Literature and Music - session three - Schubert and Romantic poems

See the previous post on Literature, Music, and Romanticism.

Coleridge (1772-1834): text of "Kubla Khan" and "The Eolian Harp"

Keats (1795-1821): text of "Ode to a Nightingale"

 

 Schubert (1797-1828) 

Schubert – Goethe’s Der Erlkönig D328 (The Erlking, 1815) – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone), Gerald Moore (piano) 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3nxyS8wf8E

Goethe’s Gretchen am Spinnrade D. 118 (Grechen at the spinning-wheel, 1814) - Rika Shiratsuchi, Mezzo-soprano; Malcolm Martineau, Piano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCTU972-oIg

Müller’s Der Lindenbaum D. 911 (from Winterreise – The Linden-tree, 1827) –  Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel (Piano)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyxMMg6bxrg

Müller’s Die Leiermann D. 911 (from Winterreise – The Organ-grinder/The Hurdy-Gurdy Man, 1827) – Fischer-Dieskau and Brendel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIIS-UgixGE

 

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) 

 

Dichterliebe op 48 no 10 (1840) – Hör' ich das Liedchen klingen (1823) - Fritz Wunderlich (tenor), Hubert Geisen (pianist)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT7OI-pOsOs

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856): 

Hör ich das Liedchen klingen,

Das einst die Liebste sang,

So will mir die Brust zerspringen

Vor wildem Schmerzensdrang.

Es treibt mich ein dunkles Sehnen

Hinauf zur Waldeshöh,

Dort löst sich auf in Tränen

Mein übergroßes Weh.

I hear the little song sounding

that my beloved once sang,

and my heart wants to shatter

from the savage pain's pressure.

I am driven by a dark longing

up to the wooded heights;

there is dissolved in tears

my supremely great pain.

Chopin (1810-1843) 

Fantasy on Polish Airs [Folk dance forms], op. 13 (1829) – performed by Kun Woo Paik, pianist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RaNIIVnHlk&index=5&list=PL7Ya_z08dGHlou9bva4kj2yDeaKU2UISm

Mazurka, Op. 17: No. 4 in A Minor (1831) [Horowitz, pianist]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmLvpJySb50

Literature and Music - session one - introduction; Renaissance and Baroque

The first session of this course for Siegel Senior Learning at CWRU establishes some backgrounds, including Renaissance links and texts, and offers the following excerpts:

Plato's view of music – from The Republic, Books 2 and 3 (circa 380 BC):

The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions The new style, gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs; and from these it issues in greater force, making its way into mutual compacts; and from compacts it goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything, both in public and in private.       

[Later, from Book 3:] And therefore, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the sound, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful – or [making the soul] of him who is ill-educated ungraceful… 

Even so, as I maintain, neither we nor the guardians, whom we say that we have to [train in music], can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms of temperance, courage, liberality, magnanimity, and their kindred, as well as the contrary forms, in all their combinations, and can recognize them and their images wherever they are found, not slighting them either in small things or great, but believing them all to be within the sphere of one art and study And when nobility of soul is observed in harmonious union with beauty of form, and both are cast from the same mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has an eye to see it.

Gregorian Chant – Salve Regina (circa 1050)

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus, O merciful, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAmydVsNMqM

 

 

Summer is a coming in – Reading rota, attributed to Wycombe (c 1260)

Sumer is icumen in, Spring has arrived, Lhude sing, cuccu; loudly sing, cuckoo! Groweth sed The seed is growing and bloweth med, And the meadow is blooming, And springth the wode nu; And the wood is coming into leaf now, Sing, cuccu! Sing, cuckoo! Awe bleteth after lomb, The ewe is bleating after her lamb, Lhouth after calue cu; The cow is lowing after her calf; Bulluc sterteth, The bullock is prancing, Bucke uerteth, The billy-goat farting, Murie sing, cuccu! Sing merrily, cuckoo! Cuccu, cuccu, Cuckoo, cuckoo, Wel singes thu, cuccu; You sing well, cuckoo, Ne swic thu naver nu. Never stop now. Sing, cuccu, nu; sing, cuccu; Sing, cuckoo, now; sing, cuckoo; Sing, cuccu; sing, cuccu, nu! Sing, cuckoo; sing, cuckoo, now!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2Tk1JseYkU

 

 

 

Palestrina - Jesu, rex admirabilis – Gardiner (c 1580)

Latin text: Jesu, rex admirabilis et triumphator nobilis, dulcedo ineffabilis, totus desiderabilis, mane nobiscum, Domine, et nos illustra lumine, pulsa mentis caligine, mundum reple ducedine.

English translation: Jesus, wondrous king and noble conqueror, ineffable delight, wholly to be desired, remain with us, Lord, dispel the darkness of our minds and enlighten us with your light, fill the world with your sweetness.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXQuOQccCWA

 

 Petrarch (1304-1374), Sonnet - text of Madrigal by Monteverdi (1567-1655):

The zephr returns and the lovely weather stirs
the flowers and all the grassy family;

the swallows warble and the nightingale sings
and spring is clean and bright.

The fields smile and sky is serene.
Jove happily looks upon his child.

The air, water, and the land are full of love.
Every animal in love is reconfirmed.

But for weary me only the saddest sighs return
Which she -who took the keys to heaven with her-

Wrings from the deepest part or my heart

And the birds sing and the countryside flourishes
And when with a beautiful woman, such gentle honest acts 
Become a harsh, wild and uncultivated desert.

Italian text

Zephiro torna, e 'i bel tempo rimena,
e i fiori et I'erbe, sua dolce famiglia,

et garrir Progne et pianger Philomena,
et primavera candida et vermiglia.

Ridono i prati, e 'I ciel si rasserena;
Giove s'allegra di mirar sua figlia;

I'aria et I'acqua et la terra e d'amor piena;
ogni animal d'amar si riconsiglia.

Ma per me, lasso, tornano i pili gravi
sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge
quella ch'al ciel se ne porte Ie chiavi;

et cantar augelletti, et fiorir piagge,
e 'n belle donne honeste atti soavi

sono un deserto, et fere aspre et selvagge.

Canzoniere 310^c

Monteverdi - Zefiro torna, e 'l bel tempo rimena (VI libro dei Madrigali) - Les Arts Florissants (c 1614)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wokuz7F7jGM

Shakespeare – Branagh’s “Much Ado About Nothing” - Act 2, Scene 3 (c 1612)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6z6LfdTNQg&t=171s

Twelfth Night (1602):

—opening of Act I, Scene i – the Duke speaks.

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again - it had a dying fall.

0, it came o'er my ear, like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,
T’is not so sweet now, as it was before.

o spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe'er,

But falls into abatement, and low price,
Even in a minute; so full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical. 

Handel – Dryden’s Ode for St Cecilia's Day HWV 76 Les Arts Florissants (c 1739)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbGI0tKriqo

Bach – St Matthew’s Passion – Erbarme Dich – 39 Aria – BWV 244 (c 1727).  Delphine Galou, contralto; François-Marie Drieux, solo violin; Les Siècles, conducted by François-Xavier Roth; 2008.

Erbarme dich,
Have mercy,
Mein Gott, um meiner Zähren willen!
My God, for the sake of my tears!
Schaue hier,
Look here,
Herz und Auge weint vor dir
My heart and eyes weep before you
Bitterlich.
Bitterly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBeXF_lnj_M

Notes on the modern period - 25 - Modern Music iii

Stravinsky and Schoenberg, the two most compelling masters of modern music, have fascinated me from the beginning of my listening life, to the extent even that I imagined them as characters in my novel Hungry Generations about the tense friendship in Los Angeles between a young studio composer and the family of a virtuoso classical pianist, a European émigré and friend of both composers. Also, especially Schoenberg haunts one of the stories, “Contrapuntal Piece,” in my new novella and story collection Acts of Terror and Contrition. As well, his conception of atonal music is one subject in my critical study Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music. Modern music, then, has been central to my imaginative and intellectual life for many decades, let alone a source of great pleasure.

Before I turn to Stravinsky and Schoenberg, I’d like to offer a bit more commentary on the connection between Debussy and Mallarmé, a connection which my last post mentioned in too hurried and compressed a way (I'll try to work on that tendency!). Particularly for the poet’s work, consciousness can seem wavering and tenuous and to verge toward a state of non-being. That ‘state’ can be both a symptom of and a response to a culture dominated by technology, materialism, and war, when the human can seem reduced to the condition of an automaton or an animal. The experience of modern life as a sort of spiritual death-in-life prompts and frames the struggle to express, to preserve, to “deliver up the volatile scattering which we call the human spirit, who cares for nothing save universal musicality” – in Mallarmé’s words. Each of the poet’s characteristic elegies (for Poe, for Gautier, for Wagner, etc.) confronts the pervasive sense of death in his era and renders it paradoxically as both a sign of modern paralysis and an opening toward transcendence, whose adepts have incurred the ultimate and universal payment. (This idea is evident also in Proust’s meditation about Swann, music, and “not-being” as “perhaps our true state:” if so, as we perish, “we have for our hostages these divine captives” of music. And the idea is present too in Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus I, 3: different from the voice of passion, “true singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.”)

In “Literature and Music,” Mallarmé writes that there is no adequate language to render the paradoxical experience of modern consciousness except through a joining of poetry with music. For example in “The Afternoon of a Faun,” Mallarmé and Debussy, in his setting of the eclogue, evoke nymph and satyr, the sensual inhabitants of the imagination, by employing an evanescing stream of both sensuous sounds and silences: “these nymphs, I would make them endure…hovering yet upon the air / heavy with the foliage of sleep,” projecting paradoxically a “sonorous voice” on the edge of “silence.” The sinuous, intentionally disintegrating ‘voice’ of both the poetry and the music “hovers” on the edge of disappearing; it enacts yet transfigures the potential erasure which is everywhere possible in the modern period. Even as modern consciousness and the spirit may seem on the verge of disappearance, music – the weightless, airborne, least “materialist” art – becomes the sign and sanctuary of the human, “now vanishing into obscurity, [yet] now radiating unconquerably.” (Here’s a YouTube link to the opening of the Debussy – Gergiev/LSO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xK0F5KkfT4&feature=related - here, also, is a great recording with Boulez conducting: Debussy: Images / Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune / Printemps - The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez.)

Stravinsky and Schoenberg offer two differing ways to confront the disintegration of traditional language and inherited convention in modern music. Stravinsky saw himself as shepherding classical music into an era of new opportunities to refresh inherited forms. In view of the riot the initial performance of The Rite of Spring provoked, he notes (in Poetics of Music) that “the tone of a work like The Rite may have appeared arrogant, the language that it spoke may have seemed harsh in its newness, but that in no way implies that it is revolutionary….If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established convention would be known as revolutionary….To speak of revolution is to speak of a temporary chaos. Now art is the contrary of chaos.” This paradoxical argument is illustrated by the extraordinary precision Stravinsky’s scores require of musicians as they execute new ideas of rhythm (abrupt shifts, surprising syncopations, and unprecedented time signatures) and render unstably shifting, newly dissonant harmonies. [A powerful example of “harshly” innovative intensity joined with control is evident in the following YouTube excerpt from Salonen conducting the ending of The Rite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi16suM21jQ&feature=related.] No matter how radical his new means sounded to listeners, Stravinsky saw himself imperturbably as “daring” but never “disorderly,” a model of autonomous art never given over to “gratuitous excess.”

Like Picasso, he continually sought inspiration in past or primitive art (in an earlier note - 14 - on the modern period, I suggest how a laying bare of essential form is at work in both modern art's primitivism and its experimental abstraction). An appropriated and concerted primitivism is evident in the erotic sensuality of his adaptation of Russian folk melodies in The Rite and other scores; the result is a sensuous array of sounds and sensations which repeatedly well up unexpectedly with intentional violence. [In the following YouTube excerpt from Boulez conducting the ballet, listen particularly to the powerful transition at 3:38: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOUYtDpKCc]; his wonderful Cleveland Orchestra performance is available here: Stravinsky: Petrouchka / Le Sacre de printemps (The Rite of Spring) ~ Boulez.] In the 1920s Stravinsky turned to earlier music (Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Pergolesi, Vivaldi and Bach) in order to create a sometimes grotesque hallowing; for example, he both masters and parodies 18th century Baroque style in the Violin Concerto, through allusion, inter-textual quotation, distorted imitation, and joining Baroque conventions with modernist dissonance and explicitly machine-like rhythm. In such acts of travesty, the pastiche of the past supplies an otherwise unavailable sense of unity and centeredness. [Here are YouTube excerpts from Gil Shaham’s performance of the first and third movements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErxgHH2eeFQ&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS0rMOXD5mg&feature=related. Here’s a link to a Stern recording: Stravinsky: Violin Concerto / Rochberg: Violin Concerto / Stern / Previn. There’s also Peter Serkin’s brilliant recording of the piano sonata: Stravinsky: Serenade In A, Sonata / Lieberson: Bagatelles / Wolpe: Pastorale, Form IV ("Broken Sequences"), Four Studies on Basic Rows, IV: Passacaglia.]

Stravinsky’s sense of sometimes grotesquely-achieved centeredness, unity, and objective mastery distinguishes his music from Schoenberg’s intentionally difficult and harmonically uncentered music. The latter presents almost no stabilizing repetitions of consonant harmonies and little sensuous celebration of dance rhythm and melody. Even the decadent dancing around the Golden Calf in Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron is leaden and spikily dissonant. To confront the 'world' of pure dissonance and to avoid any back-sliding into worn-out 'invalid' harmonies, he developed a “serial” scheme of rendering the twelve half-tones of the scale as a means of ordering his atonal music, but it does not diminish the sense of struggling integrity his music conveys as it faces the dissolution of traditional harmony, explores the “chasms in its clichés,” and fiercely opposes music for easy mass consumption. Descended from Sinai and witnessing the Golden Calf, Moses’ final ‘spoken song’ – “O word, thou word, that I lack!” – embodies a “surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked” (in a phrase from Adorno, who elevates Schoenberg music above Stravinsky’s, which he argues tends to promote “the illusion of authenticity and unity”). Much of Schoenberg’s work mourns the modern loss of sacramental human speech and meaning. [Moses’ last utterance is at about the 5 minute point in this YouTube excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kLFz5b13RU&feature=related. And here is a fine recording: Schoenberg - Moses und Aron / Pittman-Jennings · Merritt · Boulez.]

Another example of Schoenberg’s struggling ‘integrity’ is the String Quartet No. 2 (from 1911). The fourth movement (1911) opens with a reduction to the barest elements of the scale, then yields the accompanied song, which constitutes the first completely atonal classical music. This music embodies the difficult autonomy and abstraction which are central characteristics of modernism, as the singer here recounts a traversal of the painful breech between woeful modern reality and the possibility of an alien transcendent joy like that which Rilke and Mallarme evoke: “I feel an air from other planets blowing,” the soprano sings (in Stefan George’s words – sung after the 3 minute point in this excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90cgDmMhh0E.) [There is a great recording by the LaSalle String Quartet available: Schoenberg; Berg; Webern - String Quartets – and also at Amazon is a wonderful Glenn Gould recording of Schoenberg’s piano works, including the opus 25 Suite, Schoenberg’s successful foray into Neo-classicism (and, as explained above, travesty); particularly Gould's performance brilliantly projects a wide expressive range, from the tragic even to the joyous: Schoenberg: Piano Works.]