This week’s theme is…Odd and Tragic Deaths! Death comes to us all. And most of the time death is pretty routine, run-of-the-mill. Not that death is ever easy, but usually it’s the result of “natural causes”, which is another way of saying “a chronic disease akin to that which most people die of, and not all that interesting”. But sometimes death is traumatic, unexpected and tragic. This week, we look at examples of composers who succumbed to causes such as these
Odd and Tragic Deaths, Day 4 – Sicilienne from Concerto for Piano, Violin, and String Quartet by Ernest Chausson
Wear your helmets when you bike, folks. It’s for real. They’re not just recommended to make cyclists look like dorks.
I once watched an interesting documentary called The Fog of War, essentially an extended interview with Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense for both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, guiding the nation’s military through the difficult period of the Vietnam War.
The film is comprised of footage of McNamara speaking his thoughts to the camera, edited together with stock footage from the events he describes, and the whole thing is smoothed over by a rather ingenious score by Philip Glass (for more about Glass see this post) who deploys his well-hewn minimalist muscles to create captivating miniature movements that successfully evoke a surprisingly wide variety of feelings and moods. While much of his reflection regards the nature of war and politics, focusing especially on his experiences with the morally-fraught strategies deployed by the Allies to turn the tide of the Second World War and, of course, the Vietnam War, dominate the content of The Fog of War, McNamara also reflects on his time working for the Ford Motor Company. He was a major figure in helping the struggling company regain its financial composure and become successful after the war.
Once scene from the film that sticks out in my memory is where he describes how the seat belt became widespread as a safety feature in automobiles. Today seat belt use is so pervasive and habitual that it is hard for most of us to imagine what it was like before, when you would hop into a car and not even give a care to the fact that you are riding unharnessed at speeds that far exceed the human threshold for traumatic injury. Don’t you feel naked and insecure when you don’t buckle up? And anyone who has been in an accident, even at very slow speeds, can attest to the panic that overtakes them as they get a taste of their body hurtling through space out of control. In the post war years, this had serious consequences and McNamara refers to a high volume of accidents in which drivers were impaled on the column of the steering wheel. And so seat belts became much more widespread after McNamara’s time at Ford. The seat belt is actually much older than McNamara – it was first invented in the nineteenth century.
I feel less insecure without a bicycle helmet than without a seat belt, but it still feels strange to me. I’m not aware of any kind of Robert McNamara story for bicycle helmets, but, like the seat belt, the concept and prototypes of the bicycle helmet predate its adoption and widespread use by a considerable number of decades. The modern bicycle helmet, as we know it, was not really developed or widely disseminated until the 1970s and, according to this web page, the earliest helmets appropriate for cycling were designed in the 1880s as cyclists began to sustain serious head injuries from their crashes. Made of spongy, crushable pith, these early helmets would probably not be sufficient for an impact with today’s automobiles, but they did the job back then since there were so few cars on the road.
I wonder if a certain French composer was wearing one of these early pith helmets when he went out for a bike ride one fateful summer day in June of 1899. Ernest Chausson, a promising composer just hitting his prime and experiencing a most coveted level of equilibrium in his personal and professional life, was cycling in the neighborhood of one of his summer houses when he tragically hit a brick wall at the bottom of a hill. Some suspect it a suicide given that Chausson was prone to depression, while others doubt this. According to the history, the pith helmets were available at this time. Was he wearing one? Would it have saved him? How steep was that hill and how fast was he traveling by the time he reached the wall? Whatever the answers to these questions, it is a unique cause of death among the notable composers of classical music.
The violent bike crash interrupted a path of development that would have been interesting to see through. The 44 year old composer was not by any means finished speaking and over the course of his 20-odd years of composing, which ended with his accident, he had traversed a journey of stylistic refinement that covered the influence of several notable figures, before finally turning inward to listen to his own convictions, which was just beginning to happen at his death.
Something that I find surprising about musical France of the late 1800s is how much everyone loved Wagner. I wouldn’t have expected the stocky, full-blooded Germanic sensibility to mesh so well with the elegant affectation of the French, but many French composers were very enthusiastic about Wagner’s sensual chromatic harmonies and sought to assimilate his manner in some way. Saint-Saens was perhaps the earliest French supporter of Wagner’s operas, praising his early efforts at a time when most of his other countrymen did not know what to make of the German. But by the time Wagner got his Bayreuth festivals off the ground in the 1870s (for more about Wagner see this post and this one) many French musicians had embraced him, not the least of whom was Cesar Franck, one of Chausson’s most formative mentors. Claude Debussy, Chausson’s friend, was also deeply influenced by Wagner until Erik Satie broke him of the spell (for more about that, see this post and this one). Chausson made the journey to Bayreuth a couple times, including once during his honeymoon (the lucky lady!). The music of the French who reveled in Wagner became incredibly sensuous and chromatic. For Chausson, this was the second stage after an early period which saw the greatest influence from Jules Massanet, the great French opera composer. The ravishing Sicilienne from his Concert for Piano, Violin and String Quartet shows off Wagner’s sensuous influence:
By the time of Chausson’s tragic and traumatic death, he was beginning to shed his music of the excessive Wagnerian influence, moving toward a clearer, more essential, direct, and even pure music. This is the process that was interrupted and we can only imagine the sweet, pure sounds of Chausson that do not grace our concert halls because he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Wear your helmets folks. It’s for real.
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