Month: June 2018

Ludwig Von Beethoven died in 1827, likely not hearing reflected in performance a single note of his composed music in the last 13 or so years of his life.  An all occlusive deafness stole any semblance other than vibration of the complex sound paintings he was continuing to create, with nothing but his memory of sound and prodigious compositional talent to guide him in his later years.  Yet, this profound silence proved no obstacle to an other worldly genius. Beethoven’s life mask as seen above, created in these difficult years, emotes a deep internal projection that is unmistakable.  This is a man who lives among the profoundest of thoughts in his soundless prison. Beethoven wanted in the time he had left to attempt to leave for the world a record of his vision of a passionate life, and the conquering of death. He left us his entire conceptualization in the experience that is the Ninth Symphony.

I have been around classical music my entire life, but I honestly have not been ready to absorb Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a profound personal experience until now.  This specific symphony has been used and misused to adorn everything from unique shared human events like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and reunification of the German people to commercials and phone ring tones.  Most who have stated they have heard it, have heard only snippets, and would be overwhelmed and subsumed by its immense size and scope.  Easily twice as long as any other Beethoven Symphony, it clings fragilely to faint outlines of symphonic structure while traveling in directions never previously conceived,  and demanding a commitment from the listener few other musical creations ask.  Each of the four movements stand  nearly as a complete symphony, with drifting lines of intensity, sudden rhythmic shifts, sublime beauty, and echoes that later would be referred to as motifs.  It is exhausting for performers, singers, conductors, and the audience as Beethoven peals back raw layers of emotion, than expounds upon them, never to finish them, demanding ever more commitment to see the piece as a whole .  It is the complete cantata of a man’s struggle with his mortality and the conceptualization of the yearning for connection with the eternal.  Beethoven, initially composing this never before heard musical experience, may not have originally conceptualized a choral ending movement, but the finished product recognizes his recognition that only the human voice raised to heavenly sound could provide a final enrapturement.  Thus the unforgettable finale of the choral last movement.

My father passed last year, and I believe his struggles in his final year prepared me finally for the whole of this great work.  I prepared myself with study for a scheduled performance, and finally heard it last night in its entirety in live performance ,  performed by the  Milwaukee Symphony and Chorus.  I was transfixed.   In the end, transcendent, and with most in the audience, emotionally tearing.  Beethoven, in triumphing over his deafness, has left us with an inkling of the eternal.

The first movement sets the tension with an opening like no other previous work.  A sustained chord layer is built like a slowly wakening consciousness until it uncoils into an intense rage, partial melodic infusions work around the orchestra in an unhurried Allegro pace.  An attempted more pleasant second theme is wrenched back into the tense minor chord of the first theme, refusing to let go. This is a dark and troubled place Beethoven’s mind is inhabiting, asking for some clarity to the strife and pain life brings, particularly in an age when a person’s many ailments had to simply be suffered, for no treatment was available.  The music of this first movement introduces us to dissonance and makes us uncomfortable.  It elicits a sense of heroism but denies an ultimate triumph.

The second movement in typically symphonic form would normally allow respite from the tension of the first movement in both tone and length.  Beethoven would have none it, inserting an even more agitated scherzo, in place of a typical quiet idyll, then expanding and evolving it to previously unheard of complexity and length.  When the second theme is introduced as a buoyant trio to restore hope and a veneer of control, Beethoven creates a tug of war between the two themes and refuses to relieve the angst.

We have now pulled ourselves emotionally through over 40 minutes of music and are not yet half done.  Beethoven thus far denies us even a hint of the redemption for a difficult life.

And then, exhausted, we are lifted to the stars.

The third movement takes the unexpected pace of an Adagio, and slowly elevates us to the metaphysical.  Beethoven was a great composer in many idioms , but he and Mozart were absolute geniuses when it came to Adagio slow movements.  We feel slowly freed of our earthly responsibilities and tragedies and long for the beyond, mysterious and as of yet unresolved.  Then towards the end of the Adagio, trumpets suddenly  interrupt our idyll to signal a dramatic awareness, the orchestra tries linger, the trumpets return more profoundly and  the orchestra  exclaims the famous Glorious Chord.  We look up to see what is to come…but it is not to be, and the movement ends with an unresolved yearning.  Has Beethoven taken us this far, only to tell us there is no meaning, no resolution to this life?

The fourth movement then goes where no symphony had ever gone before.  Each of the three previous movements’ motifs present, only to be rejected each time by defiant cellos and basses, that interrupt and refuse to be pulled down into any of the preceding tension and indecision.  No  – there is a way out and a way up, and the deep sonorous voice of the orchestra, the cellos, basses and bassoons quietly begin to declare the theme of triumph we now recognize as the Ode to Joy.  Beethoven finished the symphony in 1824, racked by deafness and disease, sufficiently ill that he would die only three years later.  He wanted the world to know that his soul, our soul was not bound by our earthly limitations, but would ultimately be transcendent.  What follows is 25 minutes of the messiest glory filled music in the history of composition. The Frederich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy declares a singular humanity and connection to a Supreme Being beyond the celestial heavens — and Beethoven describes this transcendent joy  in a magnificent heavenly cacophony between singer soloist, choir, and orchestra inhaling and exhaling like a supernatural bellows, seeking higher  ever higher ecstasy until culminating again in an even more Glorious Chord of all three.  Then again, the silence…is it over?  No…. No, a quant little “turkish” march breaks out , and the process begins all over, march becomes fugue, fugue becomes a brilliant full orchestra presto, and then again quiet.  We seek one more time to imagine a salvation.  Schiller’s line -“Brothers, above the starry canopy, there must dwell a loving father”  rings out in hymnal form by the choir, and then all heck breaks lose as the answer is a resounding yes, first led by the soloists then, maximally surging choir and orchestra, until like a massive celestial pipe organ, the immense colors and sound drive an explosion like the crescendoing path through a comet’s tail, into an indescribably joyful resolution that leaves the performers and listener utterly exhausted, and profoundly transcendent.

There can be no experience that rivals unadulterated emotion.  Beethoven changed the musical experience forever with the ninth and changed the perception and standard of excellence of every composer that followed him.  The outright intimidation of the genius of Beethoven’s epic masterpiece left many unwilling to create their own Magnum Opus for fear it would pale in comparison to the Olympian Ninth.  It has become the musical expression of what we ideally wish to project as our common humanity and best impulses.  Called to greatness, Beethoven triumphed.  If you get a chance someday, to experience this first hand, as I did, be prepared to be shaken to your core.  Until then, watch one of the greater performances preserved for all time, in Sir George Solti’s London Philharmonic performance in 1986. If you can find the time try to master the performance as a whole and live the complete transformation  —  if you are strapped for time, immerse yourself in the final movement  begun precisely at the one hour mark ( 1:00:00) and  the glory will still envelop you…

We are often called on these pages to speak of genius.  The story of western civilization is replete with epic personalities and talents.  The accomplishments in art, music, literature, philosophy and science often soar to heights that elevate humankind to a special, almost immortal transcendency.  But inevitably, the source of such genius is at base a flawed human, filled with original sin. Caravaggio painted with epic beauty, but was difficult and violent. Percy Bysshe Shelley was an icon of idyllic poetry, but treated people in his life with disdain and infidelity.  Isaac Newton almost single handedly invented modern math and science, but was raptor like in sharing any sense that the inspiration may have been collaborative.

Then there is Richard Wagner.  A savant in perfidy, Wagner holds a special place in the pantheon of geniuses who managed to deliver a lifetime of troubled actions, making it to this day hard to separate the works from the ugliness beneath them.  Wagner ran from his debts, treated his wife as a stranger, and other men’s wives as his prey, used and abused admirers,  denigrated other great artists’ works to elevate his own, and pandered to an ugly strain of anti-semitism that allowed others to use his art as propaganda for the worst racial philosophies.  Connecting it all, was a megalomania that allowed him to excuse himself for all behaviors, for the propagation of his work as unrivaled.  In total, not a good person.

The music is looked upon with the same dualism as the composer.  The infusion of Wagner’s philosophies of life into every stitch of the music led to a type of unified field theory of musical art that fused Wagnerian poetry, stage design, operatic voice, and massive musical structure Wagner called Gesamtkundstwerk , or art in totality.  He described the concept in essays that he felt was an evolution above and beyond the Beethoven conceptualization, that injected the other senses into the musical drama.  His works became increasingly contra-tonal, complex, philosophically linked — and long. …very long.  Long and divergent to structure to the point that Rossini, the great Italian composer is famous for having described Wagner’s music as containing “wonderful moments, and dreadful quarter hours of an hour.”   The music drama form was reworked by Wagner to  predate and forever influence cinema of the twentieth century, with the influence of musical cues known as leitmotifs that predicts a character’s appearance, reveals inner emotions or tensions , or reorients the story.  Think of the foreboding two note leitmotif of the shark in Jaws.  No Wagner, and its just another shark in the ocean.  The leitmotifs allowed Wagner to time travel through the epic stories, recalling characters, previous story lines, and linking them all over an extraordinary canvas of size and scope. The orchestra itself became larger, heavier in brass, to recreate the heroic figures and their actions, mirroring the increasingly pre-christian and racial memes of Wagner’s obsession with early German and Norse myths.  The so called romantic middle operas, Der Fliegende Hollander (Flying Dutchman), Tannhauser, and Lohengrin developed Wagner’s spectacular sense of sound and color with many melodic moments that function as stand alone individual classics of the marriage of the visual and the aural.

The Magnus Opus is, however, the Ring, Der Ring Des Nibelungen, a marathon of four linked operatic dramas , Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung, run as designed, in sequence, over 15 hours long, and performed in total  only in so-called “festivals” to preserve the sanity of the audience.  Wagner took twenty six years to develop the The Ring into its final form, and seeing it as the perfect synthesis of music and drama,  browbeat his patron King Ludwig of Bavaria into freeing up the necessary funds to build a performance hall worth of the immense scope.  Bayreuth stands today as the birth home of this spectacular sensorial event, and music listeners feel a sense of pilgrimage if they secure the experience of the Ring at Bayreuth at least once in their lifetimes.

The music of Wagner requires tremendous patience, necessarily leaving behind the modern world of the short attention span into a floating consciousness that presages modern philosophy, atonality, inner conflict, innate heroism, and savage beauty.  Despite the megalomania and the  perverse humanity, the thematic brilliance shines through.  The thrilling ride of the Walkuries.  The tempestuous, violent ghost existence of the Dutchman.  The Wedding march in Lohengrin. The  spiritual Pilgrim’s Chorus of Tannhauser.  The other worldly achingly beautiful Tristan and Isolde Liebestod.  The glorious reverberation of Siegfried’s Rhein Journey.   Love him or hate him, Wagner owned the ability to grasp essential human emotion and pull it from you no matter your reticence in accepting such genius from such a flawed individual.

There are multiple moments of musical performance greatness, but a behind the scenes look at the extraordinary endurance and raw emotions required to pull out Wagner’s ultimate music scape knows no better example than a short vignette of the great George Solti leading the Vienna Philharmonic in recording rehearsal of Siegfried’s Funeral March from Gotterdammerung.  This is a young Solti, willing to drain every ounce of human emotion from his orchestra and himself, in emoting the cataclysm of death and the loss of a heroic life.  The below recording is just over six minutes long.  One can begin to perceive why only a few conductors and a few orchestras are athletic and psychically stable enough to pull off an entire Ring performance.  What a performance to begin your journey.