@Anna’s

Haydn: Symphony No. 82, The Bear

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:28:12 +0000

When Franz Josef Haydn received a letter from Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, inviting him to write six symphonies for the orchestra Bologne conducted in Paris, the offer must have seemed like a dispatch from a different planet.

Although Haydn’s music was popular, Haydn himself was in a position of relative isolation. From 1760 to 1790 he lived at Eszterháza, a 126-room Rococo palace built by the Hungarian Esterházy family. Although Haydn was well paid and led a comfortable existence, Eszterháza was nevertheless a remote country estate, built on a swamp that was never intended to support a building, with little access to the musical society of the cities. Visits to Vienna threw into sharp relief what he was missing. After one such visit, he wrote to his host in the city upon his return to Eszterháza: “Well, here I sit in my wilderness; forsaken, like some poor orphan, almost without human society, melancholy, dwelling on the memory of past glorious days…I do not know whether I am kapellmeister or kapellservant…Here in Eszterháza no-one asks me, ‘Would you like chocolate with or without milk? Will you take coffee with or without cream? What can I offer you, my good Haydn? Will you have vanilla ice or strawberry?’”

Perhaps it is a tad melodramatic to interpret a paucity of choice in desserts as evidence of Haydn’s status as a “poor, forsaken orphan.” But it is true that his orchestra was small, his movements and social circle limited, and his life wholly under the control of the Esterházys.

The musical life of Paris could not have been farther away from Haydn’s sparse, isolated life. Haydn’s invitation was to write for an orchestra called Le__s Concert__s de la loge Olympique, a group operated by a Parisian Masonic Lodge. Freemasonry was all the rage in the mid-1780s; Mozart had joined, and Haydn briefly did as well, though he seems to have lost interest fairly quickly.

The Loge Olympique de la Parfaite Estime had what was quite possibly the largest and most opulent orchestra in the world. It contained an astonishing sixty-five musicians (Haydn had twenty-five at the most at home), who performed in elaborate blue ruffled coats while wearing swords. Their maestro, Bologne, was the son of a French plantation owner in Guadeloupe and an African woman forced to serve as maid to his father’s wife. Despite the racial discrimination he faced socially and that prevented him from inheriting his father’s titles, Bologne was not just the conductor of the city’s most prestigious orchestra, a prolific composer and a virtuoso violinist; he was also a champion fencer of such fame that the Parisian public was initially astonished, upon his first appearance in an orchestra, to learn he could also play the violin. His orchestra contained many members who were successful composers in their own right, such as the flutist François Devienne and violinist Giuseppe Cambini, and a mix of amateur and professional musicians– this being long before the term “amateur” acquired the sheen of insult that it possesses today, so the amateur contingent meant the orchestra contained prominent citizens of every sort. In short, the Loge Olympique orchestra was exciting and cosmopolitan in precisely the way that Eszterháza was not.

Their sponsor, Masonic Grandmaster Count D’Ogny, founded the orchestra at the age of twenty-six, and was smart enough to recognize he should let the more experienced Bologne handle the details; it was thus the conductor who wrote to Haydn and offered him 25 louis d’or for each of the six symphonies, plus five more each for the publication rights, an extremely generous price. Although Haydn simply sent the symphonies over from Eszterháza and never witnessed his rapturous reception in Paris for himself, they bear out Haydn’s more philosophical assessment of is isolation, that at Eszterháza he was “forced to become original.” The “Bear” is the last written of the set, though numbered as the first; its nickname refers not to a specific bear but to the tradition of dancing bears accompanied by bagpipes as street entertainment, a sonority imitated in the final movement.

Schubert: Octet in F major

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:25:25 +0000

Youth is a turbulent time; and Franz Schubert, who died at the age of 31, spent most of his short time on Earth in its grasp. His relationship with Ludwig van Beethoven, or rather the idea of Beethoven, is a prime example. At seventeen, he sold his schoolbooks (and presumably suffered the consequences of their absence) to attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, and wrote in his diary that he enjoyed playing Beethoven’s variations for his own enjoyment in his downtime. Only a few years later, however, he raged against Beethoven for “eccentricity which joins and confuses the tragic and the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, heroism with howlings, and the holiest with harlequinades, without distinction.” Not only that, but his blame took on a moral angle: Beethoven’s music, Schubert said, served to “goad people to madness instead of dissolving them in love, to incite them to laughter instead of lifting them up to God.” When his teacher gave him the autograph manuscript of one of Beethoven’s songs, he studied and copied it out, but also doodled in the margins and then dismembered it and gave only half of it away.

Six years later, however, he had done another about-face: Schubert published a piano work with the dedication,“To Ludwig van Beethoven by his Worshipper and Admirer Franz Schubert.” The shift in mood may have had more to do with confidence than musical taste: instead of viewing Beethoven as an untouchable behemoth whose pedestal could never be climbed up but only cut down to size, he was beginning to appear as a forebear. Beethoven and Schubert had some important friends in common, including the brothers Anselm and Josef Hüttenbrenner; Anselm is known for having visited Beethoven on his deathbed, to which the dying man responded with “I am not worthy of your visiting me,” and for preserving the lock of his hair at the moment of Beethoven’s death that is still on display in Graz. His brother Josef wrote to his publisher about Schubert around this time that “in short, and without exaggeration, we may speak of a ‘second Beethoven.’ Indeed that immortal man says of him: ‘This one will surpass me.’” No wonder Schubert could afford to reveal his veneration.

He soon had an opportunity to display it publicly. Count Ferdinand Troyer, an accomplished clarinetist who worked as steward to Beethoven’s patron Archduke Rudolf of Austria, asked Schubert for a companion to Beethoven’s Septet, which had been an immediate and enduring hit twenty years earlier. What Schubert produced was the kind of work that is commonplace in literature, but rare in music, especially so long before the advent of postmodernism and its ethos of transformation and borrowing: a work that is intentionally derivative of a previous work, but made stronger, not weaker, by its associations to an original. Schubert added one violin to Beethoven’s ensemble, but kept the same six movements, structure, and even tonal relationships of the septet. More than that, he kept the very thing that he had raged against in his teenage diary: the joining of the tragic and the comic into a work of nearly symphonic scope. Perhaps for the younger composer, that would have been a failure; but for the Schubert of the Octet, it was an inevitability. “When I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain,” Schubert wrote. “And when I tried to sing of sorrow, it turned to love.”

Giuseppe Tartini: Sonata in G minor, Didone abbandonata

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:23:35 +0000

Giuseppi Tartini was, to put it lightly, a curious character. He was born in 1692 in Pirano, then a part of the Venetian Republic, now in Slovenia. Although as a younger son he was placed on an educational path leading to a career in the clergy, he went to law school instead, took up fencing and playing the violin, and finally burned all his bridges with the local Church when at eighteen he secretly married Elizabetta Premazore, the niece of the Paduan Bishop. When the illicit marriage was discovered, the Bishop charged him with abduction. Far from abducting her, Tartini then did the opposite: abandoned her, escaping arrest only by disguising himself as a pilgrim and slipping out of the city to take refuge with – ironically – Franciscan monks in Assisi. But he wasn’t even safe there: although his performances in the monastery took place behind a curtain, presumably the better for worshippers to focus on the spirituality of the music and not its showmanship, the curtain blew aside on a day when visitors from Padua were there. They recognized him, but he had become so serious and exceptional on the violin that his achievement led to his reconciliation with the Bishop, and he was reunited with his wife; they moved to Venice together, where he studied with and eventually surpassed the existing master of the violin world, Francesco Veracini.

Although he managed to settle down somewhat and stop creating problems he needed to run away from, the wildness of his youth translated into a wide-ranging Enlightenment sensibility of the interconnectedness of various forms of art, and of the arts with science and rationality. His violin school became well-known both for its exclusiveness (he usually had fewer than ten students at a time, saying that even four or five made him feel like “the most worried man in the world”) and his systematic approach to the instrument. He did important studies in the field of acoustics; it was Tartini who first noticed and named what we today refer to as the “overtone” of a chord, the shimmering extra note perceptible only when the notes of a chord are in tune. He collected a large library of philosophy, religion and mathematics, and wrote prolifically: 130 of his violin concertos survive, a similar number of violin sonatas, and forty trio sonatas.

Unsurprisingly given his flair for the dramatic and wide education, Tartini frequently gave his solo sonatas titles that suggest story without being explicitly programmatic. Didone abbandonata is one such sonata; the title, “Dido abandoned,” refers to the legendary Carthaginian queen popularized in the Roman world by Virgil’s Aeneid, but originally a Phoenician founding symbol named Elissa. In the Phoenician tradition, Elissa died dramatically when she stabbed herself on top of a sacrificial pyre in order to avoid marrying a neighbouring Libyan king who was threatening war. The Aeneid, written after Rome’s total destruction of Carthage and in a political milieu where mythological justification for the supposedly ancient enmity between Rome and Carthage was likely to be well-received, transformed the story into a doomed love tale between Dido and the Trojan Aeneas, on his way from defeated Troy to found Rome. The version where the Queen kills herself for the sake of a man, instead of for the sake of avoiding one, was the one that stuck around in popular culture. Although Tartini’s ten-minute sonata has no precise story to it, the mood alternates between the anger of the spurned lover and the lamentation of the woman preparing to die.

Boccherini: Symphony No. 6, La Casa del Diavolo

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:19:26 +0000

Like Corelli, Luigi Boccherini found his way to a career as a composer through his virtuoso playing. Boccherini, born in Italy but who eventually spent most of his career on the relative fringes of European cultural society in a small town near the Gredos mountains of Spain, was a cellist; but the position of the cello in his body of work is completely different from Corelli’s attitude to the violin. Boccherini wrote an enormous number of cello sonatas. Forty-three survive, but the number is misleading because most of his works for cello were for his own personal use. He never gave them an opus number, did not include them in his own list of his works, and made no attempt to have them published; it’s possible that the ones that are published were made public without his permission. The difference between his personal cello sonatas and his public compositions is telling: the sonatas are conservative, whereas his public compositions are demanding and modern.

He held himself to a high standard for his public compositions, and had an accordingly high impression of their value. His arrival in Spain brought him first to the court of Madrid, where the Prince who would become Charles IV was in the habit of playing the principal violin parts in new music– not, it can be assumed from the following account, particularly well. During a reading of a new quartet of Boccherini’s, he objected strenuously to a passage in which the first violin plays the same two notes over and over. Boccherini pointed out that the melody was in the second violin and viola parts, and the first violinist should therefore devote his energy in that passage to listening to his fellows. The Prince decreed this to be “gross ignorance” on the part of the composer, to which Boccherini replied, “Before passing such a judgment, one ought at least to be a musician.” The hulking Prince threw the scrawny composer across the room, and was prevented from killing him only by the intervention of his wife. After a similar incident involving the elder Charles– in which the King ordered him to change a part that he disliked and Boccherini instead made the offending passage twice as long– the composer wisely agreed to follow his only remaining royal admirer, Infante Luis, to his little country court.

The same staunch integrity that got him in trouble with self-important royals is on display in the Casa del diavolo symphony. The “devil’s house” symphony could have belaboured the point with dissonances and tritones, famously known as the “Devil’s interval.” But the symphony is more subtle than that, with a third movement that Boccherini either developed on the theme of the infernal ballet from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, or (the composition dates of the two are unclear) perhaps that served to inspire it. The symphony is nevertheless full of high drama; the kind of flight from powerful mischief that– for instance– a spurned composer might make from the power of devilish kings and princes.

Vivaldi: Violin Concerto in E major, L'amoroso

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:17:06 +0000

On a program of Baroque music, the royal patrons of the composers involved often play as large a part in the story of a work as do the composers themselves. In the days before government money for the arts was doled out by granting organizations to whom anyone, theoretically, can apply, acquiring government support for your art meant making powerful friends. Or perhaps more realistically, subjugating one’s self to powerful masters.

The career of Antonio Vivaldi is somewhat unusual when compared to those of other great Baroque composers, for he spent most of it employed not by a court or a church, but by a school. Though the Ospedale della Pietà was technically an orphanage, its program of study meant that in practice it was both a comprehensive music school for its orphans and a concert destination for the general public. It became so celebrated as a musical institution, in fact, that not all of the children abandoned at its doorstep were strictly orphans, and eventually the institution started accepting adolescent music students who paid tuition or had it paid for them by a sponsor.

Despite Vivaldi’s unquestionably outstanding work as teacher and composer for the school, the board of directors was frequently at odds with him; once they even voted to fire him, before crawling back to him the following year. So he was well aware that his position was far from secure, and was constantly making efforts to diversify his income; which mostly meant dedicating works to various nobles, and hoping they responded positively. His first set of published concerti, L’estro armonico, he dedicated to Ferdinando de’ Medici , the same Tuscan Grand Prince for whom Scarlatti was employed as an opera composer. He was a patron of the Pietà already, and his substantial support of Bartolomeo Cristofori resulted directly in the invention of the piano. However, de’ Medici does not seem to have extended similar support to Vivaldi, despite the wild popularity of the set of concerti dedicated to him.

He had only slightly more luck with Charles IV of Austria. Vivaldi dedicated a first set of concerti to him, and when Charles asked to meet him upon a visit to the port city of Trieste, he gave the composer a large gift of money, a gold chain, a medal, and a knighthood. They also spent so much time together that the Paduan priest Abate Conti, better known for mediating between Newton and Leibniz in their calculus spat, commented sarcastically that Charles “spoke more to Vivaldi in private in two weeks than he speaks to his ministers in two years.” Vivaldi immediately put together another set of concerti to dedicate to Charles, including the Amoroso violin concerto, no doubt hoping to seal the deal with an appointment to Charles’ court. On that count, he miscalculated. Charles loved the concerti and gave Vivaldi enough encouragement that he quit his job at the Pietà and moved to Vienna to be close to his court– at which point Charles promptly died.

Corelli: Concerto Grossi

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:15:35 +0000

The most enduring friendships are often the ones that pass a litmus test of awkwardness right at the start. Such was the case with Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli. The two met when Corelli, a virtuoso violinist and composer then living in Rome, visited Naples. He was extremely concerned about the level of playing he could expect for his music there, and took a violinist and cellist with him in case the locals proved unacceptable. The exact opposite turned out to be true: the Neapolitan orchestra played his concertos almost as well on a first reading as his own Roman orchestra did after repeated rehearsal. “They can really play in Naples!” he exclaimed to his, perhaps somewhat shamefaced, second violinist.

In fact, the musicians in Naples were so good that Corelli found himself being corrected by one– Scarlatti, of course, who prompted him with a gentle “Why don’t you start over,” when Corelli started playing in C major a tune that ought to have been in C minor. When Corelli started it again in the same erroneous key, Scarlatti was forced to once again stop him and point out his error.

The fact that the pair became good friends, and that Corelli’s playing and writing influenced Scarlatti deeply, means that their first meeting ought to be taken not of evidence of Corelli’s incompetence, but rather of his enormous capability. Anyone can make a mistake– and most of us are even capable of making the same mistake twice!– but it takes a outstanding artist to take correction without embarrassment, and to dazzle with sensitive musicality even while stumbling technically.

The depiction of Corelli as a thoughtful and mild person, who gave credit to others easily where it was due, occurs over and over again in stories of his life. When he heard the German violinist Nicolaus Strungk play for the first time, he is said to have exclaimed in broken German the highest compliment he could think of: “I am called Arcangelo, a name that in the language of my country signifies an Archangel; but let me tell you, that you, Sir, are an Arch-devil!” Jean-Jacques Rousseau related an account of Corelli’s visit to Paris, in which the French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully was intimidated by him and tried to chase him away, “which was made easier by the fact that Corelli was a greater man, and thus a lesser courtier, than him.”

Corelli’s concerti grossi, a genre that he pioneered and which won him international fame, are the ideal vehicle through which to approach the image of the temperate but ferociously talented composer. The solo group of instruments in the op.6 no. 4 concerto pass material between them like a well-ordered conversation between good friends, each contributing what they can and gladly accepting the contributions of the others.

Beethoven: String Quartet in C-sharp minor op. 131

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:12:59 +0000

“We had,” wrote Robert Schumann of the 1837-1838 winter concert season, “four evenings and twenty numbers, among which the brilliants of first water were Beethoven’s quartets in E-flat major (op. 127) and C-sharp minor (op. 131), the grandeur of which no words can express. They seem to me to stand, with some of Bach’s choruses and organ pieces, on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination; but verbal analysis and description would shipwreck them.”

Of course, Schumann’s warning has not prevented anyone from attempting to describe or analyze Beethoven’s late quartets, of which the C-sharp minor was Beethoven’s personal favourite (his verdict: “thank God, less lack of imagination than before”) and the final of the trio of string quartets requested by Russian aristocrat Nikolai Galitzin. Galitzin’s commission was open-ended in every possible way: he asked Beethoven to write “one, two, or three string quartets,” and offered to pay “for the trouble whatever amount you would deem adequate.” Unsurprisingly, Beethoven agreed to these terms. He told Galitzin he would write three, at a fee of fifty ducats apiece.

The characters of Beethoven and Galitzin were well-matched in both their virtues and their foibles. Beethoven was brilliant but frequently angry, erratic and unpredictable. Galitzin was enthusiastic, intelligent and encouraging, but had a tendency to promise more than he could deliver. So each got what they could have expected out of the other: over the course of five years Beethoven responded with three quartets that were so avant-garde that they were in many ways unacceptable to the general public as music. The second of the set had as its final movement the immense and terrifying Grosse Fuge, which his publisher insisted that he remove and replace for the sake of the market. In return Galitzin paid the first fifty ducats, but then delayed so long on the rest that Beethoven died without ever seeing the money; the full amount Galitzin owed Beethoven, for the string quartets and several other works, he only manage to pay up twenty-five years later, to Beethoven’s nephew Karl.

While still attempting to avoid the “shipwreck” of verbal description predicted by Schumann, it must be said that one of the most remarkable features of the op. 131 quartet is its unity with itself, and that unity is expressed both emotionally and formally. The forty-minute work is written, depending on your viewpoint, either in seven movements or in one. The movements run together with no breaks between them, and the last movement opening with a direct quotation of the first, as if the five intervening movements had all been merely a development section. Several sections notated as “movements” are really just introductions: the third movement is an eleven-measure entry to the fourth movement, a theme and variations that leaves its final variation incomplete. Similarly, the sixth movement is only twenty-eight measures, setting up the return of the tonic key and traditional sonata form of the seventh and final section.

The effect is of a dream, or a hero’s journey, and perhaps the only words that could do, by Schumann’s strict standards, are Stravinsky’s: “Perfect, inevitable, inalterable.”

David Rosenboom: Trio

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:11:21 +0000

“From time to time, an artist’s eternal aesthetic investigations into the evolution of humanity in the universe can encounter detours when it is necessary to search for light in times of great divisions,” wrote David Rosenboom in 2018. It is not difficult to see how the theme of tension between art as aesthetic investigation and art as practice grounded in social time and place might occur to an American composer at the midpoint of the Trump presidency; when the world seemed to be barrelling headlong into both predictable and unguessed-at turmoil, as indeed it turned out to be. But the theme, and indeed any theme in Rosenboom’s work, is not static but cyclical. “I seem to have this cycle of about four years where I come to a place in which I have to evaluate myself, or the idea I’ve been interested in, and start over,” he mused in an interview in 1983. If that is the case, then there are any number of works– including his 1966 Trio for clarinet, trumpet and bass– that can serve as an entry point into the work of one of the most innovative composers of the 21st century.

Perhaps counter-intuitively for a composer known for his work with computers, Rosenboom’s work has been from the beginning deeply concerned with the experience of performing and experiencing performance. In fact, bridging the divide between computer programs, which are largely designed to create a static finished product, and live performance, which is neither static nor “finished” in any real sense, has been one of the main projects of his career. The solutions he has come up with sound futuristic, and perhaps they are: “I believe that through the use of computers as appendages of man’s brain and methods of learning with bio-feedback, rates of information processing will be achieved that approach the speed of light,” he wrote in an article in the MIT press early in his career. “Thus, conception will be less necessarily bound with action, ellicited [sic] or observed, and life will eventually be embodied by information-’energy’ networks creating non-physical art; communal art will be revived as established networks connect us firmly.” As abstract as that sounds, much of his work has been organized around making it a reality. His On Being Invisible series of performances– “performances” because the works themselves are not and cannot be static– involve EEG input from a performer’s brain to create a biofeedback performance. Another example is HMSL, short for “Hierarchical Music Specification Language,” a programming language that Rosenboom developed with Phil Burk and Larry Polansky, intended to allow the creation of complex musical entities during live performance without individual specification by the performer, a goal that leads to some amusing examples of code:

COOL-LICK-NEEDED?
IF
( check to see if cool-lick-need is true? )
CURRENT-REAL-COOL-LICK @ PLAY: []
( play the current one )

If the work of electronic music seems to have entered the realm of the science-fictional, however, it is worth remembering through Rosenboom’s early music that there is and has only ever been one paramount goal: the centring of performance, of performer and audience, in a room together, experiencing music that will never happen quite the same way twice.

Pavel Haas: Wind Quintet Op. 10

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:10:00 +0000

The music of Pavel Haas belongs to a large body of work by European Jewish composers of the 20th century whose body of work was cut short by death in concentration camps, and surviving works have been pulled out of obscurity only with difficulty and dedication on the part of friends, surviving colleagues, and enterprising publishers. Haas, who died in Auschwitz in 1944, in fact composed some of his best-known music while a prisoner: before being sent to Auschwitz he spent three years in Theresienstadt, a camp permitted to carry on an artistic scene for the eventual purpose of a propaganda film intended to discredit reports of Nazi genocide. In the film, Karel Ančerl conducts Haas’ piece Study for String__s. Ančerl was sent to Auschwitz along with Haas after the completion of the film, but survived. He told Haas’ brother that as the two stood next to each other in a line, Haas had a coughing fit, and was chosen for death instead of Ančerl as a result. Ančerl reconstructed the lost score of Study for String__s from individual parts that he found from searching Theresienstadt, and eventually emigrated to Canada, where he spent the last four years of his life as music director of the Toronto Symphony.

Although Study for String__s is still one of Haas’ best-known works thanks to Ančerl’s championing, his other works began to come to light significantly after his death, and are only beginning their long life in the standard repertoire. One of the musicians responsible for continuing Ančerl’s work on that front was a composition student of Haas’ before the war: Lubomír Peduzzi, a Czech musicologist, composer and poet. His short time as Haas’ student influenced him greatly; Peduzzi later wrote his dissertation on Haas’ wartime music, created the entry on Haas in Grove’s dictionary, and was responsible for the publication and performance of much of his music.

In 1991, Peduzzi created a new edition of Haas’ Wind Quintet. Although the piece had previously been published in 1934, almost all copies of it were lost during the war. He found the manuscript instead in the Moravian Museum in Brno, and his edition introduced Haas’ quintet into the company of a number of significant wind quintets written in the third decade of the 20th century. Haas wrote the wind quintet in 1929, at a time when major composers were beginning to recognize the wind quintet as a vehicle for important works. Carl Nielsen wrote his seminal quintet in 1928, Arnold Schoenberg in 1925, Paul Hindemith in 1925, and Leoš Janáček– who was Haas’ most influential teacher, and Haas his best student– wrote his Mládí (Youth), a wind quintet with an added bass clarinet, in 1924. Haas’ four-movement quintet pays homage to his teacher with its mingled folk songs, synagogue music, and rhythmic complexity that places it firmly in 20th century. Despite its primarily minor mode and the mournful character of its second movement, titled “Prayer,” the final movement ends with a grand and expansive final chord that appears to resolve the uncertainty of the previous themes into triumph.

Grieg: Concerto in A minor for Piano & Orchestra, op.16

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:07:49 +0000

The idea of nationalism as a driving force for art can and should elicit a mixed reaction from modern audiences. An ideology that enforces a cultural, linguistic, ethnic or religious “nation” as the central organizing principle of the state leads naturally to discrimination, ethnic cleansing and genocide; it is therefore not without complications to state that nationalism was a major driving force in much of the most beloved music of the Romantic period. However, many of the composers that are associated with nationalistic movements in their home countries– Smetana and Dvorak in Czechoslovakia, Liszt and Bartók in Hungary, Chopin in Poland, Sibelius in Finland, and Grieg in Norway– also stand ideologically as examples of the resistance of historically subservient cultures to rapacious imperial interests.

Grieg, like nearly every European nationalist composer, received his musical education from the dominant musical culture– in Grieg’s case, at the Leipzig Conservatory– and was then left wondering how to press the compositional tools he had learned into service of his national identity. Upon leaving the school, he felt the lack of that identity keenly: “I left Leipzig Conservatory just as stupid as I entered it,” he later wrote. “Naturally, I did learn something there, but my individuality was still a closed book to me.”

In order to “breathe a more individual and independent air” than was available in Leipzig, Grieg moved to Copenhagen upon his graduation. He found there exactly what he was looking for: the friendship of other young Norwegian and Danish nationalistic composers. “We instituted a revolution against the established coteries, we enjoyed ourselves in royal fashion. Those were splendid times,” Grieg said of Copenhagen. He also benefited from the demanding mentorship of one of his musical idols, Niels Gade, who refused to even carry on a conversation with the young man until Grieg brought him a symphony. Grieg, who had learned almost nothing of instrumentation in Leipzig, threw himself into filling the gaps in his knowledge to be worthy of Gade’s attention.

The largest, most significant, and best-known work to come out of that period of “splendid times” in Denmark is the Piano concerto in A minor. Although he wrote the concerto at 24 years old, he would continue revising it (mostly to make changes to his perpetual nemesis, the instrumentation) for the rest of his life. This concerto is, to many, the very definiton of the “Romantic” style: its iconic introduction begins with a roll on the timpani that leads into a crashing introduction in the solo piano, giving way to a dramatic melody in the orchestra expanded on extravagantly by the piano. The second movement carves out a moment of peace in the overall drama, before the final movement brings in a dance from Grieg’s homeland to close the work: the driving rhythms of the Norwegian halling dance, an extraordinary athletic style traditionally involving headsprings, spins and the dramatic kicking-down of a hat held up on a high stick.

The concerto was an immediate hit, and has remained so– it has the distinction of being the first piano concerto ever recorded, in a highly abridged version in 1909. Grieg, however, had recently married; so his strongest memory of the premiere was the verdict, not of any of the musical luminaries in attendance, but of his new father-in-law: “I liked the Tuttis best.”

Beethoven: Symphony No. 8

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:54:25 +0000

At thirty-two years old, Ludwig van Beethoven decided once and for all not to take his own life. For the remainder of his fifty-six years, both his life and his art personified the contrast between the depths of human despair, squalour and abjection, and the height of humanistic triumph over mortal circumstance. To keep the two sides in balance required a personality containing both an extreme seriousness and a serious jocosity.

The complimentary sides of Beethoven’s personality are visible in the forms of the Seventh and Eighth symphonies. They were conceived at the same time, completed one after the other, and played on the same concert (along with the famous Beethoven clunker Wellington’s Victory, which when pressed by critics, he defended with the faintest praise imaginable: “What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!”) While the Seventh is heroic, expansive and almost confrontationally rhythmic, the Eighth is short, funny and almost Classical.

That the work is short requires no explanation: it usually clocks in at under half an hour. That it is funny, or at least might have been funny to its first audiences, requires a little more context.

The effect of the very opening is something like being tossed into a swimming pool. There is no introduction, as is common both in Beethoven and in Classical symphonies; and although he originally sketched it with two introductory bars to establish the tonality, he later got rid even of those. Instead of a usual eight-bar phrase constructed from two units of four bars, the theme is a lopsided twelve-bar phrase containing three units. Although the tonality holds firm for a little while, disagreements between section and “wrong” notes quickly creep in. Sections of smooth woodwind chords alternate with rude rhythmic interruptions in the strings. When the theme comes back for a recapitulation, it has been amended to the expected eight-bar phrase.

The second movement is historical record of one of the most significant musical innovations of Beethoven’s lifetime (of which Beethoven himself wasn’t the source): the metronome. Johann Maelzel, whose ear-trumpets Beethoven also used, pirated the idea of the pendulum metronome from Diedrich Winkel, and Beethoven was among the first to use and celebrate them. The second movement is reminiscent of the metronome click– until the very end, when the metronome goes haywire. Many musicians have speculated that Beethoven himself may have had a faulty model, so the joke has only deepened with time.

That the symphony is somewhat Classical appears in its third movement, which is a minuetto referencing Haydn. As a young man Beethoven had been instructed to “receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands”; perhaps he liked to remind listeners that he had done so, no matter how much more he ended up also doing. The final movement is a roaring Presto which gives the impression of someone hurrying out the door, excitedly pressing onwards to the next big thing.

As a pair of symphonies, the Seventh and Eighth have an unquestionable winner in the court of public opinion: the Seventh is played much more today, and was received better during Beethoven’s lifetime as well. Beethoven himself knew exactly why: when a student asked him why the Seventh was more popular, he answered, “Because the Eighth is so much better.”

Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:53:37 +0000

Max Bruch might have had some sharp words about tonight’s programming. “Nothing compares to the laziness, stupidity and dullness of many German violinists,” he raged in a letter to his publisher Fritz Simrock. “Every fortnight another one comes to me wanting to play the first concerto. I have now become rude, and have told them: ‘I cannot listen to this concerto any more – did I perhaps write just this one? Go away and once and for all play the other concertos, which are just as good, if not better.” To his pupil Leo Schrattenholz, he said that he would be willing to hear another student audition to study with him– but only if the student did not play the first concerto.

Such is the curse of an artist who does too much, too well. As a child, Bruch was a prodigy first as a painter. When he began composing at age 11, he immediately caught the attention of composer and conductor Ferdinand Hiller, and his achievements as a musician soon grew hefty enough to leave no room for his aptitude in painting. He was raging publicly against the extent to which the first concerto did to the rest of his compositional career what his musical talent did to his painting; it was simply too huge to withstand competition.

In private, however, he was fiercely defensive and proud of it. To a poor review from a critic, he replied that said critic “could go drown himself” for writing “barbaric nonsense” about the concerto which in his words, “has become the common property of all the violinists in the world.”

If it is indeed common property, then violinists are certainly within their rights to prefer it over the others. But before it belonged to all violinists, Bruch’s concerto belonged to one specific one: Joseph Joachim. Although Joachim is well-known for having collaborated with Brahms on his violin concerto, his collaboration with Bruch a decade earlier was even more involved.

Although the concerto was first premiered in 1866, Bruch was unsatisfied with it. He sent the manuscript to Joachim for comments, and many months later, received a long letter addressing each of Bruch’s questions at length, and wishing that they could simply visit in person to work it out. Joachim asked that some parts be expanded, others cut, and penciled in a cadenza. Some passages he altered to sit better in the fingers, one to resemble less the Mendelssohn violin concerto to which it would surely be compared. “Do you think me too outspoken?” Joachim fretted, before launching into yet more advice.

Bruch did not think so. He replied detailing which of the edits he had made and which few he had rejected. “Your alterations to the last cadenza are written as if from my own soul,” he gushed. The entire exchange was so involved that when Joachim’s son asked for permission to publish the letters forty years later, Bruch refused; he was worried that his deference to Joachim would seem “schoolboy-like.”

Though the letters were eventually published, neither the exchange nor the orderly, Romantic three-movement concerto that resulted appear juvenile. On the first page of the manuscript, there is a dedication: it originally read, “To Joseph Joachim, with respect.” In Joachim’s hand, the word “respect” is crossed out, and replaced with the word “friendship.”

Zelenka: Capricio ZWV 185 in A major

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:52:01 +0000

If the social scene of this concert has thus far seemed somewhat incestuous (with the exception of Purcell and Behn, who were prevented from entering the social milieu of the others by untimely demise and gender, respectively) then we must start by situating Jan Dismas Zelenka within it. Born in 1679 near Prague, he was thus a member of the Handel-Bach-Telemann generation; he was also the teacher of Quantz, the flute player that Scarlatti had such little desire to meet and who spent much of his career as a colleague of C.P.E Bach at the court of Frederick of Prussia. Zelenka’s solution to the tension between baroque counterpoint and galant dance music was a prescient one.

Much of Zelenka’s work is sacred music for the Catholic court church in Dresden, and in that respect he was essnetially a Catholic J.S. Bach. He had a profound understanding of counterpoint that permitted him to push the boundaries of what constituted a workable fugual theme, just as Bach was able to do with Frederick’s theme, and make use of avant-garde chromaticism and syncopation. Counterpoint, to composers like Bach and Zelenka, was not just a compositional technique: it was an expression of the fundamental mathematical order of the universe, necessary to the glorification of God because it was a depiction of God. The rejection of counterpoint in Frederick’s court where Quantz and C.P.E Bach resided was not just a musical preference, it was part and parcel of the Enlightenment rejection of holiness as a guiding principle for daily life and governance.

Unlike Bach, however, Zelenka did not outright reject the demand for pleasant dance tunes. Instead, he used rhythms from Czech folk music– a borrowing that anticipated the connections between folk music and the struggle for national independence of Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček.

The Capriccio in A Major shows his mastery of complex harmonies, dance rhythms, and the extreme virtuosity of his writing. Zelenka, himself a double bass player, pushed the boundaries of possibility for low instruments in his writing. The Dresden orchestra was also the first where musicians specialized on a single instrument; thus Zelenka’s musicians were unprecedented in technical prowess, a fact which Bach remarked on enviously in a letter to the Leipzig town council in hopes of a similar scheme. Zelenka had no children; when he died Telemann, who revered him, tried to publish some of his music. However, he was told it was locked away in Queen Maria Josefa’s room as an “important court possession,” and remained obscure until it was rediscovered by Bedřich Smetana 150 years later.

Purcell: Suite from Abdelazer

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:49:11 +0000

Handel’s warm reception in England in 1710 showed how enthusiastically the public was to embrace “the dear Saxon” as the preeminent English composer. That reception raises the question of why that particular title was up for grabs in the first place, and the answer is a tragic one.

Henry Purcell grew up up in the Devil’s Acre, the slum of Westminister made famous by Dickens. In the short time he had as a mature composer, he produced sacred music, some of the first true English opera in existence, and incidental music for the multi-media genre known as the masque or semi-opera, into which category Abdelazer falls. Purcell was immensely popular, innovative, and prolific, and ought to have been at the height of his powers well into the eighteenth century. Instead, he died of illness in 1695 at the age of twenty-six. His contribution to Abdelazer was to a work by another artist who, like Purcell, was deprived of a long life, and unlike Purcell was also deprived of deserved fame during the years she did have: Aphra Behn.

Although Behn is usually identified as the first female professional writer in the European literary tradition, really we ought to say first female professional secular writer. She wrote about sexuality, power, race and politics against a backdrop of the long literary tradition of published female saints, prophetesses and mystics. The religious authors justified their participation in the male act of artistic creation through the device of being a conduit for the creative acts of God; meanwhile, female authors such as Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, and Anne Bradstreet leaned heavily on the metaphor of motherhood as justification. Behn did not justify her works; she allowed them to speak for themselves.

Abdelazer is a adaptation of an earlier play, Lust’s Dominion, a court tragedy portraying the attempted revenge of a bloodthirsty, conniving and ultimately unrepentant Moor. By the seventeenth century, the racial designation “Moor” in white English literature had lost its original meaning of Muslim Iberians, and was an all-purpose term and stereotype for dark-skinned Africans or Arabs. Behn’s best-known work is Oroonoko, a novel that follows the tragic but sympathetic figure of an African prince sold into slavery in South America, and Abdelazer reads like a prototype of her eventual interest in race, slavery and nobility in Oroonoko.

Abdelazer retains the general structure of the original play; and although it could hardly be called anti-racist or feminist by modern standards, it is an adaptation that is profoundly destabilizing of the racial and gender assumptions upon which the original work rests. It is still a tragedy with the titular Abdelazer a Moor bent on revenge– though seeing as the King who holds him captive had killed his father, the desire is understandable. Behn gives a starring role to another Moor, Osmin, who saves a princess from rape and ultimately helps to foil Abdelazer. She creates a new villain not present in the original; a white henchman who carries out Abdelazer’s orders. She also transforms the role of the Queen, who in the original is a feeble mind who blames her weakness on the Moor. In Behn’s version she blames nobody; she is a powerful, Machiavellian villain in her own right.

Purcell’s ten movements of incidental music, though initially plagued by the misfortune of the play flopping and Purcell’s death, have now achieved immortality not just in their own right, but in the case of the second movement Rondeau, as the theme for Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Behn’s works, too, are emerging from obscurity: in 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own that “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

Telemann: Concerto in G major for Viola & Strings

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:46:29 +0000

The interactions of Corelli, Scarlatti and Handel described above give the impression of a sort of generational gap. Corelli and Scarlatti, several decades older, valued polish and refined sensibility. Handel, younger and more cosmopolitan, wanted to push the boundaries of good taste that his elders had established. To the younger generation, we can now add for discussion Georg Philipp Telemann as well as his close friend, and colleague (and during his lifetime, inferior in career and position) J.S. Bach.

But with the expansion of expressive possibilities that the younger generation brought in came new challenges. We today accept the word “baroque” unthinkingly as a descriptor for a period of music; but it was originally an insult. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summarized the term, which was already in use as an insult, in his Encyclopédie: “Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited. It appears that term comes from the word ‘baroco’ used by logicians.” While Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti composed in they heyday of the style, Telemann, Bach, and Scarlatti’s composer son Domenico lived long enough to see the backlash. The backlash had a name: “galant.” The galant style was simpler, dance-able, less harmonically complex, and rejected counterpoint as the fundamental basis of musical accomplishment; which was considered stuffy, overly academic, and too difficult to compose and to listen to.

Some rejected the backlash. J.S. Bach, an inherently devout and serious man, was the acknowledged master of contrapuntal improvisation and made no attempt to make his music more appealing to those who thought it too difficult– in fact, he made the opposite effort. When Bach met Frederick the Great, who insisted on exclusively style galant music at his court, Frederick attempted to humiliate Bach by demanding fugal improvisations on an intentionally unsuitable theme with increasingly impossible numbers of voices. Two months later, Bach responded with his dedication of The Musical Offering– a collection using Frederick’s theme of some of the most astonishingly complex counterpoint ever written, which could not possibly have been less to the King’s taste.

Telemann, who was the godfather of J.S. Bach’s son and Frederick’s accommodatingly galant court keyboardist Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, was more adaptable. His Viola Concerto is the proof both of his love of the genuinely innovative, and his graceful acceptance of the kind of regressive innovation exemplified by the galant. It features four movements of melodic not overly contrapuntal music, but in terms of boundary-pushing, it must be noted that this is the first viola concerto– ever. In the context of Baroque music, where the traditional accompaniment instruments have clearly defined roles and capabilities, the choice of the viola as a solo instrument seems to also change the character of the accompaniment. The continuo accompaniment of the viola concerto is imaginative and not particularly continuous; as if the other accompaniment instruments, witnessing the elevation of the viola, can sense their own liberation on the horizon.

Alessandro Scarlatti: Sinfonia No. 2 in D Major

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:41:55 +0000

Alessandro Scarlatti was first and foremost a composer for voice, and with good reason. In the seventeenth century, the voice was the most highly regarded and technically developed musical instrument; and the vocal aria, the most significant and organized musical form. As an Italian composer of opera, he bounced back and forth between Naples and Rome– neither which were particularly kind to his art.

The operatic scene in Rome, at times when opera was not outright banned, was held in the ironclad fist of the church: composers were obliged to include a disclaimer with the libretto of any opera on a mythological theme that the heathen gods depicted in the action were merely poetic devices and not under any circumstances to be interpreted as endorsements of non-Catholic beliefs. Naples, meanwhile, came with enormous pressure to produce accessible and popular operas for the public, and Scarlatti was usually paid late for them if at all. The War of the Spanish Succession, in which Naples was one of the disputed territories, certainly didn’t help. Despite these cultural difficulties, Scarlatti still wrote more than a hundred operas as well as a collection of oratorios and other sacred music and more than five hundred chamber cantatas for voice.

Purely instrumental music would have remained a minor afterthought if it were not for the influence of Corelli, who did more for the development of his instrument than any other. Corelli’s influence on the development of violin technique and repertoire is so enormous, and his fame as a violinist during his lifetime and afterwards so significant, that some early biographers attempted to justify it by tracing his lineage back to Noah: the only explanation for his gifts was that he was literally biblical. Corelli and Scarlatti’s friendship pushed the bounds of both of their art: Corelli’s slow movements show the fingerprints of Scarlatti’s arias, and Scarlatti improved as a violinist and an instrumental composer through contact with Corelli.

Corelli was the father of the concerto grosso, and it was to his friend’s new genre that Scarlatti contributed the Sinfonia set, of which the Sinfonia No. 2 for a solo group of flute and trumpet, in 1715. In five movements, the flute and trumpet trade off the solo role that Scarlatti had developed his aptitude in assigning to the purest of wind wind instruments– the human voice.

Wind instruments were, by the end of his life, not his favourite. When the renowned flutist J.J. Quantz came to meet him in 1925, Scarlatti was disgruntled with the student who introduced them: “You know I cannot endure players of wind instruments,” he said, “for they all play out of tune.” If it was the execution of his solo role for them ten years earlier that had put him off, it’s a good thing that, unlike many of his operas, the works survived to allow wind players another shot at them.

Corelli: Fuga a Quatro Voci

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:41:10 +0000

“We still play Corelli, I fancy,” Cambridge music professor Edward Dent mused in 1904, “because his music is not only beautiful, but easy too– a somewhat rare combination.” Inglorious as it may be for modern musicians to admit to their listeners that a work is undemanding of technical abilities honed on increasingly demanding nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century music, it is certainly the case that part of the enduring charisma of Italian violinist and composer Arcangelo Corelli is how he does so much with what we might today describe as so little.

Corelli in his role as composer is an expression and record of Corelli in his role as virtuoso violinist, which was the source of his fame during his lifetime. One of the reasons that Corelli’s music is never emotionally facile even if it is technically so is that the boundaries of his art were those of taste, not of ability. There is a widely-circulated story in which Corelli was stymied by an unplayable-to-him high A in Handel’s The Triumph of Time and Truth, and offended when the young upstart Handel demonstrated that it was in fact playable. In fact, the most strongly attested version of the story portrays the interaction very differently; it was not the notes that Corelli couldn’t or wouldn’t play but the forceful style, which he disliked. When Handel grabbed the violin and demonstrated, Corelli listened attentively and then protested, one suspects somewhat passive-aggressively, “But my dear Saxon, this music is played in the French style, which I do not intend to do!” (Both Handel’s nickname and reputation for bellicose musical style were well-known: when Corelli’s friend Scarlatti once arrived at a masked ball to find the disguised Handel at the harpsichord, he listened to the improvisation and declared, “It is either the Devil playing, or the Saxon!”)

So we know Corelli had strong opinions on how music ought to have been played: and in fact, the Fuga a quattro voci was explicitly intended to be pedagogical. It was written as an example of a fugue with a single subject in a treatise by Francesco Maria Veracini, a highly eccentric musician who once “resolved” an argument between himself and the Dresden court orchestra by jumping out a window and breaking his leg, but was known as an excellent contrapuntist. That the work is Corelli’s is not conclusively proven, but seems likely given that in the manuscript it is credited to “Gallario Riccoleno,” an otherwise nonexistent composer whose name is suspiciously close to an anagram of “Arcangelo Corelli.” The theme of the fugue is the theme to which the words “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” are set in the Hallelujah chorus of Handel’s Messiah, and was published a decade later than Handel’s oratorio. Whether it is an homage to the beloved work or a demonstration of how Handel “ought” to have treated the theme is, of course, a matter of interpretation– though if it were the latter, that would certainly explain why it was published pseudonymously.

Although the Fuga was intended to be pedagogical, it was Corelli’s op. 6 collection of twelve concerti grossi which had the most effect on what other composers were actually doing. The concerti, which featured a “concertino” group of two violins and a cello in the solo role accompanied by a “ripieno” group of strings and keyboard, were extremely popular. Corelli’s collection started a distinct trend of writing concerti that featured a group of solo instruments. Among them, inevitably, was Handel. He wrote his own collection of twelve concerti grossi twenty-five years later; when Corelli had been safely dead for long enough that the odi et amo of Handel’s relationship with him could ebb safely into deserved veneration.

Handel: Overture to Agrippina

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:39:51 +0000

In the context of baroque and Classical music, where a composer’s country of origin is strongly identified with their compositional style, George Frideric Handel is a rare chimera of musical identity. Although he was German and first worked in Halle and Hamburg, he eventually settled in London and became a naturalized British subject. Even more than his citizenship, the enduring popularity of his English oratorios, numbering seventeen in total and including the ubiquitous Messiah, sets him apart as a particularly relateable figure to English-language audiences.

But before he finally settled on his British identity, Handel tried on Italianness for size. He spent three years in Italy before settling in London in 1710. While there, he met Italian composers about whom more will be said for other selections on this program, and used the time to learn one of the most popular and lucrative genres of the day: the Italian opera. He produced operas in Florence and Venice, as well as sacred music in Rome, since opera was banned there– and seeing as an entire class of characters exists in the operas Handel would go on to write popularly referred to as “sex-kitten” roles, perhaps the Papal State was justified in its caution!

Agrippina was the last opera that Handel wrote and produced while in Italy, though it was far from his last Italian opera; at least for the first little while, he found that London had just as great an appetite for the genre. It was his first major operatic success: a satirical romp through the various corrupt, libidinous, greedy, and downright depraved characters surrounding the young not-yet-Emperor Nero, his scheming mother Agrippina, and briefly-presumed-dead father Claudius. Although most of the characters are certainly the type of person you’d cross the street to avoid, Handel’s music humanizes all of them with arias portraying events from their point of view.

That all of the schemers end up being somewhat lovable deepens the political context of the opera. The libretto was by Vincenzo Grimani, a Habsburg cardinal whose role in the Church mainly involved political sparring with the Pope. The Claudius of Agrippina is a suspiciously Pope-like character, surrounded with a suspiciously Vatican-like entourage of schemers, slackers and sycophants. That the resolution of the opera features Claudius naming Nero as his successor is, perhaps, a stronger statement when coupled with the audience’s knowledge of Nero’s eventual brutality, debauchery and suicide.

The music in Agrippina is representative of an entire era of Handel’s output, in part because it contains significant portions of Handel’s previous output. Out of the fifty-five separate pieces in Agrippina, fifty can be identified as borrowing from previous works. Far from the accusation of plagiarism that we might level at him today, Handel’s borrowing was neither unusual among Baroque composers nor lazy; in fact, references to music that the audience would already have known made up part of the humour and irony of the opera. The French-style overture in two parts, with an emphasis on the oboe as a solo instrument, sets the stage for the power-hungry Agrippina to receive the new that her husband is presumed dead, and set in motion the tangle of ambition of the opera.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:39:08 +0000

It is thanks to Beethoven that any composer who has written eight symphonies, and is in a position to consider embarking upon a ninth, finds themselves staring down a giant.

By 1818, all of the unique hallmarks of Beethoven’s late life were present. He had started using ear-trumpets designed by Maelzel, whose metronome he also endorsed. He had stopped making appearances as a soloist, as he was unable to hear well enough even to tell when his piano was out of tune. When the ear-trumpet was insufficient, he relied on conversation books to communicate, which survive as records of his daily life and opinions on music. He was also frequently angry and unkempt; Goethe, whom Beethoven idolized, received a letter from his friend Carl Zelter around this time informing him that general opinion in Vienna was that Beethoven was a lunatic. Beethoven was well aware of his reputation. “Do not be misled by the Viennese, who think me crazy,” he wrote to Wilhelm Christian Muller. “If a sincere, independent opinion escapes me, as it often does, they think me mad.”

If his deafness cast him out from both normal social and musical society, it was also the emancipation that allowed him to view human society from the outside and express a more perfect version of it. The Ninth symphony is a refusal to allow the political, personal and humanistic disappointments of Beethoven’s lifetime to dampen the vision of an Enlightenment ideal of society, and it was one that was a lifetime in the making. Beethoven was introduced to the work of Friedrich Schiller in his early twenties, and actually set the poem known today as Ode to Joy as one of a set of songs in the early 1800s. The earlier Ode to Joy has disappeared– unsurprising, since Schiller’s play The Robbers was banned by the censor in Vienna for being “immoral and dangerous.” The young Beethoven needed to temper his ideology for the sake of society. The old Beethoven did not.

Beethoven started thinking seriously about the symphony in 1818. He was still in an early stage when he received a commission for a symphony from the Philharmonic Society of London in 1822, for which he spent the next two years completing it. When it was premiered in 1824, it was obvious that there had never been anything like it: the orchestra was so large that it required the combined forces of two of Vienna’s professional ensembles, plus a collection of capable local amateurs.

The first movement of the Ninth is the longest of any of Beethoven’s opening movements. Its second movement is a scherzo containing a five-voice fugue, and its third a startlingly tender Adagio. The final movement is nearly a symphony in itself. It begins with a slow introduction which makes reference to all of the previous movements. It then launches into a military march that emulates a Turkish Janissary band– to the Viennese ear, a commentary on the feud between the Habsburg and the Ottomans. Schiller’s text, a celebration of the brotherhood of man and the love of God, joins the first two sections with a slow “movement” and a final fugue.

Beethoven was deaf enough that his conducting the complicated work was out of the question– but so was his not conducting. So the orchestra did what they always do when the conductor can’t be trusted: they pretended to watch the conductor while actually following someone else. In this case the true leader was Michael Umlauf, the choir director. By the end, Beethoven was several bars off from Umlauf and the orchestra, and continued conducting past the final bar; Carolina Unger, who sang the contralto part, took him by the arm and turned him around to face the audience and receive five ovations and a sea of waving handkerchiefs so that he could see, instead of hear, the impact of his music on the world. With the “curse of the ninth” hanging over the musical world– in addition to Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Dvořák and Mahler all died in the process of writing their tenth symphonies– Beethoven’s is the Ninth Symphony that every composer’s Ninth has been measured against ever since.

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:38:01 +0000

The image of Beethoven towards the end of his life– the tempestuous deaf maestro, alone in his singular mastery of the universe of sound– is today so strong on the public consciousness that it is easy to forget that Beethoven was once a frightened young man, uncertain even of whether his life was worth living.

In April 1802, two years after he first started working on his third piano concerto but a full year before it was completed enough to be performed, Beethoven went on his doctor’s advice to the small town of Heiligenstadt. Although restful travel was a common medical prescription, neither his doctor nor Beethoven himself expected this trip to cure his encroaching deafness. Instead, he was determined either to figure out how to live with it, or to die.

He chose life. “It is only my art that holds me back [from suicide],” he wrote to his brothers in the unsent letter now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. “It seems to me impossible to leave the world until I have brought forth all that I feel is within me.”

When he arrived back in Vienna, he embarked on the project that defined the rest of his career and much of the development of Western art music: expanding the musical, conceptual and intellectual scale of what music can do. That trajectory eventually culminated in the massive and genre-busting Ninth Symphony; but before embarking on new projects, Beethoven finished the old.

Among his stymied works in progress was a piano concerto in which he was attempting to prove wrong his own assessment of his abilities. During better times for his hearing, Beethoven had been walking with his friend, fellow composer Johann Baptist Cramer, when they came across an outdoor rehearsal of Mozart’s 24th piano concerto. “Cramer!” Beethoven lamented. “We shall never be able to do anything like that!”

But he was wrong– at least on his own account, if not on Cramer’s. The 3rd piano concerto, a traditional three-movement Classical concerto finally finished after Heiligenstadt, pays homage to Mozart’s 24th piano concerto in its ominous opening C-minor chords and its intricate give-and-take between orchestra and piano. Considering the disruption and havoc Beethoven would wreak on the traditional Classical forms, we could also interpret it as a loving farewell to the entire genre of the classical concerto.

Beethoven premiered the work as its soloist. He was the only one who could; his friend Ignaz von Seyfried, who turned his pages for the performance, described them as almost entirely blank, with a few “Egyptian hieroglyphs” scribbled here and there to serve as reminders. Beethoven’s immense gift for memory recall of music was such that he was rarely finished writing down his own solo parts before playing them. It was an aptitude for intense interior musical experience which would only increase as his hearing deteriorated, setting the stage for music unlike any the world had seen before.

Sibelius: Symphony No. 5

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:37:04 +0000

For anyone looking for a metric by which to judge when you’ve truly made it in the world, look no further than the genesis of Jean Sibelius’ 5th Symphony: when you are paid by the government to produce your own birthday present, to celebrate the newly declared national holiday of your birth, you have arrived. However, popularity did little for Sibelius’ inner turmoil, or to soften the blow of the war on the horizon. He finished the first version of the piece in time for its premiere on his 50th birthday, the 8th of December 1915.

The fact that the version premiered in 1915 is was radically different than the one heard in concert halls today comes down to the fact that Sibelius had a streak of self-criticism deeper and more vicious than perhaps any other major composer. Many blame this harshness for his complete withdrawal from publicly publishing or even talking about his music for the last thirty years of his life: after his seventh symphony, he told his friends that “If I cannot write a better symphony than my Seventh, then it shall be my last.” Apparently he couldn’t; he destroyed what he had produced of an Eighth symphony in what his wife Aino described as “a great auto-da-fe” of manuscripts, which he burned in a laundry basket in the dining room.

Luckily he had not yet reached the point of total destruction at the point that he wrote the Fifth; instead, he revised it into a very different piece, condensing the four movements of the first version into three and replacing the old finale with a new one. Given what was going on in his life during the period of the revisions, it would have been understandable if Sibelius had produced a work similar in tone to his bleak, interior, and frankly upsetting Fourth symphony. Because of the First World War, Sibelius lost all of the revenue from his German publisher, Breitkopf and Härtel. Then, in 1917, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and Finland declared long-awaited independence from Russia, kicking off a civil war. Many of his friends were killed, his brother was arrested, and his house was searched twice by the pro-Soviet Red Guard; consequently, Sibelius and his family took refuge in an insane asylum in Helsinki.

But the fifth symphony is not an expression of abject circumstances. It is, instead, a transcendence of them. Although Sibelius threw out much of the musical content of his original concept of the work, he held tight to one image, recorded in his diary in 1915: “Today at ten to eleven I saw 16 swans. One of my greatest experiences. Lord God, that beauty!” The mystical nature of the swans ties in with the other reason he was so intent on getting the symphony right: “It is as if God Almighty had thrown down pieces of a mosaic for heaven’s floor,” he said, “and asked me to find out what was the original pattern.” A sacred mandate, the swans bridging the gap between the squalidity of war on Earth and the perfection of the divine– no wonder Sibelius was so intent on leaving behind the most perfect possible version of the Fifth symphony. It stands today as one of Sibelius’ most popular symphonies, a monument to the triumph of spirit over circumstance.

Smetana: Vltava (The Moldau)

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 13:35:31 +0000

The Vltava river runs 430 kilometers through the Czech Republic. It drains over half of Bohemia, is today home to nine hyroelectric dams, and is crossed by 18 bridges.

In 1848, 24-year-old Bedřich Smetana stood upon one of those bridges– The Charles Bridge, which crosses over the Vltava in Prague– and prepared to lay down his life for his country. Or at least, lay down his life for what he hoped would be his country: Smetana’s nascent Czech nationalism, in the “Springtime of the Peoples” of 1848, was part of the larger pattern of revolutions against the Austrian Empire where radicals, serfs and the middle class briefly joined together to demand an end to the monarchy and the creation of independent, democratic nation-states.

In Prague, a citizens’ army was formed to man the barricades on the Charles Bridge against the Austrian forces. The Austrians were led by Alfred Prince of Windisch-Grätz, whose wife had just been killed in the uprising. After that, the gloves came off: “They do not want to hear about the Grace of God? They will hear the grace of the cannon,” the Prince declared. He declared martial law across Bohemia, and the uprising was quickly crushed. Smetana escaped the encounter with his life, and being at that point a figure of no importance whatsoever in the movement for Czech nationalism, also escaped the imprisonment or exile imposed on the more important revolutionaries.

Prince Alfred could of course not have known that of all the combatants in the citizens’ army, it was the destitute young piano teacher Smetana who would become the single most significant exporter of Czech nationalistic culture. Not only that, but Smetana’s most celebrated work is a description of the very river whose bridge he had defended.

Vltava is the second movement of Smetana’s Má vlast (My Fatherland) suite. Given the themes of the piece and Smetana’s life’s work of Czech resistance to the Austrians, he would probably have objected to the fact that the work is now often known by its German name, The Moldau; but in either language, the music is seemingly worlds away from the chaos of the doomed barricade where Smetana fought as a young man. Má vlast was written nearly thirty years later, much of which Smetana had spent in Sweden. After the defeat of the Austrian army by the French at Solferino, however, he considered that the power of the Empire was waning and it was high time to return home and take advantage of the more liberal political atmosphere to work on creating a distinctly Czech musical tradition.

Vltava is a depiction of the river not as it was, but as it ought to be: gently intertwining threads of melody, growing gradually in power but always retaining their essentially peaceful quality. Not just the river, but the Czech people are presented in their idealized form, as the river flows past a farmer’s wedding in the countryside: joyful, pastoral and free from Austrian oppression.

Max Richter, Vivaldi: The Four Seasons Recomposed

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:28:45 +0000

One of the primary faults of cultures who consider themselves modern is to overestimate the extent to which their ideas, customs and preferences are in fact “modern” inventions. In the case of music, it is easy to assume that the phenomenons of remixing, sampling, and covering are contemporary interests, of use only in a world where recording is cheap and parody is a more impactful cultural statement than earnestness. However, that ignores the fact that many, of the great works of the past that we consider to be self-contained were, in fact, living and evolving entities. J.S. Bach re-used his own melodies over and over again; Handel remixed the work of other composers with a zeal that by today’s standards would probably be considered a violation of intellectual property rights; Beethoven’s sections and instrumentation were variable depending on the concert.

Vivaldi, too, was perfectly comfortable with the process of recomposing old works for new occassions– and he had plenty of occasions, as he spent most of his career at the Ospedale della Pietà, a combined orphanage, music school and professional performance outfit, where he would eventually write around five hundred concerti.

In 1717, however, he was on a relatively light schedule with the Pietà in order to allow him to spend time in Mantua, in northern Italy, where prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt offered him a prestigious position. It was in that countryside, observing nature turn over in cycles, that he wrote The Four Seasons; a set of four violin concerti giving voice to the spirits of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Each concerto evokes not just a feeling but a sonnet, possibly written by Vivaldi himself; making the Four Seasons one of the first examples of programmatic music that insisted on being taken seriously by the listener.

Today, those concerti are so present in popular culture that the reality of their revolutionary style is easy to forget. “When I was a young child,” explained neo-classical composer Max Richter, “I fell in love with Vivaldi’s original. But over the years, hearing it principally in shopping centres, advertising jingles, on telephone hold systems and similar places, I stopped being able to hear it as music. It had become an irritant…so I set out to try to find a new way to engage with this wonderful material, by writing through it anew.”

Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed treads a careful path: although Baroque composers themselves were perfectly comfortable with the act of remixing music, today the genre of the classical remix is often viewed with suspicion. In a world where classical music is considered too cerebral for the general public, the logical purpose of the classical remix is assumed to be to remove the nuances that make the work interesting and create something more “approachable”; a process which could uncharitably be viewed as a “dumbing-down.”

Richter’s Vivaldi is no such thing; the recomposed work remains firmly in the tradition of concert music that it came from, but with an expanded sensibility that takes into account all of the developments in concert music over the last three hundred years. Richter, who studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London and in Italy with experimental luminary Luciano Berio, is too entrenched in the traditions of 20th-century postmodernism and minimalism to consider leaving Vivaldi’s music less complex after treatment than it was before. Instead, Richter’s sense of looping, repteating material weaves in with Vivaldi’s, as if not only are the instruments in conversation with each other, the composers are too. “That sounds a bit crazy,” Richter said, “but in the piece, there are sections which are just Vivaldi, where I’ve left it alone. I’ve done sort of a production on ‘Autumn,’ but I’ve left the notes. And there other bits where there’s basically only a homeopathic dose of Vivaldi in this completely new music. So I have to figure out how much Max and how much Vivaldi there was going on at every moment.”

The result is a piece of music that speaks to the passage of time on several different levels. The first level, the turning over of the seasons througout the year, is preserved by the division of the piece into the same sections as Vivaldi’s original. The passage of time on a small scale is given the intense reading that minimalist music demands; and the passage of time on a large scale is shown in the interplay between the listener’s expectations of what The Four Seasons sounds like, compared with a version of the piece that cannot put away the knowledge of all that has happened in the world and in music in between Vivaldi’s time and our own.

Shostakovich arr. Barshai: Chamber Symphony in F major Op. 73a

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:27:33 +0000

“Cynical, pernicious grotesquerie,” wrote Soviet music critic Israel Nestyev in 1946 of Dmitri Shoastakovich’s latest symphony, “[a] tone of relentless mockery and ridicule, emphasis on the ugliness and cruelty of life, the cold irony of stylization.”

Most musicians and artists understand the sting of a negative review; few, however, have felt the horror that Shostakovich and his contemporaries in the Soviet artistic scene felt at a poor review from exactly the wrong reviewer– Nestyev, for example, or even Stalin himself. In 1946, the year during which Shostakovich composed the 3rd string quartet which his student Rudolf Barshai later arranged into a chamber symphony, the tides of official opinion were turning perceptibly against him. His ninth symphony, premiered in late 1945, was officially censured for “ideological weakness,” the first event in a downwards slide of governmental favour that would eventually culminate with his second official denunciation in 1948 and dismissal from the teaching post that had provided a large portion of his income.

The atmosphere into which the 3rd quartet was written and performed, then, was one of abject terror, which is reflected in the mystery surrounding its meaning and intention. The five-movement quartet originally came with programmatic subtitles, suggesting that Shostakovich intended the work to be a rumination on war: not the triumphant celebration of victory over the Nazi Germany that he originally promised (and failed to deliver) in the Ninth symphony, but a more contemplative and sombre view of violence. The first movement depicted “Calm unawareness of the future cataclysm,” the second “Rumblings of unrest and anticipation,” the third “The forces of war are unleashed,” the fourth “Homage to the dead,” and the fifth “The eternal question: why and to what purpose?” Perhaps it is the title of the fifth movement, a questioning of the machinery and object of war itself, that gives a clue as to why Shostakovich removed the subtitles almost immediately: he no longer had the latitude to make statements that could be read as putting “emphasis on the ugliness and cruelty of life.”

“I have a burdensome and horrifying memories of the events I witnessed,” said Rudolf Barshai of the period of Shostakovich’s censure, during which Barshai was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. For all that government officials and the ignorant public abandoned and ostracized Shostakovich, however, he never lost the respect of his students: “All the pupils always regarded Shostakovich as a God. His advice in composition class was so wonderful, so precise, and so precious.” Barshai emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1977 to escape the constraints of anti-Semitism on his career in Russia, and his adoration for his friend and mentor “DD” (the students’ nickname for “Dmitri Dmitrievich”) is evident in his transcriptions of Shostakovich’s string quartets. Barshai uses his experience both as orchestral musician and a conductor (including as music director of the Vancouver symphony from 1985-1988!) to expand Shostakovich’s moody, intensely personal quartets into the declamatory and outwards-facing genre of the symphony; drawing his burdensome memories of totalitarianism out of the darkness and into the light.

Haydn: Symphony No. 96 in D major “Miracle” Hob. I:96

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:27:01 +0000

Franz Joseph Haydn had bad luck with leaving jobs. His very first period of musical employment, as a chorister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, ended abruptly with a caning and a shove out the door after the composer cut off a colleague’s pigtail as a joke. His next job, as the music director of an orchestra in the household of a wealthy Count, disappeared into thin air when the Count was forced to face up to being not, in fact, quite wealthy enough for that kind of expenditure. His subsequent position, in the same role for the much richer Esterházy family, lasted for much longer– but they, too, eventually moved to cut costs, drastically reducing the number of musicians employed and the amount the remaining few were paid.

Thus, in 1790, Haydn found himself with a much reduced income but in possession a towering reputation, many friends and admirers, and plenty of free time on his hands. It was the ideal moment for Johann Peter Salomon, a German violinist and conductor living and working in London, to convince Haydn to make a trip to his city. All of London was head over heels for Haydn, so it was a feather in Salomon’s cap to be the one to bring him there, which he did by collecting Haydn from Vienna in person for them to travel together; the trip was the first time Haydn had seen the ocean.

Today, the set of symphonies that Haydn wrote during his time in London are most often referred to as the London symphonies, but also occasionally as the Salomon symphonies. There are twelve London symphonies in all, numbers 93 through 104 of Haydn’s symphonic opus; and, although the 96th symphony is not numbered as such, it was actually the first symphony composed and performed during Haydn’s first London trip.

The story behind the work’s subtitle, The Miracle, provides a glimpse of the kind of enthusiastic reception that the 59-year-old composer received in London. The first symphonic premiere of the trip took place in the Hanover Square Rooms, a musical venue in Hanover Garden established twenty years earlier by Johann Christian Bach and by the late 1700s considered the trendiest venue in London. The room also contained a chandelier of the type commonly found in theatres of the day; theatre chandeliers needed to be hauled up and down from the ceiling using a hand-cranked pulley, and as a result had a reputation for being somewhat fickle. The public’s enthusiasm for the concert was enormous; attendee and music critic Charles Burney wrote in his diary, “Haydn himself presided at the pianoforte: and the sight of that renowned composer so electrified the audience, as to excite an attention and pleasure superior to any that had ever, to my knowledge, been caused by instrumental music in England.” The public’s desire to get close to the famous composer was so great, in fact, that they crowded up against the front of the stage– meaning that when the chandelier in the centre of the room crashed to the ground, the audience escaped miraculously unscathed.

The Miracle symphony is in four movements: the slow opening typical of the London symphonies, attached to a first movement in sonata form, and ensuing slow second movement, third movement minuet, and quick finale. The second movement contains a special gift: it ends with an extended orchestral cadenza, beginning with an interplay between the two solo violins. The principal of those parts was played by Salomon; a thank-you from the composer to the friend who brought him on the adventure of a lifetime.

Vivaldi: Concerto in A minor for two violins & strings Op. 3 No. 8 RV 522

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:26:30 +0000

1711 was a good year for priest, composer, teacher and virtuoso violinist Antonio Vivaldi. To begin with, he had an extremely satisfying victory in the form of a reinstatement to the job that he had lost a year previously: the board of the Ospedale della Pietà, the school for orphans where he had been working since 1703, had tired of his contumacy and voted him out by a narrow margin, then repented and recalled him back unanimously the next year.

He also published his first set of concertos, a collection of twelve titled L’estro armonico (“The Harmonic Inspiration.”) It was the start of a lifetime’s collection of concertos that would, by the time he died, number around five hundred works, and the sheer number of them was primarily thanks to the nature of his job at the Pietà. Although the school was an orphanage, and trained its male students in a trade to be sent out into the world, its lasting fame and primary place in Venetian society was due to its education for its female students. The girls of the Pietà received a first-rate musical education, and while many left to make advantageous marriages, the most skilled of the student musicians were invited to remain in residence with the school’s top ensembles for the rest of their lives. The concerts at the Pietà were considered some of the top entertainment in the city– so much so that over time, it became clear that not all of the children furtively abandoned at its gates were, strictly speaking, actually orphans. Eventually, they simply started accepting adolescent music students, who paid fees for their education.

Thus the twelve concerti of L’estro armonico, including No. 8 for two violins and strings, would have been first performed by the women of the Pietà. And although there were many differences between the concert-going experience of Venice in the 1700s and Canada in the time of COVID-19, there is one significant similarity: the audience hearing Vivaldi’s string concerti for the first time were also not permitted to gaze upon the faces of the musicians playing them.

In lieu of masks, the audience was separated from the performers by an opaque metal grate; and instead of being a ward against physical disease, the barrier was intended to protect the audience both against unpious thoughts of female beauty and, possibly, the realization that many of the musicians were in fact disfigured by smallpox. Of course, the heightened sense of mystery created by the grate probably encouraged more impious thoughts than it prevented; Jean-Jacques Rousseau was so driven to distraction by the thought of the angels hiding behind it that he finagled a lunchtime meeting with the Pietà students through a friend who worked at their dormitory. He soon realized that was was being hidden from him wasn’t exactly what he had been expecting: “Scarcely one of them was without some striking defect,” he later wrote. But he soon learned, as we masked concert-goers and -givers of 2020 must also learn, that appearances aren’t everything. “During the meal,” Rousseau admitted, “they soon became enlivened; ugliness does not exclude the graces, and I found they possessed them. I said to myself, they cannot sing in this manner without intelligence and sensibility, they must have both. My manner of seeing them changed to such a degree that I left the house almost in love with each of these ugly faces.”

Janitsch: Sonata da camera in C minor Op. 1 No. 1

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:25:48 +0000

Johann Gottlieb Janitsch was one of the lucky class of musicians who secured fairly early in his career a job that provided him with a stable income, a supportive employer, inspiring colleagues, and enough leisure time to pursue his own projects. The job was as a musician in the court orchestra of Frederick the Great, a position he acquired even before Frederick ascended to the throne: Janitsch joined the ensemble in 1736, a period of time during which the Crown Prince living in Rheinsberg Palace and was devoted almost entirely to the arts. He was also absorbed in writing a refutation to Machiavelli’s The Prince that argued against Machiavelli’s cavalier attitude towards immorality and in favour of the ideal of the royal statesman as protector of his subjects, which his friend and sometime lover Voltaire aided him in publishing anonymously to great acclaim.

Unsurprisingly, such Enlightened attitudes made for a pleasant work environment for musicians, and upon Frederick taking the throne, Janitsch and his colleagues in the orchestra followed him to Berlin. With the King’s permission, Janitsch began a tradition of “Friday Assemblies,” gatherings that mixed professional and amateur musicians and were open to the public, a tradition that inspired many later gatherings of that type in Berlin.

Janitsch’s Sonata da camera in C minor would have been composed for just such a gathering; an evening of chamber music mixing professionals and amateurs, the latter category in which Frederick the Great himself was first among equals. Frederick’s main instrument was the flute, and he found a lifelong friend, teacher and musical colleague in Johann Joachim Quantz; who like Janitsch, stayed with Frederick from before he ascended the throne until Quantz’s death.

Adolphe Menzel’s painting Flute concert in Sanssouci provides a description of the atmosphere for such a sonata da camera; the royal flutist stands, surrounded by musicians and noble ladies and cast in the soft glow of chandeliers and candles. The painting is warm and inviting, a scene that any musician would be happy to step into and take part in, and one that provided Janitsch with a lifetime of livelihood, inspiration and friendship.

Finger: Sonata for oboe, trumpet and continuo

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:25:07 +0000

Gottfried Finger was born in the Czech Republic, and arrived in London in his mid-twenties ready to make a name for himself as a composer. Once there, however he was quite content to remain exactly what he had been when he arrived: a central European oddity, committed to expanding the instrumentation of his works and to drawing on inspiration from his homeland. He quickly obtained a post in the Catholic chapel of King James II in 1687– unfortunately for him, only a year before James was deposed and exiled in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. No matter; Finger noticed that there was an expanding market for music aimed at amateur recorder players, and shifted his focus from Catholic liturgy to home recorder music and compositions for the theatre.

He was also well-known as a performer: his most significant proficiency was on the bass viol, and he was also an early pioneer of the baryton, an instrument similar to the viol but with an extra set of strings on the neck intended to be plucked with the thumb. He also played, well enough to describe their qualities in an unpublished treatise on music and to compose boundary-pushing music, the trumpet, bassoon, baryton, bass recorder, and the lute.

Finger was particularly noted for his new techniques on the trumpet: he had the ability, hitherto unheard-of in London, to use his lips alone to force non-harmonic notes on the trumpet into tune, and an article in the London publication The Gentlemen’s Journal described his minor-key music for the trumpet as “a thing previously thought impossible for an instrument designed for a sharp key.”

His Sonata for oboe, trumpet and continuo was published in 1700, immediately before his temper and high opinion of his own worth brought his time in London to a screeching halt and drove him to Germany to seek better fortunes. In 1701, Finger entered a competition to set William Congreve’s masque The Judgment of Paris to music. He came only fourth, and according to amateur musician Roger North describing the incident, “declared he was mistaken in his music, for he thought he was to be judged by men, and not by boys, and thereupon left England and has not been seen since.”

Corelli: Concerto grosso in F major Op.6 No.6

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:24:31 +0000

To any regular concert-goer in the twenty-first century, it is an obvious fact that the violin is the sovereign of the instruments of the orchestra. Violin players easily outnumber any other instrumentalist present, they sit in easily visible positions at the front of the stage, and of course the concertmaster– a title unambiguous in its majesty if ever there was one– must always be drawn from among them. It is difficult to imagine the supremacy of the violin having been established by someone; but if the credit (or the blame, depending on one’s perspective) can be assigned to one man in particular, that man would be Arcangelo Corelli.

Corelli, a violinist and composer born in Italy in 1653, looms so large in the history of violin playing that the fictions about him are more numerous than the facts. They’re also likely more entertaining; the teenage Corelli was probably not, despite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tall tale, run out of Paris by envious French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Nor is he likely, as one overly excitable abbot’s history goes, to have bravely defied his father’s wishes to left home in the service of being discovered and summoned by a high-ranking cardinal and subsequently by the Pope. (The composer’s father died before he was born, for one thing.) However, the fictions hold at least the seed of truth; that by the time he wrote his Twelve Concerti Grossi_,_ Corelli was already a legend of the violin requiring a sufficiently grandiose backstory, and his legend has not diminished in the intervening three hundred years.

The form of the concerto grosso itself was, although not invented by Corelli, popularized and indelibly associated with him. The form– meaning literally “big concerto”– features two groups, the accompaniment (“ripieno”) and an entire cadre of soloists (“concertino.”) Corelli almost certainly composed and performed an enormous number of concerti grossi during his lifetime, the majority of which were performed but never published. He was prolific but meticulous, and when it came time to choose representative samples of his concerto grosso works to be published, he found the task difficult. “I am fully aware of my own weaknesses,” he wrote in 1708, five years before his death, “so that only recently, in spite of numerous, long drawn-out corrections, I scarcely had the confidence to put before the public eye those few works I entrusted to the printer.”

In fact, Corelli died without completing the task; however, he passed it on to a trusted student, and twelve concerti made it through the stringent editing process. The surviving twelve are likely not the original works as they were first performed; instead, the movements are assembled carefully from various concerti. The result is a guided tour, led by the composer himself, of Corelli’s career highlights.

The sixth concerto of the set is a concerto da chiesa, a church concerto. The name does not necessarily imply that the music was intended to be performed during a service, only that it is closer in style to liturgical music than to the concerto da camera, or chamber music, style that was intended to be suitable for dancing.

Handel: Suite in D major HWV 341

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:24:00 +0000

George Frideric Handel has always been a composer’s composer. For all that he was popular with the public during his lifetime and is still popular (for at least a few of his works!) to the present day, it is the esteem that other great composers of the past hold him in that truly gives a glimpse of his character. “Handel was the greatest composer that ever lived,” wrote Beethoven; “I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb.” Once, when Haydn received a compliment on the quality of his recitatives, he brushed it off with, “Ah, [the recitative] Deeper and Deeper in [Handel’s] Jephtha is far beyond that!” Mozart said that “Handel understands affect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunder bolt.”

One of Handel’s other notable qualities, which was perhaps better-understood by his fellow composers who experienced the pressures of producing works explicitly intended to please patrons, was his looseness and expansiveness with regards to which works could truly be said to have been written “by” him. Even in comparison to the norms of the era, Handel’s propensity for borrowing and remixing both his own and others’ works was prodigious; modern musicologist Richard Taruskin has summarized him as “the champion of all parodists.” Copyright law, of course, was in its very infancy when Handel was an established middle-aged composer, so the idea of “intellectual property” tying one specific work to one specific person had no presence in his mind the way it does in our modern consciousness, with all of our pesky ideas of authorship and ownership.

As well as transforming the work of others, Handel was also perfectly content to allow publishers to rearrange his music, without consultation, into whatever forms they saw fit. Such is the case with the Suite in D major_, which_ for reasons that may well have been dramatic but have been lost to the sands of time, was originally published by the rival publishing house to the one with whom Handel had an exclusive agreement. The musical contents of which are a mix-and-match of tunes from sources such as the second Water Music suite and the opera Partenope_._ They are arranged for trumpet, strings and continuo in the virtuosic style that despite not being Handel’s own work, is certainly at least an homage from a contemporary who, like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, held Handel in the very highest esteem.

Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 “Italian”

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:22:51 +0000

Felix Mendelssohn had the most fortunate upbringing that a composer could hope to have. On one hand, his parents furnished him with all of the advantages that wealth and social status could provide: a world-class musical education, a constant stream of interesting visitors across many and varied intellectual fields through their living-room, and teachers who were able to recognize and nurture his obvious talent. On the other hand, he dodged the bullet that hits so many identified “prodigies” in early stages of their careers: his parents had no interest in profiting off of his early aptitude, and he was in fact only second among the musical prodigies of the Mendelssohn children. His older sister Fanny was considered by the teachers that the two children shared to be more promising musician: when they both studied together at the Berliner Singakademie, their teacher Carl Zelter wrote of their father Abraham, “He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.”

Fanny’s “something special,” however, was suppressed to acceptable female levels in a joint effort between Abraham, who informed his daughter that music would be her brother’s profession but only ever her “ornament,” and Felix himself. Her younger brother largely discouraged her from publishing her music under her own name, but he did publish several of her songs under his name. (This later led to embarrassment on his part, when Queen Victoria announced her intention to sing her favourite of Felix’s songs, which he had not in fact written.)

Thus in 1829, as Fanny was preparing for marriage, Abraham encouraged Felix to travel Europe. “Examine the various countries closely to fix on one where you wish to live,” he instructed. “You are to make your name and gifts known, and was to press forward in your work.”

The trip, which lasted nearly three years, was transformational for the young man. He went first to Britain, where he was warmly received and composed the Hebrides Overture and the Scottish Symphony based on inspiration from the British Isles. The poet Goethe then suggested that he go to Italy, which he did, and ended up spending a year and a half there; during which he began his first piano concerto and the Italian Symphony.

The tone of the entire work makes clear how very happy Mendelssohn was during his travels. “Today was so rich that now, in the evening, I must collect myself a little,” he wrote in a letter from Venice, “and so I am writing to you to thank you, dear parents, for having given me all this happiness.” Of the new symphony, he wrote to Fanny, who was at home taking care of her one-year-old, “The Italian symphony is making great progress. It will be the jolliest piece I have ever done.” The music captures the warmth of the Italian sun and sunny outlook of a young man with the world at his feet; the second movement calls to mind the church services which he observed in Rome, and the final movement he called a saltarello, after a leaping Italian dance.

Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:21:47 +0000

In 1828, at the age of nine, German pianist Clara Wieck made her debut as a professional musician. And although she toured Europe extensively as a child and teen, and earned the acclaim of Goethe, Paganini and Chopin, perhaps the most impactful meeting of her musical life happened in her very first year of public performance: it was then that a teenage Robert Schumann heard her playing. He immediately informed his mother that, despite his family’s preference that he study law, he was quitting law school to study piano with the same teacher as the brilliant player he had just heard.

Clara’s teacher was her father, Friedrich Wieck. Robert moved in, and lived with the Wieck family for a year. Friedrich was a difficult and unyielding man, who had planned out Clara’s career meticulously from the time she was four years old; and although Clara managed to flourish as a pianist despite the harsh conditions of her training, Robert did not. Under the elder Wieck’s tutelage, he sustained an injury to his right hand that permanently ended his career as a pianist, and he turned to composition as a primary career.

His old teacher became a foe in earnest when Robert, after several years of courtship that often consisted of him waiting hours in a cafe to see her briefly after her concerts, proposed marriage to the 18-year-old Clara. She accepted, but her father refused. Together, they took him to court and won the right to marry– which they did one day before her 21st birthday, the date on which she would have attained majority status and not required her father’s permission anyway. Although they were understandably estranged from Friedrich for several years, after the birth of their first child they reconciled, with Friedrich eager to meet his granddaughter, Marie.

Although Robert Schumann wrote an enormous amount of music for piano, his Piano Concerto in A minor is his only completed concerto. Clara urged him to expand the piece from a one-movement Phantasie into a full concerto; she premiered the Phantasie in Leipzig, and the full concerto four years later in Dresden. She was utterly taken with the concerto that she had coaxed into being from her husband: “How rich in invention,” she wrote after the premiere, “how interesting from the beginning to the end, how fresh and what a beautiful coherent whole!"

Indeed, the work is a “coherent whole” in a way that no piano concerto had ever been before. Contrary to the expectation of the time that a piano concerto was merely an orchestral vehicle for pianistic virtuosity, Schumann’s concerto places the soloist and the orchestra on equal footing. Although the innovation was met with mixed acclaim and confusion, the work soon grew in popularity and ushered in a new era of collaboration between pianist and orchestra.

Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet Op.18, No. 2

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:21:06 +0000

In November 1792, 22-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven left his hometown of Bonn for Vienna, with the arrangement of a scholarship for him by Count Ferdinand von Waldstein. Waldstein was a competent amateur actor and musician, and a less-competent amateur militarist; he once raised an entire regiment, called Waldstein’s Light Infantry, with the goal of definitively defeating the French during the War of the First Coalition. Waldstein’s Light Infantry never fought any Frenchmen, but they did help put out a fire in a biscuit factory on the Isle of Wight.

His patronage of Beethoven was better-considered, and bore more fruit. He recognized Beethoven’s skill early, and sent him off to Vienna with the arrangement that the young composer would study with Franz Josef Haydn. Before Beethoven left, Waldstein wrote a now-famous entry in the young man’s friendship book, summarizing his ambitions for Beethoven in the wake of Mozart’s death: “Dear Beethoven! You go to realize a long-desired wish: the genius of Mozart is still in mourning and weeps for the death of its disciple. By incessant application, receive Mozart’s spirit from Haydn’s hands.”

A tall order for a young composer; and one that today, it would be most reasonable to agree that he not only met, but surpassed significantly. Beethoven would not be content to merely receive Mozart’s spirit; he had a spirit of his own. However, he did first fulfill admirably the wishes of his first patron, by producing, between 1798 and 1800, a set of six string quartets that demonstrated his mastery of the classical string quartet as developed by Mozart and Haydn. All six quartets were commissioned by a new patron, Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, who also commissioned Haydn’s last string quartets. “This Prince was as kindhearted as a child and the most foolish music enthusiast,” wrote a friend of Beethoven’s new patron. “He played music from dusk to dawn and spent a fortune on musicians. Innumerable musicians gathered in his house, whom he treated regally.”

The pleasant nature of Lobkowitz’ regard for his musicians is clear in all six quartets, but especially the 2nd, which earned the German nickname Komplimentier-Quartett: “the quartet of bows and curtsys,” a nickname also given to one of Haydn’s quartets; a fitting homage from Beethoven to his teacher, friend, and mentor.

Jean Sibelius: En Saga

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:20:32 +0000

Jean Sibelius is habitually referred to as Finland’s greatest composer. But to give the title to a single individual is to obscure the truth, which is that success on the revolutionary level that Sibelius achieved is not an individual endeavour but more commonly, at the very least, a joint one. In this case it was the friendship, and occasionally enmity, of Jean Sibelius and Robert Kajanus that was the driving force behind Finnish the development of Finnish orchestral music.

Sibelius and Kajanus first met not in Finland, but in Berlin. Kajanus, both composer and conductor, was conducting his own work Aino with the Berlin Philharmonic. Aino is a tone poem for orchestra and male chorus, with the chorus singing words from the Kalevala-- the Finnish poetic epic which Sibelius would eventually use as inspiration for twelve different works. Back in Finland, the two began working together in several capacities; first with Sibelius teaching under Kajanus at his conducting school, and then Kajanus acting as the principal champion, conductor and interpreter of Sibelius’ music. They were estranged due to a squabble over a teaching post, and then reunited; finally, in the 1930s, Kajanus embarked on a massive recording project of all of Sibelius’ symphonies, on the composer’s insistence. Only his death prevented him from finishing the cycle.

It is unsurprising, then, that the tone poem En Saga was a suggestion of Kajanus’s. Relatively early in their association, he asked Sibelius for an orchestral tone poem that would not make “too great demands on the powers of concentration and comprehension” of the audience. Sibelius, who shared Kajanus’s interest in Finnish history, folklore and independence, is mainly known for tone poems with programmatic themes; En Saga is the only one that has no story attached. Instead, Sibelius appears to have re-worked a previously written piece of chamber music into an orchestral work. The original version of En Saga, probably a septet or octet, has never been found; however, the tone poem was sized down for septet by Gregory Barrett, in an attempt to reconstruct how the original may have sounded.

Although the title, translating to “a fairytale,” suggests that there may be a hidden program behind the work, Sibelius rejected the idea of superimposing a story on it, while simultaneously hinting that for those seeking to find the true shape of his mind, this haunting, adventurous piece may be the place to look: “En saga is the expression of a state of mind,” he wrote enigmatically. “I had undergone a number of painful experiences at the time, and in no other work have I revealed myself so completely.”

Benjamin Britten: Phantasy Quartet

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:19:55 +0000

At seventeen, British composer Benjamin Britten won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music. Despite his hatred for Gresham’s School, which he had previously been attending, he found himself reluctant to leave when the time came: “I am terribly sorry to leave such boys as these,” he wrote. “I didn’t think I should be so sorry to leave.”

Although trading in public-school bullying and corporal punishment for a comprehensive musical education perhaps ought to have left him wildly grateful, he soon adjusted to his circumstances and found aspects to object to. His RCM classmates were “amateurish and folksy,” and his teachers valued his technical brilliance too little, to the point of mistrusting it. Fortunately, at the RCM Britten had access to not just the academic opportunities of the school but also the wider cultural life of London. He took advantage of the many opportunities to attend concerts, and became known by many of the important performers working in the city.

One such performer was oboist Léon Goossens. Goossens was in many ways Britten’s opposite; whereas Britten had received a comprehensive education and made his way into music through force of will, Goossens had been born into a family of musicians, and even had his instrument picked out for him by his father. By the time the young Britten decided to dedicate a piece of chamber music to him, Goossens was considered one of the best oboists in the world: an Italian oboist, upon hearing him play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, said “I am willing to break my instrument over my knee after listening to such perfection.” He was also an innovator, whose legacy can be heard in every North American woodwind performance to this day: he developed the practice of using vibrato on the oboe, despite the strenuous objections of the older generation of players who insisted that vibrato had no place in woodwind playing at all.

Britten’s Phantasy Quartet is one of the many twentieth-century oboe works dedicated to Goossens, who nearly single-handedly elevated the status of the oboe to solo instrument, both with his propensity to inspire composers to write for him, and his habit of commissioning them for new works on the off-chance that they were not immediately forthcoming. “There is no musician of our time whose genius has had so radical an effect upon the status and fortunes of his chosen instrument,” wrote the music critic of the London Observer. Although the Phantasy Quartet was an early effort for Britten– his Op. 2, written in his second year of the study at the RCM– Goossens loved the carefully crafted, perfectly symmetrical 15-minute fantasy. He chose to premiere it on a BBC broadcast, and then brought it to Florence to play at the annual festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music; where Britten received the first international acclaim of his blossoming career.

György Ligeti: Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:18:56 +0000

In 1944, Hungarian composer György Ligeti was 21 years old and embarking on a career in music. He was studying in Cluj, now located inside of Romanian borders, during the school year, and returning to Budapest in the summers to learn from folkloric composer Pál Kadosa. Then his entire family was arrested. His parents were sent to Auschwitz, his brother to Mauthausen. György himself escaped the concentration camps only by being conscripted instead into a military labour corps for Jews, supporting front-line Axis troops. But when Germany invaded Hungary, despite its already being aligned with the Axis, Ligeti took the opportunity that the chaos presented to escape. After a nearly 500 kilometer journey on foot, evading both the Nazis and the Soviets, he returned home to learn that his entire family, save his mother, was dead.

After the war, he returned to school in Budapest– as an illegal migrant, since the post-war redrawn borders meant that his hometown was newly Romanian and he therefore had no right to attend school in Hungary as a resident. But in the shambles of Budapest, still overrun by soldiers, he found that he could not go back to life or art as it existed before the war. Romanticism– the triumph of feeling over reason, the nationalistic character and German roots of sturm und Drang-- was dead. But Ligeti was in the wrong place at the wrong time to freely explore the avant-garde. His country turned from one regime to another, and by the time he had graduated from Budapest’s Liszt academy and accepted a teaching position there, Hungary was firmly in the grip of Stalinism.

As in the USSR, the artistic environment in Hungary permitted only music that was acceptable within the political climate of the Soviet bloc. Cheerful, optimistic, and folkloric music was the order of the day. Ligeti, fortunately, was well-suited and not necessarily opposed to that style: his original intention in returning to Budapest had been to study with Béla Bartók, master of the Hungarian folkloric style. But Bartók had died of leukemia in 1945, never making it back to his homeland; and Ligeti had little interest in producing only music intended to be co-opted by totalitarian politics. He yearned for music that existed in realms beyond those he was allowed to inhabit, so he wrote in private.

One such private composition was the Musica Ricercata, a piano suite from which Ligeti would later pull six movements to form the Bagatelles for wind quintet. Musica Ricercata can be viewed as a very literal attempt by the composer to reconstruct his shattered sense of identity from nothing: it consists of eleven movements, with the first movement using only two pitches (A and D), and each movement adding a single pitch into the set used to craft the music. With melody and harmony restricted, Ligeti is forced to rely on contrast in rhythm, dynamics, and contour. The result is a singularly arresting suite of pieces, to the point that Stanley Kubrick chose the second movement, consisting only of the pitches E♯, F♯, G, as a recurring motif in his 1999 psychosexual mystery Eyes Wide Shut.

Ligeti mounted the second daring escape of his life after the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution: he and his wife (ex-wife at the time, though they later remarried) huddled together underneath sacks of mail on a train headed to Vienna. In West Germany, the music that he had consigned to the bottom drawer of his desk in Budapest could finally emerge. Musica Ricercata saw the light, as well as the arrangement of six movement of it for wind quintet, which was premiered in 1969 in Sweden. In the Bagatelles the third, fifth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth movements of Musica Ricercata acquire yet another aspect of musicality to work with in the absence of melodic freedom: timbre. In fact, the music makes such engaging and surprising use of its five instruments that anyone who has heard only the Bagatelles might find it difficult to believe that it would be possible to play this music on a piano; each instrument becomes not just a tone but a player on a stage, demonstrating the full range of both its capabilities and its limitations.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 “Pathétique”

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:17:07 +0000

On November 6th, 1893, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony in St. Petersburg. Nine days later he was dead.

The symphony has been inextricable from the demise of its composer ever since, and in listening to the music, it is not difficult to understand why. Tchaikovsky’s hastily scribbled notes to himself in the planning stages of the composition show that the piece was always intended to be an exploration of life and death: “The ultimate essence of the plan of the symphony is LIFE,” he wrote. “First movement—all impulsive passion, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short. (Finale DEATH—result of collapse.) Second movement love; third disappointments; fourth ends dying away (also short).”

What was Tchaikovsky’s final dying away, and how much of it did he know when he composed and performed the Sixth? One plausible theory is that he drank unboiled water at a restaurant, a death sentence during a cholera epidemic. However, observers were suspicious of that explanation even at the time: why would a reputable restaurant have served a prominent citizen unboiled water? Tchaikovsky biographer Anthony Holden suggested that, if cholera was the composer’s cause of death, it could have been contracted sexually, with the unboiled water explanation serving as a cover story.

British musicologist David Brown went further, stating that ‘‘That he committed suicide cannot be doubted, but what precipitated this suicide has not been conclusively established,” and that the composer “almost certainly died of arsenic poisoning.”

That, of course, brings us to the most tragic, and thus most widely-circulated, theory of the suicide of Tchaikovsky: the claim, made by Soviet musicologist Alexandra Orlova, that the uncle of a young man with whom Tchaikovsky had a romantic liason wrote a letter of complaint to the Czar, causing the assembly of a hasty “court of honor” of the composer’s former classmates, who censured his homosexuality and ordered him to die as a result.

It would be pleasant to believe that the frisson that this theory produces in modern audiences is due entirely to our horror and righteous indignation at the barbarism of such an (alleged) practice. It would be more realistic to accept that our thinking on Tchaikovsky’s death, and thus the Sixth Symphony, is more of a Rorschach test for musicologists and audiences than it is a scholarly debate or a measure of social progress. As for the composer himself, he was both definite on the piece’s worth, and withdrawn on its meaning. “I love it as I have never loved any one of my musical offspring before,” he wrote to his nephew. “[It] will remain an enigma to all— let them guess it who can.”

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:16:39 +0000

Beethoven’s second piano concerto is, in fact his first: he completed it in 1795, two years before the concerto which ended up being assigned as “First” due to a publishing error. Even these two early concertos were not, technically, the first piano concerto that Beethoven wrote: at the age of fourteen, he produced an entire concerto in E flat, and sometime in his late teens and early twenties he produced a second attempt, of which only the first movement exists.

Thus, Beethoven was already a relatively experienced composer of piano concertos when he wrote the Second, at the age of twenty-five. Experienced enough, it seems, to have high standards: although he wrote the piece mainly for himself to perform, he was never entirely satisfied with it. He sold it for cheap, writing to his publisher, “I value the concerto at only ten ducats, because, as I have already written, I do not give it out as one of my best.”

We would do well, however, to hold in mind Beethoven at one of his more honest moments, on the value of his lesser work: “What I sh*t is better than anything you could ever think up,” he wrote to a critic, defending his (atrocious, but lucrative) battle piece Wellington’s Victory.

The Second Piano Concerto succeeded fabulously at the purpose for which Beethoven used it: his very first public appearance in Vienna, at a charity concert to benefit the widows and orphans of local musicians. Beethoven was ill in the days leading up to the concert, and a friend wrote that “not until the afternoon of the second day before the concert did he write the rondo [the final movement], and then while suffering from a pretty severe colic which frequently afflicted him…. In the anteroom sat four copyists to whom he handed sheet after sheet as soon as it was finished.” The last-minute rondo is one of the highlights of the piece, a catchy tune based on the “scotch snap” rhythm, short-long, short-long: a pattern common in English and Scottish country songs, but nonexistent in their German and Italian equivalents, and thus recognizably foreign-sounding to Beethoven’s audience in Vienna.

Brahms: Violin Concerto

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:16:10 +0000

In 1853, the 22-year-old violinist Joseph Joachim was invited by Robert Schumann, then nearing the end of his life, to play the Beethoven violin concerto at the Lower Rhine Music Festival. There, he met a 20-year-old Johannes Brahms, and the two immediately formed an intense bond. On Joachim’s playing, Brahms wrote that he “shows the intense fire…which predicts the artist,” while Joachim described his new friend as “pure as a diamond, soft as snow,” and would later say, of his first hearing the young Brahms’ piano compositions, that “Never in the course of my artist’s life have I been more completely overwhelmed.”

Twenty-five years after that first meeting, their friendship would produce one of the great collaborations of classical music: Brahms’ (and, to a large extent, Joachim’s) Violin Concerto. In August of 1878, Brahms told Joachim that a few violin passages would be coming in the mail. They went back and forth arguing the merits of passages technically, with Joachim, not Brahms, writing all of the fingering and bowing indications, as well as contributing a cadenza. The negotiations continued even after the concerto was technically finished: it was Joachim who insisted on programming the premiere with the Beethoven concerto performed first (“A lot of D major,” was Brahms’ verdict on that programming choice), and the violinist made further edits in between the premiere and the score going to publication.

As a young man Brahms was intimidated by the figure of Beethoven, and avoided writing a symphony until he was forty-three to keep out of his shadow. By the time he and Joachim produced the concerto, however, he had gotten over his nervousness of the inevitable comparison, and in fact actively embraced it. The similarities with the Beethoven concerto would have been evident at the premiere, being as they were played back-to-back, in the same key and with the same opening structure of the orchestral exposition being followed by an exposition for the violin. Although the piece’s initial reception was lukewarm (perhaps the audience was distracted by the fact that Brahms, conducting the piece, had forgotten to change out of his grey street trousers or fasten his suspenders) Brahms knew the value of the piece. “It is well to be doubted whether I could write a better concerto,” he wrote to his publisher, acknowledging in his typical self-deprecating fashion that the violin concerto features among his, and his best friend’s, finest work of their lives.

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:14:05 +0000

Of all of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies, the towering, gripping Fifth is both the most frequently performed, and one of the musical works about which the most critical, analytical, and explanatory ink has been spilt. The urge to use the music of Shostakovich to draw parallels between Soviet political repression, and any injustice that seems relevant to the time and place where his music is performed, is neither superfluous nor unjustified: Shostakovich’s music, and the Fifth Symphony in particular, has always been both politically motivated and politically received. However, in just what way it was politically motivated, and in what spirit it ought to be received, is one of the most hotly contested questions of twentieth-century music.

What we know for certain is that the period in Shostakovich’s life before and during the composition of the Fifth was a turbulent one. In early 1936, the composer was enjoying the success of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District:his bloody, sex-soaked operatic adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s novella of the same name. The opera was so popular that there were three productions running concurrently in Moscow in January of 1936, when Joseph Stalin attended a performance.

The dictator left early. Two days later, an editorial with no byline appeared in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, denouncing Lady Macbeth. “The ability of good music to enthral the masses has been sacrificed on the altar of petit-bourgeois formalism,” the author— reasonably assumed to be Stalin himself, or a writer directed by him— warned. “This is playing at abstruseness - and such games can only finish badly."

The opera closed abruptly, and rehearsals for Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, already in progress, were called off. (Whether this was the composer’s initiative, the orchestra management’s insistence, or some combination of both, is unknown.) He kept a packed bag by his bed in readiness for a night-time knock from the secret police.

By November 1937 the premiere of the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich’s next move as a composer was ready to define him politically and historically. Would he rise up against the requirement that Soviet artists treat no other subject but the triumph of the proletariat? Or would he fall into line as a socialist artist in service of the state?

It is perhaps the Fifth Symphony’s greatest triumph that eighty-two years later, audiences, musicians and historians are still arguing over which path he took. The public received the piece as an expression of their suffering under the Soviet regime; officials took it as evidence that Shostakovich had been reformed into an ideologically pure socialist artist. “Glory be to our people which procreates such talents,” wrote Aleksey Tolstoy. “Today we have ten masters, tomorrow there will be hundreds. Soviet art is world art, it must be world art!”

Shostakovich himself— in memoirs which are, like so many pieces of this story, of questionable authenticity— supposedly described the triumphant-sounding final movement as his rebuke to the authorities: “The rejoicing is forced, created under threat…It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.”

Like the political and social situations it (perhaps) describes, our reception of the Fifth Symphony is still shifting today: uncomfortable, disturbing and vital.

Debussy: La Mer

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:12:43 +0000

The sum total of composer Claude Debussy’s marine voyages consisted of two crossings of the English Channel. Despite a lack of personal experience with the sea, he maintained a lifelong fascination with it. In fact, it could even be said that his separation from what he called his “old friend, the sea, always innumerable and beautiful,” was a deliberate absence, designed to stroke the flames of passion: Debussy composed La Mer holed up in Paris, insisting that the sight of the piece’s subject was so beautiful as to be paralyzing to his creativity.

Or— to make less charitable assumptions about the composer’s motives for staying in the city— perhaps he was simply busy. When Debussy had proposed marriage to his wife Lily in 1899, he provided motivation in the form of his threatened suicide if she refused. In the summer of 1904, their relationship came full circle: Debussy left her for the French singer Emma Bardac, and Lily made an attempt on her own life.

Thus, the 1905 premiere of La Mer proved to be both a musical event, and a public exploration of a question still very much alive today: to what extent is the audience permitted to separate their opinion of the artist, in all of his humanity and fallibility and messy social and sexual entanglements, from their opinion of the art? We can never know if the poor initial reception of the piece would have been warmer without the public disapproval of the composer’s personal conduct hanging over it. Musicologist Louis Laloy wrote simply that “prudish indignation had not yet been appeased;” but other writers had harsh words for the music’s depiction of its subject, with Louis Schneider describing it as “some agitated water in a saucer,” and Henry Krehbiel of the New York Tribune describing only a slightly more generous body of water, upon the American premiere, when he wrote that “the composer’s ocean was a frog-pond.”

From today’s vantage-point, we can read the initial negative reviews mostly as amusing novelties. The piece eventually came to be recognized as one of Debussy’s major achievement, especially after a performance in 1908 conducted by the composer himself. Perhaps, once the fog of scandal lifted, the world was finally ready to see La Mer for what it was. Or perhaps it was not our perception of the piece that has shifted over the past century, but our perception of the sea itself: in the same way that Homer ensured that the Greeks could gaze into the Aegean and call it wine-dark, Debussy’s music both invokes and changes our concept of the sea.

Fixer-Upper

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 02:05:35 +0000

I didn’t want the house to be sold at all.

The periods in between owners are always the best times, for me; best of all, as the place cycles through owners and buyers become warier and warier, those golden ages of emptiness become longer and longer.

It’s not that I dislike the idea of owners, in theory. I don’t like being lonely. Being a lonely person means sometimes you hear whispers, or maybe the whispers are just in other peoples’ eyes: they must like being lonely. Leave them alone, it’s better for everyone that way.

But although I don’t like being lonely, it’s better than the alternative. The alternative is: light and laughter in the house, the smell of food cooking. Hanging around the edges, being able to see everything. An eavesdropper. When I was alive, I always thought that would be fun: to be able to see how people act when they think nobody is watching. I always figured I must be doing it wrong, just fundamentally not behaving right and maybe if I could just watch someone, watch them eat dinner with their family or walk up the stairs in the dark or pull down their pants to go to the toilet or sit down at their computer to check their emails, maybe I would get it. Ah, I would say, that is how it was done, all along. And then I could go back to my own life and do it properly, know that I was fully human and contributing to the close-weaved mesh of other humans around me, a part of something. Giving back.

But nobody has ever shown me how the business of being human is done, and now even if they did, it’s now too late for me to take advantage of the knowledge. Anyway, I did my best. I tried to contribute, despite not knowing how. Nobody will ever know what I did to thank me— not even C, I think, though she has come the closest— but I think they would be grateful if they did somehow find out.

I didn’t have any particular feelings about her, when she first came to the house. Yes, usually families buy the place; it’s a big old farmhouse with lots of land surrounding it, and most have delusions of spending all their time gardening or building a woodworking shop or whatever. Nobody ever does; they just sit inside in front of the computer all day. Not that I’m criticizing; it’s not like I ever started a garden worth writing home about. Maybe if I’d had enough time, I could have experimented with using my leftover materials as fertilizer. Still, I’d mostly stopped paying attention to the visits that people made with the realtor. They never bought the place, these days; something about it just repelled them.

While alive, I would probably have guessed that they aren’t buying because the place feels haunted. Now that I’m dead, I’m not so sure. It seems awfully self-important to delude myself into thinking they’re not buying the house because of me, when most days I barely even exist. Not like I once did, when I was able to both act, and act upon.

This one bought the house, though. I might not have noticed, if anyone else had bought it; if some nice family had moved in, I might have just stayed in my attic and only noticed that anyone had moved in at all when they started poking around up there.

But this one, I noticed. I noticed because one day the door opened and footsteps stomped into the house and she screamed.

It was a good scream. Loud. Full-throated is the word that comes to mind, as if you could scream with half your throat. Not shrill— more of a yell pushed to the absolute breaking point, if I wanted to be exact. I have had a lot of time to be exact about these sorts of things, and I was well on my way to being a connoisseur of screams even before my time as a true body was cut short.

So, that was surprising. It’s not that screams disturb me. Usually they’re quite nice. The echo of the other body’s dying scream still sounds in my ears, more like the burble of a peaceful brook than anything else. One last scream for the road. I didn’t scream as I died.

But I went down the stairs to see what was happening anyway. I don’t need to use the stairs, technically; I can be anywhere I like within this house. I’m not bounded by hallways and rooms and staircases, except for the house itself. But old habits die hard; harder than people, who die really rather easily. So I took the stairs.

The new owner was standing just inside the front door; it was late fall at the time, the trees in the forest out back starting to weep and die, so the open door was sweeping in a few stray leaves. She didn’t move to close it, and she didn’t seem to be hurt or even particularly upset. Actually, she looked kinda pleased.

She opened her mouth and screamed again. She threw back her head as she did it, baring her throat to me— well, to the empty house. She made the loudest sound she could until her lungs ran out of air and then let off, panting slightly. She looked around the empty hallway, opening into the empty living room, the empty kitchen down the hall. All hardwood and echoes. “Fuck yes,” she said, like an addendum to the scream.

I get it. I’m a lonely ghost, but I was human once. I was a human who, if they had throught to do it, probably would have happily done the same: screamed just for the pleasure of it, a test of the glorous fact that out here, finally, I was alone.

I felt a bit bad for her. Out of all the possible houses she could have bought in the middle of fuck-all nowhere, she had chosen the one where she would never be truly alone.

She did a lot of work on the house, before even starting to move in. I watched her do it, and tried to feel angry or jealous. A proper ghost, maybe, would care if someone changed the things in their house around. But the work itself I didn’t mind. She installed new cabinets in the kitchen, repainted the bedrooms, installed plush carpeting in the living room. After she was done with the carpet, she lay down on the floor and rubbed her cheek against it, then shoved a hand down her tattered work jeans and rubbed one out right there on the floor. I watched from the other side of the room. I would never have thought to masturbate in the living room. I don’t know why, it just never occurred to me. At that point, I became pretty sure that even if watching living humans could theoretically teach me how to act, this specific human was probably not the one to learn from.

She moved in slowly, over the course of weeks. Carload by carload, setting things up as soon as she brought them in the house, then going back to wherever she had been before. She set up the living room first, and that night, I stood in the doorway, wondering if I was allowed to go in.

I am allowed to do anything I want, or rather, anything that I can. It’s one of the advantages of being dead. But this felt more intimate than watching her get herself off on the floor; this was a lamp with a faded shade and a rocking chair covered in pillows and a blanket thrown over, set up in front of the window, where she could sit in the chair and watch the sun shining or the leaves falling or the snow drifting or whatever goes on out there all the many seasons until she, too, dies.

It’s a strange habit that I used to understand, but it fell through my fingers like water when I became something else. Why do the living construct entire spaces inside just for looking at the outside? Perhaps because the outside is too hot, or too cold, or too buggy– but surely you could stand it, just for a little while, if you really wanted to see what was out there.

(I’m biased, I know that. I can’t leave the house. I’ve tried. It makes me feel a little less guilty about watching anyone who enters it go about their business when the mood strikes me; I have literally no other option. Guilt doesn’t come naturally to me; I have tried to practice it, use it as a gauge. Perhaps some would think that I got it wrong, in life, but something tells me that this new owner wouldn’t be one of them.)

So I went into the living room, and sat down in her chair, for some value of “sat.” It was old. Granny furniture. The kind of furniture that nobody else was ever supposed to see; you don’t move out into the woods if you’re planning on convincing anyone to come out and visit you. The kind of furniture you might get old in, until maybe one day you’re rocking away sipping your tea and watching the world go by and you just die, just like that, you’re done.

Sounds nice.

It will take a while, though, for her to die like that. She’s not old. Not a kid, but not old. Maybe a little younger than me, when I died, and I haven’t been counting since then.

Time moves differently now. I sat in the chair for an amount of time that was probably long, because she came back while I was still sitting in it. When she opened the door, though, it turned out I was wrong about never inviting anyone over: there was someone with her, a man with short curly hair and strong arms and— ah— a large van parked outside. They carried in a couple loads of furniture together, from the van that must belong to the man into the living room.

“Need help getting any of this up the stairs?” the man asked.

“Ugh,” said the woman. “No, I haven’t decided where anything’s going yet. Thanks so much for your help, though.”

“No problem,” he said. “Good for that great honkin’ thing to be useful every once in a while.” He gestured at his vehicle and laughs. He wanted to be invited in. She could have invited him in; there were more chairs. I knew there was beer in the fridge, because she sometimes drank it while she did work on the house, which seems like a dumb idea if you ask me.

“Right.” Her smile reached her eyes, but it was a deliberate reach, as if she was thinking pull the corners of your mouth up– now crinkle your eyes– yes, like that as she did it.

She did know where everything’s going. She’d made entire floor plans, measured the spaces in between walls, muttered to herself. She just wanted him to leave.

“I’ll see you on Monday then,” she said.

He was clearly irritated. She didn’t care; the reward of being alone was greater than the threatened possibility of pissing off a coworker. “Bye, C,” he muttered, and goes off to his van. Or maybe it was “Cee,” or “Sea,” or “See.” I’ve never seen a document with her name on it, though you’d think that she’d leave one lying around eventually. Anyway, I don’t care that much. C is a good enough name for me.

C watched her coworker’s big white murder van— probably only a metaphorical murder van, and I’m quite good at distinguishing these things— trundle down the long gravel driveway. Then she flopped down into her rocking chair, exhausted.

I wasn’t prepared for it. I’ve never tried touching anyone, before. Like so many things, it had simply never occurred to me. Maybe the first thing any normal person would have done upon realizing they were a ghost was try out what happens when you touch a human, but I didn’t like touching humans while I was alive unless it was for very specific purposes, so I never thought about it when I died.

It wasn’t much. Nothing at all, really, and maybe C reached for the blanket and wrapped it tightly around her just because the house was drafty. But I thought I felt something. A brush. A warmth. It terrified me.

I have been the most terrifying thing in the room all my life, even if usually unrecognized. I am not used to being terrified, and I don’t like it.

I stayed in the attic for a good long time, after that. Cowardly, but there is no point to being otherwise any more. It took me a long time to work up to picking up the knife, that first time. Being dead is not pleasant, but that part of it was almost a relief; I can’t pick up anything. I can’t do anything. No obligations. No restless need to make up for my inability to figure out how to fit into a society by finding myself a useful place on its edges. No grainy feeling of skin parting under the blade.

When I finally left the attic, it was some time later. Weeks, or months, or years. The furniture had been moved into its final location; she had managed, somehow, to get a desk up the stairs by herself, and I ran my fingers unfeelingly over the wall of the staircase as I descended it, newly pockmarked with tiny holes where she had dinged the edges of it against the paint. No matter, perhaps, to her; there was supposed to be nobody else here to hear her screams or view her chipped paint. Perhaps ruining the wall had given her the same kind of giddy self-contained pleasure as screaming. Perhaps she will fix the walls eventually, and that will be just as much pleasure as ruining them.

I could have tried fixing things, if I had lived long enough; or rather, that is what I was trying to do. The line between destruction and repair is so thin. Destroy one thing and you fix another. The old flooring, that I had lived with my entire time here, now lies out in a pile in the backyard, replaced by new boards that aren’t water-damaged or splintered.

Or at least, they aren’t damaged or splintered yet; but when I finally descended from the attic, there was a threat to their integrity that hadn’t been there before.

“Daniel,” C was saying, and I went into the kitchen, where the shiny new floorboards reside, to see who she was talking to. “The door. The door is right there! Three more seconds, buddy, and you would have made it! You utter fucking asshole.”

There was a large brown dog hanging its head by the door, looking very chastised indeed. Daniel is an odd name for a dog, but there wasn’t anyone else in the house for the name to apply to, and the dog was clearly the one on the receiving end of the berating, because there was a large puddle of yellow-tinged liquid spreading on the floor.

C was walking around it nervously, like she was trying to figure out how to tackle the problem. She reached on top of the refrigerator for a handful of paper towels and threw them down, but they soaked through immediately and she winced as she realizes that she was going to be left with an enormous handful of soggy foul paper towels. She got a plastic bag and a rubber glove from under the sink, and I averted my eyes from her muttering to look at the dog.

The dog was looking at me.

Daniel was clearly getting on in years. His fur was patchy and discoloured in spots, and the skin hung loosely around his mouth. Still, he had a certain hard, vicious look about him; the kind of dog you would want with you if you lived in the woods all alone. Just in case.

He growled. He growled at me, and I knew that it was at me with that same sudden shock of realness that I had felt when C and I were suddenly sitting in the same chair, coming close to inhabiting the same skin. “Oh, stop it,” C groused, throwing him a look.

Daniel did stop it. I wondered whether it was because she told him to, and he understands what she says, or if he would have lost interest anyway. He turned away and started ignoring me, even when I got right in front of him and waved a hand in his face.

I had no idea whether I was relieved or disappointed. It feels good to have another living being recognize your presence, and yet I’d spent most of my life avoiding the feeling. One isn’t supposed to try new things in death, I was almost certain. One was just supposed to exist, halfway, forever.

C and Daniel settled into a routine, and I hung around the main part of the house enough to see it. Every morning, she let him outside and threw sticks in the yard. Never having owned a dog before, I would have assumed that the abiltiy and inclination to fetch sticks would be something inborn, that all dogs knew how to do; but Daniel seemed confused by it, at the beginning. He would fetch it slowly and carry it back, then leave it with her as if to say “now that I’m gotten it for you, make sure you don’t lose it again.” He appeared somewhat betrayed by the fact that she just kept throwing it, and he had to get it again, and again, and again.

C would go to work two or three days a week; on the days that she didn’t go, she stayed in the room she’d clearly designated as a home office and tapped away on a laptop. It only occurred to me after several weeks that I could, if I chose, be curious about what she was doing, and look at the laptop screen to find out. Once it had occurred to me, though, affecting curiosity in that way felt fake. Like I was trying to pretend to be human, and that was doomed to fail.

On Sundays, she put Daniel in a crate and cleaned things, starting with herself. C had short hair that she kept short with buzzing clippers, leaving flecks of blonde hair all over the bathroom like snow. Then she would shower, cut her nails and pluck her eyebrows, clean the bathroom, vacuum the house, and work in the yard, raking leaves and putting them in big brown bags. Something about the ritual seemed odd to me. Perhaps the impersonality of it, the way it implied that her body was a part of the house that had to be cleaned and maintained just like any other part of the house. Or perhaps the opposite: not that the body was part of the house, but that the house was part of the body. Every floorboard a phalange, every wall a limb, every window a great unblinking eye. I was a part of the house, too. Did that make me a part of her?

If it did, then perhaps her finding me was inevitable. My workshop was hidden, but only in the way that something you wouldn’t want dinner party guests stumbling over was hidden. (I had never had a dinner party, so this wasn’t a realistic concern, but the idea had weighed on me all the same.) Eventually, of course, C was going to notice that the dimensions of the basement didn’t match those of the main floor of the house, and carefully remove the false wall at the west end of the basement. it was just plywood, slotted into a groove in the ceiling and the floor; once inside, I would slot it back into the floor and pull up on a little handle attached to the top edge to close it back up. I always closed it back up while working, just like I’d always closed the door to the bedroom while masturbating. Some things were better done in privacy, even if the only thing to wrest privacy from was the open air of your own space. C is different, though. She inhabits this house so fully already that everything in it is private to her.

It must have smelled really bad. I could tell that it did, because of the face she made and the way she immediately stepped back and nearly tripped over the false wall lying on the ground. I was impressed that the wall was so effective at keeping the smell inside, actually, but it was cold in the basement, so perhaps that had dulled the scent of decay and let it settle.

C didn’t scream. She held her shirt over he mouth and nose and looked: looked at my shrivelling body, tangled up with his.

I looked with her, because I hadn’t really seen it before. I hadn’t come back to this room, once I’d realized that my body was bound to the house. Something kept me away. Perhaps that’s my one vestige of humanity, was that I didn’t want to see my own rotting corpse laid out in front of me. And yet looking now, beside C, her breathing loud and laboured through the fabric of her shirt, wasn’t so bad.

He’d been the thrity-eighth. I remembered that, because I kept track of them meticulously; if this was a job, or maybe more like a volunteer gig, my offering to the good of humanity, then I ought to keep straight just what I was doing. If I made it to the pearly gates, and was asked to give an accounting of myself, I ought to be able to say how many I’d done away with. Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight men that the world was better off without, and I was the one who’d removed them.

C crept closer, as if we might somehow come to life and attack her. I was lying on the floor, the bruises on my neck a strange mottled grey against the lighter grey of my long-dead skin. He was collapsed on top of me. There was a wide trail of sticky blood leading from the metal chair in the centre of the room to where we lay in the corner.

I hadn’t tied him well enough, that was all. Thirty-eight victims in, and it was something that simple that got me. Silly, maybe. Ignominious. I could have done so much more— but maybe this was enough. I hoped so, until I realized that my day of final judgement was never going to come. I was just stuck here. Maybe that was the judgement, in itself.

I remember that when his hands closed around my neck, I wasn’t afraid, or sad. I knew I was going to die, and it was just an inevitable fact. I think I’d known, from the very beginning, that one of them would kill me eventually. Men are stronger than women, on average, after all. On an individual level that doesn’t matter much; a woman can kill a man once, twice, maybe three times. But the law of large numbers says that the more times one performs an experiment, the closer the average of the results is to the expected value. Two people in a basement: one man, one woman. The expected value is that the woman ends up dead. The fact that I managed to take him with me, stick him deep enough that he’d died of his injuries right along with me, was a victory. So too were the thirty-seven before him, which a naive misunderstanding of probability would say should never have happened.

When I was a kid— when I was human, when I was soft and delicate and needed to be protected— I had a babysitter, and my babysitter had back pain. Sonya was old and reed-thin and had a thick accent that I only much later learned was Serbo-Croatian, and she would sit down heavily and grimace sometimes and when I asked her what was wrong she would say “oh, just the usual.”

Just the usual. I asked her once if her back ever didn’t hurt, and she said yes, sometimes. That sometimes she would get a few minutes, or even a few hours, of unexpected reprieve, and walk around wondering what the world would be like if she felt like this all the time. Inevitably, however, the pain always returned. I asked her if she was angry when it came back, when she had had a taste of it being gone. And she said that no, no, she wasn’t angry, she was just grateful for the time without pain, handed down from the sky with no rhyme or reason. She didn’t feel entitled to it.

That was how I felt when the man’s hands, slippery with blood, cut off my air and the blood to my brain. The unexpected reprieve, the time in which no man had killed me, was coming to an end. It was inevitable that the time where I was allowed to do the only work I could be good at must end. Probability would carry on without me trying to flout it. The house always wins in the end.

C didn’t call the cops. I watched her consider it. She had a landline, which I found odd, but perhaps she was worried about being able to phone people if the power went out. Smart. She stood beside it for a long time, one finger resting on the receiver. Perhaps she was contemplating calling someone other than the cops, I don’t know. But in the end, she just went and dug two holes in the backyard.

The holes were deep, but not wide, and I startled with recognition. I had read once on the internet, when planning my life’s work, that aerial searches look for patches of disturbed ground about six feet wide, assuming that dead bodies will be buried lying down. If you bury one standing up instead, it’s not as recognizeable. How did C know that? Perhaps she thought of it all by herself, like everything about this place belongs to her. Perhaps each one of her ideas was truly original. How I would have liked to be just like her.

She wore gloves and a face mask to put us both into seperate garbage bags, and tipped the garbage bags into the holes.

I watched from an upstairs window as she buried us. The man, she put in head-first. I thought that was funny, him standing on his head for eternity. The bones of the neck are delicate in life, and must be even more so in death; perhaps they would collapse first, and he would end up bent out of shape down there.

Me, she put in foot-first. Standing up. I was facing away from the house, towards the woods where my own narrow, deep holes dotted the underbrush.

I could never have been like C, in life. And yet here we were, in our old haunted house, burying our dead bodies. I had done that to her. Made her more like me.

I had never left the house before while dead, and yet C was outside, so perhaps I could be too. Carefully, I floated through the wall and outwards, along the line of sight traced by my own dead unseeing eyes. Wandering, as if my work could ever be finished if I were only given enough time.

Bacchae

Anna Norris — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 01:58:19 +0000

Hello. My name is Sanne. I am fourteen years old. I have white skin and blonde hair and blue eyes and no diseases, which means I will command a high price when I am butchered. Today I auditioned for a play in school, and I really hope I get the part. It’s in a Greek Tragedy that we learned about in class called The Bacchae. I auditioned to be a mother who brings her son’s head on a pike to her father. I think that would be nice, marching around with a bloody head, and Mary would take a very nice picture of it, probably.

Mary is the staff photographer at the farm. She takes pictures of the things we do for the website and for the people who will buy us once we’re butchered. All farms need to do this, we learned in school, because the rich on the Outside care very much about where their food comes from. It’s important to them that they buy only happy animals, because that’s ethical. Also, the meat tastes better if it wasn’t stressed before it died.

That’s why we learn so much philosophy. It’s very important, the most important thing, that we be okay with death by the time it comes. Everybody dies, but only farm animals learn to love death first. Most people, especially rich people out on the Outside, are afraid of death. They’re still going to die, but they don’t know when. So they don’t know that they have to prepare. They put off thinking about it. They tell their children yes you’ll die but not for a very long time so don’t worry about it right now. Then by the time death comes for them they’re terrified. They procrastinated on accepting it and now it’s too late. That’s why being sold to a farm makes you one of the luckiest people on Earth.

Next week we’re going on a field trip to the museum. We’re going to get to see all sort of other ways that humans have lived throughout history. We learned about a lot of civilizations in school and now we’re going to see them, or what’s left of them; little pieces of tablet or books or mummies like how the Egyptians used to keep important dead people around forever. Dying is the only way to really live forever. You die and get eaten and your cells become fuel for someone else’s. Then they die and if they’re rich they get buried in the ground and get eaten by worms. So you tell me what you would rather: be human food or worm food?

Maybe I shouldn’t malign worms like that. It’s not that being worm food is bad. Worms are very interesting creatures and in science class we take care of a worm compost that we use to feed the garden. It’s amazing how just by eating and pooping the worms can make something that we can use to make our food. Then we eat it and poop, too. Then someone else eats us. I guess you could also say that you only have the choice between being human poop or worm poop. But humans use the energy that food gives them to do things besides poop, too. Maybe the people who eat me will be in a play. Rich people have time to make art, on the Outside, so they could be in a play or a band or make paintings or whatever they want. So as well as hopefully being in The Bacchae when I’m fourteen, maybe I’ll be in a play after I’m dead too. The energy of my meat and fat fueling art, the highest calling of humanity.

I auditioned for the play with my friend Alina. We held hands tightly in the waiting room because we were both nervous. We’re going to be nervous before we die too. It’s just one of those things; having some anxiety before you do something or before something happens to you is normal. The important thing is to be able to harness it and use it to your advantage. That’s why really you’re supposed to call it “performance activation” instead of “performance anxiety.” Alina and I both did breathing exercises like we learned in drama class and chose mantras to think about. Hers was “you are strong, you are powerful, you are beautiful.” Mine was “I’m going to make as many mistakes as I damn well please.” Alina said my mantra seemed counter-productive but I always find that when I give myself permission to make mistakes is when I usually do the best, because I’m no longer worrying about making mistakes which is what makes you make mistakes. So I thought that over and over and my audition went well. Of course when you have performance activation when you’re waiting to be slaughtered it’s not really the same thing, because you won’t actually have to do anything but stand there and wait. There’s a kind of very precise horizontal laser guillotine they use. One moment your head is attached to your body and the next it’s not, just like that. It’s very peaceful and humane. But anyway I still think it matters to be able to control your anxiety, performance activation, whatever, before you’re slaughtered too. After all, everybody dies but what really matters is how we live. Wouldn’t you prefer a life where you walk to your death with your head held high? Wouldn’t the best culmination of everything you are and were as a person be to have good strong thoughts in your head at the very moment it falls to the floor?

My friend Alina has dark skin and I have light skin and we learn in school about how that matters a lot on the Outside because people get treated differently. It’s important that we learn about stuff like that because the rich who are going to buy us don’t want us to be dumb animals kept in ignorance about how the world is. They want us to be awake. Because if we are awake and woken and we know we are going to die and we know why, then it means everything is ethical. So we learn how white supremacy is everywhere including on the farm, is what they teach us. We have to know that it’s not fair but it’s a cruel reality that white animals command a higher price than dark ones. Why this is is because rich people are usually white and they feel bad about eating black or brown animals because it feels like colonialism to them. They don’t want to feel like there is a race or class element to who gets eaten and who does the eating. So if they only eat animals who are white like me then they don’t have to feel bad. It’s all ethical. But really all it means is that my parents probably got a better price for selling me to the farm than Alina’s parents did, so how ethical is that really.

I really like rock climbing. I do it a lot with another friend named Josh who is good at it because he’s tall but mostly because arms are very long compared to his torso. In the sport of climbing that is referred to as having a very good ape index. Called that because like monkeys have very long arms because they climb things and swing around a lot. I measured my ape index once and it’s just 1; the length of both my arms stretched out is exactly equal to my height. Josh has an ape index of 1.05 which doesn’t seem like that big a difference but it sure is. I asked Alina once if she wanted me to measure her but she said she didn’t care because she’s short anyway so she can’t even get to rocks that I can get even with my regular ape index, since I’m taller than her. She does rowing instead which means she is always worrying about her weight. All the rowers do. Partly because sometimes the rowing team goes to competitions with rowing teams from other farms and they have to do a weigh-in before the competition, but I think mostly because they read books and watch movies about famous rowing teams on the Outside, and all those rowers worry about their weight all the time. So it’s the cool thing to do to show you’re good at rowing.

Anyway it’s funny how we worry about numbers that don’t really matter. The rich people who buy me once I’m butchered won’t care about my ape ratio. The people who eat Josh probably won’t even know that he was very special in this way. The people who buy Alina will maybe care about her weight a bit, since nobody wants to buy scrawny meat, but even the rowers on the farm aren’t allowed to get too skinny for obvious reasons so all of their worry is mostly academic anyway. It’s just a hobby to think about it. And the buyers do like looking at the pictures Mary takes of us rock climbing and rowing. You are what you eat so they need to eat healthy animals who got lots of exercise. It’s ethical.

If I don’t get the part of Agave in the play, who is the mother with the head on the stick, then I’ll still probably get to be one of the women who rip apart first a bunch of cattle and then a man with their bare hands. I think it would be fun if Alina and I got to do that together, be these crazy ripping women. So maybe I don’t want to get the big part after all, I don’t know.

I’m going to be slaughtered when I’m eighteen. That’s the usual age unless a rich person special-orders meat from a different age. So really it could come at any moment and you need to be ready. I think a lot about whether I’m ready and I don’t know. I think maybe you only really know whether or not you’re ready when the moment comes. So I guess I’m excited to see how I feel, in the moment before I die. I won’t have a long time to think about it but life isn’t long anyway, for anyone. At least on the farm we don’t lie to ourselves about it.