19. Serenade

With a grotesquely giant bow,

Pierrot saws away at his viola,

Like a stork on single leg

He glumly plucks a pizzicato.

I find “Serenade” very beautiful. Do you? It’s worth asking the question, because Schoenberg was capable – it needs to be said out loud – of writing music of striking beauty. (I was reminded of this in two different conversations with different people in different places within the span of the last six days. Both people, to be fair, were talking about Verklärte Nacht!) You want proof? I can’t prove it. This reminds me, in turn, of something I read not so long ago, attributed to artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011): “You can’t prove beauty, it’s there as a fact and you know it and you feel it and it’s real, but you can’t say to somebody this has it.” [1] That must be more or less right, but I’m looking at m. 30, when the cello soars above the repeated figure in the piano, and does anyone with ears hear this as other than beautiful, however strange?

Pierrot plays a beautiful line, “Serenade,” mm. 30-31.

Here’s a marvelous thing. Pierrot is serenading us on the Bratsche (viola) in the poem, but on the cello in Schoenberg’s score. Instead of a grotesquely large bow, it’s the instrument itself that gets distorted, magnified, on its way from words to sounds. The cello has already been identified as Pierrot in other movements; it also has associations with the male hero and antihero in nineteenth-century music and with Schoenberg himself – the authorial presence – because it was his instrument. (That point doesn’t need to be taken in any interpretative way; it can be as simple as a pointing out that the composer played the cello.) Pierrot, therefore, both is the cello and plays it, and Schoenberg both is the cello and writes it. The reason it’s worth teasing that out is that “Serenade” is the cycle’s most unrelentingly lyrical movement, partly because it describes a scene where lyricism is demanded. Schoenberg is answering the dramatic demands of the cycle, yes, but he is also daring to write a serenade in the bold new idiom that Pierrot lunaire exemplifies. And? Rejection! Cassander is the sidekick as he was in “Gemeinheit,” and yet again he’s the butt of the joke. Without missing a beat, Pierrot grabs the heckler, and bows his head instead of the Bratsche. Don’t you find it tempting to understand this, given the Pierrot-cello-hero-Schoenberg cluster, as the composer ignoring his critics and playing on, come what may?

Pierrot keeps playing, despite critical reception, “Serenade,” mm. 41-44.

How can we know, though, if the beauty that I hear in “Serenade” is beauty or mock-beauty? Is the dreamy Pierrot that Hartleben describes so taken with himself that he makes a mockery of beauty, using its component parts without being able to piece them together? Here I’m reminded of Beckmesser’s contest song in Die Meistersinger, where Wagner tries his hardest to write bad music for a character who “doesn’t get it” (much more could be and has been said elsewhere), before giving us the real thing. I don’t hear Schoenberg doing that. Cassander, I think, should have listened – what Pierrot was playing for him was top shelf, just beautiful.

[1] Quoted in Emily LaBarge, “At Dulwich” London Review of Books 43, no. 24 (16 December 2021): 27.

7. Der kranke Mond

You moon, nightly sick as death,

Up there on heaven’s black pillow,

Your gaze, so massive, fevered,

Captivates me like an unfamiliar song.

It may not seem much of a claim to say that “Der kranke Mond” is singular in a work that features a different deployment of instruments in each movement. Even so. . .it is singular – of twenty-one songs, it’s the only one for voice and a single instrument, and a linear one at that: the flute. (No. 14, “Die Kreuze,” which closes the second part of the cycle, starts with an art song texture of piano and voice, but at a crucial moment gains the full ensemble, on which more later.) Like each instrument in the cycle, the flute (doubling piccolo) has a unique role in Pierrot lunaire. It’s often enlisted, frequently in tandem with the piano in its upper range, to elicit various qualities of light, from beams to liquid light to flecks. And I’m afraid this brings us to the doorstep of a vast domain (Think Bluebeard’s Castle. . .), the question of to what extent the signification that adheres to timbre stays in place, takes part in a cosmogony of sound color, somewhere on an individual-to-cultural-to-universal continuum.

Hm. Maybe that isn’t perfectly clear. What I mean is: Is the flute, once linked with light, always or even mostly light? And is that because it’s light for Pierrot, for Schoenberg, for Vienna, for “Western concern music,” for humankind, for Rama, or, mutatis mutandis, ad infinitum? And why should that matter? Because it makes the light that might flow from the flute in “Der kranke Mond” a special kind of light, a relationship to a practice of flute-light, one color in a spectrum sparked by the prism of Pierrot. Here I think the case is easier than I’m making it. Yes, the flute in “Der kranke Mond” is light – a wan and morose light, as the poem explains. That moonlight could be this way isn’t surprising, is it? Oppressive, like the planet barreling inexorably toward Earth in Lars von Trier’s 2011 Melancholia. That film, incidentally, uses Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for much of its score – mostly the Prelude – which aligns with the longing for total annihilation that Kirsten Dunst’s character gives herself over to by movie’s end. Schoenberg does something very different, whittling down the ensemble to just one instrumental voice, as if the everyone else has jumped ship. This sense of abandonment and a consequent collapsing in on oneself is reinforced by some extraordinary expressive markings. I’m drawn to m. 15, where the flute is asked to play pppp, with the vocalist eking out that most Wagnerian of words, Sehnsucht (“longing”), in a counterintuitive ppp gesture that falls into subterranean realms. Listen to ten different recordings, and you’ll realize how unreasonable Schoenberg’s demand is, but it remains. . .an aspiration. How could you perform in that state of self-abnegation – all but absenting yourself as a performer from sound itself? Pierrot has many more surprises for us, but it won’t have anything like this again: a moon so large it fills the sky with its sickness, at the same time a pinprick of light in a field of unfathomable dark.

Schoenberg requests impossible quiet, “Der kranke Mond,” mm. 14-16.

Grotesquely, I’ve gone on too long in the first two paragraphs of my allotted three, so my last comment has to be brief. I hear “Der kranke Mond” in D phrygian, a strangely specific suggestion for what’s supposed to be atonal music. And I like the suggestion, because it is a duet of funereal signifiers: D, the final of the Requiem; Phrygian, the mode of finality.

I’d say it’s D Phrygian, wouldn’t you? “Der kranke Mond,” mm. 26-27.

6. Madonna

6. Madonna

Climb up, O Mother of all sorrows,

Onto the altar of my poetry!

Blood from your withered breast

Has been spilled by the sword of wrath.

Whenever I read the middle stanza of “Madonna,” with its description of “ever-open wounds like eyes, red and staring,” I think of Schoenberg’s expressionist portrait of 1910, The Red Gaze. (If you’ve ever looked at the composer’s paintings, you probably remember this one.) When teaching I’ve often asked students whether they understood the painting as sending out a glare – of “wrath” or loathing – or as witnessing something so horrific that it scalds the eyes. To me the mouth in the painting – offen, but wordless; frozen in breathlessness – registers a horror seen, too terrible for description, a moment of trauma so great that it defies the tongue to tell. It burns the eyes going in.

There’s something stunning about how Schoenberg forestalls the climax of his “Madonna,” a movement about the trauma of seeing. Hartleben’s translation is baroque and thick as stew (“Doch der Blick der Menschen meidet / Dich”) and shares the same tick of enjambment as in the final line of “Mondestrunken.” There it seemed to point to the spilling over of the moonwine, as if it cascaded by accident into the fifth line. Here in “Madonna,” it’s different, shockingly so if we’ve been paying attention, because, for the first time, the ritual line changes by a single word. Instead of Steig (“climb up”), it’s Dich (“you”). This change of a single word does happen in several other movements, but the change in “Madonna” seems the most significant: from beseeching Mary (“climb up”) to the pronoun for her (“you”): she has arrived, or we have arrived at her. Schoenberg takes note. Much of the movement employs a trio of instruments – flute, bass clarinet, cello – but for the final ritual line, Schoenberg adds the others. The violin slices a zigzag across three octaves, and the piano detonates its sonic bomb (the wound itself, à la Parsifal?), all while the vocalist sustains, somehow, a Sprechstimme top-line F sharp. The contrast between etiolated weeping-sighing trio and full explosive ensemble gives us Pierrot’s most conventionally dramatic moment thus far. We see her: Mary. We bear witness to her psychic wound, unflinchingly.

The violin slices, and the piano is the wound, “Madonna,” mm. 21-24.

But about that Sprechstimme F sharp. . . One of the other strange things about it – other than the fact that sustaining Sprechstimme on a pitch makes it singing more than Sprechstimme – is its very length: a half note tied to an eighth. This note, on the word Mutter, is the movement’s longest agogic accent, made more dramatic by contrast with the much faster and frankly unrelenting rate of text delivery in much of the rest of the movement. Possibly a vocalist wouldn’t forgive me for this, but it almost seems like she is mumbling for most of the movement or, at best, carrying on an internal dialogue that suddenly erupts into a public declaration in the final stanza. Inner/outer, private/public, hidden/revealed. But what on earth does it have to do with Pierrot? Is Mary’s wound one of convenience, capitalized on for self-pity’s sake? Or is the proposal that this is the wound we must understand to gain wisdom: the Ur-wound, the sign of signs at the center of history? Back to Wagner. . .

Our Lady of Sorrows, Iglesia de la Vera Cruz (Salamanca, Spain) [Creative Commons]

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.

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Colin Matthews

It’s probably not surprising that listening to the OST for The Empire Strikes Back (for the last entry) would put me in the mood for Gustav Holst. There’s The Planets, after all, which John Williams has referenced (mined?) in a variety of ways throughout the Star Wars saga.

But the record I pulled off the shelf this week was not The Planets, but Holst’s Sāvitri (1908), a stunning one-act opera clocking in at about 30 minutes, with a B-side that I’d never heard: The Dream-City, a ten-song cycle that composer-conductor Colin Matthews arranged and orchestrated from Holst’s Twelve Songs, Op. 48 (1929), on poems by Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940). Matthews’s The Dream-City (1983), like Holst’s Op. 48, is by no means well known, but it’s frequently attractive and occasionally fascinating. Matthews organized the ten Holst songs into three “parts” and, in addition to having orchestrated them “more elaborately, perhaps, than Holst might have allowed himself,” he contributed some “linking material” to weld certain songs together. The third part, for example, connects three songs in one unbroken set: “Rhyme,” “Journey’s End,” and. . .wait for it. . .“Betelgeuse.”

Nexus entry.

MV5BZDdmNjBlYTctNWU0MC00ODQxLWEzNDQtZGY1NmRhYjNmNDczXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_UY1200_CR87,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg Another week, another ‘80s movie reference. Behold, I bring you: Beetlejuice (1988). Granted, the weird nightmare landscapes that Michael Keaton’s poltergeist-purveying title character slinks through in Tim Burton’s film are a far cry from the wisps of dreams in Humbert Wolfe’s poems. But something does tie together that bizarre film, Wolfe’s poetry, Holst’s settings, and Matthews’s orchestration: the strangeness of our fantasies about death.

“Rhyme,” jittery and unsettling, is about the power of that particular characteristic of poetry to disrupt the natural order, to jolt us “out of space and time.” “Journey’s End,” written in a sort of faux naïve father-son dialogue, depicts the afterlife as the cold, dark, and silent “room” of a coffin. Holst’s music (and Matthews’s beautiful orchestration) goes much further, revealing the numinous through its arching lyricism.

By placing “Betelgeuse” last in the cycle, Matthews sustains this meditation on an afterlife “out of space and time”: “On Betelgeuse the gold leaves hang in golden aisles for twice a hundred million miles,/and twice a hundred million years/they golden hang and nothing stirs,/on Betelgeuse.” TheMagiciansNephew(1stEd).jpg This science-fiction-like vision of death—which reminds me of the terrifying frozen world of the White Witch’s home planet in C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew (1955)—becomes a marvel in Matthews’s rendering. He has forged a sonic Betelgeuse in the environment of his orchestration, with sly references to Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” to ground the autumnal quality of the poetry in the musical language of the Romantic orchestral song cycle. In the recording, soprano Patrizia Kwella barely touches consonants and uses light vibrato or straight tone throughout while perfectly placing every pitch, aiding the sense of the strangely beautiful and otherworldly, her voice attaining the quality of an instrument beyond the human frame. (She sounds like a glass harmonica at times!) Perhaps Kwella and Matthews were thinking of the 1968 recording of Holst’s Op. 48 by Peter Pears and Britten, in which Pears attains a similar diction-light placidity? Or perhaps Matthews heard Britten and Pears perform it live, since shortly after the recording was made he became the composer’s assistant.

Nexus exit.

I admit that it’s a bit perverse to have “gone nexus” on the LP’s B side without lavishing attention on Sāvitri, which is, well, a truly wonderful work. How do I love it? Let me count the ways. Or at least briefly mention a few of the things that I love about it.

It is an opera with only three roles—Death, Sāvitri, and her beloved Satyavan—in which Holst gives Death the first word. (Like Wagner, Holst wrote his own librettos, in this case adapting the story from the Sanskrit epic The Mahābhārata.) 518Pw2aGHgL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg Death sings the opening section alone, without orchestral accompaniment, which might initially suggest Wagner’s strategy at the beginning of Act I of Tristan und Isolde, but in Holst there’s no prelude to set up the emptiness of the opening song. And then, magic! Sāvitri joins Death in an unaccompanied duet and reveals that his song has been running through her mind. So the first character we hear is actually the thought of another character. The stark tension between the two vocal parts seems to prophecy Peter and Ellen’s bitonal duet in Britten’s Peter Grimes, which is similarly unmoored from orchestral accompaniment. Composer-scholar Raymond Head claims that Sāvitri features Holst’s first use of bitonality (“Holst and India (III)” Tempo 166 [September 1988]: 37), and given that Britten acknowledged his debt to Holst’s harmonic thinking, the Sāvitri-Grimes link seems intriguing.

Another favorite moment is the use of women’s chorus to accompany Sāvitri’s song to death (“Welcome, Lord!”), which sounds like the very best of the Anglican choral tradition, and so glosses the Hindu mythology of the story with the resounding strains of a British paradise. If that seems uncomfortably colonial, well. . .how could it not? Holst was inevitably a tenant of his times.

I’m not sure it counts as a “favorite moment,” but I’m also amazed by the conversation (argument, really) that Sāvitri has with Death, over the course of which she essentially tricks him into not taking the life of her Satyavan. The deliberately archaic language of the libretto echoes Wagner, certainly, but I’m more fascinated by the musical logic of this section of the opera. The succession of tempos, the modal shifts, the way the orchestra supports the drama—all suggest the logic of Wagner while remaining satisfyingly Holstian. But it’s more specific than that. I almost feel that this particular collection of tempos and moods comes from something: Tristan and Isolde’s conversation at the end of Act I, perhaps? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but seeking an answer is a quest well worth taking up sometime. Meanwhile. . .

So. Many. Records.