used the analogy that football is a kind of surrogate American war ritual.

The fact that Berlioz had to compose a piece with such obvious limitations would be a source of inhibition for this composer whose most recommendable quality is his illimitable imagination. But even if Berlioz's symphonic imagination clearly hit upon a place of diminishing returns with this piece, the Grand Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale, within its limitations, has some incredibly glorious music within its first movement which clearly channels the spirit of the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica. Which, of course, was appropriated from the music he first composed for the (deep breath) Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des hommes illustres de la France" or in English the Funeral music festival in memory of the illustrious men of France.  (ten second fadeout around 4:40)