Literature and Music - session two - Mozart and Beethoven

Rise of the Enlightenment after the Baroque: shared rule of the Bourgeoisie and the Aristocracy. For example, in England, Parliament (including the class of industrialists, business owners, professionals) and Monarchy.

What language can help to unify and streamline communication among these contending parties? The Classical era, partly homophonic music: melodies now within simpler harmonic structures.

Invention of Sonata form: themes in tonic & dominant, midpoint development, recapitulation. Invention of the new Opera as drama opening up conflict between individuals and society.

The new Classical Forms emphasize cohesion and integration of the whole as a communality: coherent, harmoniously ordered, testing and connecting the individual’s relationship to society.

Music – though supported by both the aristocratic court and the owning class – is by its wordless nature freed from the prosaic & didactic, from explicit aristocratic or bourgeois social representation.

Mozart (1756-1791)– Don Giovanni (c 1789)

Overture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemAKvtXL8w

Act 1/15 ‘Fin ch'han dal vino’ (Hvorostovski)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTT2RkrBsAs

 

 

Mozart’s gift is to cast a light of harmonious and beneficent acceptance on all he composes, no matter how dark or disordered.

 

Don Juan as a product of the Renaissance:

Tirso da Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla -the trickster of Seville and the stone statue

-a 1630 quasi-tragedy about the exploits & punishment of a Renaissance libertine.

Moliere’s play of Don Juan (1665) exposed the hypocrisy of the aristocracy.

Don Juan became the subject of a 1680 novel about a picaresque rogue.

Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte drew on many sources for his tragi-comic drama: collision between the vulnerable but finally triumphant “normal” world of couples, family, both aristocratic and middle-class mores about women and money

versus the figure of the unique individual sensibility, which can model and define the emotions and spirits of the community, investing them with new power and energy, inviting others to enter a new life, and yet which like Don Quixote can seem foolish and grotesque: this is the figure of the Romantic Genius, an intense force of energy and imagination, beyond good and evil, yet capable of inspiring.

 

Act 1, #10 Renee Fleming as Donna Anna, prelude to “Or sai chi l’onore”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp8UTemmlq8

At 2:10 – “Silently he approached me and tried to embrace me. I tried to free myself but he seized me all the harder. I screamed, but no one came! With one hand he tried to quiet me, and with the other he seized me so hard that I already thought myself lost….Finally my despair, my horror of the deed so strengthened me that by dint of twisting, turning and bending I freed myself of him.”

 

 

Act 2/2 ‘Ah taci, ingiusto core’ – Donna Elvira (Carlos Alvarez, Anna Antonacci)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IwaqfepCgc

Act 2/14Finale: Commendatore (Samuel Ramey, Kurt Moll)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHSPT6LRDx4

Ending of complete opera (Furtwanger, Salzburg, 1953) at 2:50:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPYjqz7nToY

Requiem – (Peter Schreier - Staatskapelle Dresden)

“Requiem Aeternam” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsyPhvrEzPU

           “Dies Irae” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARO7ZjsXSkE

           “Lacrimosa” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE2muDZksP4

Beethoven  (1770-1827) –

Music focused on developing the basic elements of the classical vocabulary - and also focused on projecting the power of the individual - in large upwelling passages displaying emotional force and zeroing in on play with elemental motifs.

Appassionata sonata – Barenboim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ak_7tTxZrk

Last sonata op. 111 – Trifonov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcFFxvG8pWg&t=6s

Symphony No. 9, finale (1824) – [text 1785: Ode to Joy, by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)]

Anja Harteros, Waltraud Meier, Peter Seiffert, René Pape, National Youth Choir of Great Britain, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim (Royal Albert Hall, July 2012) [7:30-12:00]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChygZLpJDNE&t=2s

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

Revision of "Pathological States" finished 2016-17

I've placed the revised first chapter of "Pathological States" (replacing the original first chapter) in the blog entry for October 4, 2010 (which so far has almost 4000 views). With this new version, the search for an agent is resuming!
Here is a possible cover image:

Here's a synopsis:

“Pathological States” - a novel of about 67,000 words, 238 pages,

by Daniel Melnick; email: danielcmelnick@gmail.com

It is 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and hydrogen bomb testing, of Eichmann’s execution and the Telstar satellite. Dr. Morris Weisberg is a sixty-one year old pathologist, Chief of Laboratory, and a classical music lover and amateur violinist. Medicine is an obsession for him, and a devotion to truth is essential, he feels, in order to keep alive his professional values, which he finds under attack at his hospital.

Both the doctor and his wife, Sarah, are secular, educated Jews; they were born in Europe near the beginning of the twentieth century, and each was brought to America at an early age. Their mutual love of music brought them together in the 1920s, and now in 1962, the two of them are attempting to bear their chalice through the denatured suburbia of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Their worlds of music, family, medicine, and suburban survival are evoked in all their tragicomic intensity and instability.

At home in Northridge, the Weisbergs have raised two sons, and the family’s story is told by each family member in turn. Gene and Albert are now in their twenties and return this year to the suburban household. The young men—one of them is straight, the other gay—act out their needs and resentments, and the suburban household begins to fill with revelations of excess and abuse.

At work, Morris unearths a disastrous instance of unprofessional conduct and a cover-up reaching to the office of the Hospital Director. As the pathologist struggles with his ethical responsibilities and the threat to his career, buried truths erupt both at work and at home. He tries to control his rage and disorientation, only to plummet deeper into depression. The heartbreaking struggle persists in him, though, to affirm his love of science and of music, despite the despair he experiences in sunny California and early sixties America.

By the end of “Pathological States,” Morris Weisberg becomes a moving, larger-than-life Dr. Quixote, both noble and destructive. This eloquent and powerful novel zooms in close to Morris’ tragicomic struggle and pans far out to see what signs of reconciliation and healing endure in his time and place.

Beethoven xv - playing Beethoven

Hypnotic is a word to use about the experience of playing Beethoven for both the performer and the listener. We’re drawn into a world which is self-contained as it works through its expressive possibilities, its rich and nuanced thinking, its emotional tensions and equanimities.

Imagine a piano in a crowded setting, like the communal room of a boarding house. Mute, unplayed, the piano has sat there for the first month of a freshman student’s first semester. (First year students at Berkeley live in a regulated setting – such was the case in 1961 and probably continues to be – in boarding houses, dorms, or Greek houses.) Finally the seventeen-year-old - bewildered and desperate for a piano to play - sits down at the piano, amid the chattering crowd, and he begins playing Beethoven. Conversations do not stop; nothing much changes, except that inside the mind of the young man, there is a nearly hypnotic zeroing-in on the sense of working out the motifs and possibilities of a beautiful structure in sound.

Some people listen to the piano being played by the very young man with bushy red-brown hair, thick horned-rim glasses, and pale green eyes. There is some pleasure in hearing the Beethoven sonata being played amid the cooking smells, the chatter and laughter. The sense of “making music” (or the player's experience of "musica practica") – of an emotional  and intellectual structure being built in ephemeral sound - has its own fascination for the player/hearer.

I remember being that young freshman, though it is hard for me to claim him as myself – he is I and yet also somehow another self. Which says something about the distance in years: I and not I. But it says something as well about music – for it draws from us a sort of double-consciousness: in the moment of living and in the moments of the music at the same time, here and there at once.

I remember also the sonata I played (there were subsequent sonatas played on that piano, once humiliation or death had not descended on the player at the first try). That first work was Beethoven’s opus 22 in B-flat, which is the same key as the great Hammerklavier sonata, composed twenty years later.

Opus 22 is not great, yet by virtue of its greater ordinariness, it offers other pleasures. First, it is a sort of pause before Beethoven’s creation of first the experimental sonatas (some offering slow variations or fantasies like the “Moonlight” in their first movements) and then the immensely powerful works for piano of 1805 – the Waldstein and the tragic Appassionata sonatas.

In contrast, this eleventh sonata looks back on the form of the previous ten and offers a summary and even a teasingly long-winded parody of their basic form: exposition of themes, development, recapitulation, and coda. Long but humorous and clever, the sonata was fine and fun to play, for it superficially did not contain the emotional and intellectual demands of the subsequent works.

Yet opus 22 does contain a sort of bounding energy (this and its length offer slight links to the later B-flat sonata): it contains the essential quality that one senses in Beethoven’s music – that working out of an inner “organic” dynamism. Whether playing or listening, there is the feeling that one is witnessing and subliminally – in the mind – participating with the working out of the structure of an entire world, with all its parts growing finally to cohere in a vision of force and order.

In my next post, I’ll try exploring a few more, related issues about experiencing Beethoven.

Beethoven xiii - Adorno on Beethoven's Appassionata

A source of power in the Appassionata sonata’s first movement is that it keeps unfolding wave upon wave of creative transformation with relentless iterations and variations of its core motifs, so that the sections of the first movement begin to meld together. Each eruption of development becomes part of the creative flux: the differences between motifs are elided (the foreboding and ferocious first theme, for example, finds insistent echoes in the jaunty, striving third theme), and the differences between sections are all subsumed within the unfolding process: the initial statement of themes quickly and inexorably yields their massive development, and the restatement disintegrates into an enormous redevelopment in the coda. Here is a link to Barenboim’s great performance of the movement in 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPR3pkcNbKI.
In Adorno’s Hegel-inflected formulation in Beethoven: Philosophy of Music, the movement maintains a defiant “diversity [which] evens out into unity but keeps diverging from it while the form remains an abstract sheath over the diversity,” a “sheath” comprised of the unity of sonata form. The continually unfolding sequences and motifs become examples of a tragic, subversive “subjectivity veering into wretchedness” (51) with the “individual moments estranged” (13) from the enveloping and enabling bourgeois conventions of sonata form with its false promise of freed and empowered expressiveness. The tragic power of the first movement of the Appassionata is that it transforms what is false and perfunctory into “a terrible beauty” (to use Yeats’ term), so that the eruptive music of the Appassionata sonata unfolds “a total becoming” within the dominating form which it inhabits (46).

Adorno’s earlier statements bear repeating here: “If Beethoven is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer. His work explodes the schema of a complaisant adequacy of music and society” (43). And: “By its power, his successful work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure,” for “that bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamic – this is imprinted in Beethoven’s music,” whose creative process both reproduces and puts to shame (“explodes”) the “esthetic untruth” of bourgeois expressiveness and freedom, which are revealed as a deluded and null in comparison to the power of the music (46).

These formulations locate a paradox in Beethoven’s sonata suggestively reminiscent of a paradox in Dostoyevsky’s novels: in them, a protracted act of confession is expected and exacted from the protagonists, and yet their subversive voicing of the convention of confession is performed in such a way as to cast into question the very nature and substance of the confession. It is an index of their modernity or proto-modernity that the society-sanctioned forms are simultaneously fulfilled and subversively transformed. After Beethoven (or for that matter, after Dostoyevsky), one next step in the history of the arts is modern and postmodern travesty and pastiche.

Adorno offers many specific insights particularly into the Appassionata’s middle, development section in the “dialectical” first movement of the sonata (60). In this section, the sonata hugely expands the development and finally synthesis of the sonata’s two major thematic motifs not only in this middle section but in the coda as well (51-2). These “improvisatory” sections pit the resources of “fantasy” against the rigidity and restraint of sonata form, and they seem “haplessly to desire the suffering” of the confrontation, with its “extra-human” harmonies, their sforzando “minor seconds,” and the hammered chords and demonically driven arpeggios. These effects all place the listener, as it were, in mid-stream, in the midst of extreme turbulence, and instill a continual awareness of the “incompleteness of what has just been formed” – i.e., the open-ended power and shattering freedom of the creative process unfolding before us.

A significant crux for Adorno is the sonata form’s requirement that the original main theme be brought back by the “recapitulation” section after the shattering development. This reprise of the main theme is exposed, he writes, as an act of “crushing repression,” as “a trait of esthetic untruth” implicating bourgeois society’s imposition of and insistence on “the conjuring of static sameness amid total becoming” (44, 46). In the Appassionata, Beethoven refuses that complacent sameness by infusing the recapitulation with instability, continually generating newly energized details and accompanying the reprise with a low-pitched pulse of repeated notes, a constant agitation, quickly leading to the newly massive development of the coda. The sonata in this way exposes “the reprise as a problem,” subverting and upending “the moment of untruth in bourgeois ideology” (16) – and so for “Beethoven, then, the traditional forms are reconstructed out of freedom” (61).

The symphonic equivalent of the Appassionata is the first movement of the Third Symphony, the Eroica, composed just a few years before. For Adorno, the orchestral work’s earlier genesis and its more public “writ-large” gestures of “symphonic mastery” rather streamline the effects of the work. Nevertheless, a tension is once again set up between the “closed symphonic” (sonata) form and the “open” improvisatory organic episodes of “epic” development. There are the harmonic collisions in the Eroica from the opening bars on and the many other intentional irregularities, particularly – once again – in the development and coda sections. The many developments Adorno notes all conspire to reveal the turbulent and even tragic “incompatibility” of those rival, “irreconcilable” conceptions – of the “open” and the “closed,” the improvisatory and the conventional, the “epic” and the “symphonic” (105-6). In Adorno’s Marxist-Hegelian view particularly of hearing such a work in isolation in media remote from the concert hall, the collision of forms in the Eroica confirms “the truth of the unreconciled condition of the individual in bourgeois society” (120) – in part because one exists self-consciously both within and outside the inhabited society [a version of this Hegelian formulation -  stressing the music's ironic Goethean wisdom of simultaneously enacting 'within' and narrating 'outside' - can be found, too, in Scott Burnham’s Beethoven Hero (146)].

In my next post, I’ll attempt to explore Adorno’s rather more detailed and remarkably responsive formulations about late Beethoven and his self-consciousness about convention and innovation.

Beethoven's "Sound World" iii

In the twentieth century, Beethoven has been the subject of a flood of commentary by musicologists, biographers, philosophers, composers, novelists and poets, reviewers and listeners, etc. In the 1950s, I read Donald Francis Tovey’s critically astute and highly informative essays, along with J. W. N. Sullivan’s stormy, impressionistic portrait – followed then in the 60s by Charles Rosen’s books on “the classical style” and finally Maynard Solomon’s biography. Since then, there have been multiple studies, some of them “pathographies,” some of them “new historicist,” and some of them responsive to Theodor Adorno’s analyses of Beethoven from the vantage point of “critical theory.”

In the late 70s, I was strongly influenced by Adorno’s “Introduction to the Sociology of Music,” “Philosophy of New Music,” his studies of Mahler and Wagner, “Minima Moralia,” and “Prisms.” Later, in the 80s and 90s, in the context of a ‘theory group’ in Cleveland, I read his “Dialectic of the Enlightenment,” “Aesthetic Theory,” and “Negative Dialectics.” In the midst of these readings, I wrote, revised, and published my study of modern fiction and the aesthetics of music, Fullness of Dissonance (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994). By the end of the 90s, I had explored much of the panoply of current theories, which in part served to distance me from the movingly agonized logic of Adorno’s tragic vision and thought. Nevertheless, as I here address some features of Beethoven’s music, I realize that my thinking yet resonates with the Frankfurt School’s emphasis – in its thinking about art and discourse generally – on fragmentation and fracture as a means of achieving meaning and on abstraction as a defense against the falsification of meaning. In any case, let me try to suggest how some of this thinking is illuminating when discussing Beethoven and particularly his late works.

I’ll begin with Beethoven’s last piano sonata, opus 111, which I began to try playing when I was sixteen, inspired as I was by an LPs of Egon Petri’s and Arthur Schnabel’s performances; as I mentioned in an earlier post, I took a few lessons a year later from Petri in Oakland in 1961, and playing some of the sonata for him, I was deeply grateful for his revelatory commentary and then his playing of much of the sonata. Even when I was sixteen, I was drawn to the special quality of the Arietta, the second movement with which the sonata ends, to its strange trembling quality, its exploratory sense of open-endedness, of always delaying full resolution of harmony, of always proposing newly varied facets of melody and motifs, and of postponing full disclosure or rounding-off of any gesture.

The theme of the slow movement Arietta exists in the most basic tonic key of C major – for the piano, of course, the “white keys” scale. Yet the theme continually shifts to related keys – to the dominant G, and a destabilizing dominant G tone constantly pulses in the base as the melody hovers around or rather in and out of the tonic C. The theme continually shifts to other related keys, to the subdominant F or to C’s somber “shadow key” of A minor. While the ineffably simple gestures of the theme unfolds, the constantly recurring G and the continual shifts among keys create an ambiguity about where as a listener one can orient oneself. As the Arietta’s variations produce their world of abundant, continually exfoliating forms, the hovering or trembling we hear and feel in the music projects an ambiguous irresolution of effect. The ending of the movement witnesses this serene and fluent trembling, which the listener does not forget even with the soft striking of the final C chord.

That trembling or ambiguity which so moves the listener to opus 111 is linked to the ideas I mentioned before – fragmentation, fracture, and abstraction. Beethoven’s variations continually locate fractured bits of theme as material to explore. As the music strips its C major theme down to its abstract essence, it draws from its primal gestures unstable possibilities in harmony and form, which continually waver between convention and an ambiguous open-endedness. In a sense, Beethoven creates musical beauty by renewing basic conventions with such ambiguity, and the question arises then whether those essential classical conventions can ever be the same, whether the sonata’s evanescent beauty actually lays bare the death of those conventions, even as it endures or transcends them by means of the music’s trembling ambiguity.

The notion that ambiguity is at the core of Beethoven’s late works resonates, at least for me, for my responses constantly explore the questions of what harmony will come next, what melodic leitmotif, or what rhythmic fragment will next lead me into a new experience or music. Beethoven’s greatness results (differently but powerfully even in his “heroic” period) from the momentum of exploration, whether passionate or cerebral; always, it is the exploration and generation of brilliant, beautiful form which leads him on.

Of course, these issues about the embrace of ambiguity and open-endedness in the face of the “death” of classical form point to the “post-classical” or modern quality of Beethoven’s last sonata and of his “late period” generally. This idea is central to Adorno’s thinking about late Beethoven and also to Thomas Mann’s adaptation of Adorno’s thinking in his novel Doctor Faustus. Needless to say, it was an important moment for me when in the sixties I read Mann’s attempt to vivify opus 111 in his Doctor Faustus – with Kretschmar‘s lecture/performance of the piano sonata for Leverkühn and his friends. In reading that early chapter, I could not help hearing Petri’s voice speaking Kretschmar’s sentences. But more important is the complex of ideas and insights which offer a revealing way of perceiving what happens in Beethoven’s music. In my next post, I hope to suggest some of those insights (and note their emergence not simply from my own listening but, more significantly, in Adorno’s thinking, in Mann’s imagination, and in the work of later commentators like Michael Spitzer in his stimulating and helpful academic study, “Music and Philosophy;” reading Spitzer's account of what he terms the Arietta's "flickering" helped to revivify the memories I try to recount above).

Pathological States - a novel - first chapter (novel revised - 2016-7)

I'm glad that now over seven thousand of you have connected to this blog post, and it would be wonderful if any one of you know of, or have contact with, a publisher (or agent) who might be interested in a novel like this one; if so, or in any case, please do leave a comment, perhaps about what draws you to this post, or email me at danielcmelnick@gmail.com.
         PATHOLOGICAL STATES
--a novel in the form of a family memoir

“It is strange. If you talk to the good gentleman about anything that does not touch on his madness, far from talking nonsense, he speaks very rationally and shows a completely clear and calm understanding.”
—Cervantes, Don Quixote

Part One: Phlegmatic 3
i. Jupiter or Neptune 4
ii. Phlegm and Torpor 23
iii. Sandra Perez Weisberg 36
iv. A Sac Within A Sac 48

Part Two: Choleric 57
i. Elsinore 58
ii. A Bilious Brew 74
iii. Albert Weisberg 92
iv. A Sinister Hammering 109

Part Three: Melancholic 119
i. Montecito 120
ii. A Black Mood 135
iii. Gene Weisberg 148
iv. The Chemistry of the Brain 171

Part Four: Sanguine 181
i. Cuba 182
ii. A Bloody Mess 195
iii. Dr. Morris Weisberg 208
iv. Coda 223

Prologue

             The best way to put yourself in a novel, a wise friend once told me, is to leave yourself out. Not only have I removed myself here, but this prologue also leaves out my hero, spry but aging as he is, Dr. Morris Weisberg, pathologist and sometime Chief of Laboratory. Here, instead, you are to meet an antagonist, Dr. Bill Smith, who will appear again later but significantly at the Montecito Veterans Hospital, located on the northern rim of Los Angeles in the desiccated hills some miles from suburban Northridge. Of course, these designations – hero or antagonist – are provisional, even questionable, and you must exercise your inalienable right as reader to revise and even to reverse them. For example, it would be possible to present Dr. Smith as a wielder of knife and scalpel, a slayer of disease, a marbled statue of power and grandeur.

            In the event, however, the surgeon - other than being a drunk - seemed perfectly ordinary: not too short, nor too tall, and not too fat, though with a round face which was sometimes clouded, for his mouth could appear disapproving, and his brown eyes were somewhat assessive behind corrective lenses. On this June morning, dressed in his surgical garb, he wiggled his stiff fingers into latex gloves and felt how recalcitrant they were as he forced them in. Last night had been what he called a long, hard night, but let bygones be bygones, he thought. Smiling and a bit bleary, he strode confidently into the brightly lit surgical theater. He would perform an exploratory, which he invariably enjoyed.

            The poor girl was dying, but now prepped and anaesthetized, she was stretched out on the operating table.

            “Good morning, Dr. Smith,” the nurses said as did the new anesthesiologist, Dr. Maury – he was a handsome man; swarthy was the term. The line of his strong neck led down to broad shoulders and what looked to be a lean, fine physique below. Dr. Maury smiled politely at him, and Dr. Smith immediately turned to look at what was on the menu today.

            The skin of the abdomen was bared before him as he picked up the scalpel with his stiffened fingers. Perhaps he would give her a few months more of life, he thought as he automatically cut through flesh, fat, and muscle. His nurse placed clamps and a drain so no profusion of blood would well in the cavity. At its bottom, there it was, the pancreas riddled with cancer. Searching for spreading metastases in liver and spleen, his rough fingers pushed the pancreas aside.

            The heart monitor began irregularly to beep, and it stopped.

            “Dr. Smith, her heart has…”

            A slight tremor convulsed the body on the table, and Dr. Smith pulled his bloody gloved hands away.

            “Adrenaline. Syringe,” he said as he glanced about, numb and unsteady. Dr. Maury was staring alarmed at him.

            He plunged the needle into the heart. Immediately, he knew it had missed its target, and he lifted, shifted, and plunged it once more into the heart’s chamber.

                                                Part One: Phlegmatic

i

Jupiter or Neptune

2-20-62: John Glenn—riding in Mercury-Atlas capsule—is first American to orbit Earth.

             Imagine we are now giant doctors, the size of Jupiter or perhaps Neptune, and that we had at our disposal the necessary massive instruments for magnification. We would direct them at the Earth, and each of us would peer through our lens at the continental rim of the western United States, where the Pacific surges. There we would behold a rectangular cell, one among many, a hundred feet wide by a hundred-fifty deep, the lot sited forty miles east of the lapping ocean. The wintry clouds would part like receding leukocytes to display a carefully measured suburban nucleus, and we would wonder whether the slight trembling we all observed were due to some pathological disturbance in the California landscape or to the conditions of our gaze, perhaps the imperfection of our device. In any case, before us within that suburban cell on Simshaw Avenue in Southern California, we see the semblance of persons. They are like chromosomal strands of life (are these viruses?), like nucleic acids, yes, a nuclear family within the cell lot. They are the home's inhabitants, but silent: from our electric and celestial distance, we cannot hear the whispers they exchange or the beautiful string sounds vibrating from the curved hollow boxes of wood three of them hold in their hands and a fourth between her legs.

            To hear them, let’s try a new vantage point.

            In our city, there stood a house—oddly ramshackle, yet recently built and surrounded by newly planted trees—a house owned and occupied by the Weisberg family, or rather now only by the doctor and the doctor's wife (the two sons currently residing in France and in a Redondo beach duplex, respectively). In our family’s neighborhood, Dr. Weisberg was especially respected for the fact that he never ventured from his house without a tie, a white shirt, and usually a suit coat to boot. This familiar uniform earned him, he thought, respect at work, though in fact his overly polite manner and rather tensely formal appearance were rebuked by some as peculiarly patronizing and European. It must be said, at the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, that the doctor’s co-workers – particularly his Hospital Director – would soon be the source of a rather dire crisis; in a few months, Dr. Weisberg would dissect the corpse of an otherwise healthy Caucasian female on the autopsy table, only to discover that her surgeon had effectively killed her. Whether the act was inadvertent or not, the result was the same: death. The resourceful pathologist would attempt to confront the crisis in his characteristic manner, at once phobic and quixotic.

            To resume our story, it was winter here in Northridge; hence deciduous trees lacked leaves, garden beds lacked extensive blooms, and the heavens were without their wide sun-white canopy of light. From horizon to horizon, there were high, gray, rainless clouds. It was the evening of February 28, 1962, and music wafted from the Weisberg windows. Yes, there was sound, and it could be heard even by neighbors across the street, faintly but distinctly. Beethoven, yes, it must be, only odd—not the big racing momentum and climaxes of a Napoleon symphony, but the experimental and transcendent coherence of a late work.

            Morris—such was Dr. Weisberg's first name—sat in his living room, with windows open to the sixty-five degree evening stillness, and in his hands he gripped and played a violin with a bow of horsehair and wood. He was the second violinist, playing the lento variations Beethoven had composed one hundred thirty six years earlier, in the epochal year of 1826. With gratitude and wonder, Morris played his part in the grave flow of sound, transcendent though imperfect in this performance. To his right, the first violin was played by Michael Kramer; then, kitty-corner from Morris—a tall two hundred watt lamp centrally placed between them—sat Joan Ruggles, the blonde violist with her one eye, the other glass. To Morris's left sat a burly cellist with large hands, Edith Lowenstein. The music, quite slow, quietly sang. Its perfectly balanced melody was a sort of hymn, and this hymning core was steadily present throughout the movement, always underpinning each variation, no matter how desperate, broken, reduced to only the fewest two or three tones or, as now, elevated to the heights where the hymn's vaulted grandeur was rung round with ecstatic wreaths of soprano sound, where Michael Kramer's high violin tones lived a separate, inspired life while just below, Morris's second violin played a sort of lullaby, a companionable hum, which quieted as the movement drew to its close.

            There was silence, respectful, punctuated by Edith’s coughing into her large hands and Michael’s turning a tuning peg to sharpen his E.

            Then the stark, mysterious introduction to the last movement of Beethoven's last quartet (the sixteenth, written a few months before his death from massive liver failure). The strings played in unison, asking the question Beethoven had penned above the notes:

            Must it be?

            It must be! So answered everyone, as the movement's main melody flew out in fine form. Episode after episode, affirming or questioning, anxious or insouciant, were all punctuated by the recurrent phrase: It must be (and each time, among the listeners, someone's hand gave three supportive slaps to a chairarm). Always the quartet's happysad, sadhappy voice declared that life, even amid death, keeps leaping forth, keeps on rolling and rollicking, life and love, yes, love despite everything: It must be.

            “Beau-tee-ful, just beautiful,” Daisy Kramer said, from the couch, a smile full of teeth blossoming in her face. (Morris saw that his Sandra sat nowhere in the room; where was she?)

            “Hear, hear,” Dr. Lowenstein said from an armchair, next to Daisy; he sounded as if he were a backbencher encouraging a fellow dissenter. It had been Max Lowenstein's hand which rapped his chairarm in time to each it must be.

            Morris Weisberg, his violin and bow carefully balanced on his lap, laced his fingers together it seemed in prayer. “Wonderful music,” he said to Michael Kramer, who smiled back at the doctor's wide eyes gazing from hooded brows and a long, thin, wondering and appreciative face. Before they'd begun, Morris had reached to hold Michael's left hand, and clinically but gently he traced the lines of bone and sinew, saying to the first violinist: “It amazes me, such extraordinary small muscle development.”

            Now Morris's own less amazing yet serviceable hands were woven together in what looked like prayer. Each month Michael Kramer (a gifted professional violinist, and a knight among chamber players) found time to play with this group of amateurs, Dr. Weisberg's friends Joan Ruggles (violist tonight and accountant by day) and Edith Lowenstein (Mrs. Dr. Max Lowenstein in life, cellist in art) and last but not least Dr. Morris Weisberg himself (pathologist and chief of laboratory in life, otherwise second fiddle).

            Edith Lowenstein, a big athletic woman, leaned to lay down her cello and then rose to stretch. “That was quite a workout,” she said to all and sundry. “Soon you'll be competing with Isaac Stern,” she directed her joke to Kramer, who raised his eyebrows. Forty year old Kramer, who had been a concertmaster of the Columbia Symphony for Bruno Walter's magnificent recordings of 1959-61, who had sat in with the Budapest String Quartet on their South American tour (trying out for second fiddle to replace Gorodetsky), who only played with these amateurs out of love for Morris Weisberg—yes, this Kramer was being mocked by Edith, the cellist.

            Morris sensed some distress, and he awoke from his vague meditation. “Dear Edith, there should be no competition in such matters. Let's just be grateful such music exists.”

            “I'm grateful, Morris; it's just that I think my friend Isaac better watch his backside.” Edith had been a family friend of the Sterns, when she lived in San Francisco and Isaac was then a teenager taking lessons from Nathan Blinder. “Michael is catching up!”

            “It's not a race,” Michael said.

            “Dear Edith, listen to me, you mustn't,” Morris said. “You mustn't speak of competing. What we played is transcendent music, pure and simple.”

            “Okay, okay,” she said, and turned with a big smile to Joan Ruggles, slight and blond. “Are you feeling transcendent this evening, Joan?”

            “Oh yes, my dear,” Joan said, lowering her voice to Morris's pitch and emphasis. “I'm feeling positively transcendent.” Her face seemed oddly divided, the glass eye immobile on the left, the living right eye animated with laughter, a flashing blue orb.

            “You do look radiant tonight,” Morris said, smiling his compliment to Joan, and the two women burst into laughter.

            Joan Ruggles, her functioning eye beginning to tear from laughing, thought back for a moment to a night of drunken stupor after her divorce, when she walked into the metal edge of her upper kitchen cabinet door, carelessly left open. Sudden blinding pain, blood on her face, her stomach churning to the brim, her lungs suffocating, hysteria in her heart, confusion in her brain. Only Morris's phone number came to mind. “Morris,” she had screamed into the line, “help me, help me.” And he had told her what to do, directing her, reassuring her, hanging up to dial an ambulance, meeting her at the hospital forty minutes away to the southeast corner of the Valley. Now she laughed, with a sort of glee that he had helped and that, more or rather less intact but sober now, she lived on to tease him this evening.

            “Oh yes, Morris,” she said, irony in her voice, “I'm positively radiant!” She unwittingly gestured with the hand holding her viola bow to the left side of her face. Then she laid her bow by the viola in its case and walked with the other musicians and listeners out of the living room, through the central hall to the dining room, and up to a table filled with abundant appetizers, drinks, and desserts.

            Morris stayed behind. Putting his violin and bow in the case at his feet by his chair, he got up and felt a bit light-headed, though only for a moment. He walked around the circle of stands, retrieving the sheet music on them. Carefully he put the four parts of Beethoven's last quartet—It Must Be, opus 135 in F major—into its outer sheaf. The fine smell of the paper, decades old, was in his nostrils. The ream of music had a heft and thickness in his hand, with the tens of thousands of coded notes scattered like stars through the myriad sheets: it was another dimension into which they had stepped for half an hour. Sheaf in hand, he moved toward the wooden shelves built into the wall at the end of the room, and he suddenly found he could not slow his pace. The room began to tilt. His shoulder bounced against the wooden shelves, and his free hand grabbed one to right himself. For several seconds, he stood absolutely still. His body had of its own animal volition plunged forward; of course, the body had its own surfaces and depths, and this symptom may have been associated with a deeper condition, perhaps the sporadic cough besetting him lately. The vertigo subsided. Though his shoulder ached a bit, he felt he was back to normal, and he placed the sheaf he held of music on the shelf at the end of the row of Beethoven quartets.

            Manuscripts had been on Morris's mind all day, for he was facing the fact that he had not yet completed his magnum opus, had not even truly begun, and yet for what did he live? To discover something of value, to make a difference for future understanding, to leave behind his contribution. How old was Dr. Jaffe, his finest professor when he was chief Pathology resident at Cook County General in Chicago, when he died—forty-nine? And here Morris was, already sixty! Suddenly he recalled the first time he had observed Dr. Jaffe conduct an autopsy, or perhaps it was the first time he observed an autopsy forty years ago. At the base of the amphitheater, a corpse was stretched under the sheet. The professor pulled back the covering and began to speak a litany of description. The features of the naked man were noted with an attentive eye to every detail of size and surface: the skin—mottled or pallid, taught or slack—and the external organs, from the bald pate to the drooping genitals to the swollen, calloused feet. Another cloth was pulled back to unveil several, carefully enumerated instruments: the seven-inch knife, the vibratory saw, the scalpels and scissors, the forceps and chisel, the pump and hose, the basins and gloves. The doctor held up the knife and inserted it into the man, slitting him open from chest through belly to just above the pubic hair and then from nipple to nipple. The peeling layers of skin and fat were exposed, and liquid seeped out and into the table drain. All the while, with breathtaking care and precision, the professor narrated what he did.

            Now Morris had become the professor and the Chief of Laboratory, and he had done so many autopsies, he had not realized how many he would perform. A new job offer—not to be Laboratory Chief, but Head of Research in Pathology—had come from the U.S. government research installation at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. So last August he and Sandra had taken a long, leisurely trip, driving across the country to visit friends, old haunts, and finally to interview at Oak Ridge. If truth be told, his current position did not altogether please him (and particularly his smarmy and politic Hospital Director); he had let it be known in certain circles that he was open to an alternative. The call had issued—rather late in his career—from the Institute for Nuclear Studies and, amassed behind it, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the combined forces of American Intelligence—for the FBI had even given him a security clearance for Oak Ridge (despite fifteen years ago at the dawn of the McCarthy era, his having with some trepidation signed Linus Pauling's Stockholm petition, opposing the use, testing, and proliferation of nuclear weapons). The official written offer had been delivered by courier; with the letter had come a document which had disturbed him: the Oak Ridge Report on Acute Radiation Syndrome in American Nuclear Accidents—from the Manhattan Project to the Y-12 accident a few years ago. For Morris's eyes only. He had needed time to make up his mind, however, more than time.

Last August, when he toured the round-domed research facility with its sealed insularity, he had realized irrevocably that he was a clinical pathologist and not only an academic researcher; he could never relinquish his daily confrontation with death, the histological diagnosis of the body’s struggle against it, and the autopsy’s revelation of its causes. As well, he had been repulsed by the monomaniacal faith in technology on the part of the Oak Ridge Director with his team of scientists: as if studying the cellular effects of acute radiation poisoning was merely a step toward perfecting the technology rather than the study and exposure of the nuclear horror, of skin burned and peeling off the body, roasted flesh falling from the bone, an eternity of birth defects and mutant genes. It was that same blind faith in technology—whether to create or destroy—which Morris saw at work in so much of his society: as if weaponry alone could prevail against Cuba, or in the skirmishes lately in Vietnam, or in the confrontation at the new Berlin Wall, with each side's nuclear missiles bristling just miles or it seemed yards from each other; most recently, there was the criminal stupidity of the atmospheric nuclear testing, one just a month ago—a 50 megaton H bomb in Russia, answering a similar test in the U.S. It was not merely the billion pound explosive force, but the radiation loosed lethally into air by the fools.

            That August, Morris refused the call from Oak Ridge. Afterwards, he and Sandra had driven north from Tennessee to visit their Cleveland friends—Julius Weinstein, the fine cellist, and his effervescent wife, Sophie, and their son, Jack (who was so much like the Weisbergs' sons, sullen, with Elvis sideburns and music of all types blaring from his bedroom record player).

            Then, driving toward Chicago on the trip home, they stopped for lunch in Toledo, a big dusty town on Lake Erie's western rim; after lunch, Morris had wandered down the main street into a nearby used book shop specializing in medical texts, and there on a backroom shelf he had found the title “Pathological Conferences” by R. B. Jaffe, M.D. Morris's breathing stopped at the sight of the words and then the photo on page one: the bald, intent, plump, brilliant face of his teacher, Robert Benjamin (yes, Benjamin, Morris’s father's name) Jaffe, 1888-1937. Gulping for breath, he leafed through the browning pages. Starting on page 1074 and thereafter for the final hundred pages, the dialogue of each Thursday afternoon in 1937 was reproduced between himself—Dr. Morris Weisberg, Chief Resident in Pathology—and Dr. R. B. Jaffe, Director of Laboratories at Cook County Hospital. First came a page of Morris's account of the initial facts for each case (“this patient came to a sudden and dramatic end by a profuse hemoptysis; she was nineteen year old girl who...”) and then Dr. Jaffe's magisterial report of the autopsy findings (“the patient was a well-nourished and well-built woman from whose mouth and nose much blood was exuding; the left pleural cavity was completely obliterated by...”). The last conference had taken place on December 16th (my god, it had been Beethoven's birthday). The eminent clinician had conducted his usual revelation and on the 17th had dropped dead of a cardiac infarction. Morris was not allowed to assist at the autopsy: no students had been given leave to gut and saw their teacher's corpse.

            Morris bought the aging volume in Toledo, and over these last six months had re-read the book for evidence of the voice he had and the life he had led in the thirties in Chicago, for clues as to why in the ensuing years no hefty volume—say, a histological study of cancer—had emerged from his pen; all his thoughts (stray, illuminating, furtive, penetrating), why had he not collected them into a sustained discourse?

            Manuscripts—both existent and non-existent—were on Morris's mind, then, as he shelved Beethoven's opus 135 between the opus 133 Grosse Fuge and Schubert's a-minor quartet.

            “Where are you keeping yourself!” Sandra Weisberg said from the entrance to the living room.

            “Where have you been, Sandra?” Morris asked in response. He looked up from the shelf of chamber music, and there she was, walking toward him and still wearing the dress he had objected to before their guests arrived. He had been instinctively repelled by its pattern. The enemy had manifested itself in a woolen shroud obscuring his wife's body: from out of a blueblack ground of Azocarmine dye signaled the bright Tetrazolium blue blots of squamous cell carcinoma, each with giant tentacled arms revolving around a dense blue nucleus. The cancer enveloped Sandra, covering her breasts, her stomach, her precious thighs. “Remove that dress at once, Sandra. You must not wear it.” And he had even reached to her back and begun to fumble with her zipper, urgently attacking the problem. She had wrested herself away. “Why? Why must I change my dress?”

            “Morris, your guests are missing you. Come have a bite to eat; please, come,” Sandra said to him now. With her fine, light brown hair (the gray magically gone), her smooth, plump, olive skin, and her short ample Mediterranean body, she smiled at him and gestured for him to come join the group.

            “Yes, dear,” he said placidly and followed. She had been right about the knit dress of merino lamb's wool. What had possessed him? He had mistaken its print for a cancer's stained microscopic image. Yes, it was merely a wool dress, and the print was in fact a beautiful, abstract, flowing, floating pattern, like beautiful blue windmills cartwheeling on a dark horizon.

            Morris followed her across the wide, modern, glass-roofed central hall, which opened to the living room, the hallway to bedrooms, the front door, the glass door to the backyard, and the noisy dining room, which he entered. Everyone talked as if in a fever, the voices over-loud, happy and serious, teasing and earnest. Everyone felt heightened by the proximity of the music played in the immediate past and to be played in the near future.

Sandra watched her husband move to the laden table and fix himself a small plate of creamy clam dip and an open-faced rye bread sandwich of buttery chicken liver. His metabolism was phenomenal, his cholesterol fine, his head of black hair still full and shiny as a twenty year old's. He was a prince of health, her wiry husband. Though she had noticed a slight dry cough lately; also, his light Ashkenazi skin was especially pale. “A natural,” he would call her, “a brilliantly intuitive diagnostician: Mrs. Dr. Weisberg.” Her brilliant prince, rugged in stamina, maniacal in metabolism, could her prince be ill? Of course, there had been no sign of slack at dinner, when he practically ripped her dress from her body. “Why? Why must I change my dress?” she pleaded. “You have no understanding of these matters, Sandra,” he had said coldly; “it's a medical concern.” Finally she realized what his concern was, and she cried out: “Who is your wife? Medicine is! No, not your wife. She is your mistress.” He had winced at that. “Your mistress, yes, and must I, your wife, always take orders from your mistress!” In silence, they had sat down to have a snack of cold roast beef; as usual, he had refused to carve the slab of peppery meat, so kin was it to flesh. As they ate, he had mumbled across the kitchen table where they sat: “I think there's a severe case of the meanies going around this house.”

            “I feel sorry for Van Doren,” Edith Lowenstein was speaking to Sandra, who had not realized it.

            “Father or son?” Sandra asked.

            “Why, the son, of course. To grow up with such pressure from a hoity-toity father. Who could live up to the expectations of a Mark Van Doren! Poor Charles, and then to be offered the blandishments of the Sixty Four Thousand Dollar Question.”

            “Blandishments, shlamdishments,” Daisy Kramer interrupted, her bright and generous set of teeth decorated with crumbs from the brownie she ate—it's delicious, she'd said, brimming. “I feel sorry for the father. For a fine man like that to have a son convicted of such deceit and now going to prison...”

            Sandra looked from one woman to the other, smiling her assent to each, divided in sympathy between Mark and Charles. Yes, thievery had occurred, and deceit. Of course, fakery and deception were what television was all about, according to Morris. He disapproved when she watched any of it, even the news, let alone The Sixty Four Thousand Dollar Question. But who were these people anyway, the MC, the television producers, that young light bulb, and the old ivy-league professor? Everyone was maintaining such an image. Where was reality?

            “It all seems so unreal,” she said. “Let's judge gently—both the father and the son. Because it's a question, what is just in this situation, don't you think, Edith?”

            “I should say so. After all, that kind of money...” she went on, and Sandra thought of how kind Edith had been to them over the years, in her rough and tumble way. They met her through Sandra's sister, Teresa, who had been Edith's violinist friend during her San Francisco years. Poor Teresa, living alone now in her apartment far out on Clement toward the Pacific. Sandra must visit her soon.

            “I have something I want to give you,” Michael Kramer said to Morris.

            “You do?” the doctor said, staring expectantly at the violinist, twenty years his junior. “I should give you gifts, not you me. I'm so grateful you play with us.”

            Michael—balding and heavy, wearing a bulky brown sweater, scuffed shoes, and carefully pressed black pants—handed Morris a flat cardboard record album. The words Walter and Brahms' Second were emblazoned in red and white over silver.

            “I told you about those sessions in '59.”

            “Of course. You played a tape of it for me, on your reel to reel—three years ago, yet hearing your solo on the Adagio, it's like yesterday. Your phrasing, perfect, like breathing. Remind me again how Walter chose you to be concert master.”

            “There was a competition; it was me or Israel Baker,” Michael said, smiling, with a glint of pride in his eyes, mouth, voice. “Like a tournament,” he explained, as if he were a son reporting what he accomplished to a father. Yes, like a son, Morris thought, and a pang of feeling jolted him, inside, pleasure and pain combined. Albert, his true son, had also played the violin and possessed a gift of tone miraculously like Michael's, a beauty of sound completely independent of any hollow of wood his hands held. But Albert, with his wondrous potential, had stopped playing in college, and on his twenty-first birthday last May, he had sold his violin at an incredible loss, the Amati copy Morris had bought him when he was seventeen. With the money, Albert had sailed on the Queen Mary to Europe. Such distress Morris had felt, and there was more to come, though at the moment the doctor could not foresee that both Albert and Gene would be returning home and that filial rage and resentment, pain and breakdown, would soon descend.

            Morris coughed now. He felt a bit feverish, and there was an amorphous, intermittent pain not in his shoulder but in his chest, just a slight ache but worth examining in greater detail.

            “You know, Michael, I think I need a bit of fresh air,” he said, and the violinist looked concerned. “It's nothing. Nothing to worry about,” Morris said in a chipper voice, ruling out any seriousness of ills or distemper.

            Perhaps the trouble was having children later in life. Both of his sons seemed unhappy, though both were physically sound (despite Gene's asthma and Albert's tendency toward obesity, sinusitis, and nose-bleeds). Gene, his elder son, was given occasionally to sudden rages, and whenever he visited an onslaught was always possible. Even as a child, stubbornness and tantrums had erupted in him. All the same, though, he was not as troubled as Albert—or as gifted. Certainly not dull, only a little literal-minded, Gene was a photographer for the record industry, with pretensions to artistic expression. A few years ago, he had gotten married—when he was twenty-two: too young. (Morris himself had waited until he was almost thirty and already a resident in Pathology.) What a beauty Gene’s wife was, though. Deborah of the dark and flowing hair, perceptive and polite, sharper than Gene, and the true breadwinner, as far as Morris could tell; she worked as a pastry chef at a restaurant in Westwood.

Of course, Gene had posed problems from birth. The baby’s body was immensely vulnerable to disease, and the possibility of his death threatened Morris, looming over him, an unspeakable enormity. Their tiny first-born son absorbed Sandra’s attention, even to a fault, and it brought his demanding mother-in-law into their apartment. So the infant’s arrival had been an alarming disruption to the family, though Morris had of course kept himself under control. The latest child-rearing orthodoxy was based on Watsonian Behaviorism, and intelligent parents were placing their babies in Skinner Boxes. The Weisbergs followed suit, and it was a godsend, isolating the infant from contamination and releasing the mother from the drain on her energies.

Morris had sometimes caught Sandra disobeying the Box rules and removing Gene from the crib outside of the feeding schedule. A sense of rage had arisen in him, almost blind outrage – but at what? At his wife’s violations of the Skinner protocols: it was intolerably naïve of her and oblivious to the harm done by excessive holding of the infant. What was even more galling was her absorption in the moods and needs of this newborn protoplasm. He insisted that the behavior cease. Such was the purpose of the lectures he was compelled to give his otherwise fine and pliant wife. Of course, now, there were new child-rearing orthodoxies, which oddly shifted over the decades and even censured what was gospel in the thirties. Lately Morris had wondered whether Gene’s asthma, a disease of often psychogenic origin, stemmed from those early supposed deprivations, and there was Gene’s temperamental spirit, developing later and potentially so destructive, so in need of regulation and control. But on reflection, these idle speculations seemed of no import.

“How are you doing?” Dr. Max Lowenstein grabbed his host's arm. Morris had begun walking through the central hallway. He coughed slightly and flinched a bit: the amorphous pain returned and again vanished.

            “You'd better watch that cough, Morris,” the ophthalmologist advised the pathologist.

            “Oh, it's nothing, Max. I'm taking care of it.”

            “You know the adage, the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.”

            Morris attempted to restrain another cough, and his right hand unwittingly reached to his chest to soothe the fleeting pain. Max noticed the gesture, and the two men peered at each other, each through thick glasses to correct myopia. With a glint in his eye, Max said, “Lungs are precious, Morris, and you know we only have two.” Brimming with laughter, he reached his hand to hold Morris's arm, to keep himself from guffawing at his own bon mot.

            “And the new technology of pulmonary study! Way beyond mere x-rays: it's amazing,” Max said. “But who am I to tell you about what they can do today? This new generation, Morris, it's pushing the limits of science.”

            “That’s true, Max,” Morris said in a mild, detached voice. “Of course, before antiseptics and antibiotics, doctors killed more patients than they saved. Now, to be a good doctor, one should implicitly be a good scientist too.”

            “And a good businessman, as well,” Max said. “Nowadays, you have to be aware of market factors, or you won't survive. Today, doctors must be merchants,” Max concluded and rapped his hand twice on Morris's arm at the syllables “must be,” just as he had rapped his chairarm as he listened to each “it must be” earlier.

            “You mustn't say that, Max,” Morris answered, straightening himself to his full sixty eight inches, extricating his arm from Max and interlacing the fingers of his hands now in front of his chest as he spoke. “Doctors must not be mercenary.”

            “Did I say mercenary?”

            “Medicine must be unaffected by concerns of social privilege or the mercantile world,” Morris said and then began to lecture his colleague and friend on the primacy of truth-telling from the beginnings of their profession.

            “Right, right, Morris. Just as I said in the first place,” Max interrupted with ironic and forced bonhomie toward his difficult, relentlessly serious colleague. Morris felt suddenly how much the cellist's husband was patronizing him. “The pursuit of scientific truth knows no limits now,” Max continued. “It's the golden age of technology, Morris. Look at that astronaut last week. Far out in space, he orbits the earth, more than once! Glenn—he must be one of your heroes.”

            “Max, you mustn’t,” he replied, leaving vague what Max must not do. “This is no golden age; it's an age of technocrats. What do they know of a lifetime dedicated to serving truth and opposing death? What do they know of honesty, of ethics? Just now the tests of H bombs in the atmosphere. The nuclear radiation released will blight the growth of unborn fetuses, the bones of growing children, the bodies of the aging. Those bomb blasts are butchery! And did you read the propaganda generated by the servants of technology, the cover-up from the mouths of paid-off doctors and technicians? Science is irresponsible today.” Morris's voice was icy and detached.

            He began edging toward the central hall, his eyes on the sliding glass door in back. He was not feeling well and needed fresh air and the canopy of cloudy sky.

            “What are you, Morris, a god, some Jupiter or Neptune gazing down at us from on high!” Max loosed mocking laughter at his startled host; Daisy Kramer heard and took a concerned, protective step toward the two doctors. “You judge all of science, looking down at us dwarfish minuscule beings through your superior microscope!”

            Morris turned and smiled palely to his guest, who seemed to be snickering. “I hope I don't put on airs, Max; does it seem so?” Morris said, stopped now in his tracks and again tightly interlacing his fingers, as if to keep his hands from flying into the air between them. “I am no Neptune, and I don't set myself up as particularly wise, Max. I'm a flawed, imperfect person. All I want is that doctors remember the values of our profession. What a mistake to forget the joy and glory of simply opening your eyes and speaking what you see. Truth-telling, Max—though I agree it's not an easy task.”

            Max's eyes no longer narrowed into a glint of mockery and irritation, and he was once again pleasant and avuncular. “For sure it's a tall order,” he said. “I share that creed with you. I know it by heart; it's our liberal faith in freedom of perception, expression...whatever. But, Morris, who actually wins and loses in the history of medicine—from the time of Bichat and Hunter, Rokitansky and Virchow, into perpetuity? It's the go-getters, Morris!” Max mentioned Art Kornberg's Nobel prize three years ago, awarded for the discovery of an enzyme which copies the gene's nucleic acids, so that growth can occur; unfortunately, the enzyme Art discovered was not the one which helped life to thrive or be at all. “Tell me, Morris, he's your colleague: did he give back the money? No. Did he delay progress? Yes. But did he intend to obstruct it? Of course not. He was doing what comes naturally: he's a go-getter!”

            “I need some fresh air, Max. I think I'll just step outside. Would you tell Edith I'll sit this next one out. I know she wants to play the Mozart String Trio. Tell your wife, it's on the shelf, would you?”

            “Are you okay, Morris? Let me help you,” Max asked with pleasant kindness as Morris walked into the central hall and began to slide open the door to the California evening.

            "No, no, it’s nothing! Tell Edith about the Mozart. Now's her chance to make some glorious music."