Shuffling Off, Day 5 – Turandot by Giacomo Puccini

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 5 – Turandot by Giacomo Puccini

If you are a fan of the Disney experience, I definitely recommend dining at least once at the Blue Bayou.  The Blue Bayou is the Cajun-style restaurant that is integrated within the scenery of The Pirates of the Caribbean, one of the Disney Parks’ most iconic dark rides (see this post).  I have had the pleasure of eating there twice and it is a most enchanting experience.  In addition to fine Cajun cuisine, the distinctive ambiance, which it shares with the most peaceful episode of the ride, is enhanced by the periodic passing of boats from the attraction, with diners and riders sharing in the collective experience from different perspectives.  

 

As if having a full-service fine dining experience completely integrated within one of the best rides in the park is not enough, Disney took it one step further.  The large house behind the dining area of the Blue Bayou actually houses something even more special: an area called Club 33, the most exclusive part of Disneyland.  A private club with annual dues of $12,000, patrons wait for years to gain membership, allowing them to access the finest dining in the park (every dinner is a 6 course meal) and the only alcohol served within the perimeter.

Clubs come in many shapes and sizes, but the one thing they all share is a measure of exclusivity.  There is always some criterion which serves to restrict membership.  For Club 33 it is largely financial (although I suspect there is at least some form of recommendation involved even if it is not disclosed to the general public – given what is published on the website anyone with the financial means should be eligible), but for other clubs (we might call them de facto clubs), it is accomplishments.  For example, a very exclusive club is living presidents of the United States which currently boasts a membership of 5, soon to be 6 (as of this writing).  Another, similar club, is astronauts who have walked on the moon, membership 12.  Yet another exclusive de facto club is composers who feature in the regular rotation of the great opera houses of the world today.  Given the sheer number of opera composers in the Western history, it is astounding that the list is so small.  It indicates either that history’s method of selecting winners is somehow flawed, prejudiced, or reliant on highly arbitrary factors, that opera is just really that hard to write well, or maybe both (this seems likely).

If you look at the current or upcoming season of any of the world’s great opera houses you will notice a small number of composers represented, and an even smaller number if you exclude those known only for one opera (for a related phenomenon see this post).  The resulting list is a very exclusive club indeed – the seasons of today’s opera houses are primarily filled with the scores of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Richard Strauss (somewhat), and Puccini.  Sure, there is a Carmen in there, also a Fidelio, and often a Cavalleria Rusticana among a handful of others (these are the operatic one-hit wonders), but it astounds me that a tradition so strong and distinctive is represented by such a small group of creators.  Also, you might be justified in regarding Richard Strauss as something of an odd duck on that list – his best operas are always toeing the line of the avant-garde, never quite so comfortable as the others, for many audiences an exercise in endurance as enjoyment.  If we grant this, we can say in a very real sense that the grand tradition of opera, melodious, melodramatic, and lush, ended with Puccini, who died in 1924, and his last masterpiece, Turandot, is its last great utterance, very much still with us, and composed long after Strauss’ shocking operas of the early 1900s.  After Puccini, the club has accepted no new members.

Part of the reason for Puccini’s enduring success is certainly his response to the times in which he lived.  Living until 1924, he would have been aware of and even familiar with the trends flowing through the music around him.  He wrote his first professional opera right as Richard Wagner died and as his career played out he would have witnessed the Germans and the French idolizing and imitating the great German figure.  He would have heard the first experiments of Schoenberg (see this post) and his early serialist disciples, not to mention the spiky, stoic music of Hindemith (see this post) and the piquant scores by Stravinsky (see this post) which grew out of Russian nationalism.  He would have heard all of this, but internalized none of it, sticking squarely within his lyrical, post-romantic Italian vein.  Even the modernizing currents which touched Italy, expressed through the gritty realism of verismo, did not work its way into Puccini’s scores as thoroughly as it might, always tempered with warmth, and never completely overtaking his output.  Puccini seemed determined, in his obsessive fastidious way, to provide the Italian bel canto tradition with a creamy, sensuous twilight.

All of his operas, even those written during what might be termed the modern age, exhibit this old school bel canto sensibility, focused on telling tear-jerking stories with lyrical melodies of exquisite balance.  His swansong Turandot is an oriental drama par excellence, telling the story of an icy Chinese princess whose heart is softened by the persistent advances of a mysterious prince named Calaf.  The most recent opera to remain in regular rotation at Western opera houses, Turandot was left unfinished at Puccini’s death.  Arturo Toscanini, a hot-and-cold friend of Puccini’s, recommended a young opera composer, Franco Alfano, to pick up where he had left off and render his sketches into a coherent and seamless finale.  It is this feat for which Alfano, a successful composer of Italian opera in his own right, is now best known.  Legend has it that at the first performance of Turandot, Toscanini stopped conducting at the end of Puccini’s finished score, turned to the audience and stated “It is here that the master laid down his pen.”  If you did not know the story, you would easily be convinced by Alfano’s seamless writing that everything had come from the same composer’s pen:

Thanks to the brilliant reconstruction of Franco Alfano Turandot was given a solid double bar and a solid finale which meshed fluidly with what had come before.  Experts will tell you they can tell the difference, but can you?  Because of Alfano’s contribution, Turandot has become the bookend of an era, entering steady rotation in opera houses, and sealing Puccini’s membership within the exclusive club of composers whose work fills the Western operatic canon.

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Shuffling Off, Day 4 – Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 4 – Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I fear the Mozart Requiem is a piece I will never really be able to hear with “fresh ears”.  What I mean is that it is so laden with emotional, conceptual and aesthetic baggage from my personal history that I am always hearing it through a bunch of overlapping lenses.  First of all, it was the centerpiece of one of the earliest classical concerts I remember attending.  This occurred just as I was developing an interest in classical music so it has something of a cherished place in my mind, saturated with the enthusiasm and majesty of the experience, even if it was a community orchestra and choir.  In preparation for that concert the piece was considerably talked up by music teachers as an immortal masterpiece and transcendent listening experience.  Similar baggage has been overlaid from performing the Requiem, and hearing similar enthusiasm from conductors and fellow performers.  This is of course not to deride a wonderful masterpiece, which it certainly is, but I do wonder if a listener, having been cleansed of his preconceived notions, and comparing the Requiem to a handful of Mozart’s other late works, say his last piano concerto, the Magic Flute, the Clemency of Titus, his Masonic Cantata, or his quintet with glass harmonica (see this post), would favor the Requiem in any particular way.  Perhaps he would, but I still have to wonder.

The other major culprit which is responsible for having layered considerable psychological baggage about the experience of the Mozart Requiem, baggage that is incredibly difficult to shed, is the movie Amadeus.  Now, if you are a faithful reader, you may remember earlier references to this film (like here and here) and if you do then you know I am a fan and typically recommend it.  This is still true.  But I would take care to warn prospective viewers of Amadeus of the resulting associations they will forever carry with the Requiem, no matter how hard they try to escape, and in spite of the more or less commonly understood fact that the central premise of the film, Antonio Salieri’s intense jealousy and intended murder of Mozart, is most certainly legendary and apocryphal.  Still, it is easy to be swept away by the crackling drama of the film, and the Requiem serves as a cohesive focal point around which to stage it.

(!Spoiler Alert!) In Amadeus Salieri, mad with envy for Mozart’s superior musical aptitude, eventually seeks every opportunity to sabotage him professionally and, eventually, to hurt him personally, even plotting his murder (it is reported that Salieri had confessed to this on his deathbed, possibly due to the senility of old age).  The final scenes, in which Mozart’s death appears imminent and Salieri manipulates his way into his inner circle, are bathed in the music of the Requiem, indeed they focus on its composition as Salieri takes dictation from the muse of Mozart.  In the film the narrating Salieri, years later, reveals that it was his plan to murder Mozart (or let him die – this is not quite clear) and then to pass off the Requiem as his own in honor of his deceased friend, finally recognized for the sublime art he has longed to create since beholding Mozart’s befuddling powers.  To facilitate the commission, Salieri dons an imposing cape and mask to hide his identity during all transactions surrounding the Requiem (in the film it is a reference to Wolfgang’s strict father, Leopold – see this post – the evocation of whom has dramatic psychological effect on the younger composer), claiming to represent a wealthy patron.  He comes so close to seeing his plan through that he can taste it, but Mozart dies too soon and Salieri later is shown at his funeral, supremely frustrated by what could have been…  In scenes leading up to the finale we see other depictions of Mozart and Salieri together, for example at the Magic Flute, where Salieri compliments the work.  That the terse dramatization is fiction is obvious, but fascinatingly there are a handful of truths, both explicit and thematic, present within the twists and turns of the plot.

Salieri and Mozart were acquainted, even familiar.  Generally it is thought that Salieri regarded Mozart well, although there are speculations that he attempted to frustrate the career of the younger composer, understandably if at all sensed his powerful position as director of the Habsburg opera was at all threatened by the young upstart.  These are difficult to substantiate, however.  Mozart would have served Salieri well as a creator, so long as he did not become a competitor.  There is evidence of their mutual admiration, and it is true that Salieri attended The Magic Flute, as well as other works by Mozart, and was complimentary.  Two other elements ring true, although their stories are at once more banal and simultaneously more fascinating (in my opinion) than those the high drama of Amadeus.  

That Mozart transacted exclusively with a mysterious veiled figure representing a wealthy patron is true.  An Austrian nobleman named Franz von Walsegg had an odd penchant for taking credit for various composers’ creations.  He would commission them anonymously, copy the parts into his own hand without the true composer’s name, and have his house musicians perform them.  He always made sure to get complete rights over the commissioned works in order to avoid the possibility of trained ears hearing them elsewhere; the composers probably didn’t care as long as they received their due, which was always generous.  Apparently his house musicians knew what was up, but didn’t let on, either out of affection or pity.  As a side note, I sometimes wonder if it is more fulfilling to be extremely secure financially, with little in the way of creative legacy, or to be impoverished and leave a substantial creative legacy.  The story of Walsegg gives clear indication of the longing one may experience with the former.  And in hindsight, few would switch places with him, whereas at present few may switch places with Mozart who was practically Walsegg’s inversion.  Anyway, Walsegg’s young wife had died in 1791, almost a year before Mozart, and the aristocrat sought a musical Requiem mass to claim as his own and present annually on the anniversary of her death, hence Mozart’s commission and dealings with the anonymous agent.  Incidentally, Mozart’s untimely death in the middle of his work on the Requiem put Walsegg in a tricky spot given Constanza’s legal and financial machinations.  You can read more about the details of that fascinating story here:

http://www.salieri-online.com/mozreq/pg1.php

That Mozart may have had something of a secretary during his work on the Requiem is also based in fact.  It was not his archenemy Salieri as Amadeus suggests (exaggerating both his intimacy and enmity with Salieri), but a composer named Franz Xaver Sussmayr.  With ambitions to write Italian opera, Sussmayr had studied with Salieri, and after this became something of a friend and apprentice to Mozart.  The two traveled together and Sussmayr, perhaps among other efforts, is recorded to have written much of the dry, extensive recitative of Mozart’s penultimate stage work, the Italian serious opera The Clemency of Titus.  This stands with Idomeneo (see this post) as Mozart’s finest contributions to the genre; his most famous operas are German or Italian comedies.

It is thought that, given Sussmayr’s intimacy with Mozart, he was privy to much of the process that yielded the Requiem.  Constanze, eager to collect the balance of Walsegg’s invoice, tapped him to complete the Requiem.  Exactly how much of the final work is Mozart and how much is Sussmayr is difficult to discern, but certain movements are clear enough.  The opening Requiem is the only movement completed in full by Mozart.  Others remained unfinished, or unorchestrated, while others were not composed at all, and so Sussmayr wrestled with a variety of tasks through his process of completion.  It seems certain to say that Sussmayr composed the Agnus Dei from scratch.  The following movements, which close the mass, use material from the beginning, certainly by Mozart.  Can you tell the difference between Sussmayr and Mozart?

 

It is difficult for me to listen past all of the lore, legend, and personal associations with Mozart’s requiem and hear the purity of the music underneath, but if I tried, I might say that it is illustrative of the near superhuman transparency and elegance which characterizes all of Mozart’s late works.  The opening bars of the Requiem are sublimely orchestrated, and the vocal entrances convey loss and awe given the eternal journey ahead which Mozart would have regarded through a very Catholic lens as he prepared to make it himself.  Sometimes I wish I could wipe all of the baggage from my mind, unsee Amadeus, and discover the Requiem as a more or less anonymous work of his late years in order to make a fresh evaluation free of influence.  Alas, that is not the world in which we live, and I simply have to be content to roll the legends and the drama which surround the story of a flawed man but great composer into my experience of the Requiem, his unfinished masterpiece.

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Shuffling Off, Day 3 – Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 3 – Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler

It seems that listeners love to discover musicians’ sources of inspiration, the events, objects and feelings in their lives that are responsible for the music sounding as it does.  Perhaps you can relate to this.  Have you ever listened to a piece of music and found yourself thinking “Gosh, this seems deeply felt or unusually evocative; I wonder what this is based on.”  As a composer I have been asked questions like these.  I remember a lady, upon hearing something I wrote, asking what had inspired it, as if some kind of extramusical impetus was necessary for something that struck her so beautiful and human.  It’s only natural given the human penchant for meaning, relatability and understanding.  And like anything this personal, it will vary widely from musician to musician, informed by a diverse array of factors ranging from personality and life experience to aesthetics and historical era.

Sometimes it’s patently obvious, like when a singer-songwriter tells you the precise story upon which a particular song is based.  We all know that most songwriters perpetually probe their lives and experiences for fertile lyrical material.  It is probably the exception to find a contemporary song that is not based in some way on an experience or feeling from the songwriter’s life in some way.  But in classical music it isn’t usually so clear.  Part of this stems from the tendency to simply refer to “classical music” as a monolith rather than parsing out the finer distinctions which constitute its body of work.  The fact is a European composer working in 1700 will have had a much different notion of “inspiration” than one working in 1890.

Students of music history, professional and amateur alike, are often astounded to learn about the production rates of Baroque and Classical composers.  The concertos of Vivaldi, the cantatas of Bach, the operas of Handel, the symphonies of Haydn (the marches of Sousa – see this post – not a Baroque or Classical composer, but animated by a similar creative impulse, I think).  Prolific to the point of boggling our modern minds.  But why?  Obviously these feats are possible within the human experience, and not even extraordinary since their less famous contemporaries produced at similar rates.  But it’s only possible because they weren’t sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike.  They had solid and reliable methods and techniques for inventing and polishing their musical works, even if their results seem inspiring to us.  But the notion of inspiration would probably have seemed foreign, and distastefully self-indulgent to them.  They saw their role in the social order as sonic decorators for hire, illuminating the great myths of their societies into affective form fit for human consumption which supported their social order and structures of power (see this post).  Certainly this can be argued as a form of inspiration, but not as we typically think of it.

The attitude which cultivated the modern idea of inspiration, which I would summarize as autobiographical, can be seen to have emerged, like so many of these significant aesthetic shifts, with Beethoven and his legacy.  Suddenly listeners and scholars were scrutinizing his strong, powerful music for influences from his life and the forces which shaped the world around him.  The music seemed so deeply personal that it must have had a different impetus than the dry, stodgy patronage system!  I have read about analyses of his Eroica Symphony (see this post) which border on extravagant, even zany, and reach far to account for every moment as owing to some kind of inspiration.  My feeling is that Beethoven was not as autobiographically motivated as his commentators and fans like to think, but perhaps more than his predecessors.  At any rate, the feelings of his music became deeper and seemingly more personal; his rate of production dropped below the previous common practice norm, and he either anticipated or motivated later trends in which composers used their music to tell personal stories and/or promote ideological agendas.  And certainly in Beethoven’s late music, so bizarre and wonderful (see this post) he seems to be working out his personal existential questions, reconciling his life, philosophy, eternity, and the world.  Later musicians most certainly looked to this as a model for their own similar processes.

Was this shift a benefit to Western art?  Rhetorical question of course.  It depends on your evaluations of the results and the needs they fill.  For some the earlier paradigm with its clear, principled and disciplined aesthetic is the very definition of artistic purity, a bonus to which is the the diversity of voices which managed to individuate within its framework (in other words, Bach, Vivaldi and Haydn have clear, distinctive, and distinctively clever voices even though their musical languages and cultures were shaped by similar societal forces and values), while the latter paradigm is messy, neurotic and uncomfortably self-indulgent.  For others the older model is sterile and impersonal while the newer, autobiographical model is passionate and intensely meaningful on an emotional level.  As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to lay teleology upon the flow of history and see a goal where none may in fact exist (see this post).

At any rate, after Beethoven musicians saw greater liberty to explore their personal places in art music, and we tend to call this sensibility Romanticism.  In my estimation the neuroticism and intimacy of this approach reaches its absolute zenith in Gustav Mahler, the great Austrian conductor and symphonist who expanded the symphony to its absolute peak breadth and personal significance.

Over the course of his career Mahler had worked to expand the symphonic form to unprecedented length (see this post) while also developing a very unique manner of orchestration and harmony.  Like Beethoven, he seemed to use his final utterances as a way to explore his inner landscape and work out the philosophical implications of his troubled life.  Many see his final symphonies, particularly his sprawling 9th (which Alban – see this post – Berg called the most extraordinary thing he had ever written) and what exists of the 10th as deeply autobiographical, grappling with his roller coaster of marriage, his often turbulent career, his impending death and the losses of his life.  There was perhaps no Western composer more neurotic or death-obsessed as Mahler, and his late music speaks this in abundant volume.  Mahler sought the advice of Sigmund Freud in 1909 to deal with his wife, Alma, and her affair with the architect Walter Gropius.  The advice of the great psychoanalyst seemed to provide a way forward, but the damage of the ill-advised marriage was done and ran deep.  During the next couple of years Mahler began to work on what would be his Tenth Symphony but succumbed to a bacterial infection of the blood in 1911, not even two decades prior to the discovery of penicillin.

Mahler completely orchestrated the first of five movements and left sketches for the others.  Some musicians and scholars have completed it in various versions, but many purists are content to confine their experience of Mahler’s Tenth to the aching and dissonant first movement, the only completed by him, an adagio that takes the listener on a deeply personal journey of neurosis and longing over the course of 30 minutes:

So go ahead and speculate about the inspiration for the music you hear.  Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes not.  Sometimes the societal and aesthetic framework of the musician’s experience supports the idea of inspiration and sometimes it doesn’t so much.  But if you hear late music by Mahler, you can be sure that the inspiration is never far below the surface.  In listening to movements like these you become like Freud in a sense, witnessing Gustav as he works through his life, reconciling pain and triumph.  In his late symphonies we hear it all, fighting to make sense.  Even though we would all love to have heard Mahler’s final version, many of us are content with the tears, pain and, ultimately, resignation that the surviving first movement speaks, a fitting epitaph to the most neurotic, but also one of the most pathetic, characters in the history of Western music.

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Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapuntus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapunctus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

 

Do you have an “elevator speech” prepared?  An elevator speech refers to a pithy sales pitch or description of services that is brief enough to deliver to a captive audience during a short elevator ride, but substantive enough to give a complete impression of doing business with you and persuasive enough to move a prospect toward closing a sale or referring someone else to do the same.  Business professionals of all stripes are encouraged to prepare such elevator speeches with the aim of turning any short meeting into closed business.  You can think of an elevator speech as a personal abstract, a concise summary of what you are about that gives the broadest overview as clearly as possible.  A good elevator speech should provide a vivid image of what working with you is like, but leave enough to the imagination that the prospect is intrigued to take further steps to making this a reality and filling in the outlines it draws.

Sometimes when I read articles about notable composers in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the gold standard for general research about practically any topic in Western art music, I note that the authors are, in many ways, creating elevator speeches for them.  Actually, they are not so much about the composers themselves as their legacies.  If you had met Handel on the street his description of services would be somewhat different than the way we have come to describe the legacy left by his life and body of work.  When the Grove’s authors write their introductions they are essentially summarizing why we value these musicians and the benefits acquaintance with their work can offer to us, even after multiple centuries.  While the gigantic articles about significant composers are packed with interesting biographical and artistic detail, I often find the little abstracts which precede them to be the most clever and carefully written parts of the article.  And I think my favorite abstract in the Grove’s, one to which I return again and again out of admiration, is that about Johann Sebastian Bach.  His article warrants 55 pages, and its author, Christoph Wolff, summarizes the old master’s legacy thus:

His genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. 

While it was in the former capacity, as a virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that have earned him a unique historical position.  His art was of an encyclopedic nature, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, styles and general achievements of his own and earlier generations which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.

It is densely written and requires considerable study to unpack and appreciate.  But it is also very effectively summarizes what we value about Bach.  Can you imagine him walking around with business cards on which are printed:

Johann Sebastian Bach, organist and composer

My genius combines outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative posers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced

Of course not.  Don’t be ridiculous!  Like I said, that’s his legacy.  But let’s take that apart:

Outstanding performing musicianship – I think what this means is that for Bach there was little distinction between performing, improvising, and composing.  As a performer and composer, he was constantly inventive and completely at home, going between them with ease and grace.

Supreme creative powers – That’s a strong word, even a superlative one.  What Wolff is saying here is that no one in the history of music was more creative than Bach, who could create quickly and consistently, and with astounding inspiration, any time any place.

Forceful, originally inventiveness – If you have listened to any amount of Bach and paid attention, perhaps you have been struck by the cascade of remarkably vigorous and finely-wrought musical ideas which are always distinctive, but always speaking clearly in Bach’s voice.  It never ends, nor does the strength with which they are asserted.

Intellectual control – Bach is still heralded as the most intelligent musician ever to live.  Had he been a mathematician or physicist, he would have rivaled Newton and Einstein.  As an author he would have contended with Shakespeare.  Once you know a little bit of how music works it is simply mind-boggling how controlled Bach’s music is on every single level, and consistently so.

Do you get the picture?  It is easy to divinize Bach, but the image I often carry of his music is like that of a god (or a demigod at least), creation full of beauty, detail and inner consistency springing from his mighty finger (see this post).  Bach’s music really does feel like some kind of eternal stream flowing from the source of the very forces that bind the universe.  I think that is what Wolff is saying in his summary.

But Bach was not a god; he was mortal.  And in one particular piece we hear his god-like stream of creation come to a very human halt.  At the end of his life Bach created a collection of fugues and canons all on the same subject, something of a catalog of contrapuntal techniques.  The resulting Art of Fugue, if not necessarily loved, is respected by musicians for the feat of superlative craftsmanship and invention that it is.  Bach did not live to complete his vision.  He came very close, but the final fugue, which promised to work upon four different subjects, evokes the image of Bach’s life force finally and completely ceasing:

 

Can you hear all the elements of Wolff’s description, working in full-bodied force, and suddenly stopping?  From this it seems that Bach’s musicianship sprang complete from his spirit with no necessary refinement by his ears or external editor of any kind.  In a way it is almost a blessing for this to stay unfinished, a fitting image of the valve that closed when Bach died and stopped the flow of the consistent eternal creative force which he had learned to channel.
I’m not sure what Bach’s elevator speech would have been during his lifetime, but I think Christoph Wolff came up with a pretty good one for his legacy.  The qualities Wolff describes are constantly present in every single bar of music composed by the mature Bach.  I once played a chamber piece by Bach, coached by a university professor.  I was astounded by the constant inventiveness of the music and he noticed this.  He said something like “Yeah, there’s just constantly amazing things happening.  The guy was from another planet!”  He wasn’t, but it can often seem that way.  He was mortal after all, and the final fugue of the Art of Fugue shows us this plainly, if tragically, placing the god-like Bach in real space and time.

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Shuffling Off, Day 1 – Symphony No. 3 by Edward Elgar

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 1 – Symphony No. 3 by Edward Elgar

Classical music is susceptible to what might be termed the “monument syndrome”.  What I mean by this is that it is very easy to regard the music and musicians who created it as somehow different and separate from you and me, different in historical era, different in worldview, and different in human potential.  While some of this is true, we should remember that the facts of human potential have not changed, and all of these musicians were human, grappling with the world into which they were born just as we are today.   But the quality of their work can seem intimidating, superhuman with regard to technique and, perhaps ironically, human expression.  And it seems so long ago doesn’t it?  The veil of the past feels heavy and opaque, the music materializing through it, offering tantalizing clues regarding a way of life we can’t really comprehend.

But it wasn’t that long ago, nor was the culture terribly far removed from ours.  I’ve recently gotten to know a Chinese family.  The husband and wife hail from different provinces and speak with different dialects.  I get the impression that this is a more pronounced and dramatic difference than comparing a speaker from Maine and Alabama, two states in the United States which feature rather different dialects.  The provinces of China are massive, and geographically diverse with their own dialects (or even languages) and cuisine.  Mandarin was eventually promoted as a lingua franca in order to unify the nation and remains so to this day.  In the United States our history extends back a mere 250 years before merging with the history of another nation.  For other Western nations the scale is longer, but the age of even the oldest European nation (with the exception of Greece, a special case), San Marino, founded around the year 300, is best measured in centuries rather than millennia.  As with the geography, the history of China is on a different scale, with scant evidence of its first clear dynasty predating the Bronze Age.  Since then there has always been some kind unifying line within Chinese history, be it dynasty or political state. Can you conceive of all this?  I daresay it is impossible, and Americans take excessive pride in their mere three centuries.

In relief to the phenomenon of Chinese history, the scope of Western art music is dwarfed, literally occupying the final 5 minutes of the proverbial clock face of temporal comprehension.  It isn’t as old as we usually think or feel that it is, nor is the veil that separates us from their minds and conceptions of the world as thick or opaque as it often seems.  And some stories demonstrate this to us, bringing the glory of classical music to our temporal threshold, effectively bridging the generations and closing up the gap.  Edward Elgar was Great Britain’s greatest post-romantic composer, emerging as the first native figure to dominate British musical history since the Renaissance (see this post) and Baroque periods, just a few hundred years ago.  His lush, melodic gift, mastery of orchestration and impeccably British sensibility managed to capture his nation’s attention and heart, as well as exporting it to the rest of the Western world.

His incredibly fertile period of composition was rather cut short by the death of his wife; he was one of those rare handful of composers, along with Rossini (see this post) and Sibelius (see this post) who, at a point in their lives, long before their deaths, decided that their previous creative statements were sufficient, and essentially stopped, although their personal reasons for doing so were certainly diverse.  Elgar’s reasons seem to be the death of his beloved life and a falling off of public demand for his music.  His cello concerto of 1919 is often recognized as his last major work.  But he lived 15 years beyond this and still picked away at things.  During this time he started a third symphony, left incomplete at his death.  Accounts of his feelings about the symphony seem to conflict regarding his opinion of its legacy, as to whether his remaining sketches should be left alone or brought to fruition.  This was barely a century ago.

His surviving family proved indecisive about the best course, but realized the sketches, having been published in a biographical work in 1936, would eventually enter the public domain, allowing anyone to have a go, and so the Elgar family, in conjunction with the BBC, permitted the English composer Anthony Payne to reconstruct an authoritative version, which you can listen to here:

 

I am always impressed by reconstructions such as these, in which someone of modern sensibility must so thoroughly inhabit the mind of a bygone era.

Incidentally, there is another example of Payne performing a similar function, but on a much small scale.  Elgar left five complete marches in the series known as Pomp and Circumstance, including the famous first march, ubiquitous at graduation ceremonies.  The other 4 are less well-known, but certainly worth hearing.  He also left sketches for a sixth, which Payne also realized:

 

I must confess that I am less convinced by his realization of this than the symphony; in listening to the marches in order I feel he does not quite capture the nuances of Elgar’s orchestration and lush nobility and he does for the Third Symphony.  Not that I could do better though 🙂

Elgar died in 1934, barely a century ago.  There are people alive today who were alive then.  Just 40 years later, Anthony Payne became interested in completing the Third Symphony; my parents were alive at this time.  The completed work premiered in the late 1990s, when I was in high school, and just beginning to become interested in music history.  This history is still being written.  While we often regard classical music as having ended long ago, it hasn’t, and the truth is that none of it was all that long ago, even if the great figures seem to us as gods.  The story is still being written, for stories never end, only their telling.  The history of the Western world is not as vast as we often feel, and we are very much a part of it ourselves, even if we don’t realize it.  How will your chapter read?

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