Beethoven xviii: more evidence of an obsession with the composer

A dream from the sixties: a drunken meal around a table, with plentiful wine and many plates of savory food. Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter, sits next to me, whispering; in the 1930s the troubled girl had fallen in love, unbidden, with Joyce’s friend Samuel Beckett, who is somewhere there roving about the room of my dream. Friends sit across from me, and at the end of the table is my great late teacher Thomas Flanagan, telling a story – sharp-edged, wry and witty.

At the head of the table sits Joyce himself, pivoting in his chair towards a piano conveniently placed by him, and he is playing away right through all the talk and clatter, the vodka toasts, Flanagan’s story and the laughter of its reception. Joyce plays no opera or Irish song: he is playing Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata.

Suddenly Lucia turns to me, puts her hand on my knee, and whispers – almost mouthing the words: “Do you love me?” I soon awoke into my 1965 life, but not before I felt the full force of her searching glance, her yearning words, and her delusion.

The dream has continued to reverberate in my imagination for almost a half century. In 1970, I wrote a story about a piano virtuoso, and the story continued to grow until 1990 when it became my novel Hungry Generations. The painting on its cover (based on Matisse’s “The Music Lesson”) shows the virtuoso playing the piano with his family sitting about and his new friend, a young composer, standing and listening. Beethoven is everywhere present – his picture on the wall, a volume of the sonatas on the piano lid, and the filigreed opening notes of his Hammerklavier atop the picture.

There exists a wonderful photograph of Joyce playing the piano with his son Giorgio listening as he leans over the closed lid. There is a painting on the cover of my study of music and modern fiction, Fullness of Dissonance (which was written in the eighties and published in 1994), and it is based on the photograph. The painting shows Joyce at the piano with not Giorgio, but Mann, Proust, and Schoenberg standing by the closed lid, listening.

The obsession – with a life of its own – does not stop. This is my seventeenth post about Beethoven, and of course several concern the Hammerklavier.

[Both of these cover paintings – visible in the right column of this blog – are by Jeanette Arax Melnick, my wife.]

I’d thought of writing about Tia DeNora’s 1995 study of how Beethoven’s aristocratic Viennese patrons early on helped to support and, in important ways, to shape the growth of Beethoven’s genius – its title is “Beethoven and the Construction of Genius.” But somehow I’d like to use more of these posts to explore why I love Beethoven – and so: my dream from the 1960s.

Notes on the modern period - 24 - Modern Music ii

One of the stories in my new collection, Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable, imagines the fate of an emigre virtuoso pianist in L.A., Alexander Petrov, who is a friend of Stravinsky and Schoenberg; he is at the center also of an earlier work of mine, Hungry Generations: a novel, which partly tries to convey my pleasure in the history of classical music and especially modern music from Wagner forward. About Wagner, as my previous post tried to show, the evident gigantism in Wagner’s extraordinary operas participates in the modernist impulse to create art which surveys and encompasses the entire span of civilization, reaching back to its mythic origins and moving forward to the present world which is judged to be disintegrating from the mid-nineteenth century onward – and increasingly so, as the two World Wars were fought. This ambitious and audacious vision of human experience announces the current disintegration of traditional thought and received conventions. Such is the vision in Wagner and so too, for example, in Joyce’s Ulysses, with the qualification that Joyce’s creation of Leopold Bloom – as much a mockery of Odysseus as he is – celebrates the character’s struggling humanity. As a result, Joyce’s exposure of the vast, disintegrating edifice of civilization yet leaves some room for the ordinary human being. Such a paradox is not central in Wagner’s work (despite some superficial elements of it in Meistersinger).

However, in Mahler, a composer deeply influenced by Wagner (as every German-speaking classical composer was), we do encounter that paradoxical face-off between the individual versus the massive forces which can crush the human. The individual’s features are reduced to often primitive and, therefore, bitterly ironic markers of expressiveness, yet they survive. I am thinking of the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, in which a naive children’s tune is transformed into a deeply sad minor-key funeral march, and so its sweetness is converted into a beautiful but bitter gesture of yearning. Soon in the movement, we hear klezmer-style carnival tunes, and their primitive contours are made to convey a similar yearning for expressiveness, despite their grotesque transformations. (Here is a Bernstein performance of the movement on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEPERXpOqiU&feature=related.) What we hear here is travesty: the children’s folksong and the carnival dance music are mutilated and mocked, and yet they are clung to as embodying the last possibilities of expressiveness and meaning: deformed as they are, they become a lyrical hallowing of the mundane and the clichéd as all that humankind has left of meaning.

The transition from the utter silence at the end of this funeral march to the last movement’s apocalyptic thunderclap is a primal gesture of disruption, and it yields another sort of tragically inflected and travestied march. (Here is a Dudamel performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY_g69mzv2E.) Mahler’s grotesque version of a victory march is, in Adorno’s image, a march as heard and witnessed from the point of view of the vanquished, the victims, who yearn for an alternative to brutality. Mahler’s music becomes an act of mourning for the passing of a "human" world. His symphonies employ huge orchestras, which can dwarf any semblance of the individual, and yet he makes us hear the individual instruments with chamber-music-like clarity. A most eloquent version of this meeting between gigantic resources in sound and the bared individual voices of instruments is to be found in his Symphony No. 3, the fourth movement, in which the mezzo-soprano sings Mahler’s setting of the “Midnight Song” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The world is deep, / Deeper than day had been aware. / Deep is its woe;” yet joy is “deeper even than agony. / Woe implores: Go! / But all joy wants eternity - / Wants deep, wants deep eternity.” (Here is Abbado’s great performance with Anna Larsson, on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCEr2mWhYs8&feature=related.) An estranged minimalism (which is ironically a bit at odds with Nietzsche's yearning for the fertile, unbounded spirit) is at work in this movement after the gigantic structures, in terms of both time and sound, heard in the previous three movements, estranged because its “wisdom” is so dwarfed, so close to silence, though all the more moving to the modern ear for that. (There are many great interpretations on cd of the first and third symphonies; here are links to Abbado's [recently] conducting   Mahler: Symphony No. 3 and Bernstein conducting Mahler: Symphony No. 1- Titan / Symphony No. 10 (Adagio).)

Travesty and the tension between gigantism and minimalism are important also in an alternative classical music tradition to that in Germany, Austria, etc. In France, Debussy and Ravel employ features of modernist art with a quite different aesthetic, one based in a sort of floating aleatory associativeness, a graceful, sinuous welcoming dance of fragmentation. We can hear a powerful example of this alternative approach to travesty in Ravel’s “La Valse,” which presents the demonic destruction yet celebration of the mundane clichéd form of the waltz. Ravel disintegrates the form even as he simultaneously adheres to it as a last grotesque source of expressiveness. (Here is the second half of Dror Biron’s brilliant performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdaU-_vFH3g&feature=related# . There is also a wonderful performance available on cd of Argerich playing Ravel’s La Valse with Freire: Rachmaninov: Suite No. 2, Op. 17 / Ravel: La Valse / Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations ~ Argerich / Freire.)

Debussy, the greatest modern French composer, can employ a large orchestra (as he does, for example, in La Mer, or even in his setting of Mallarmé's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune), but he always maintains a clear, supple, associative flow of musical gestures, a sort of stream of consciousness emphasizing unexpected individual "voices." His music continually opens itself to the possibility of an alternative pentatonic harmony independent of classical music’s customary harmonic vocabulary and to the potential logic of synesthetic sensations joining the senses and separate from the ordered development of musical themes, which are always on the verge of fragmenting. (Here is a fine orchestral cd of Debussy: La Mer / Nocturnes / Jeux / Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre - The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez.)

Above all, Debussy’s minimalism becomes a means of maintaining individual expressiveness in the face of the experience of fragmentation, of sustaining the pared-down search for “meaning” in the face of chaos. His minimalism is very far from the rather gently beautiful impressionism with which he is sometimes identified. It veers abruptly from the delicate to the violent and back, for example, in Debussy’s Prelude for piano, the 12th in Book 2 - Feux d'artifice, or fireworks. (Here is a fine Maurizio Pollini performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m1_IPErT-U. There is also a very great performance on cd of Sviatoslav Richter playing this prelude along with all of Debussy's Book 2: Richter in Spoleto.)

In my next post, I’ll attempt briefly to discuss Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Notes on the modern period - 16 - on modern fiction

For information on my political novella about Israel plus “eight stories of the eighties,” please take a look at the page describing my new book Acts of Terror and Contrition – A Nuclear Fable. It’s available from Amazon.com (here's the link: Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable) or from the publisher (click on the cover image to the left).

In some of my first notes on the modern period, I tried to show that Romanticism’s idea of the self has deeply influenced the modern. From 1807 on, Hegel's concept of self-consciousness - as a force which can upend the stability of master-servant relations - resonated in much of the literature and thought of the Romantic period (and of course for later writers, too). Jane Austen’s heroines (as carefully controlled and "ironical" as their presentation is) exemplify the power of self-consciousness as a tool, sensibly utilized it was hoped, to modify rigid class behavior and social assumptions. Emma’s “self,” for example, grows in ambition and self-empowerment to the point that she does harm to others, all as part of her experience of learning to control the force of her character. By the 1850s and 60s, however, the range and force of novelistic self-consciousness and the behavior it stirs threaten to break the deepest social and human bonds, and the “self” of the protagonist grows monstrous in Madame Bovary and in Crime and Punishment.

From its origins, the novel form focuses on the growth and survival of the budding self as it encounters “reality,” engages its nurturing possibilities, and struggles with its blighting forces. As the novel fabricates its fictive beings, the form reveals itself as the very font and model of self-creation, and it naturally yields characters who are themselves self-fabricating. Finally, the peculiar grandeur of this world-rendering, self-creating form reveals the special power and ambition of its social origins in the bourgeoisie, with its own enormous capacity for growth.

A burgeoning enormity of self typifies the characters generated by the great modernist experiments in the novel. And modern authors are implicated in the process, for autobiographical material seems invariably to find its way into the modern masterpieces of the form. There is Marcel Proust’s creation of the autobiographical character and narrator Marcel, crucial among In Search of Lost Time’s core characters, whom Proust terms “giants in time” as they bestride his novel’s colossal, society-encompassing structure. A similar sort of gigantism marks Joyce’s ironic transformation of himself into the autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus, whose struggles and intellect dominate A Portrait and large parts of Ulysses (above all, the novel’s aesthetic structure and ambition); this is not even to mention the degree to which Joyce gives autobiographical qualities also to Leopold Bloom. There are, of course, other powerful examples: Woolf’s autobiographical fictions in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Mann’s self-implicating summa of western civilization in The Magic Mountain (let alone the autobiographical elements in Buddenbrooks), Conrad’s own Marlovian confrontation with European megalomania, Kafka’s K and Joseph K, Lawrence’s self-searching novels, etc.

For Proust and Joyce, the impulse to fabricate an autobiographical self in fiction arises from their larger ambition: to preserve, to encompass, and also to frame and judge a collapsing world - a disintegrating society and culture. These novelists create a novelistic world capable of encompassing a society grown monstrous on its fare of war, its economic expansions and collapse, and its imperial ambition to regulate human life. In the years just before and following World War One, modern society had become a murderous juggernaut, just as Joyce and Proust published their novels. The seemingly desperate audacity of the modern novel’s aims – the gigantism of its scale and characters – reflects the massive challenge of giving form to and finding signs of life in the enormity of modern life. Even a fundamentally decent figure like Joyce’s everyman Leopold Bloom must inhabit and confront the dimensions of Ulysses’ gigantism. Both modern history and modern fiction can resemble a steamroller which threatens to flatten lives into vast thinned-out representations of the human. In our new century, we participate in a similar experience of monstrosity. It is what we have as the condition of any affirmation in postmodernity. Images of self-destructive and unabated cancerous growth fill the byways and airways of all our activities, economic, political, “cultural,” and medical.

In the face of the rampant growth of self and society, the achievement of the proto-modern novels of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, from the 1850s through the 1870s, is powerfully to engage the dilemma of remaining human – to maintain images of the human even as they undergo a radical redefinition, a simultaneous distension and flattening. The two novelists establish alternative yet equally essential strategies for modern novelists. The clinical realism of Flaubert’s sentences exactly renders characters’ lives; his realism establishes the precise nature and origin of a character’s situation, whether their self-blindnesses, their drowning in a world of things, or their yearning for vision. In Madame Bovary, for example, there is the great cinematic “country fair” scene, in which the rake Rudolf’s hackneyed phrases seducing the unappeasably needy Emma are exactingly paired with the official’s own empty conventional phrases announcing prizes for farm products: “‘Did I know I would accompany you?’ / ‘Seventy francs!’ / ‘A hundred times I tried to leave; yet I followed you and stayed.’ / ‘For manures!’” And the acid climax of this scene of self-aggrandizing public and private manipulations is the image of a final award-recipient: an old peasant woman gnarled and withered by fifty years of hard service and suffering walks forward – “Thus, a half century of servitude confronted these beaming bourgeois.”

At one point, Emma – herself now suffering from the consequences of her enormous appetite to consume things, both material and human – walks in the night, given over to a great aching bout of self-pity, having been rejected by one of her lovers whom she importuned for money. As she walks beneath the stars, Flaubert’s narrator – with a characteristic mix of irony and sympathy – writes as follows of her plea and, by extension, of the novel’s own exacting language in rendering her plea: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” Our language would fill the unfillable emptiness which is the life of the modern self, grown into a sort of enormity of nothingness, as its self-conscious, self-creating desires consume or, rather, exude extraordinary amounts of destructive energy. It is as if the bourgeois self had grown disproportionate and gigantic in its unquenchable imaginative needs and their impact on society. And the reverse is also true: the burgeoning gigantism of an increasingly destabilized modern society unleashes a distorted, alienated grasping and daring “as never before” in the self.

Emma Bovary’s night plea is only one among many examples of her alienated grasping for life, a grasping which Flaubert’s realism inevitably grounds in psychic emptiness. In contrast, Dostoyevsky renders a similar grasping and daring with quite different aims and techniques. In Crime and Punishment, the opening interior monologue emerges from the mind of Raskolnikov, a “student” character compounded of literate privilege and dire poverty. He is thinking of committing a murder, for his desperate and unmoored ego has grown to the point of contemplating an enormity, a violent breaking of the basic human ‘code;’ even his self-lacerating recriminations have the air of expansive self-dramatizations. These initial paragraphs of the novel draw us into the most dangerous ruminations of the psyche (Freud, of course, saw Dostoyevsky as a source and predecessor), and that psychological realism offers modern novelists a model for rendering the most submerged and potentially monstrous levels of the stream of consciousness.

Yet there is a still deeper point to Dostoyevsky’s explorations of his characters’ psyches. As they enter each other’s lives, these characters encounter a zone of contact, of fluid and unpredictable exchanges, which pressures and requires them to bare their feelings. In an extremity of such baring of self, each human being insinuates himself or herself into the life of the other in what is finally, for each self, a zone or process of creative freedom. In an example of such contact early in Crime and Punishment, there is Raskolnikov’s conversation with Marmeladov, who will stop at nothing in excoriating himself for his drunken exploitation of his daughter, Sonya (she later helps to succor the young protagonist). Here is Marmeladov in action, insinuating, violating boundaries, simultaneously blaspheming and crying out for human contact: “Why pity me, you say? Yes! There’s nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, and not pitied! But crucify, O judge, crucify, and having crucified, pity the man!...He will pity us who pitied everyone…And when He has finished with everyone, then He will say unto us, too, ‘You, too, come forth!’ He will say, ‘Come forth, my drunk ones, my weak ones, my shameless ones!’ And we will all come forth, without being ashamed, and stand there. And He will say, ‘Swine you are! Of the image of the beast and of his seal; but come, you, too!’” In this zone of contact, Dostoyevsky locates the unrestrained eruption of his characters’ egos; this is an ultimate model for the sort of psychological gigantism which modern novels render and confront.

Here are some links to the above mentioned books: Crime and Punishment (Paperback), Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics), In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-pack (Proust Complete), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses.

My next post will (more briefly, I hope) attempt to explore work by a single modern novelist.