Do You Want Three Hours of Meditation on Meaninglessness? Mix Schnittke with the Coen Brothers

Maybe you have a favorite uncle who on taking leave of you, jauntily winks as he advises, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Well, after the way I spent Saturday, evening, I advise you to think twice about doing anything I would do. The day started reasonably well, teaching a fistful of piano lessons to some of my favorite students, several of whom I’ve had for years. A leisurely walk home, while listening to some Panufnik on the ipod, only to find several packages of books I had ordered waiting in the front vestibule. So far so good; I thumbed through a biography of Hindemith I’ve been wanting for some time, as a reasonably entertaining football game played out on the TV. And my wife was baking a ham. A real ham, not Ham and Water Product or whatever.

And then I ruined everything.

First mistake:  I listened to Schnittke’s First Symphony. Now, the antecedents for this wild chaos (composed in 1972, I think) include Mahler and Ives, and maybe even Berio’s “Sinfonia”, when was that written? And did Schnittke know it? Was it unavailable to a composer working in the Soviet system? I’ll look this stuff up, if nobody enlightens me before I get around to some fact-checking. In any case, the piece is closest to Ives’ collage pieces, but on steroids. I’m planning on discussing Schnittke next semester, so he’s become a project of mine. He is generally associated (rightly) with a Shostakovich type ethos, but the First Symphony owes little to Shosty, although I do think I found some quotes from Shostakovich amongst the bedlam. This is a formidable piece. The scoring requires more players than the entire population of Cameroon in the 15th century. It is confrontational, violent, despairing, cruelly humorous, and ultimately demoralizing. So, naturally, I followed it up with a second mistake, by going with my wife to see the Coen brothers’ new movie, “No Country for Old Men”- which is confrontational, violent, despairing, cruelly humorous, and ultimately demoralizing.

Both pieces are exemplars of what is sometimes called post-modernism. Both are informed by a savage intelligence and irony, and both create worlds of sheer meaninglessness. For an hour with Alfred, and 2 hrs. with the Coens, you’re plunged into a weird, intractable void. You’re much better off with what Ives called “sissy” music- maybe some Boccherini or something. And if you’re gonna see a movie, go into screen seven and see “The Bee Movie” instead of screen eight, where “No Country” is… 

More on Schnittke anon. I don’t anticipate discussing the Coens any further. (Yes, I recommend both symphony and movie, if you’re confused.) 

Repetition or Redundancy: Introductions by Mendelssohn and Mussorgsky

The beginning of Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang” symphony is completely inert, and therefore alarmingly dull, if I am permitted the oxymoron.  As I’ve been studying this score recently for classroom presentation, I started from the assumption that the piece’s dullness was due to my own limited perception, probably related to the generic problems connected with this “symphony-cantata” as well as the stupefyingly poor text that Medelssohn employed in the work.  Salvatore Cammarano’s book for Verdi’s Il Trovatore is a literary masterpiece compared to the shambles that Mendelssohn set in the cantata portion of his piece.

I adore Mendelssohn, and confess to being intimidated as well by the advocacy for this score by R. Larry Todd in his book on Mendelssohn that I’m using in the class. Todd is really careful to avoid personal enthusiasms and censures in his book, but the fact that he draws a structural diagram for “Lobgesang” and has several music examples constitutes advocacy.  I also hope that I’m man enough to admit my limitations. But I think I’ve discovered something that lends credence to my negative assessment of the piece.  

The first phrase of “Lobgesang” and the first phrase of Modest Mussorgsky’s (admittedly totally different and unrelated work conceptually and stylistically) Pictures at an Exhibition are similar.  It’s not an uncanny similarity, but similar they are, and not because they share the same key signature and roughly the same thematic shape, which they do, but which is certainly coincidental, but similar in their rhetoric.  Both are statement and response formulations, rather like a mass celebrant chanting something and being answered by a congregation.  This is common in classical music.  Brahms’ first piano sonata, Beethoven’s last symphony, Bach’s great mass, Rimsky’s Russian Easter Overture and most likely thousands of other works use this device.  It is common, to say the very least.  But Mendelssohn’s passage flops and Mussorgsky’s is immortal.  Why?

It is because in Mendelssohn the responsorial harmonization of the original single note phrase merely confirms the harmonies that are obviously implied in the former.  And then he adds new strophes to his passage, and each time the subsequent harmonization confirms the totally obvious. In Mussorsgsky, the harmonization, or at least the spacing is different each time, and even presents certain modal ambiguities; his opening promenade is definitely in B-flat, yes indeedy, but it is tinged by a lurking modal g minor, and sports as well the feeling of a premature move to the dominant, F major.  If this seems technical, well, it is-but remember, music is a craft with its own procedural protocols.  I can put it this way, non-technically: each time the listener hears the “celebrant” intone a phrase in Pictures, the listener is curious as to how the “responsorial” is formulated, and by the way, this interest does not diminish over repeated hearings.  The “Promenade” is a unique thing.  In Mendelssohn’s opening, you get exactly what is stongly implied each time.  It’s boring the first time, and it approaches unendurable on subsequent listenings.  

This should not sound immodest, because it is only basic musicianship, but I think I proved my contention in class yesterday.  I improvised Mendessohnian sounding harmonizations of the responsorials at the piano , but used different spacings each time and employed proxy chords which were rational but less obvious then the chords in the actual piece.  The passage was somewhat improved, but because I didn’t have an overarching conception of where I was going, it was still pretty bad.  In other words, I improved the passage tactically but not strategically.  If this seems like lese majestie,  let me suggest that the alternative is that we all shut up, stop thinking and experimenting, and eat everything that is put on our plate.  We shouldn’t eat everything that even a great master puts on our plate; we’ll get fat and complacent, and lose our powers of crititical discrimination.  The Italian and Scottish symphonies are masterpieces, “Lobgesang is an also-ran, that’s the way it is, whether I am personally impertinent or not.  I return to my profound rejection of the phrase, “You like it, I don’t, end of discussion” which an exceptionally intelligent friend of mine formulated during our conservatory days.  We need standards and discrimination.  

Finally, you may ask: “Isn’t repetition an often important unifying device, and therefore okey-dokey?”  Oh my, yes.  But repetition and redundancy are different things.  If you don’t believe me, consult a reliable dictionary.

Schumann's Second Symphony: What Did Twentieth Century Critics Allow Schumann to Learn From Beethoven?

Mendelssohn, Schumann

A friend lent me Anthony Newcomb’s 1984 article, “Once More ‘Between Absolute and Program Music’: Schumann’s Second Symphony”.  The best part of the article is the exhaustive summary of critical reception to the work in the 19th and 20th centuries, and commentaries on the radically different critical climate for Schumann’s work in those centuries.

Although the article is full of very useful information, it is written in academic-eeze, and therefore is not a literary pleasure. I confess that I prefer style as much as content even in academic papers.  I can’t help it. That’s why I like Charles Rosen so much…in fact, it is quite amusing to me to hear occasionally exasperated or condescending remarks about Rosen from jealous critics and musicologists.  It reminds me forcefully of a passage in William Shirer’s (3-volume, I’m referring to vol. 3) autobiography where he comments on the hostility of the official academic historian lobby to his best-selling “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, which they decry as the irresponsible work of an amateur.  What they are really objecting to is the fact that it was chosen for Book-of-the-Month Club.  Jealous, Jealous, Jealous.

This post does not attempt to analyze the Schumann 2nd.  Maybe I’ll do that in a subsequent post.  For now, suffice it to say that the work clearly follows the paradigm of Beethoven’s 5th, with the famous “knocking at the door” unifying device replaced by a motive taken from Haydn’s 104th symphony, and the function of the scherzo in Beethoven is usurped by the (third movement) slow movement in the Schumann, and Schumann establishes C Major at the outset, and changes the nature of C Major between the troubled first movement and triumphant finale, reserving c minor for the slow movement, where, like Beethoven’s scherzo, it goes from minor to major as a device of transition to the finale; this is opposed to Beethoven’s plan of going from c minor to C Major over the course of four movements.  Whew! That passage wasn’t very literary!

I should mention that the scherzo in this work is a tour-de-force.  Its vitality and technical prowess rivals Mendelssohn. How did Schumann manage to rise above his orchestral limitations for this impressive movement?   

The question that concerns me currently is this: What use does the twentieth century allow Schumann to make of Beethoven? Newcomb points out that the Second Symphony enjoyed wide esteem in the nineteenth century, presumably because the 19th century exalted Beethoven’s 5th, as opposed to the twentieth, which decried it as bombastic pretension (at least among hoity-toity critics).  Consider the case of a Beethoven inspired piano work, the Fantasy, op. 17.  This is allowed, because here Schumann is appropriating one of the most personal, even sentimental and autobiographical themes in Beethoven: An die ferne Geliebte, which may be understood as a typically Schumannian pun, referring both to Beethoven (the work was composed partly to raise funds for the Beethoven monument in Bonn) and to Schumann’s own distant beloved, Clara, whom he was attempting to marry at the time against the strenuous and exceptionally cruel opposition of that villain of the Schumann biography, Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck.  Maybe we should just call Old Man Wieck “Leopold”. 

I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating. Wieck was indeed a cruel man. Maybe Leopold was only selfish and insecure, but terrific damage was done by both flawed men; but you do need to credit Leopold (unlike Wieck) for creating the right environment for Mozart to develop artistically.  What if Leopold was an unambitious clerk, let’s say…would we still have Mozart? And are we missing potential Mozarts?

Many critics in the twentieth century wanted to put Schumann in a box. It’s easier, that way.  Schumann is personal, poetic, neurotic, secretive… but not the symphonic heir to Beethoven! We’ve already decided that only Brahms, and, for some, Bruckner can be that! Not Schumann, he’s our miniaturist, our fabulist, our aphorism maker.  If we admit the 2nd Symphony, we have to throw out our hasty generalizations! Much better to ignore or deride the work.  Remember: Schumann could only create aphorisms.

Schumann's "Spring" Symphony: A Great Symphony that Could Have Been Greater

Mendelssohn, Schumann

This is a fairly technical post. 

Schumann’s symphonies have traditionally been criticized for their amateurish orchestration.  This criticism is valid.  Schumann attempted to transfer the mechanics, techniques, and acoustical character of the piano to the orchestra, which works poorly.  Transferring orchestral style sonority to the piano, on the other hand, paradoxically works reasonably well; consider Brahms’ First Sonata or Shostakovich’s op. 34 preludes, or Stravinsky’s “Serenade in A” for example.  

The “Spring” symphony, composed in 1841 and published as Schumann’s op. 38, has many virtues.  It is a lengthy work but one absolutely without “longeurs”, it abounds in contrast, it is by turns exuberant and lyrical, the melodic writing is consistently superior without compromising the sense of symphonic narrative  and drive, and its organization and structure is flat out brilliant; consider the beautiful masterstrokes that frame the piece, the evocation of Schubert’s “Great” C Major symphony (whose manuscript was discovered by Schumann in Vienna) in the horns and trumpets fanfare at the beginning, which summons  spring, and then is reiterated with perfect calculation at the beginning of the recapitulation in the first movement, and the lovely and unexpected birdsong cadenza that elegantly and touchingly launches the recapitulation in the finale. This warm, youthful, and luminous work is a treasure.

But the orchestration is problematical.

This may come as a shock to the uninitiated, but conductors alter orchestration all the time, and not just in Schumann. Yes, in Beethoven and Schubert as well, if not usually in Mozart and Mendelssohn. Just go to a rehearsal.  In no time you’ll see a conductor ask a clarinet to double a passage for bassoons and horns, or divide the double basses so only half play a scampering figure, or tell the flute to play something an octave lower, or tell the disengaged last member of the second violins to take his finger out of his nose, pack up his fiddle, and go home.  Just kidding about that last one! But seriously, this stuff happens all the time, and needs to happen. Only idiots and children think you can serve the music by slavish devotion to the printed text.  And composers who are also conductors probably make the most changes.  Look at Mahler, for example, who changed so much in the Schumann symphonies that he has his own version of the works.  Mahler also made changes again and again in his own works.  

Here is an example of Schumann’s bad orchestration.  The beginning of the second movement features a lovely melody in octaves for the first violins, a sustained, syncopated accompanimental texture for the second violins and violas, and a bass line in contrary motion to the melody in the cellos and basses.  Here are the problems:

1. Octave doubling of melodies is great on the piano, but ineffective in the violins, especially in the relatively less expressive middle of the violin register, where this melody lies. The octave doubling adds little weight and makes the melody a tiny bit out of tune, which is sometimes welcome, as it warms up the sound, but not here, where it is essential that the first violins, who are all on their divisi lonesome, hold their own against all of the second violins, violas, cellos, and basses.  

2. The second violins and violas are trying to duplicate the effect created by a pianist’s right foot on the sustain pedal.  Maybe Schumann congratulated himself on finding such a subtle rythmic expedient to represent the piano’s pedal, but he shouldn’t have been trying to represent the piano’s pedal at all, the orchestra has plenty of ways of its own to create sympathetic vibrations.  Also, and most damaging, the ensemble is gonna be a huge problem.  Even the finest players in the best orchestras are going to be tentative here, they are not going to be as comfortable finding the beat and coming in properly, with well co-ordinated ensemble as they could be.  And all for nothing. Plus, this passage is likely to consume valuable rehearsal time.

3. All the cellos and basses playing a kind of mirror image of the first violins (who are not in a brilliant register, or in a great violin key [the key here is E-flat Major]) are more than a match for the first violin section; there is a danger of a bottom heavy sound, and in any case, the melody should predominate, as this is a homophonic texture.  

Okay, Tough Guy, your solution?

1. Have all the first violins play the top octave of the melody, and half of the second violins and half of the violas play the bottom octave of the melody.

2. Have the syncopated accompaniment played by the left over second violins and violas, and re-notate their parts so you don’t have two sixteenth notes tied together commencing on off-beats. Use overlaps rather than rythmic unisons, so you get the sustain, but don’t have ensemble problems.  You might consider putting mutes on the players executing this passage.  That depends, it’s hard to know if it’s necessary or desirable before trying it out in the hall.

3.  Keep the cellos as is, but make the basses (who double the cellos an octave lower) punctuate rather than double the cello line.  In the first measure they could play an eighth note E-flat, in the second an eighth note A-flat, in the third they could take the whole value of the D, as the melody is now in a more exposed register, etc.

Conductors have to mess with stuff like this all the time, it’s a tough job, I promise you.  When done right.  Some conductors might skate past the whole problem.  I have not heard Mahler’s solution to this passage, but I understand that his versions have been recorded.  Perhaps someone who has heard what he does can enlighten me…I’m sure his solution to the passage discussed is better than mine.       

Do All Styles Become Historical? Or Just Those of the Nineteenth Century?

Mendelssohn, Schumann

In Leon Plantinga’s survey of musical romanticism, “Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style In Nineteenth-Century Europe” he gives vastly greater weight to Schumann than to Mendelssohn.  In fact, he essentially promotes the time-worn and insupportable dismissal of Mendelssohn from the ranks of the truly great, for the time-worn and insupportable reasons of Mendelssohn’s supposedly “conservative” style, considered to have been fueled by the aesthetics of the past, his fortunate social and financial position, and the flawless perfection of his compositional technique, which is almost seen (implicitly, I grant you) as a liability.

But at the very end of his inadequate and even somewhat condescending passage on Mendelssohn, which focusses mainly on the overture to “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the scherzo from the d minor Piano Trio, he makes a really provocative and interesting comment: “In the later twentieth century, when all the styles of the nineteenth seem historical, there are clear signs of a reawakening interest in the work of this extraordinarily gifted composer.”

Can you imagine a textbook (and that is what this book is, being part of the Norton “Introduction to Music” series) saying that Beethoven, or even Brahms, for heaven’s sake, was “extraordinarily gifted”? Of course not. That would be like saying that water is wet. But when that phrase is applied to Mendelssohn, it either means:

1. Actually, you know, Mendelssohn really wasn’t that bad. His music is sort of good afterall! or,

2. Mendelssohn wasn’t really a great composer.  He was just exceptionally talented.

In fact, Plantinga’s book is excellent on the whole; lucid, informed, and remarkably wide-ranging for an introductory text.  But the only interesting part of Plantinga’s Mendelssohn commentary is the suggestion that styles can “become historical”, which implies that we hear things differently over time, which does seem obvious, and platitudinous to boot, but really isn’t, because by specifying styles of the nineteeth century, he leaves open the notion that styles from other eras are capable of achieving a sort of timeless relevance denied to the romantic era. But it’s also possible that Plantinga is obliquely referring to a general reaction against Romanticism in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, at least among academics, among whom Plantinga is counted, obviously.  I remember being really annoyed in my conservatory days when more than one of my fellow students would make a silly pronouncement to the effect that they didn’t like anything between Beethoven (or even Bach!) and the moderns.  And they would say it with pride. This isn’t personal taste.  It is either ignorance or immaturity.  Or more probably, pretentiousness, which is in fact a sort of immaturity at all times, and at least some of the time it bespeaks ignorance as well.

Schumann’s greatest music is undeniably eccentric.  Mendelssohn’s music is not, because when we apply the standards of the nineteenth century to (for us) strange conceptions such as the yoking of religious sentiment and virtuosity, or pseudo-baroque oratoria, we make allowance for the zeitgeist of the times. Charles Rosen discusses this in his Mendelssohn chapter in The Romantic Generation. For most of the twentieth century, critics (almost unanimously) and many listeners made a cult of “personal style”, which almost by defininiton implies something like eccentricity, or at least, uniqueness.  So perhaps Plantinga is trying to say something along these lines:

“When Schumann’s music was composed, it appeared that its intrinsic eccentricity distinguished it in a way that would allow for the suspension of a historical context, because the music was so inextricably bound up with the unique personality of its creator, as opposed to Mendelssohn, whose aesthetics were, so to speak, more general. But with the passage of time we can see that this was not so, at least for the Romantics.  This means that Mendelssohn’s style is capable of posthumous “rehabilitation”, because the avant-garde quickly becomes the “derriere-garde”, and therefore composers who were formerly considered reactionaries are now in the same boat with the erstwhile ‘experimentalists’.” 

In our own time, it is impossible to tell what is reactionary and what is progressive.  One may scoff, and say “It’s just music. It’s either good or bad, and the application of such categories is meaningless.” I totally and vehemently disagree with that.  The history of style and the relationships between styles, and evaluation of these relationships is a vital part of understanding art.  Brahms, Puccini, and Rachmaninov are no longer old fashioned.  Vivaldi, Scriabin, Cage and Babbitt are newly old fashioned.  And a generation from now? Who knows.  Mendelssohn’s friend, Goethe, said: “The surest sign of sincerity is craftsmanship.” Pretty applicable to the “extraordinarily gifted” Mendelssohn, eh?

An Egregious Example of Critical Dilettantism

In my last entry I discussed the futility of drawing on a composer’s personal life in analyzing his music. Fittingly, since then I’ve come across a pair of reviews of the new book Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician by John Worthen. I haven’t read this book, and based on the reviews (below) I don’t plan to — anyone who has read it is welcome to set me straight if the book is being misrepresented.

Reviewing in the Telegraph, Damian Thompson mentions Worthen’s selective attention to Schumann’s output, suggesting that Worthen only discusses the works that support his thesis: that Schumann’s miseries resulted from syphilis and drinking rather than mental illness:

Worthern’s attempt to prove that Schumann was suffering from syphilis rather than schizophrenia goes on too long. It reminded me of a biography of King George III which argued that he was suffering from porphyria and therefore not insane. Really? I would have thought that if you end up shaking hands with trees (as the King) or arguing with angels (as Schumann) then you are bonkers, whatever the cause.

Thompson’s choicest words are reserved for Worthen’s dwelling on Schuman’s gastro-intestinal issues:

“Schumann had had haemorrhoids in Dorpat, back in February [1844] and constipation and haemorrhoids go very badly together,” he notes. Thank you, professor. Could that explain the slightly strained quality of Schumann’s writing at the time?

Maybe that last bit was gratuitously nasty, but Thompson was rightly dismissing one of the, um, crappier pieces of “musical scholarship” that has been drawn to my attention. There’s plenty to discuss in the music without desperately resorting to this kind of pedestrian non-analysis. (Thompson himself can’t entirely resist the temptation of extra-musical music analysis. “I defy anyone with an open mind to listen to [the violin concerto] and not realise that something is about to go horribly wrong.”)

In another review published in the same paper on the same day, John Adamson sees value in Worthen’s agenda to debunk the mythologization of the Schumann as the mad, tortured genius:

The tragedy of Schumann’s final years has fitted so perfectly with a certain Romantic stereotype - the demented and troubled genius - that it has exercised a captivating influence over his biographers ever since. Each time, for instance, Schumann recorded in his diary a moment of depression, melancholy or nervous exhaustion, it has tended to be identified as a warning of the storm to come.

It’s Adamson who notes that Worthen is a professor of English, not music. That, in itself, doesn’t mean he can’t analyze music (Charles Rosen’s doctorate, after all, is in French literature rather than music). But according to Adamson, the bulk of Worthen’s approach is a textual criticism of Schumann’s letters and other sources.

Quite frankly, great music is quite challenging to understand. Irrelevant associations with the composer’s life rarely makes it any easier.

And something else that disturbs me even more: the attempt to discredit or marginalize mental illness, to attempt to explain mental illness as if the term is a catch-all for subsidary causes, as if mental illness were the equivalent of the helpless generality, “nervous disorder” which attempted to provide the cause of death in cases where the doctor was baffled…Schumann’s father, August, had his death “diagnosed” in this way.  Unfortunately, mental illness is real and cruel, and Schumann suffered from it, poor man.  And why is there a mania to diagnose composers with  syphilis all the time, from a distance of centuries? Schumann drank quite a bit in his youth, and he always liked pretty girls.  Maybe these two facts are enough to set irresponsible critics and biographers in motion, but this sort of ex post facto tabloid junk is, at least for me, disgusting.  Even if it is sometimes true, which I’m not conceding in any specific case, although the evidence is stronger for Schubert than for Schumann. 

Please let us do criticism the correct, and difficult way.  Learn the darn music and go from there. 

Do Composers Compose Out of a Need for "Personal Expression"? The Strange Case of Dr. Mendelssohn and Mr. Schumann

Mendelssohn, Schuman

Obviously, any artist is de facto “expressing himself personally”. But to reduce the purpose of an artist to a need for self expression is so simple minded that the phrase “personal expression” becomes meaningless.  It puts me in mind of amateur poets (a class with whom I am intensely sympathetic, by the way) who take one class, write a few incoherent and narcissistic poems, and proudly proclaim that they have a need for “self expression”.  Meaningless, meaningless, meaningless.  This is for amateurs, not professionals. 

Which brings me to Mendelssohn’s String Quartet, op. 80, in f minor (Beethoven’s most hopeless key; vide the “Appassionata” sonata).  If those who think Mendelssohn is wimpy were to listen to this piece, they’d “have another think coming,” as the expression has it. Those who say that Mendelssohn is wimpy either don’t know Mendelssohn, are mean spirited, or have a deficiency in their aesthetics. But they are not even potentially correct.  No way. In the best scenario, some music lovers who have innocently labored under this regrettable delusion, promulgated by irresponsible critics and even musicians, some of whom are indeed motivated by antisemitism, like Wagner, for instance,  may cure themselves in a most pleasurable and fulfilling manner by listening to a broad spectrum of his works.

Mendelssohn composed this agonizing and despairing quartet in 1847, supposedly as a response to the tragedy of his sister Fanny’s (1805-47) death.  Felix had been very close to his sister, and suffered deeply when she died. The quartet is full of “deep suffering” as well.  Must be a connection, right? I don’t buy it.  I don’t buy it, even if it could be shown that Mendelssohn consciously thought he was expressing his grief by the quartet’s composition.  Composition doesn’t work that way.  The professional obligation to create meaningful work isn’t at the beck and call of personal circumstances.

There are other works that fall into this category: Mozart’s a minor piano sonata (a response to the death of his mother); Brahms’s Requiem (death of his mother plus the death of Robert Schumann); Stravinsky’s Symphonie en Ut (wife and daughter).  In all fairness, I should point out that Stravinsky commented that it was the composition of the work that “kept him going”, and that the work has a reasonably sunny disposition.

The cases of Berg’s Violin Concerto and Schoenberg’s String Trio are completely different.  These are programmatic pieces that specifically introduce personally definable elements as part of their structure and meaning.  Deaths and love affairs, for Berg, a near fatal heart attack, for Schoenberg.  Incidentally, personal allusions represented in musically concrete ways was a pervasive stylistic feature of Berg’s music. 

Most interesting is the case of Robert Schumann, the professional who pretended to be an amateur.  He didn’t fool me!  His case is similar to Berg’s.  Papillons, Carneval, Frauenliebe und Leben, etc. are “programmatic pieces that specifically introduce personally definable elements as part of their structure and meaning”.  Schumann’s commitment to his craft is as discernably professional as any other great composer.  That doesn’t mean he was as technically gifted as Mendelssohn; of course he wasn’t.  Genius and technique are not the same thing.  I look forward to discussing the “cult of the amateur” in connection with Schumann in my upcoming class. 

I’ll give the last word to Stravinsky, but I have to paraphrase, I don’t feel like pawing through Robert Craft’s zillion books about Stravinsky to find the exact passage.  When Stravinsky was asked when and where he got his musical inspirations, he responded:  “At my desk, when I’m trying to compose.”  The words of a professional.

What's So Wrong with Mendelssohn's op.44?

mendelssohn.jpg

schumann2.jpg

Mendelssohn, Schumann

Purely as an aside, I just noticed on television that the American Express ad touting their business credit card, a spot that features the “small business owner next door” has replaced its former background music, the exhilarating scherzo from Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” symphony, with some inane techno-pop.  What does it mean? Nothing.  But you can no longer get your Mendelssohn fix by sitting in front of the idiot box!

In Paul Griffith’s generally admirable book, The String Quartet, a History, he makes a revealing point.  He discusses Mendelssohn’s op. 44 quartets in a rather superficial way (but of course the book is a survey), essentially criticizing the works as a step backward following the great a minor quartet, op. 13, which he acknowleges as the “…one masterpiece that slipped through…”, referring to the not-so-great aesthetic milieu for the quartet between Beethoven and Brahms.  That’s alright, but I’d prefer a discussion about op. 44’s considerable intrinsic musical merits.  Critics and historians seem to be obliged to force musical history into a progressive narrative.  I’m frequently guilty of this, myself.  But by any reasonable standard, op. 44 is a great musical achievement; and every piece can’t be the Ninth Symphony. 

Great repertories, such as the mature work of Mendelssohn, the mature work of Hindemith, the mature work of Richard Strauss, almost anything by Rachmaninov, are slighted again and again by the imposition of this progressive narrative on musical history.  What’s more old fashioned now, I ask you, Pierrot Lunaire or the Rachmaninov Etudes Tableaux?  And I say this as a committed supporter of the aspirations of the so-called “avant garde”; at least where these aspirations are coupled with craftsmanship and sincerity, and as opposed to those composers who attempt facilely to gain a public by making their scores relevant, or as opposed especially to those composers who cynically employ the resources of the past without having been trained in the techniques of the past. 

But the point that got me was Griffith’s speculation that Robert Schumann refrained from making a public criticism of Mendessohn’s op. 44 “perhaps out of tact”.  What? Backward looking or not, op. 44 is a significant technical achievement, well beyond Schumann’s technique, which is essentially proven in Schumann’s op. 41 cycle, which sports some charming and indeed expressive moments, but which feels like a work Schumann concocted to establish his classically formal bona fides.  And Griffith makes the great point that Schumann’s sonata forms in op. 41 are more “textbook” than anything found in the Classical masters, whose forms are much more adapted to the musical materials they are using.

And Schumann’s criticisms in his Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik are generally more enthusiastic than tactful.  By the way, I’m not saying that Schumann may not ultimately be a greater composer than Mendelssohn;  works like Dichterliebe and the Phantasie, op. 17 strike a deeper chord, perhaps than Mendelssohn is able to do.  But when it comes to putting the dots and hooks of a score together in a professional way, Mendelssohn wins by, to borrow a term from pugilism, a TKO.  Schumann himself admitted this somewhere, saying he could study with Mendelssohn for years, and still have more to learn.

Mendelssohn and "The Anxiety of Influence"

David’s reply to a previous post on Mendelssohn’s relationship to Beethoven brings up an important point. How and to what extent did Beethoven’s (especially symphonic) successors respond to his overwhelming prestige, to his inescapable influence?

Mendelssohn’s three great Beethoven glosses (Piano Sonata in E Major, op. 6, String Quartets Opp. 12 and 13) are early works.  Mendelssohn appears to be more concerned with Bach, Handel and Mozart in most of his latter works, maybe because Beethoven seemed like too big an elephant in the room to the mature Mendelssohn, but then, of course, you have the “Lobegesang”, as a (problematical) exception.   A kid’ll try anything, and if you’re a kid like Mendelssohn, you just might succeed.  But the only kid like Mendelssohn in musical history had a father named Leopold.  Mendelssohn’s latter works are not nearly as experimental or progressively minded as the earlier works.  Beethoven, of course, is the most experimental and progressive composer in history. 

Is it coincidence that Mendelssohn’s two indisputably great symphonies are placed outside of the Germanic (Beethovenian) orbit, in Scotland and Italy? Is the “Lobegesang” weakened because Mendelssohn is Handelian grandiose, perhaps, but not Beethovenian grandiose?  

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music

R. Larry Todd

A work that takes up the Beethovenian gauntlet and works well is the Brahms First.  The 5th and 9th symphonies meet and reconcile in an incredibly classisizing synthesis.  Brahms was progressive by reinventing the past.  Bruckner’s Beethoven glosses in the Third, Ninth, and parts of the Eighth work well because, unlike Mendelssohn, Bruckner was attuned to the Beethovenian grandiose.  David mentitions a book by Bond that tosses Schumann 4th into the ring.  If Schumann’s 4th wasn’t in d minor, and didn’t accentuate submediant relationships, and wasn’t cyclical, would we associate it with Beethoven’s Ninth, and Fifth? And do all cyclical works owe their existence to Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous motto? Maybe, but we can’t say for sure. The question is, is Beethoven so fundamental in himself, or was he accepted as fundamental because the zeitgeist of the 19th century was in accord with his nature? Some of both, but if I had to choose, I’d take the first alternative, when we’re talking symphony.

Tchaikovsky appropriated the model of the Fifth in his own Fifth, but I think he might have thought he was getting it from Liszt, a composer much closer to his heart than Beethoven.  And How about Liszt? Is the “Faust” symphony another Beethoven gloss? As for Berlioz, in “Fantastique” and “Harold in Italy”, how about that?  Berlioz was too much his own man to be sure about.  His big musical gods included Cherubini and Gluck.   And he was weird.

Caught Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Mendelssohn's Reputation

Felix Mendelssohn is the most underrated master in classical music history.  Not as transcendant as Mozart, not as powerful as Beethoven, not as intimate as Schumann, not as poignant as Schubert, not as idiosyncratic as Chopin, not as quirky as Berlioz, Mendelssohn seems to fall between two stools…at least for many listeners.  His technique alone qualifies him for the pantheon.  And technique matters, and not just to musicians.  It’s pretty facile to say, “oh, well, you know, I don’t care about all that fancy technical stuff, I want music that moves me.”  Counterpoint, instrumentation, formal subtlety are rewarding in themselves.  Plus, Mendelssohn is transcendant, powerful, intimate, poignant, idiosyncratic, etc.  He was just too intelligent, too urbane, too refined to allow his music to be dominated by any single characteristic. He doesn’t “wear his heart on his sleeve”.  Mendelssohn requires a listener who doesn’t need to be blown away all the time, a listener who cares about the craft of musical composition.

It is well known that Mendelssohn’s reputation has been deeply harmed by anti-semitism, most famously in Richard Wagner’s screed, “Judaism in Music”.  And everbody knows that his statue in Leipzig was pulled down by the Nazis and his music banned.   But I don’t really think that antisemitism is the principal reason for the relative undervaluing of his work.  I think many listeners impose the wrong (Beethoven or Wagner) context on him.  The right context (Bach and Mozart) may lead listeners to a greater appreciation of his gifts.

Now, one might say, “What are you talking about, Mendelssohn is a staple of the repertory, in concert and on recording.”  My riposte? Mendelssohn is underrated until such time as he achieves the status of Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms, and perhaps he is deserving of the status accorded to Schubert and Chopin as well.  These rankings are a parlor game, I know.  Individual tastes differ, naturally, but it probably should be acknowleged that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner are the untouchable four, comprising the benchmarks against which other greats may be measured.  And why have I neglected to mention Haydn? For shame.