Music and Transcendence: Beethoven, Mahler, Schonberg – and Rilke

A while after sending out Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser,” I wrote an email about music. It was prefaced by a headnote, which I reproduce below.

There is a link between poems and music. Both are dependent on sound, although in the case of music it is almost entirely so[1], while with poems semantic content is of primary importance.  I find that usually music appeals directly to my emotional being: it makes me happy or sad or excited.  But particularly as I listen to Bach, whom I have fallen in love with over the past seven or eight years, or Beethoven I also respond deeply to structure.  In music, one can hear structure, one can intuit it directly. 

Let me recount how I first became aware of the immense importance of structure in music.  In the half year I lived in Kolkata while teaching at Calcutta University, I went to a lot of performances of Indian music.  The high point was when my wife visited for a month and we went to the Dover Lane Music Conference, a four-day series of concerts which stretched each night from early evening till after dawn.  (We never made it all through the night – that was just too long for our stamina.)  The reason for those extended performances was profoundly Indian: ragas come in two forms, either evening ragas or morning ragas.  Unless the performances lasted until after dawn, the latter could not be performed.

Although I didn’t know anything about Indian music, I could sit fascinated and delighted through a thirty or forty minute piece for sitar, sarod or voice (always rhythmically accompanied by the tabla, an Indian drum).  How a raga works is still impenetrable to me, even though I have tried to read about their structure. 

Still, as I listened to ragas performed on sitar or sarod or flute, I could hear what I realized was their internal ‘architecture’: there were rooms, and these rooms opened into other rooms.  Each room had a shape.  I realized I was encountering structure without really understanding how it was created or by what rules its symmetries developed.

Music, like poems, moves us bodily.  We take in sound, quite literally: the vibrations in the air enter into our ears and our eardrums vibrate in sympathy with the vibrations they encounter.  Music is, of all the arts, the most ‘bodily.’  And it is not only our eardrums, though it is them above all.  Anyone who listens to music with pleasure knows that its vibrations are registered in other parts of the body as well.  Just think of a loud rock concert, where the bass resonates in our bellies .  . . . 

Poetry does that too.  Its rhythms, whether it is voiced out loud or just encountered on the page, have rhythmic patterns (yes, even free verse).  These sonic patterns overlay and intersect with the elemental rhythms of our bodies as we inhale and exhale and our heart pumps blood to every extremity.

Did I write the email which follows because of the affinity between music and poetry?  Or was it primarily that music is almost as important to my life as poems?  For I have rediscovered, increasingly, what every teenager knows: that we expand our minds when we encounter new music[2], we grow without having to work as hard as we have to work when we study physics or statistics or even poems.

So I wrote a brief email about music and transcendence.  It is, I think, clear enough, and needs no additional commentary.

I feel the need, before moving to what I wrote, to add two things.  In a later email, as you will see, I surrendered to my fascination with what happens to a poem when it is set to music.  (You will encounter it when I take  up a lousy poem and great music, both written by Charles Ives.)

Secondly, the web, which I often think has been a mixed boon to us in our post-modernity, offers us remarkable music resources.  It enables each of us, without going to a record shop (if any remain) or a performance, without subjecting ourselves to the vagaries of what is on the radio, to hear almost anything we want to hear.  Between SPOTIFY, a free web music site that is easily searchable, and YouTube, which in addition to cute videos about children and kittens has an enormous library of music, you can listen to music on demand.  For free.  Any time. Whatever you want and when you want it.

I love radio, and for most of my life I have listened to music every day.  With the advent of Spotify I can listen to the music I want to listen to.   It is much easier than looking for a CD, opening its case, and popping it into a player.  So, in the spirit of what I write below, let me suggest a few classical works you might want to listen to.  As I just wrote, in recent years I find that I can stretch my mind, encounter new realms and new experiences, more easily and frequently by listening to music I don’t know, than in any other way.

1. This is an oddity, but a delightful one, and a learning experience.  There are two albums of tenors singing a single aria by Puccini, “Che Gelida Manina.”  It is astonishing to listen to a century’s span of tenors, like John McCormack, Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli and Jussi Bjorling, and in the same evening to listen to Pavarotti and Carreras and Domingo and even our contemporary Jonas Kaufman . Who knew there were so many ways to sing the same aria?

  There may be a reason someone interested in poetry would listen to this particular aria.  From La Boheme, it is the song in which Rodolfo introduces himself to Mimi, his neighbor in the boarding house where both live.  The scene is powerful yet sentimental: love at first sight. In a darkened room (Rodolfo has just blown out his candle ‘accidentally’) their hands touch in the dark and he remarks that that her small hands are cold[3].  Then he tells her he is a poet, rich in words although poor in the way of cash.  The notion of a ‘bohemian’ way of life in which poets and other artists live in garrets, poor but creative, can in part be traced back to this opera. 

Is this what a poet is, a struggling artist on the margins of society?  I don’t think so, although there were 19th century poets (we will eventually get to Baudelaire) who lived this way.  Ever since the middle of the 19th century some poets, for example Guillaume Apollinaire and Vladimir Mayakovsky (both of whom I later wrote letters about) and Allen Ginsberg, have lived out this bohemian role…

2.  Earlier I mentioned Bach.  Like many people, I had always thought of him as a great composer, even as I avoided listening to his works.  But re-encountering some of his compositions about a decade ago was a revelation. 

  I am a compulsive list-maker: who is the greatest basketball player (Michael Jordan), American novelist (William Faulkner), modern painter (Henri Matisse).  I think Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book Two is the greatest work of music ever composed, although at other times I am convinced no human being, ever, created anything as extraordinary as Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro.  For the music that our souls breathe deep within us, go for Mozart.  For the apotheosis of human structuring, go for Bach. 

  My current favorite version of the WTC II is the recent recording) by Andras Schiff.  But it is, alas, not available on the web, although if you click on the link in the previous sentence you will hear him perform it live in London.  If you want to listen to the WTC II on the web, here are three other wonderful choices.  The amazing early recording by Edwin Fischer remains extraordinary, and so are recordings by the two greatest pianists of the second half of the twentieth century, Sviatoslav Richter and Glenn Gould. Or just type ‘The Well Tempered Clavier II’ and the pianist’s last name into Spotify….

3. A few months ago a friend invited several people to brunch.  ‘Bring a recording of a short musical work to share with others’ he instructed.  It was a tough assignment, since there is so much, so much, wonderful music to choose from.  Eventually I decided on the ultimate song of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs[4].  Entitled “Im Abendtrod,” it is sung beautifully by Kiri Te Kanawa with George Solti conducting.  I like Te Kanawa because hers is the version I first fell in love with.  But I also recommend an earlier recording by Gundula Janowitz, which is available only through all four of the songs.

4. The Marriage of Figaro.  I find that opera is best on YouTube, where you can see many entire performances.  I like versions with English subtitles, so I can know exactly what the characters are saying as they sing.  Alas, there is no good version of this magnificent opera on YouTube, but here is one with fine singers, including Kiri Te Kanawha and Fredericka von Stade, who oin addition to being the best Cherubino ever, was the aunt of a former student of mine.  .  Most versions do not have subtitles that translate what the singers are singing into English.  “No good version’ also means that the available versions are not dramatic enough for me, though there is certainly some good singing.  The Marriage of Figaro, with the most moving music ever composed, seems to me hard to stage, and only rarely is the staging up to the singing.  Opera is a ‘complete’ artwork: music, singing, scenery, acting, words, action.  It needs everything if it is to move us most deeply.  Oh well.  You may have to go to an opera performance to do it full justice.  

5. I have several good friends who are opera lovers.  Some go for Wagner, who for me is too long and too absorbed in his own majesty; some go for Verdi.  As for me, I am not quite so erudite and sophisticated.  I go to opera – when I was young, in college and after, I thought opera-going was an affectation of those who wanted to prove they were highly sophisticated – because it moves me so deeply.  At most operas, I cry during the performance.

  Ok, I am not a great sophisticated type.  I love Puccini.  He has melodies…ah, to die for.  La Boheme always makes me cry, and since the same melody runs throughout the opera, I am usually in tears most of the time.  Here is a spectacular  recording with Maria Callas and Alberto di Stefano, but it is only the music.  Here is a dramatic version that is quite good but without subtitles  and here is a (too) modern dress version with fairly good singing and subtitles.  Tosca is dramatic as all get-out.   Turandot starts out with too much chinoiserie, but by the time it is underway I am captivated.  Alas, this version – for I looked for one with subtitles, is over-th-top in its staging.  Hmmm.  Maybe the opera demands that.  Still, there is that wonderful aria, “Nessun Dorma,: the most famous I think that there is, and here is Pavarotti singing it.… I find I cannot watch and listen to a Puccini opera without being deeply engaged and, well, crying.

6. Lately I am in a Brahms phase, which replaced a Schumann phase.  The two are connected: Schumann was Brahms’ mentor and supporter.  Here is one of the strangest facts I have encountered about music: when Schumann broke down and was committed to an asylum, the only person – the only one – who visited him was Brahms.  He was a most loyal friend,

  Try the Brahms’ Sextets.  Number 1 is played by Casals; both played by members of the Berlin Symphony.  Or  the Piano Trios: number 1 played by Casals/Menuhin/Istomin, or  number 2 played by Stern/Rose/Istomin. 

  My favorite piece for piano, outside of Beethoven[5] I suppose, is Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme by Handel.” Exuberant and wide-ranging, it remains wonderful listened to time after time.  And, sorry Bach, it ends with the greatest fugue, ever.

7.  Exuberant?   Try an American: Charles Ives’ first piece, written when he was a teenager, “Variations on America.”  Go for an organ version, for it was composed for organ.  If you want another traditional American piece transformed, try the contemporary composer Fredrick Rzewski, “North American Ballads: Down by the Riverside.” 

8.  If you have kids or grandchildren there is nothing, nothing, better than Pete Seeger.  If you don’t have progeny, you’ll love this anyway: Song and Play Time. 

  I could go on and on, but I think I have to stop. I’ve been self-indulgent long enough.

As I was doing my taxes this year, plugging away at figures and entries on a 1040 form, the radio played in the background.  At one point I stopped filling out the return and just listened.  The broadcast was a movement from a symphony by Gustav Mahler.

  I was deeply affected, so much so that I wrote a brief email to a few friends about music and transcendence.  One of those friends suggested that the brief message was interesting and uplifting enough to send out to my poetry list.  ‘Nah, it’s about music, not poems,’ I thought, but I filed away the idea in the back of my brain. 

A week or so ago, the economist Paul Krugman encountered a situation Norman Mailer once brilliantly described as getting “tired of the sound of my own voice.”  Krugman’s blog on this day consisted of nothing more than a title, “Going for Baroque” and the YouTube video of the first movement of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto[6].  [The video has since been “blocked…on copyright grounds.”]

Krugman’s blog reminded me of my own email and my friend’s suggestion.  Krugman was, I think, weary of the endless wrangling over the debt limit here in Washington.  Just about everyone I know is exhausted by the thought our nation could default on its debts because we in the corridors of power can’t come to any resolution[7].

So it is time [I wrote] for some music.  I will not offer much in the way of poems this time, though I will end with a poem without the usual explication since it seems to me the best poetic description of music I have encountered.  (That poem, by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, was written in the second decade of the twentieth century; the translation is by William H. Gass from his superb small book, Reading Rilke.  I will read it carefully in a later chapter on the poem, ‘On Music.”) 

I may have been urged on by Krugman, but, hey, Paul, I was there first.  And my email is more interesting than your blog . . . .

I just heard, on the radio, the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, a movement solely for strings and harp.

I was struck by its longing for transcendence.  The Adagietto reminded me that whatever transcendence is, it is best figured by certain rare pieces of music – in particular, the slow movement of one of Beethoven's late quartets, the fifteenth, the Quartet in A minor, Op. 132  The movement is a work of thanksgiving for having endured an illness: It is called the “Heiliger Dankgesang.”  And then there is the very end of Schönberg 's Verklärte Nacht.  You can listen to the whole piece, or just pick it up at minujte 25….

All three of these, now that I think of it, are for strings.... 

In the Mahler there is a longing for transcendence and then a movement toward transcendence, and then -- this recurs several times -- a move instead toward the dark peacefulness of death. 

I once assigned to an advanced seminar in modernism the requirement that they watch and listen to a video of Leonard Bernstein's ‘Norton Lectures’ at Harvard University on the history of music.  This particular video, the fifth of six, considered modernist music.  Bernstein concluded the lecture with a video of himself conducting the Adagio from Mahler's Ninth Symphony, and intoned, as only he could intone, something like 'This is the closest we can come to death...." 

Here, then, are links to the music that I thought of and wrote about when I took that brief break from that most untranscendent of activities, doing my tax return....

All these recordings are free on line.

String Quartet 15 (Opus 132), Third Movement, the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ by Ludwig van Beethoven [about 15 minutes]:

Let me add that if I had to make a list of the five greatest pieces of music of all time, this movement would be on that list

Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony by Gustav Mahler [8 minutes]:

The Bernstein Lecture I referred to is at YouTube.  Lecture 5.  If you want to hear just the Mahler portion, start at 1:31:45.  For a few minutes Bernstein is enmeshed in his own time, the sixth and seventh decades of the last century, looking back atexamples of the Beatles and La Dolce Vita.

  Then he turns to an assessment of Mahler’s last symphony, his Ninth. 

  And then, finally, to its concluding movement, an Adagio.  He says of its ending, “the final incredible page… is the closest we have ever come in any work of art to experiencing the very act of dying.”   He cites Keats, “We are half in love with easeful death…Now more than ever seems it rich to die.”

  Watching Bernstein discuss this last movement, then watching him conduct it [beginning at 1:44:30], is as memorable an experience as you can encounter on the web.  After watching and listening, you will be a different person…. Although, as you will have guessed from what I have just written, the Adagio is not about transcendence.  For Bernstein, it is about death: Mahler’s premonition of his own death, the death of tonality (Schönberg is about to create his serial technique as an alternative to tonality), and the death of Western culture (for in five years the First World War would begin).

Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schönberg

  Type ‘Verklarte Nacht’ on Spotify.  Listen to the last movement “Adagio, molto tranquillo.”  Probably best of different versions is the string version by von Karajan.

 Footnotes

[1] There is semantic content to instrumental music, even when there are no words.  In classical music, the key in which the piece is written has extra-musical meaning.  Choice of instruments also carries meaning.  In addition, the form of music has its own meaning: in classical music it can come from the derivation of the form (dance, as in a chaconne or gavotte) or from the origin of the melody  (popular song, military music, hunt motifs); in ‘popular’ music it can come from the form (rock, country, type of jazz) and also from the resonance of the melody. 

[2] This expansion seems immensely important to me.  As we grow older, especially when we reach a point where we think our most vigorous years are behind us, it becomes important to keep growing, to move onward rather than have feeling that we are settling back, for not moving onward is a kind of tacit acceptance of death.  I am not trying to be rhetorical or monumental here.  Long ago I wrote a book on Norman Mailer; his deepest commitment, it seemed to me – and to him, too – was to a principle he enunciated in his novel The Deer Park: “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”  Listening to new music, expanding what one encounters and the range of what one is prepared to encounter, is growth.  As T. S.  Eliot wrote, and the attentive reader will notice that most of the time I excoriate Eliot (but not here): “Old men ought to be explorers/ Here or there does not matter/ We must be still and still moving/ Into another intensity …”  Music enables that move ‘into another intensity.’ 

[3] ‘Che gelida manina’ translated into English is ‘’what cold small hands.’

[4] Ouch.  Since writing this, I discovered a song even more wonderful to me.  I thought about sending out a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, an early 19th century German poet, called “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny.”  Ah, it turns out – I’ve read a lot of Hölderlin over again recently – that the poem is atypical, that his poems are much tougher to read than this particular one, which was part of a novel he wrote.  But as I was considering Hölderlin, and this poem in particular, I learned that Brahms had set the “Song of Destiny” to music.  Opus54.  Unbelievably wonderful.  Just type ‘Brahms Song of Destiny’ into Google…. 

[5] Beethoven.  His late work, which in my younger years I also thought was a scam that pseudo-sophisticates embraced because it proved their sophistication, is as good a music gets. The last five piano sonatas, the last five quartets:  Deaf Beethoven, at odds with the world, pushed music beyond boundaries no one had ever breached.  But these, difficult at first to listen to, are not experiments but music of the most magnificent sort. For the piano sonatas, you might listen to Sviatoslav Richter, who my friend, the pianist Paul Orgel, ways was the greatest pianist of the century.  For the quartets, perhaps the old Busch Quartet recordings are as good as any?

[6] The most significant of the series of six concertos is, I have just been reading, the Fifth Brandenburg.  According to James R. Gaines in his lovely study of Bach and Frederick the Great, Evening in the Palace of Reason, Bach in the first movement “gives the cadenza not to the flute or violin but to the harpsichord, an instrument that had never had a solo in front of an orchestra….Every piano concerto in the history of Western music has its antecedent in the fifth Brandenburg concerto, when the lowliest member of the orchestra was turned loose to become Liszt.”  For all the Brandenburgs, click here. 

[7] How quickly we forget.  In the summer of 2011 Republicans in the House, determined to show that the government was spending too much, threatened to refuse any increase in the debt ceiling.  Their intransigence led to large drops in the stock market and the first-in-history downgrading of the credit rating of the United States.  With the international economy on the brink of crisis, eventually less histrionic heads prevailed and the debt limit was raised.  At the time, and in retrospect as well, it seemed that rhetorical posturing rather than anything substantive was what the Republican obstructionists were after.