13. Enthauptung

The moon, a glinting scimitar

On a black silk cushion,

Ghostly great – glowers down

Through a night dark as pain.

The unlucky number. Schoenberg had no choice, did he, but to put Pierrot’s execution by crescent-moon-scimitar thirteenth in the cycle. Twelve lucky pitches in the chromatic scale, lined up in a row – thirteenth pitch out. One shy of a twice-seven cycle. Wouldn’t leave the house? Born on 13 September, died on 13 July. Would number measures 12a and 12b? Dreizehn. He’s for the chop. I’ve made too much of it? After all, Pierrot merely imagines that the moon-sword slices him: Er wähnt. And yet it’s all been building up to this in Part Two. The moon absents itself, obscured by the papillons noirs, after which laughter is slain, there’s a grave robbery gone wrong, Pierrot rips out his own beating heart, he debases himself in a gallows song, and now. . .this. The inevitable consequence. End of the line.

Cello-hero, prophetic light-blade, “Enthauptung,” mm. 1-3.

The surface of the movement is strikingly varied, its climax carefully prepared. I wonder things: Now the cello, swept up in deranged lyricism, reveals itself as the Schoenberg-protagonist. Male cello hero, Beethovenian Eroica of cellists, Straussian Quixote of the windmills. And, at the cello’s height, a hint of moon-blade falling – legato in the bass clarinet, not yet fierce enough: a prophecy. We return to a recitative-like strategy when the voice enters: We must hear these words, must get the joke, and yet Schoenberg can’t resist a queasy lurch to fff in the band for gespenstisch groß (“spectrally massive”? “ghostly great”?). Now the bass clarinet anticipates, eliding the last line of the first stanza with the next action: Pierrot darting about, restlessly, driving himself crazy as the instruments build up their densest layer of hyperactivity yet – leading-leading, straining-straining, pointing-pointing. Now violent, explosive, he falls to his knees, the vocalist spewing out a frantic stream of syllables until the scimitar of light falls, glissandi scattered over the accented descent in the piano, all of them traversing different distances, arrows pointing downward at skewed angles. Bounce-bounce. The head plops, like at the end of “March to the Scaffold.”

Fall of the moon-blade, and the Berliozian punchline, “Enthauptung,” mm. 20-21.

And now the head is separated from the body, without form and void, darkness upon the face of the deep. For the first time in the movement the flute enters, intoning a shortened version of “Der kranke Mond” (No. 7), this time with polyphonic dance partners. I’m reminded of a Renaissance mass movement – a paraphrase mass, the old familiar tune adopted, adapted, in the other voices. No. I’m reminded of Beethoven’s late quartets in what is, after all, a quartet epitaph, or else the vocal quartet in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony. No. I’m reminded of the funeral scene in Bruckner’s Seventh, the heart-in-your-throat farewell at the grave of Wagner. No. It’s the final page of Mahler’s Ninth. He’s launched us into space, Schoenberg. We’ve crossed the event horizon and passed through the black hole. The textless, headless moment has opened up a vaster field of reference than we can say. We can’t say. Grain of sand, note beyond the twelfth note, torso sans mouth, signifying statuary with smashed brow. It’s from here that we see the poet’s Golgotha.

Quartet as all, “Enthauptung,” mm. 22-26.

12. Galgenlied

The scrawny whore

With scraggly neck

Will be his final

Paramour

And what should one say after such a quatrain? “Galgenlied” may seem calculated to offend, but in the decade after Strauss’s Salome (1905) and in the immediate aftermath of “Red Mass,” perhaps it’s a mistake to focus on that quality. In terms of the narrative of Part Two of Pierrot, Schoenberg has led us through a series of crimes and now anticipates Pierrot’s execution in a hasty administering of mock-last rites. And this rite – by far the shortest movement of the work, denied the resonance of the piano, with the text compressed to the utmost, the vocalist breathlessly motor-mouthing it – is, as the title might suggest, a bit of gallows humor. Essentially colorless except for the, um, fountain-like burst of piccolo in the penultimate bar, followed by the littlest post-cadential shudder – it is the opposite of erotic, a pitiful instance of Rothian self-abasement. And the shock of this musical negation after the excess of “Red Mass” presents a juxtaposition of extremes worthy of late Beethoven.

The vocalist as motor-mouth, “Galgenlied,” voice, mm. 1-3.

As with “Gebet an Pierrot” (No. 9), Hartleben practiced some powerful contraction on Giraud’s original. The first line above is “La maigre amoreuse au long cou” in the French, which becomes “Die dürre Dirne / Mit langem Halse” in German. I count these as, respectively, ten syllables over one line versus ten syllables over two – the French is halved. Hartleben, with his post-Wagnerian orientation, gives us a strikingly alliterative phrase that seems to disavow any possibility of tenderness. Nor is a hint of tenderness (amoreuse, after all) all that Hartleben excised from the original French. The missing parts of Giraud’s poem are by turns strange, wistful, and, at the end, explicitly sexual: Schoenberg’s parting shot with the piccolo has ample justification in the French. This brings up the interesting possibility of the composer restoring something missing from Hartleben.

The piccolo has its moment, “Galgenlied,” mm. 12-13.

This is the second time in this brief entry that I’ve mentioned absence or negation. It’s worth a third mention as a way of opening a can of worms that I can no longer avoid. I’ll put it as a question: Is Schoenberg’s musical language ever a language of negation – a matter of avoidance, of choosing against? In many cases the answer is obviously no. The pitch logic of “Nacht,” the repetition of meaningful gestures that sound out the text, or of compelling sonorities for whatever reason – in none of these approaches do I understand a spirit of negation. However, in a movement such as “Galgenlied,” deliberately trimmed of all fat, how do we understand what the composer is doing with pitch? I don’t say rhythm, because the rhythmic accumulation and release over the course of the movement couldn’t be clearer, but is the underlying impetus for the choice of pitches (beyond a preference for the major 7^th) based on a pattern of denying pattern? If so, in this movement, Schoenberg’s embrace of a method of compositional negation parallels the self-negation also emphasized by Hartleben. That is, Schoenberg seems to be taking his cue for how to compose from the state of the poetic protagonist. But blink and the moment’s over.

Composing by negation? Pitch un-logic, “Galgenlied,” viola and cello, mm. 1-3.

I Saw the World Begin: Das Rheingold

It wasn’t possible to post last week. And why? Well, life presents its various difficulties, of course, but I think more than this is that I reached the precipice: Wagner. It was inevitable that I should eventually write about him, as I knew when I started this blog, although I wasn’t sure how I would get there or when. But, having spent some time on the Circe myth in Alcina and South Pacific, I started thinking about sirens, about the Lorelei, and this led me to the Rhinemaidens, that trio of seductive water nymphs swimming in the Rhine in the opening scene of Das Rheingold, first of the Ring operas.

(Nexus entry?)

This is the kind of moment that has the power to arrest the flow of prose. What can one say that hasn’t been said? At the same time, how can one choose what to say when there are so many things to say? Just take the Prelude of Das Rheingold, that long suspension of E-flat major bliss, growing from the subterranean basses and blossoming into swaths of full orchestral diatonic glory—how to focus? Do I say something about the significance of the three-flat key signature, suggesting simultaneously the trio of Rhinemaidens, the trio of Norns, the three muses (Dance, Music, Poetry) that Wagner cites when writing about his concept of music drama, the Christian trinity, the key of Beethoven’s Eroica, of the Masonic in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte? Do I then opine further about how in this originating kernel of E-flat-ness, Wagner has conducted preliminaries for a ritual theater during which he makes obeisance to the Christian god, to the norse gods, to the Greek gods, to the gods of music (Mozart and Beethoven)? v1.bTsxMTYxODIxMjtqOzE3Njg0OzEyMDA7NzY4OzEwMjQ.jpeg Or do I go in another direction entirely and talk about the uses of Wagner—for example, the use of the Prelude from Das Rheingold in Terrence Malick’s film The New World (2005), ostensibly about the founding of Jamestown and the relationship of John Smith and Pocahontas, but projected, through the use of Wagner’s Prelude, into a larger creation myth, an originating legend for America paralleling the creation of Wagner’s world of the Ring, and/or a suggestion of the unspoiled world before European colonization.

(Nope, just kidding.)

You see? I have a problem. And no one’s even on stage yet!

I take consolation from reading Deryck Cooke’s I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner’s Ring (Oxford University Press, 1979). An attempt to say as much as could be said, Cooke managed to say intriguing things about the libretti (and occasionally the music) for the first two Ring operas, and then laid him down to rest. Somehow this is touchingly fitting, in a way that echoes other extraordinary projects of scholarship cut short by the unsympathetic winnower: Henry-Louis de La Grange’s revision of his definitive Mahler biography, J. A. B. van Buitenen’s translation of the Mahabharata. What I mean is that the epic subject is honored, in a sense, by not being fully encompassed by similarly epic scholarship. On a more pedestrian level, I was by turns upset, amused, and relieved that in the extensive liner notes + libretto accompanying Karajan’s classic recording of Das Rheingold with the Berlin Philharmonic, the essayist Wolfram Schwinger hardly mentions that singing is going on. (Yes, really!) Schwinger’s focus is almost exclusively on the Master—Karajan!—and his sensitivity to orchestration, his commitment to accuracy, transparency, his refusal to get bogged down and insistence on maintaining forward momentum. All well and good, but. . .singers?

After all, here is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Wotan, the ultimate singer of German Lieder crafting a father of the gods who is lyrical and sympathetic instead of brash, spoiled, tyrannical. And here is the masterful performance of Gerhard Stolze as Loge, who follows every opportunity for multi-dimensionality of character that Wagner provides: at one moment playfully mercurial, at another fiercely scornful, at another distant and wise. And here is Martti Talvela as Fasolt, volleying blasts of bass sonority over the orchestra and hamming it up marvelously as the unlikely love-struck giant. But perhaps this is why Schwinger doesn’t say much about the singers—they do their job splendidly, on the whole, so his focus is free to flit to other phenomena. (How’s that for Stabreim?) All this to say that, after delay and uncertainty, I feel liberated not to attempt the completist’s gambit. Flit, float, fleetly flee, fly—it will be enough to be and not to be enough.

Nexus entry.

Wagner’s command of musical irony always stuns me, and I was perhaps more sensitive to it than ever on this listen to Das Rheingold. The gold standard for Wagnerian musical irony is Act I of Tristan und Isolde, and the queen reigning over that language is Isolde herself, who can snatch away someone else’s line and spit it back laced with venom. But I don’t think I had fully appreciated how much irony there is throughout the first of the Ring operas. Take, again, that opening scene with the Rhinemaidens, where the dwarf Alberich, frustrated in his attempts to capture one of them, takes the Rhinegold instead and curses love so that he will be able to forge the ring of power.

(Don’t say anything about Tolkien. . .don’t say it!!! No, go on and say it—you’re in the nexus!)

In Wagner’s cosmology, love is the ultimate power inasmuch as it cannot be achieved through force, whereas everything else can be. So when Alberich can’t have love, he seizes upon the next best thing. Seen another way, the denial of love is what twists Alberich into a destructive tyrant. In Tolkien’s mythos, the creation of the Ring doesn’t work this way. It is forged by Sauron, who is so wholly evil, a force so far beyond conventional human experience, that to imagine him (it?) giving up love for power is a laughable suggestion. Love is foreign to evil in Tolkien’s universe; it cannot be imagined as existing anywhere in Sauron’s sphere.

Wagner invites us to consider, though, what might have happened had one of the Rhinemaidens chimed, “Oh, so he doesn’t replace the toilet paper and puts his elbows on the table—can’t help lovin’ that dwarf of mine!” And how does he invite us to consider this possibility? By writing mock-love music, of course! The Rhinemaidens sing, each of them, as if they’ve fallen for our sulfurous cave-dweller, and he buys it each time. But we know better, and not just because of the narrative context. Wagner hams it up, giving us saccharine overtures interrupted by action-oriented “underscore.” (Incidentally, do you realize how much mickey-mousing there is in Das Rheingold?! Steamboat Willie, sit down!) The music shifts gears too quickly for us to hear the love music as genuine; something that gets that sticky that quickly must be manufactured.

There are so many moments like this in Rheingold, each representing its own unique dramatic accomplishment, and the completist in me wants to dwell on many more, but the realist in me wants to mention one more general idea that kept occurring to me on this listen to the opera, and this has to do with Wagner’s materials. When the Rhinemaidens first direct Alberich’s (and our) gaze to the Rhinegold, we hear, for the first time in the score, a bright and shiny solo trumpet line. Got it, Wagner. A trumpet is made of brilliant metal, and so is the Rhinegold. But what about other such associations? Like the blast of clarinet sonority that accompanies Alberich, suggesting a reedy, swamp-like origin for him. Or the waves of arcing string lines in the Prelude suggesting, yes, the motion of the waters of the Rhine, but also, because of presence of string instruments themselves, the “threads” (strings) that the Norns are weaving and the wood of the World Tree—those organic materials. Wagner was the kind of brilliant orchestrator who understood the cultural significance of timbre, particularly as it had been used historically in opera, and knew therefore how to use timbre to communicate dramatic ideas. But the world of the Ring seems to me to have presented Wagner with the perhaps singular opportunity to associate instruments with primal elements. Okay, so this idea is partly formed at best, but I’m recording it nonetheless as one of those topics to keep in mind as the life journey that constitutes anything more than a passing familiarity with Wagner’s Ring continues to unfold. Long may it last and never reach its end.

Nexus exit.

When a Symphony is Like an Archipelago: Marco’s Symphony No. 5

The symphony is dead. Long live the symphony.

Last night I had the local classical radio station on in the car, and they started playing Brahms’s Second Symphony. Brahms is not my ¡FaVoRiTe! symphonist, and the Second isn’t my ¡FaVoRiTe! Brahms symphony, and yet. . . And yet. . .

I love this form. I love the experience of listening to a symphony. Live. On recording. I love talking about them, reading about them, thinking about them. I love studying scores of them, and, as a composer, from time to time I repress the urge to write one. Or at least to start writing one. I happen to think—and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who does—that the symphony is one of the ¡gReAt IdEaS oF hUmAnKiNd!, in the way that Peter Watson places the invention of opera between chapters called “Capitalism, Humanism, Individualism” and “The Mental Horizon of Christopher Columbus.” <1> And so hearing Brahms Second at the end of a long day was my own little piece of heaven.

For the last entry two entries I’ve been listening to “island music”: the first, steel band music from Trinidad; the second, works by Tania León that are profoundly informed by Cuban culture. This week I encountered two symphonies that were new for me: Spanish composer Tomás Marco’s Symphony No. 4 “Espacio Quebrado” and Symphony No. 5 “Modelos de Universo.” But the one I found most fascinating is also “island music,” in a sense.

Nexus entry.

Marco’s Fifth Symphony has seven movements, each of which is named after one of the seven main Canary Islands: I. Achinech (Tenerife), II. Ferro (Hierro), III. Avaria (La Palma), IV. Maxorata (Fuerteventura), V. Tyteroygatra (Lanzarote), VI. Amilgua (Gomera), VII. Tamarán (Gran Canaria). (As an aside, I’ll admit that one of the reasons I was drawn to the piece is because in the last few years I’ve read a fair amount about the connection between San Antonio and the Canary Islands.)

Things get a bit more complicated here. In extensive program notes, Marco (b. 1942) explains that the symphony was commissioned by the Festival of the Canaries and that he wanted, therefore, to create an homage to the islands, which he claims to know “inside out (better than the natives, I expect),” as a kind of testament “to their progressive destruction.” Despite the titling of movements, though, the composer had “no desire to commit the tactlessness of appropriating Canarian folklore. . .an easy, opportunist way out, as well as being a sort of profanity, that would have harmed both the folklore and the symphony itself.”

Instead, Marco wanted to create a “universal work for the Canaries that would carry their name across the wide world every time it was performed.” <2> (This makes me think of the Dalai Lama approving the recording and distribution of Tibetan Buddhist rituals with the idea that every time one pressed play, the prayer was renewed, like a disembodied prayer wheel.) And how does a composer make a symphony universal, other than by omitting any direct reference to music and folklore of the Canary Isalnds? Marco attempts this by tying his work to others in the symphonic tradition. He references the famous opening motive from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the opening of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra repeatedly. Arguably, that’s a different kind of opportunism; at the very least, it’s the ¡MoSt ObViOuS wAy! of involving an audience in a conversation about the music, through the music.

Marco also explains that there are “hidden references to various well-known Fifth Symphonies” elsewhere, especially in the transitions. But three other “non-Fifth” symphonies occur to me as models of Marco’s symphonic universe. One is Mahler’s Third, a six-movement work with titles that most often point to the natural world as inspiration. Another is Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Sinfonie (1948), with which Marco’s Fifth Symphony shares an unorthodox number of movements, many featuring titles that point to a personal cache of complicated referents. A third is Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1969), the symphony after symphonies have died, which famously uses the scherzo from Mahler’s Second (1894) as a “vessel” into which many text and musical quotations are poured.

Berio’s scherzo movement, with its apparently self-defeating environment of hyper-quotation, might seem the most apt comparison, especially when Marco writes something like, “Once creative innocence has been irrevocably lost, one has no choice but to be ironic about one’s own creation.” MV5BMmNlYzRiNDctZWNhMi00MzI4LThkZTctMTUzMmZkMmFmNThmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzkwMjQ5NzM@._V1_UX182_CR0,0,182,268_AL_.jpg In other words, it’s difficult to hear Also sprach, especially after 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Beethoven’s Fifth and not roll your eyes. But when ironic experience is repeated so often, it loses its ironic edge, becomes instead simply an environment. That environment is a palimpsest, endlessly written over, just as Marco’s movement titles have traditional island names and parenthetical “colonized” names, just as the symphony as a genre is a model that is written over again and again. What is left is a place of depth, a place where unfathomable things have happened and are recovered only partially, through a veil of imperfect memory, Marco Polo repeatedly trying to describe the glories of Venice for a mesmerized Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Nexus exit.

Ultimately, in his Fifth Symphony Marco claims to have given the listener “seven formal models,” inspired by various theories of the universe, “translated into seven abstract and exclusively music movements,” the “techniques of construction” for which the composer does “not want to tire the reader by describing.” No matter. On the island of symphonies, there’s enough to hear without all that.

References

<1> Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (HarperCollins, 2005).

<2> Tomás Marco, Sinfonia No. 5 “Modelos de Universo ‘88/89”; Sinfonia No. 4 “Espacio Quebrado ’87,” liner notes by Harry Halbreich with program notes by Tomás Marco Indigéna, aurophon AU 31812, 1991, compact disc.

More to Three Ds than Death: Honegger’s Fifth Symphony

Contributed by Dr. Ken Metz, Professor of Music (University of the Incarnate Word)

51-5xVSwtbL._SY355_.jpg Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) suffered a health crisis in 1947 and did not live too many years beyond that, but he had one more symphony in him. Symphony No. 5 (1950) is subtitled “Di tre re,” with re referring to the note D, which ends every movement. Does this D, with its association with Requiem settings, point to death? Probably so, but to my ears this three-movement work (played here by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks under Charles Dutoit) also evokes devotion, delight, and defiance, three D-words I’d like to add to describe aspects of the symphony. I hear the first movement as devotion to Honegger’s art and faith. Yes, there is some very sour dissonance in the chorale-like first theme, but the landing places are typically rich extended chords that possess a soaring devotional quality. The climactic trumpet part sounds at once like a plaintive cry to God and a declaration of faith. The second movement is scherzo-like and comparable, in a way, to the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, revealing a sense of humor about the human condition. The adagio sections in the movement offer a contrast, perhaps the promise of a soothing afterlife. The third movement is the boldest, and I hear in it a striving for strength, a will to persevere despite any obstacle. I want to cheer the piece on as it raucously unfolds, anchored by assertive brass statements. I don’t feel despair (another D word). I think Honegger knew that music had more to offer and that he had more to leave behind.