About three weeks ago as
of this writing (May 11, 2013), I learned, via a Google search to see what he
had been up to lately, of the death of Charles Rosen some four months earlier,
on December 8 of last year. The fact
that I had to wait so long to hear such news, and had to come upon them in such
a fashion—that I did not have them bumptiously thrust into my ears after the
manner of, say, the news of the death of that guy from the Beastie Boys (which
I recall forming the immediate post-jingle contents of a certain 2010 or 2011 afternoon’s
All Things Considered)—constitutes the principal impetus of the present
essay. Whether that fact has a right to
constitute that impetus is, to say the least, debatable. For I certainly cannot aver in good faith that
the news of the death of Glenn Gould were bumptiously thrust into my ears at
any point at all, and certainly not on Gould’s death date of October 4,
1982. No: I learned of Gould’s death at
the earliest in spring of 1983, with the arrival in my family’s mailbox of that
year’s Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia yearbook, in whose obituary section it
(the death) was announced. Before that
day I had never heard of Glenn Gould (or, let it be said, Charles Rosen),
although I most certainly had heard of the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Eugene
Ormandy, and even Gould’s (and Rosen’s) fellow pianist-cum-near exact
contemporary, Gary Graffman. I apologize
for all the name-dropping, and for starting off on such a flamboyantly
autobiographical note, which are both really just by way of by way of
calibrating the scales as precisely as possible in advance, of taking as little
as possible for granted vis-à-vis the duo or diptych upon which I am about to
expound. You see, DGR, when all is dead
and son, at the day of the end, when the downs are chips, when shove is come at
by push, fame is a front-bottomishly difficult quality to gauge or maysure. Yes, as I learned some years ago via
You-Tube, Glenn Gould’s death may have made nationwide television news on
October 4, 1982, but the nation whose width was and is in question was (and is)
Canada, a country of (then) no more than twenty million souls; one imagines
that the death of any Canadian musician of any international stature would have
secured him or her such a posthumous mention.
And while one assumes Glenn Gould’s recording sales figures handily
outstripped Charles Rosen’s, one likewise assumes that the Beastie Boys’ sales
figures were something in the neighborhood of Gould’s to the power of
Rosen’s. Such that to assert as I would
like to do, and to devote several thousand words in defense of such an
assertion, that Rosen deserves to be regarded in the same light as Gould, that
the amount and kind of attention devoted to him looks like outright neglect
when juxtaposed with the amount and kind of attention devoted to Gould, cannot
but in the so-called grand scheme of things smack of petulance (or, perhaps,
given that the person whose reputation I would thus boost is deceased and neither
a friend nor a relation, something much more perverse and less laudable than
petulance).
In a way I now find myself
in the much the same sort of anomalous position I found myself in four years
ago when trying to drum up enthusiasm for Haydn on the back of a complaint
about the to-my-mind excessive praise lavished on Mozart, with the difference
that I admire the lavishee every bit as much as I do the neglectee. (“Still on that old Mozart-bashing kick of
yours, eh? How very Gouldian of
you.” Indeed, but more on that in its
proper place.) But in a way my position
is very different, because whereas in taking up the cudgels in defense of Papa
Haitch I was aligning myself with an established (albeit minority) faction, in
that Haydn and Mozart had (and have) always gone together like peanut butter
and jelly or Abbot and Costello, such that no matter how little you admired one
of them, you could not say word one about the other without mentioning him (if
only and as if, indeed, by way of scraping a P&J sandwich clean of the
offending half of the filling, or splicing all the Abbotian or Costellan bits
out of A&C Meet Frankenstein); whereas Rosen and Gould have never
been mentioned together in any of the scores if not hundreds of essays I have
read on one or the other of them. To be
sure, it would surprise me very much if I turned out to be the only person who
had ever thought it worthwhile to juxtapose Gould and Rosen, but it would
surprise me even more if I suddenly discovered a massive trove of Plutarchian
literature on Gould versus Rosen dating back to the early 1950s. So perhaps what is really peeving me and
impelling me to write is not so much that Charles Rosen’s death was not covered
by the meejia in a fashion that I could not manage to overlook as that this
death did not release the torrent of comparisons to Gould that I had always
regarded as Rosen’s due but whose absence I had always (at least so it now
seems) attributed to the sort of reticence that keeps (or should keep) a
municipality from renaming a street or a building after its most illustrious
athlete before his retirement. According
to that NPR TV critic with an Italian last name whose proper spelling I cannot
be bothered to look up, Patrick Stewart, one of the half-dozen greatest male interpreters
of Shakespeare since Olivier, is resigned to being called “second captain of
the Enterprise
This talk of didacticism
conveniently brings me abreast of my second point of contrast between Gould-cum-Rosen
and Bernstein. It is certainly true that
Gould and Rosen comported themselves didactically in their writings and media
appearances. But neither of them ever
seemed to see himself as a teacher in quite the sense that Bernstein did. Bernstein, you see, thought he should be
devoting the bulk of his public extra-official energies to bringing the good
word about great music to the same demographic as was serviced by the Pre
K-to-Grade 5 schoolmarm—viz. prepubescent
children; accordingly he spent an awful lot of time explaining the very basics
of music in very basic terms. Now don’t
get me wrong, DGR: I have no wish to impugn or call into question the
worthwhileness of old LB’s pedagogic mission, to which I certainly owe a good
chunk of my own germinative enthusiasm for so-called classical or serious
music; indeed, I have no wish even to aver that a semi-saber toothed oldster
steeped for three decades or more in the classical repertoire and the secondary
literature thereon has little to learn from LB the male schoolmarm—for indeed,
not more than six months ago, I picked up from one of LB’s Young People’s
Concerts a definition of so-called classical or serious music that
superseded and put paid to every other such definition I had ever heard: “Classical
music,” LB intoned, to a fifteen-hundred strong Carnegie Hall-swelling mob of
restless, nose-picking, seat-watering tots, in that inimitable baritone of his
(richly burnished and popcorn-stucco’d by a 500-a day [insert most carcinogenic
brand and make of 1950s cigarette here] habit), “in contrast to jazz, pop, and
folk, is music that has to be played exactly as it is written.” But to reach this epiphanic formula I had to
sit through many an hour of instruction that I had effectively already sat through
in my own tot-dom, couched in a showroom stock of allusions and anecdotage
better attuned to my parents’ childhood selves than to my own. With Rosen and Gould, by contrast, I have
never had to waste any time sitting uncomfortably (and unprepossessingly)
crammed into the grade-schooler’s chairdesk.
To be sure, chez eux I may occasionally have had to sit through a
few minutes of a sort of musicological analogue to the flight attendant’s briefing
on emergency exits–a run-through of Composer X’s familiar biography here, a one
two punch-paced account of the well-known basic differences in technique
between Composer X and Composer Y—but these episodes have always been
preliminary or peripheral to a central argument that is always (yes, like the
life of a repo man and almost every work in
the oeuvre of Joseph Haydn) full of surprises. And what this consistent discovery of novelty
by the present semi-saber toothed writer most signally proves is that unlike
Bernstein, neither Gould nor Rosen, despite his didactic bent, and despite his
deliberate targeting of non-musicians, conceived of himself as a popularizer. Neither of them was interested in publicly
saying something just because it was true and deserved to be more widely known. No: Gould and Rosen would commit something to
the public eye or ear only if it had not as far as they knew already been
committed thereunto by somebody else, ever and full-stop. To be sure, their work often built upon the
work of others (to whom they always graciously acknowledged their debt), but it
always added something new, a Gouldian or Rosenian postulate or theorem, to the
established corpus of meta-musical thought.
Thus the broad argument of Rosen’s Classical Style is much
indebted both to Guido Adler’s notion of obbligato accompaniment and Heinrich
Schenker’s theory of deep harmonic structure, but it does not simply
uncritically adopt either of them.
Rather, it fuses them, synthesizes them, by way of showing that
first-movement sonata form as perfected by Haydn and expounded by Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven was neither based principally on contrasting themes (as
received, nineteenth century-derived opinion would have it) nor reducible (as
Schenker would have it) to a single, gigantic cadence; that the melodic and
harmonic structures of this form rather grew into and out of each other thanks
to the newly privileged opposition between the tonic (or root degree) and
dominant (or fifth degree) of the scale (this part came from Schenker) and the
new exchangeability of melodic and accompanying figures (this part came from
Adler).
Yet despite all these
parallel writerly interests and virtues, Gould and Rosen have seldom—and indeed
never as far as I know—been mentioned in the same breath. It is as if in the public imagination they occupy
two complementary yet mutually exclusive halves of a single being, the ideal
pianist-cum-scholar, with Gould being thought of as an ideal, thoroughly
professionalized pianist with only half-baked, autodidactic leanings towards
scholarship, and Rosen as an ideal, thoroughly professionalized scholar with
only dilettantish skills and accomplishments as a pianist. But neither characterization stands up to
serious scrutiny. As pianists, both men
owed pretty much their entire formation to their first teachers. Gould appended to his studies with Guarrero a
degree from the Royal Conservatory of Music, whereas Rosen’s formal musical
training ended with his lessons with Rosenthal: as a college undergraduate he
did not take a single music course, and in graduate school he studied French
literature. So in terms of sheer
academic qualification to write about music Gould had more than a slight edge
over Rosen. Moreover, whereas Gould’s career
as a writer about music began almost as early in life as his career as a
performer, Rosen did not publish a single line of music criticism until he had
been pianizing publicly for nearly two decades.
Even moreover, by Rosen’s own account, his career as a writer about
music began as a casual and humble outgrowth of his pianizing métier: being
dissatisfied with the liner notes on one of his Chopin recordings, he resolved
to replace them with some less objectionable ones of his own. The favorable reception of these elicited commissions
for more liner notes, for reviews, and eventually for the full-fledged book
that ended up being The Classical Style.
Now, The Classical Style, in clocking or weighing in at 533
pages, is a hefty enough volume, and only one of a half-dozen of comparable
length in Charles Rosen’s authorially sanctioned English prose oeuvre. In marked contrast the only full-fledged book
in Glenn Gould’s authorially sanctioned English prose oeuvre, Arnold
Schoenberg: A Perspective, is a book only in the sense of having once
been printed (in its initial publication by the University of Cincinnati Press)
in bound sheets between solid covers: as republished in the Glenn Gould
Reader it occupies a single chapter of a mere seventeen pages. Now, whether the comparative slenderness of AS:
a P is owing to the publishers’ neglect of Gould or to an aversion to
longer-form genres on his own part, I do not know. The biographers, as near as I can remember,
are silent on this question: they seem to go on and on ad nauseam about Gould’s
mania for writing without ever mentioning the B-word in connection with it. At any rate, Gould’s baseline qualifications
for writing about music were no more flimsy than Rosen’s, and The Glenn
Gould Reader itself clocks or weighs in at 476 pages—very nearly as long as
The Classical Style. What is more,
as TGGR’s editor, Tim Page, informs us, TGGR is only a
“selection” of Gould’s writings.
Finally, in dying in 1982, a full thirty years before Rosen (who, it
should be remembered, was five years his senior) Gould simply did not have
nearly as much time at his disposal for the spreading of his authorial wings. Prima facie (a.k.a. prima vista
or at first blush) the most derogatory thing one can get away
with saying about Gould the author is that he never proved himself a master of
large forms, that he was, to reapply Rosen’s faintly damnatory attributive
epithet for Joseph Haydn, a “medium-scale” writer. But having done this one must also remember
that Rosen himself only occasionally proved himself a master of large
forms, that the majority of his published books are not proper monographs or
surveys but compilations of lectures and essays, or, more properly,
articles—the majority of these having been written for The New York
Review of Books. And speaking of the
NYRB, one mustn’t discount the possibility that the unignorable
divergences in authorial idiom, voice, comportment, habitus, and so on, between
Gould and Rosen were dictated to a significant extent by correspondingly
strident divergences in the venues for which they were most accustomed to write.
The NYRB is, as its name
suggests, a dedicated forum for the discussion of newly published books (even
if the novice may be forgiven for initially mistaking one of its numbers for
the catalogue of an academic publishers’ trade fair or of an exhibition of the
work of some wearisomely repetitious fairground caricaturist). Its official remit is to distinguish between
books that are worth reading and those that are not; its unofficial (and more
important) one is to spare its readers the trouble of cracking the spines of
books of either sort. Towards the
fulfillment of this second mission, it grants its contributors vast fiefdoms of
column-inchage unobtainable in any other newsstand periodical, be it glossy,
tabloid, or broadsheet. The NYRB
contributor is under absolutely no pressure or obligation to make a flashy,
zippy entrance; to skip steps one and three; to safeguard the durability of his
welcome in ten words or fewer. He can
start out from a vantage point of Olympian irrelevance to the down-to-earth or Mississippian
impertinence to the mainstream; the reader will forgive him with abundant if
not quite limitless patience, knowing full well as he does from the three or
four blocks of italics, rounded brackets, and dollar sign-prefixed and
“pp.”-postfixed numbers brazenly yet not greedily stealing into the upper third
of the article’s first page that the writer will eventually have to get
around to discussing Stephen Greenblatt’s, Niall Fergusson’s, and Benedict
Anderson’s respective and interpenetrating takes on the Age of Exploration, or
Louis Menand’s, Stanley Fish’s, and Robert Cockfuck’s on the Gilded Age’s
checkered romance with the gold standard.
Of course by that same three-or-four-block token, the NYRB
reviewer is categorically debarred from truly letting his hair down. He cannot start off writing just any old
thing in any old tone in any old register.
He must make sure that however many gigaparsecs away from his assigned
subjects he has begun, the course he subsequently takes ultimately brings him
into contact with those subjects with recurring comet-like inexorability. For all his dawdling, he is the ruthlessly
Fordian antithesis of the truly free-spirited reviewer of the golden age of the
feuilleton, of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré, who in the review of a play-performance
devoted ten times as much space to the leading lady’s legs as to her acting.
If he, the NYRB
reviewer, also sounds like the ruthlessly Fordian antithesis of Glenn Gould the
writer, who in his puckish digressiveness seems in turn to come across as something
of a disciple or descendant of Lucien de Rubempré—well, that ultimately may be
as little owing to Gould’s inalienable free-spiritedness as to any given NYRB
reviewer (including Charles Rosen)’s inalienable shackled-spiritedness. You see, Gould, like Rosen, had a particular
mass-circulation periodical as his public sounding-board of choice or habit. This periodical was called High Fidelity. High Fidelity was (and I suppose
perhaps still is) a generically altogether patchier stuffed animal than the New
York Review of Books. It catered to
two overlapping but by no means coextensive readerships—viz., the owners and
would-be purchasers of expensive electronic sound-reproducing equipment and the
lovers of recorded classical music. The
first readership it catered to principally in glossy Playboy-esque photo-spreads
of the latest high-end amplifiers, loudspeakers, and turntables; the second in
pithy, New Yorker-esque capsule reviews of the latest offerings on vinyl
by the likes of Karajan, Marriner, Pavarotti, and (yes) Gould and Rosen. The balance of the magazine’s content was
intended, as one would expect, to bridge the gap between the non classical
music-loving audiophiles and the non-audiophile classical music buffs—partly,
as one would expect, by addressing topics that would be of equal interest to
both Venn diagram-outliers, but also by bringing in topics that would seem to
be equally remote from, equally alien to their respective
interests. Do you catch, DGR? The idea was for some po-faced classical
music buff to come across a debate between, say, Zubin Mehta and Seiji Ozawa on,
say, the hot-button issue of fox-hunting, and ejaculate to himself, whilst
administering a corroborative fillip to his monocle, “’Pon my soul! A debate on fox-hunting in the pages of High
Fidelity. I suppose it’s ‘anything
goes,’ as they say, in this mag. I reckon I might as well cock a shufti at that
supplemental gatefold on Bang and Olufson’s and Harman Kardon’s latest Richter
9-impervious Plattenspielers.” To
such a deliberately quasi-anarchic format, you doubtless now expect me to
add, Gould’s unslakeable thirst for the banally arcane and the sublimely
recondite—the exposed and hidden byways of high and low culture alike—along
with his irrepressible proclivity for good old-fashioned clowning-around, was
ideally suited. But I shall do no
such thing. For given that the
just-mentioned thirst and proclivity developed in tandem with Gould’s career as
a High Fidelity contributor, it is not quite beyond the pale of
improbability that they were engendered or at least nurtured by HF
itself, or at least that in indulging them Gould was as much pandering to the magazine’s
format as exploiting it. Not that I
would for a moment wish to be thought to intimate that Gould did not sincerely
and wholeheartedly enjoy all the clowning and byway-snooping—the
self-interviews, funny costumes, and silly voices; the phony time-capsule, the
mock-autobiography in the style of Artur Rubenstein, the mock-hagiography of
Petula Clark, and so on—but that I would for an eon like to be taken to
intimate that these episodes are hardly representative of Gould’s habitus,
tone, modus operandi, or ethos vis-à-vis the explication of musical phenomena. Truth to tell, when Gould was encouraged—as
in the Schoenberg Perspective—simply to expatiate at length on a given
musicological topic, he would invariably do just that clearly, deliberately,
and conscientiously—not without wit and humor, to be sure, but also without any
red-nosed, trouser-dropping antics. Or,
to tell it another way: Gould’s authorial approach and persona were in fact not
radically dissimilar from Charles Rosen’s.
Complementarily, although Rosen has not (as far as I know) bequeathed to
posterity any red-nosed, trouser-dropping antic-ridden essays of his own, one
should not assume that he was any less inclined to such antics than was
Gould. For Rosen assuredly was no
bigoted defender of any kind of hard-and-fast distinction between high (or
“elite”) and low (or “popular”) culture.
His table talk reportedly was as likely to center on sitcoms (Taxi,
Cheers, and Absolutely Fabulous being his favorites) as on
sonatas; and in The Romantic Generation he doughtily (if rather
backhandedly) defended the schlock composer biopics of Ken Russell as “noble trash.”
Indeed, one of the
mainstays of his perspective on culture is that the aesthetic categories of
greatness, tastefulness, and “high”-ness are capable of being combined with and
alienated from each other in unpredictable and historically specific ways. In glaringly favorable contrast to the common
garden variety prole-humping cultural Whig, who would have us surrender to the
remorseless simplicity of the historico-evaluative conveyor-belt, according to
which the “low,” mean, tasteless cultural trash of the past is alchemically
transformed into the “high,” great, tasteful cultural gold of the present (and
the “low,” mean, tasteless cultural trash of the present is transformed into
the “high,” great, tasteful cultural gold of the future [such that Hamlet
and Great Expectations simply were the Big Brother and Jersey
Shore of their day and Big Brother and Jersey Shore simply will
be the Hamlet and Great Expectations of tomorrow]), Rosen
argued that neither genuine progress in the arts nor genuine expression of
artistic genius could ever be guaranteed to coincide with movement in a
determined direction on either the social scale or the scale of aesthetic
merit. In some senses (Rosen argued) the
classical style of Haydn and Mozart did indeed participate in a kind of
popularization of serious music, infusing the high genres of opera, symphony,
concerto, and divertimento with an abundance of folk-derived melodies, rhythms,
and harmonies and producing what may with some legitimacy be described as the
first pop hits—compositions that were at least partly known and ardently loved
by large populations who had never seen them in print or heard them performed live
(Mozart’s Don Giovanni famously supplied the mobility of Prague with
hours of whistling material). But in
other, and ultimately more significant senses (Rosen argued), the classical
style had been a refining, complicating, civilizing, “elitifying” force, one
that banished the bracingly anarchic chord progressions characteristic of the
likes of such mid-eighteenth century titans as C. P. E. Bach, and substituted
for them a large-scale sense of harmonic structure that was both more logical
and much harder for the average listener to comprehend. Yes (RA’d), taken in isolation Haydn’s and
Mozart’s tunes may have been the most accessible in the history of music thereunto,
but the compositions to which they contributed were hardly fan fare for the
common man. By a similar token (RA’d),
Felix Mendelssohn was perhaps the greatest musical genius the world has yet
known—if by genius one means a precocious combination of fertility of invention
and mastery of the technical means of expression. Certainly by this measure he blew Mozart
away: nothing produced at the same age by Wolfgang Amadeus is anywhere near the
equal of the sixteen-year-old Mendelssohn’s string octet or Midsummer
Night’s Dream overture. What is
more, there was nothing callow, superficial, or otherwise stereotypically
youthful about the young Mendelssohn’s compositional métier: it arose out of a
comprehensive and searching acquaintance with the musical literature of the
preceding century, from the early Bach to the late Beethoven. And yet aside from the two works already
mentioned plus a symphony or two and an overture, the entire triple-digitally
abundant Mendelssohnian compositional corpus is basically dispensable. “In what sense?” In the sense that nobody is seriously going
to argue that Mendelssohn’s string quartets are the equals of Beethoven’s or
that Mendelssohn’s Elijah is the equal of the St. Matthew Passion. “So I suppose his is a classic case of a
child prodigy burning out in his ripe-old early twenties.” Not at all: for Mendelssohn’s late works are
much more ambitious and no less fecund in ideas than his early ones. Mendelssohn’s case (argues Rosen) is the admittedly
not particularly classic one of a genius (whether young or old is immaterial) hamstrung
by the necessity of expressing himself through a collection of styles that have
run their courses. His principal models
for chamber composition, the late quartets of Beethoven, were not amenable to
productive imitation; their formal idiosyncrasies testified to the moribundity
of the stylistic sub-tradition that had engendered them. His principal models for his religious vocal compositions,
the great sacred choral oeuvre of J. S. Bach, hailed from a pre-French
revolutionary Christendom whose prevailing attitude toward the Almighty was one
of terror, terror of a pitch that no merely secular power could then dream of
eliciting. The Christians of
Mendelssohn’s day, on the other hand, being sufficiently terrified by the
instruments of man—from the guillotine to the locomotive—sought in religion and
the very notion of the divine mainly a source of consolation. Consequently, when Mendelssohn imported the
solemnly peremptory gestural repertoire of Bach’s sacred compositions into his
own fundamentally ecumenical religious works, the result was what Rosen very
aptly describes as religious kitsch, a kind of pseudo-sacred art that allows
the listener to enjoy the feeling of being religious in the old sense without
committing him to the exigencies of a particular creed. Bach is like an authentic fire-and-brimstone
eighteenth-century Protestant preacher a la Jonathan Edwards: when he enjoins
you to behold Christ as a bridegroom and a lamb, it is with an implied
postscript of “and if you can’t or won’t you’re going straight to hell.” Mendelssohn is more like a liberal high
church Anglican vicar who sticks to the archaic grammar and phraseology of the Authorized
Version and the original Book of Common Prayer, while basically always
preaching variations on “All are Welcome” and “Just be thyself.” So in short, Mendelssohn’s very mastery of
the musical language of the great tradition effectively debarred him from
fulfilling that tradition by moving it forward.
Quasi-paradoxically, that fulfillment was to be achieved by composers
with a much shakier command of the tradition—by Schumann, and by Berlioz. Schumann excelled principally in the
unprestigious genres of the song and the piano miniature; in the traditional
large-form instrumental genres—e.g. symphony and string quartet—he was if not
quite a washout at least a very slow study.
But by exploiting in his short pieces the newer pianos’ capacity to draw
out notes practically ad infinitum via the magic of the sustain pedal, Schumann
developed an entirely new and lastingly influential way of treating voice-leading
and rhythm. In Schumann’s piano works,
for the first time in the history of music, the accented beat or main voice of
a given measure could be supplied by a note that had not even been initially
sounded in that measure, that may indeed have been first struck many measures
earlier. As for Berlioz, Rosen points
out that he was a downright hack—proficient at playing no musical instrument
and ignorant of some of the most elementary and virtually indispensable rules
of counterpoint. And yet through his
imaginative instrumentation he endowed the symphony orchestra with the capacity
for tone-painting that was to be its hallmark through the remainder of the
nineteenth century. The sound of the
post-Berlioz orchestra was the sound of classical music for the vast
majority of the twentieth-century listening public, and the programmatic symphonies,
overtures, tone poems, and movie scores that were written for that orchestra were
that public’s favorite concert works.
If there is one quality in
virtue of lacking which Gould may be accounted Rosen’s inferior as a writer on
music, it is the sense of historical mediation that imbues and guides all of
the arguments I have summarized in the preceding paragraph. In Gould’s view, one element of music
outranked all others as both a locus of interest and a touchstone of aesthetic
merit, and that element was counterpoint.
“All of the music that really interests me—not just some of it, but all
of it,” he told Tim Page in 1982, “is contrapuntal in nature.” And of all the possible manifestations of
counterpoint the only one that seemed to count qua counterpoint for him was the
fugue. This did not mean that he prized
only works that called themselves fugues, because, as the fugue is not
quite a genre in the same quasi-straitened sense as a classical sonata or
symphony, there are plenty of non-fugues that are chock full of more or less
punctilious fugue-like part-writing (notably the development sections of most
classical sonatas and symphonies, a substantial minority of which Gould was
proud to listen to or perform). But it
did mean that he effectively had no use for entire periods of music history in
which most composers were not habitually writing pieces dominated by simultaneous
arithmetically interrelated fully hummable melodies—notably, the gaping,
175-year-wide chasm separating the death of Bach from the maturity of
Schoenberg. The Cocytus, the era
horribila, of his disdain was comprised by the thirty-something year period
between Beethoven’s Great Fugue and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, a
period for which he sportingly enough confessed to have a “blind spot,” a
period that corresponds with uncanny tidiness to the period covered by Charles
Rosen’s Romantic Generation. The
catalogue of composers treated at length in that book reads like a veritable
rogues’ gallery of personae Gouldo non gratae: Mendelssohn, Chopin,
Schumann, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Verdi—as far as Gould was concerned, the collected
corpora of these luminaries might as well have consisted of three-chord rock or
synth-pop tunes as symphonies, chamber works, solo sonatas, and operas. And as for proper counterpoint’s reemergence
in the music dramas of Wagner’s maturity—why, it was presumably owing to some
epiphanic coup de foudre vouchsafed to Dickie W. alone by Johann
Sebastian’s ghost. The thought that
Wagnerian counterpoint might have been merely a refinement or elaboration of
the contrapuntal practice of W.’s immediate predecessors either never crossed
Gould’s mind or was so unpalatable to him that he could never bring himself to
entertain it publicly. What was more,
Gould seemed to have a second blind spot—this one unacknowledged—for music
written after the second golden age of counterpoint, for anything postdating
the first wave of modernism and the death of Schoenberg. His abhorrence of minimalism—he said it
“drove him up the wall”—was by his criterion understandable (and, incidentally,
shared with Rosen), for the tirelessly iterated unvoiced chords of Philip Glass
et al. are genuinely devoid of contrapuntal substance. But his patent lack of enthusiasm for the
music of the two most eminent and stalwart standard-bearers of post
Schoenbergian modernism, Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter is rather more
bemusing. Carter receives a mere duo of
passing mentions in The Glenn Gould Reader. The first of these occurs in a brilliantly
one-upping survey of the “career” of Peter Schickele’s creation P.D.Q. Bach,
wherein he pretends to descry in the fictitious compoer’s use of rhythmic
“‘incompatibility’” as ‘“a structural element in the composition”’ a prolepsis
of Elliott Carter’s theory of metrical modulation” (428). Now, metrical modulation is to Elliott Carter
pretty much exactly what stream of consciousness is to James Joyce—a signature
technique that one learns of within minutes of learning the name of its
inventor, and well in advance of becoming acquainted with his works. The second Carterian mention occurs in Gould’s
prefatory remarks to a catalogue of his own would-be contributions to a
by-then-no-longer-existing Canadian version of Desert Island Disks:
“there’s always the chap who, under cross-examination, will confess undying
affection for The Art of the Fugue or the Elliott Carter string quartets but,
when left to his own devices and with microphone removed, would in fact select
The Pines of Rome and “Starlight Favorites at the Hollywood Bowl” (437). Here Carter functions simply as a synecdoche
for ultra-highbrow music (in highly suggestive tandem with a peak in the
Bachian alps that Gould never quite finished scaling, in that he recorded only
excerpts of it). To Boulez Gould devoted
a New Republic article remarkable both for its touching loyalty to
Schoenberg in the face of its subject’s self-aggrandizing crowing over AS’s
death and for its utter barrenness of commentary on Boulez’s works. Now whatever faults one may plausibly allege
to espy in the compositions of Carter and Boulez, an absence of “the
simultaneous proliferation of ideas—a.k.a. Gould’s definition of “counterpoint at its best”—is certainly not
among them. It is difficult to think of
a single measure of, say, Le Marteau sans maître or Carter’s Third
Quartet, in which more than three things, let alone one, are not going on at
the same time. But in neither work are
these simultaneously occurring things quite melodies in the sense that the
subject of a Bach fugue is, or even motifs in the sense that a tone row
subset-cum-rhythmic figure is in one of Schoenberg’s mature twelve-tone
compositions. Rather, they are events—dilations,
accelerations, amplifications, and contractions of other successions of notes
that have already been heard or are yet to be heard. They pursue the logic of Bachian
counterpoint, to be sure, but not—as Schoenberg did—by merely iterating it
under a new harmonic dispensation but by expanding it into an extra dimension,
the dimension of time (or, perhaps more accurately “meta-time,” in the light of
the implied temporal outspooling of all traditionally annotated music). For Gould the prodigal “simultaneous
proliferation of ideas” in the spatial register that was “counterpoint at its
best” had to be subordinated to a tight-fisted dearth of ideas in the temporal
register, to “firm beats,” to “a sense of rhythmic continuity” that Carter’s
and Boulez’s idioms had deliberately forsaken.
So far, I admit, at least
on the scholarly front it looks like a score of Rosen 2 and Gould nil. But this referee’s call depends on a rulebook
in which the more is from an epistemological point of view inevitably the
merrier, in which a blind spot can only take the form of a failure to
appreciate the merits of a given compositional corpus. But surely the over-appreciation of such a
corpus amounts to a blind spot in its own right. Yesterday, en route through Rosen’s
latest—and hence last—collection of essays, Freedom and the Arts,
immediately after finishing a characteristically delightful and insightful
meditation on the notion of canonicity under cover of a review of new editions
of the works of J. J. Rousseau, Bettina von Arnim, and the Marquis de Sade, I
was bemusedly dismayed to bump into the title page of Part Two, entitled
“Mostly Mozart.” Of course, from the
book’s table of contents I had already learned that it contained such a section,
but I had somehow self-protectively managed to forget that it turned up so
early. And why did I need to avail
myself of such a cheap feint? Could it
perchance have been because I despised Mozart?
No. In fact I have always liked
and occasionally even loved Mozart. My
dismay and my need for self-protection spring rather from my otherwise
unshakeable faith in Rosen as a guy—perhaps the only such guy even recently
alive—who gets both the small and the big pictures, or—even more specifically,
appreciates how the small picture builds up into the big. Time and again Rosen has devoted huge chunks
of prose to the works of Mozart. And time
and again I have failed to discern the worthwhileness of the devotion. The Classical Style bills itself as a
history of the development of music in and through the works of Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven, but the narrative it traces would survive largely intact if
Mozart were eliminated from it entirely.
One is solidly convinced by Rosen’s accounts of Haydn’s establishment of
the main instrumental genres of string quartet, keyboard sonata, and symphony;
and of Beethoven’s expansion of these genres to the utmost dimensions they were
capable of within the tonic-dominant harmonic schema, but one cannot quite see how
Mozart’s (admittedly indisputable) mastery of the tangential genres of string
quintet, comic opera, and keyboard concerto contributed indispensably to either
phenomenon. That Mozart’s greatest
operas evince a sophistication of harmonic architecture not even attempted in
Haydn’s patchwork entertainments for the Eszterháza stage every listener who
has thrilled to Figaro and slept through L’incontro improvviso will
readily believe. But that the symphonic
masterpieces of Haydn’s later years, together with the whole of Beethoven’s
oeuvre, would have been impossible without Figaro, Don Giovanni,
& co.—well, that’s a rather hefty sack of Mozartkugeln to have to
swallow. That the composition of a
string quintet entails certain technical problems not attending the composition
of a string quartet, problems that Haydn did not master but that Mozart did, we
may readily gather from the anecdote about Haydn’s way of handling a request
for an opus in this genre, viz. by adding a blank staff to one of his quartet
scores and ordering the requestor to ask Mozart to fill it; and the a
fortiority of the piano concerto’s presentation of the same sorts of
problems, as well as the Haydn-to-Mozart success ratios thereunto, require no
illustrative anecdote—the mere juxtaposition of the entirety of FJH’s puny and
partly apocryphal klavierkonzertistic
output with any one of the last ten Mozart concertos is more than sufficiently
eloquent. But Rosen never even tries to
argue that these problems are problems of the sort whose more or less
successful treatment can separate a masterpiece from a piece of hackwork–viz.,
problems of formal organization.
Granted, Mozart’s C major string quintet, K 515, is a masterpiece, but
is Haydn’s C major string quartet, op. 76 no. 3, any less of one merely because
it lacks a second viola part? The closest
thing to a genuine Mozartian formal innovation identified by Rosen is the
“tonal mass,” a sort of harmonic analogue to the frat boy’s Zen or cool alcohol
buzz, a capacity for maintaining the listener’s interest over long stretches
without changing key. And to be sure it
is true that the individual movements of Mozart’s post-juvenilian sonata-form works
are on average about a third longer than their Haydnian counterparts, and that
they owe their comparative longevity to a less restless treatment of key, to a
tendency to let melodies have their long, loping way within their specific
diatonic compasses, rather than cane-hooking them offstage every ten measures
to make way for their differently keyed successors. But (as the actress said to the bishop) is
longer always better? I personally find
the more elevated harmonic metabolism of a typical Haydn sonata-form movement
quite bracing, and the depressed tortoise-esque one of a typical Mozart
sonata-form movement a bit of a snoozefest.
Mind you, when Mozart is melodically on in one of these sonata-form
movements, there is no beating him, and during these moments one is hesitant to
trade the composition immediately at ear for a wilderness of Haydnian
alternatives. But one’s rapture does not
often survive the specific occurrence of the melody, and rarely survives the
movement. Why? Because the ensuing material is not up to the
same level as the melody or is inadequately integrated with it. A good example of such a “There was a
falling off!”-provoking movement (disclosure: I have complained of this
elsewhere) is the first one of the so-called Dissonance quartet, where a first
subject of indescribably ethereal—nay, aeronautical sweetness (if “aeronautical
sweetness” sounds almost like an oxymoron, well it should, for the choon’s
ability to soar and sigh with equal grace is precisely what makes it miraculous)
is succeeded by a smart-ass little second subject in triplets, engaging enough
on its own, but far too puny to serve as headliner after the warm-up act that
was the first subject. Not that even at
this point all hope is lost for the redemption of the movement, for in the
development Mozart could always explain to us—as Haydn almost invariably would
do—what the second subject has to do with the first. Instead, in typical Mozartian fashion, Mozart
devotes the development to a fugato treatment of a single figure from the first
subject. Finally, in the recapitulation,
after running through the first subject in its entirety virtually unaltered
(and thereby wringing most of its gracefulness out of it and, indeed, making it
seem slightly creepy) he has the galled huevos to reintroduce the smart-ass
theme, completely unaltered, thereby making it sound twice as
insufferably smirky as the first time round. Oh, sure, besotted Mozartomanes (and here I am
not thinking of Charles Rosen, although I am sure he did tender this judgment
at some point in his long and overly Mozartophilic life) will try to tell you
that the smart-ass theme has been rendered “almost heart-Ginsuingly poignant by
all that has happened in the intervening XX measures (no, those aren’t Roman
numerals, but place-holders for my ignorance of the number of measures between
the first and second appearances of the second subject, a number which I assume
is much larger than nine and slightly smaller than one hundred), but they are
eff-issimo of the old ess, because in point of fact effectively nothing
has happened in those selfsame measures.
In short, this is a movement whose sell-by date elapses at the
two-fifths mark, a movement that effectively serves as a place-holder or
kipping-out spot for a single admittedly marvelous tune. Not, as I have already implied, that there
are not entire Mozart-penned movements that make it to the finish line without
curdling, or even in a very, very few cases, put to shame their most obvious
Haydn-penned comparandum. The best (and,
I stress, practically only) example of such a movement is the first one
of the string quartet in D minor K. 421, from the so-called Haydn set (i.e.,
the set of six quartets dedicated by Mozart to Haydn). This movement is obviously inspired by, nay,
modeled on, its counterpart in Haydn’s Op. 9 D minor quartet, and as a finished
product it is to that model what the actual, seaworthy U.S.S. Famousaircraftcarrier
is to a mantelpiece-ready bottled Cutty Sark.
Here, none of the cavils I voiced in connection with the first movement
of the “Dissonance” are voiceable: the second subject, while unmistakably
different in character (i.e., in rhythmic and harmonic gait) from its
predecessor, does not upstage it; it presents the listener with a different side
of the lugubriousness of the first subject rather than with a different
emotional habitus altogether. And the
development, while patently nowhere nearly as American Indian-esquely
exhaustive of thematic material as an average Haydn first movement, does not
content itself with sequential treatment of a portion of the first subject;
rather (not wholly unlike the earlier Haydn of the so-called Sturm und Drang
period {though not of op. 9}), it divagates into new material whose relatedness
(yes, a heart-Ginsuing relatedness) to the exposition is elusive but
palpable. In the recapitulation there
are few surprises, but unlike in the “Dissonance,” the intrinsic dignity of the
second subject (abetted by the obligatory change to the minor mode) keeps it from
spoiling the Empfindugnsgeist.
But the real piece de grace, the real coup de resistance,
comes in the coda, when, after another divagationary episode, this one
suggestive more of a ruminative, flaneurish cast of mind, the triplet-heavy
figure from the close of the exposition comes dashing back in like a footpad in
the Bois pouncing on the aforementioned episode and makes short work of it in a
steep crescendo riding o’er the back of not four but three
self-statements. Do you see the dramatic
force of this move, DGR? One was not
expecting the entrance of the expo-closer at all; and when it did arrive in
defiance of one’s expectations, one immediately began bracing oneself for it to
finish off the movement in the familiar statement-plus-three-iterations; hence
when it supplies only two iterations one feels that the movement has come to an
end a full measure too early. Pretty
heart cum gut-wrenching stuff, what-what?
But the rest of K. 421—its three later movements—is a mixture of the
forgettable and the unendurable. The
forgettable bit is the two middle movements, and unendurable bit is the finale,
a seemingly never-ending set of what must be the least varied variations in the
chamber music repertoire. Seriously,
Jude, WAM practically might as well have postscripted the first statement of
the theme with two dots bearing a superscript of, say, 800 or even 1,000. Such monotonous poverty of invention
following (admittedly very distantly) on the heels of such copiousness thereof
as was witnessed in the first movement is downright demoralizing. But one expects to be demoralized by the extra-operatic
Mozart, who tends to treat his instrumental compositions more like medleys or
suites (of the movie-soundtrack type, not the baroque solo-instrumental type)
than like proper, self-contained, intra-connected aesthetic entities. I realize that I am on empirically shaky
ground here, that the late eighteenth-century symphony or string quartet is not
so obviously formally unified a genre, as, say, the late eighteenth-century
novel; that the only way of proving that a late-eighteenth century
symphony or string quartet is formally heterogeneous is to demonstrate the
irrationality of its key relations, and memory urges me to take for granted
that in The Classical Style the key relations of every composition penned
by Mozart from the age of seventeen onwards are conclusively shown to be as
rational as Mr. Spock on truth serum. Be
that as it may, or, rather, must, Mozart’s instrumental corpus abounds in works
that simply do not gel for me in a way that almost all of Haydn’s symphonies and
string quartets and piano sonatas and piano trios—even the most marginal and
supposedly minor ones--do. Just take as
an example of such Haydnian gellage the B minor string quartet from Haydn’s op.
64, a piece that, let it be said, more than cancels the debt incurred in K. 421
by borrowing at least as heavily from that work as it borrowed from his own Op.
9, no. 4. Its first movement is
admittedly not the equal of that of K. 421.
Like that movement it begins and ends in the minor mode (yes, Hans
Keller, despite its brilliant “progressively tonal” first measure in apparent F
major), and hence officially is tragic rather than comic. But in point of fact its mood is, as they
say, all over the map, ranging from the highly tragic to the broadly comic, to
the neurotically panicked to finally, in its last measures, the defiantly
sarcastic. And it is this sarcastic note
that proves the quartet’s unifying linchpin, for by taking it up again at the
beginning of the finale—a sonata and not a set a variations—Haydn paves
his way to a non-tragic, and indeed a properly comic (major-key) ending; for
the transition to good-natured laughter is more easily made from spiteful
laughter than from the totally unrelated medium of non-joyful tears.
“Something too much of
this.” But not very much too much
of it, because, although I have indeed put a good square foot or two of typage
between the present noun-phrase and my most recent mention of Rosen, I believe
that it is really only through an admittedly tedious circumstantial comparison
of certain works of Haydn and Mozart and their attendant respective phenomenal
manifestations in one’s own psyche of the sort that I have just essayed that
one can even begin to instill the ghost of a conviction that one has not simply
missed the main points of Rosen’s argument valorizing Mozart at Haydn’s expense;
the conviction that one has not simply “denied” Rosen’s “major”; the conviction that one really has
seen all the sights that Rosen has pointed out in the Mozartian Landschaft
and acknowledged them not to be mirages, and yet respectfully continues to
regard Haydn as the superior composer; and thence to instilling the logically
consequent conviction that Glenn Gould was not simply shooting off his mouth or
talking through his ass, let alone performing some kind of two part
invention-esque canon involving both orifices, when he called Mozart (albeit
not in so many words) “a lousy composer,” or said that WAM had died too late
rather than too soon, or that he was basically a composer for the theater. When you come right down to it, Rosen’s
preference of Mozart to Haydn must be seen as emanating from Mozart’s
undeniable superiority to FJH as a melodist.
Mozart’s (fairly) successful accommodation of his loping melodic gifts
to a style—Haydn’s style—better suited to the outworking of short motivic
units, was indeed an impressive achievement, but it is perverse to elevate, as
Rosen did, even the best examples of this accommodation above such supreme,
unaccommodating exertions of the style on its native aliment as Haydn’s last two-dozen
or so symphonies and string quartets.
(In any case, if the apotheosis of the long melody is what you really
prize, surely your man is Schubert, a titanic figure who oddly yet
unsurprisingly falls between the cracks of Rosen’s two magna opera. Not that there are not quite a number of
references to FS in both books, but that in neither of them does he get an
official chapter to himself, and that in each of them he is used mainly as a
foil to the falling or rising generation.
In the later pages of The Classical Style, Schubert figures as a
kind of proto-Mendelssohn, failing to wring a single specimen of Beethovenian
sublimity out of dozens of slavish imitations of the master’s idiom, while in the
earlier pages of The Romantic Generation he figures as a kind of belated
poor man’s Beethoven, obdurately clinging to the old four-square secco classical
phrasing and articulation for all his love of such proto-Romantic devices as unelaborated
iteration.)
The lesson of Rosen’s
overestimation of Mozart is that one can sometimes take historical mediation
too far. Yes, Gould’s categorical
poo-pooing of the high Romantic epoch and the entire oeuvre of Mozart left him
blind (or deaf) to the merits and beauties of much great music. But the cardinal article in the creed of all
serious professional non-pop musicians and students of music born since, say,
Johannes Brahms attained legal drinking age, has been “Bach is best”; and Rosen
himself renewed his subscription to this creed when he remarked, “Bach is the
only first-rate composer”; and such being the case, anybody who rejects any
music for not being sufficiently Bachian perforce cannot be a complete loon and
indeed must be on some version of the right track. It is all very well to defend Composer X (or
indeed Driftwood Artist or Finger-Painter X) against charges of not doing P on
the grounds that he was not even trying to do P and was really only interested
in doing Y, but in the so-called final analysis such a feint merely postpones
the posing of the uncomfortable but ineluctable question “Is Y really as
important a thing even to try to do as P?”
One sees how ineluctable this question is most glaringly in Rosen’s NYRB-hosted
hatchet-job on the mighty twentieth-century Gesamtgeist (and Gould hero)
Theodor Adorno. In Adorno’s view, as
expounded in his Philosophy of Modern (or, in the newer translation, New)
Music, of the two most illustrious composers of the twentieth century,
Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, Schoenberg alone carried the great
post-Bachian tradition of Western music forward by continuing to work with
motifs that were both new (in that they did not remind you of something you had
already heard) and amenable to development in combination with other motifs,
and thereby heroically maintained the individual’s power of expression qua
individual in face of ever-increasing standardization in the arts as in all
other domains of human life. Stravinsky,
on the other hand, according to Adorno, was regressive vis-à-vis the GWCT; his
compositional technique marked a step backward in that it worked with motifs
that were shamelessly evocative of what had come before (this was called
“neoclassicism” then; today, we would call it “retro”) and then refused to
combine them with other motifs, preferring instead to repeat them. To the totalitarian forces of
standardization, Adorno’s Stravinsky simply said, like the Kaiser in the old Austrian
joke, “If yah wanna piece o’ me, help y’self.”
He was all for his own annihilation as an expressive entity, because he
believed that by his day the expressive individual was already dead and buried. For Rosen, this précis of the
twentieth-century musical landscape is but the product of so much blinkered “cultural
racism” (i.e., ethnocentrism) and analogizing run amuck. He supposes that Adorno did not care for
Stravinsky, just as he did not care for Debussy, simply because Stravinsky was
not a German (or, more properly, an Austro-German) and did not do things auf
die deutsche Art; and that simply because they lack corporeal arms
and legs it is absurd to think of musical ideas as surrogates for human agency. But Rosen’s defense of Stravinsky is weak,
amounting to a concession of Adorno’s major—“Adorno was right about
Stravinsky’s motifs: they do not have the dynamic charge of the German
motif”—followed by an assertion—“These motifs, which Adorno considered dead,
were an invention of genius that revolutionized music”—whose empirical
validity, as near as I can see, boils down to this: that an awful lot of
twentieth-century composers imitated Stravinsky. (Cf. the contemporaneous pandemic
hypermoronism “The Beatles revolutionized music.”) But this unignorable empirical SOA leaves unanswered
the more exigent aesthetic question whether the bulk of music composed under
Stravinsky’s influence has been any damned good or not. I should have thought that in the light of
the fact that no twentieth-century composer has been more deeply, shamelessly,
and transparently indebted to The Rite of Spring than the godawful dark
prince of minimalism, Philip Glass, Rosen would have been inclined to answer
this question in the negative. But
perhaps Rosen was too much a musician of his own generation to recognize these
affinities, or at any rate to feel them.
In the mid-twentieth century, Stravinsky’s full equality with
Schoenberg, if not outright superiority to him, was an idée reçue among
musicians and audiences alike; to assert then (as Glenn Gould was one of the
few to dare to do) that Stravinsky’s music was boring or uninventive was thought
as boorish as saying that Einstein was not really a very important
scientist. But the scene of listening
here in the early twenty-first century suggests that Adorno has been largely
vindicated. By this I do not mean that
performances and in-print recordings of the big Stravinsky orchestral
blockbusters—The Firebird, The Rite, and Petrouchka—seem
to be any fewer than they were fifty years ago, but that performances and
in-print recordings of Pierrot Lunaire and Moses and Aron now
seem to be substantially more numerous than performances and in-print
recordings of The Rake’s Progress and Dumbarton Oaks. Schoenberg is now the composer that fans of
Brahms and Mahler turn to in order to find out “what happened next” in the
history of music, to which every one of his compositions and every stage of his
career are seen to contribute, whereas the later works of Stravinsky are mostly
ignored because they are not seen as contributing to that history. And would-be
popularizers of Schoenberg no longer bother trying to push his pupil Alban Berg
as a kind of gateway drug delivering the “warm, expressive, romantic side of
twelve-tone music,” because they can now safely assume that Schoenberg will be
received as sufficiently “warm, expressive, and romantic” on his own. This is a development that Charles Rosen, who
repeatedly eulogized Schoenberg’s music as “the most expressive ever written”
should have welcomed and indeed presumably did welcome to the extent that he
was aware of it. But he seems to have
been either unable or unwilling acknowledge that the efflorescence of
Schoenberg’s reputation would have to coincide with the eclipse of Stravinsky’s.
It behooves me before
moving on to the matter of Gould’s and Rosen’s relative merits as pianists to
acknowledge that some sort of general section-outrounding summary of their
relative merits as writer-scholars would ordinarily be in order at this
point. But because—at least so it seems
to me—the writerly-scholarly habitus of each of them is so intimately bound up
with his pianistic habitus, I think it would be wiser to press on and save all
the summarizing for the end. So, then,
to fire the first salvo/make the first incision on/in the comparative pianistic
front: it is tempting to dismiss the whole question of which of the two, Gould
or Rosen, was the superior pianist by means of the old apples-versus-oranges
ploy, by saying that “as they specialized in two completely mutually alienable
repertoirial bailiwicks, there is no way in which the merits and demerits of
the one can be fruitfully compared with or to those of the other.” But alas and in fact the proverbial
even-most-cursory-glance at the two discographies reveals an incredibly
extensive amount of overlap (doubtless an equally proverbial butcher’s at the
less readily accessible concert schedules would reveal even more, as young
Gould the part-time concertizer was considerably less picky about what he
played than middle-aged Gould the full-time recorder): Bach, Beethoven,
Debussy, Haydn, Mozart, Liszt, Schoenberg, Ravel, and Webern were all composers
of whose works Rosen and Gould each committed at least one to vinyl. The real, ineluctable, and in many ways fatal
obstacle to a proper comparative appraisal of Gould and Rosen qua pianists is
Rosen’s lack of anything like the sort of dedicated, carte blanche-granting
patronage of a record label that Gould enjoyed with CBS from his signing onwards
and indeed continues to enjoy over thirty years after his death. Mind you: Rosen’s recording career got off in
1951 to a start that was in some respects even more auspicious than Gould’s
1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations, namely the first-ever
recording of the complete Debussy etudes.
And for nearly two full decades, from 1960 to 1978 or thenabouts, Glenn
and Rosen were recordcompanymates, each of them being affiliated with a CBS label
(Columbia Rome
His
Mozart recordings were deliberately among his most willful, and very
eccentrically he executed the opening theme staccato except for its last
appearance. When I asked him why he
played the theme legato this time, he grinned and replied disarmingly, “Well, I
thought I should do it right once.”
(Mozart actually wrote this phrase with detached two-note slurs. [i.e.,
a succession of legato pairs that were to be played staccato in relation to
each other (DR)]) (403).
The tactically
understated clincher of this passage is its final, parenthesized sentence: Even
when Gould purported to be playing with letter-perfect fidelity, it
stewingly intimates, he could not resist having his own way at the expense
of the score. But it would be wrong
to infer from this passage that Rosen’s exasperation with Gould’s approach to
K. 332 arose from anything like arch fuddy-duddyish HIP-sterism, or even a
mildly fuddy-duddyish insistence that the composer’s instructions, insofar as
they are intelligible, must be followed to the letter. For Rosen knew or, rather—for I would not be
taken as equating fuddy-duddyish HIPsters with flat-earthers out of hand—believed
that the forces by which the works of the ancients were customarily executed in
their day did not always correspond to those desired by their composers, and
that these composers’ instructions to the performer were often adjusted
accordingly. The most famous examples of
such accommodation—or at any rate the ones most often cited by Rosen—occur in
certain sonatas by Beethoven, in which either the score indicates a note that
could not yet be played at the date of the work’s composition, or the
voice-leading implies a note that does not actually appear in the score (i.e.,
in deference to the limited compasses of existing instruments). In such cases the performer pretty much owes
it to the composer to play the piece on a modern instrument, and to play the
unplayable note and fill in the missing one. But beyond this Rosen believed that there were
pieces whose ideal realization surpassed even what the composer had been
capable of imagining, pieces vis-à-vis which the performer was within his
rights to countermand even instructions that one had no reason to believe did
not correspond to the composer’s express intentions. An example of such a piece, Rosen argued, was
the first movement of the final piano sonata of Franz Schubert, whose blanket
tempo direction of Molto moderato was self-evidently more than a scoche
too brisk for the twentieth-century concert hall. If the twentieth-century pianist, performing
to an audience of two-thousand people, was to convey to any portion of such an
audience the almost unbearable intimacy of the movement’s argument, he would
have to impose this intimacy on them by playing the movement much slower
than Molto moderato; perhaps even justifiably opting, as Sviatoslav
Richter did, for a Molto adagio that stretched its modest dozen-odd
pages into a thirty-five minute paint-drying session rivaled in durée if not longueur
only by the first movement of Mahler’s or Bruckner’s Ninth as conducted by some
legendary sluggard like Klemperer or Giulini.
At what latitudinal line, then, did Rosen’s willingness to indulge
interpretative license stop? Why, quite
simply at whatever line past which the music would seem in some respect
inferior—less interesting, less significant, or less coherent—than it would via
a more scrupulous attitude to the letter of the score. In Rosen’s view, Richter had crossed this
line when he applied his slow-motion approach to a much less weighty Schubert
sonata than the B-flat major, namely the G major—which when liberally larded
with extra-long rests sounded gratuitously pompous rather than seasonably
serious. So, self-evidently, had Gould,
in his treatment of the expressive indications in Mozart’s K. 332, which drew
unwarranted and nonsensical attention to the last appearance of the opening
theme qua theme merely for the sake of gratifying a perverse whim, the whim of
supposedly “doing it right for once.”
But lest one should wrongly assume that Gould believed in principle that
virtually anything went in interpretative realizations I must dip once more
into the 1981 Goldbergs interview to extract a tidbit that suggests that
Gould’s most deeply (or at least most lately) held views on performative
license were not after all much more liberal than Rosen’s:
The
art of the fugue [is] music that works astonishingly well with a harpsichord,
an organ, a string quartet, a string orchestra, he [i.e., Bach] didn’t specify
[actually, according to Rosen, he did!]—it works astonishingly well with a saxophone
quartet….I think all the evidence suggests that Bach didn’t give a hoot about
specific sonority, or even volume. But I
think he did care to an almost fanatic degree about the integrity of his
structures. I think he would have been
delighted by any sound that was born out of a respect for the abstract
necessity of those structures, and appalled—amused, maybe, but appalled—by any
sound that was born out of the notion that by glossing over those structures it
could improve upon them in some way.
First just let me note some
characteristics of the rhetoric in the bits describing Bach’s conjectural
attitudes—on the one hand, vis-a-vis sonority and volume we have a
formula—namely, “didn’t give a hoot”—that is expressive of the extremity of
cavalier indifference, the very same sort of indifference liberally bestowed by
Gould on the phrasing indications of Mozart’s piano sonatas; on the other hand,
vis-à-vis the “integrity” of B.’s “structures,” we have “caring to an almost
fanatic degree” and “appalled,” language expressive of the most passionate emotional
investment. Clearly, in Gould’s view some
kinds of liberties scarcely count as liberties at all, while others surpass
criminality and border on barbarity and sacrilege. The scarcely countworthy liberties are fairly
easy to identify: “sonority” is obviously the choice of instrument(s) (e.g.,
solo piano versus saxophone quartet), and “volume” is probably equatable
with the number of performers. (Just
before the passage quoted Gould remarks that Bach probably did not care whether
the B minor mass was sung by 50 or 500 people.
But it is remotely possible that under the rubric of “volume” Gould also
included dynamics.) But the identity of the
quasi-barbaric and sacrilegious ones is as yet mysterious and inscrutable—at
least to the reader of this passage on its lonesome. What exactly are musical “structures,” and
how exactly does one go about well-nigh banausically and blasphemously “glossing
over” them? For an answer to that
question, we must, I am deeply afraid, return to the quotation box, to a
snippet from Gould’s review of Walter Carlos’s Switched-on Bach:
It’s
the sounds which recall no particular experience that underline what I take to
be Carlos’s prime motivation—a utilization of the available technology to actualize
previously idealized aspects of the world of Bach. Now this may well be just the sort of
argument Stokowski would use to justify his orchestral inflation of the organ
works, and even Anton Webern would probably have claimed he was seeking a
contemporary look for Bach as he set about pointillistically dissembling [sic?]
A Musical Offering’s last fugue.
But Stokowski’s indulgences simply celebrate the English vesper service
postlude circa 1900, while Webern’s Viennese pontifications make all the
hair-splitting, beard-stroking Freudian analysis that ever led to a faulty
diagnosis (433).
Switched-on Bach was—as I may as well explain for the benefit of
the uninitiated-cum-can’t be arsed—was an LP recording of a small number of famous
Bach pieces as arranged for the Moog synthesizer, with some specific and
unvarying Moog timbre doing duty for each part or voice in each of the scores. Of Leopold Stokowski’s Bach transcriptions I
know only the famous one of the D minor Toccata and Fugue from Disney’s Fantasia
(plus a modified version thereof featuring an organ obbligato part—I mention it
only because it shows contra Gould that LS was not completely and invariably
heedless of JSB’s instructions), and how in “inflating” this work Stokowski adulterated
it any more than Gould himself did the prelude to Wagner’s Meistersinger
in reducing it to a piano arrangement, I fail to see (i.e., to have
heard). For this failure, though,
perhaps my utter ignorance of the late-Victorian Anglican liturgy is entirely
to blame. (But only perhaps: Gould himself,
after all, was not an Anglican but a Scottish-Canadian Presbyterian.) But I think I have a pretty good handle on
what Gould is getting at when he says that Anton Webern “pointillistically
dissembled” the final fugue from A Musical Offering. Webern’s orchestration of this piece
(officially known not as the final fugue but rather as the Ricercar for Six
Voices) gives the naïve listener the impression that he was trying to do with
it what Benjamin Britten would later do with Purcell’s Rondeau from Abdelazer in the Young Person’s Guide
to the Orchestra—only in six minutes rather than thirty. Rather than allocating the subjects and their
various transformations to specific instruments or combinations of instruments en
bloc, Webern parcels out segments of subjects, sub-subjects, that
are often of minuscule length; such that one will often hear the likes of, say,
a two note-figure on the flute followed by another two notes on the combined
French horns. Sometimes the second
figure will simply correspond to a continuation of the line (i.e., voice)
adumbrated by the first one, at other times it will come across as an echo of
or answer to the first figure in one of the other voices. In the minuteness of the figures one sees
whence Gould derives his analogy to pointillistic painting, as well, perhaps—i.e.,
if he misconstrued “dissembling” simply as a “sa”-free alternative to its
longer near-homonym—as his designation of the orchestration as an act of
“dissembling.” For to “pointillize”
either a pictorial or a musical composition is obviously in a certain way to
take it apart, to break its relatively compact number of relatively long lines
into a relatively large number of relatively small dots. And when one considers that “to break down”
is one of the chief senses of “to analyze,” one can easily see how Gould came
to introduce “analysis” into his description.
(The introduction of Freud thereinto I take to be merely an opportunistic
cheap shot exploiting W.’s and F.’s contemporaneous wienerhood [one that has
afforded me an opportunity to make an even cheaper shot via the most
Freudianized word in current English.])
But in what sense is this analysis a “misdiagnosis,” and in what sense
does it “dissemble” in the proper, dictionary- defined sense? Presumably it does so by promulgating the
notion that Bach’s six-voice fugue is actually a six dozen-voiced entity to
whose argument every instrumental timbre in the modern symphony orchestra makes
a substantial contribution. To put the
contrast another way: Bach’s fugue as written builds or constructs itself as
every six-voiced fugue must do, one story at a time, and into a permanent (for
the work’s duration) six-story building; whereas Webern’s orchestration, in
oscillating several times between thinner and thicker textures before rising in
its final measures to a full-fledged tutti, presents the fugue as an
architectural work in a state of constant revision—now rising to the height of an
apartment block, now sinking to the level of a humble bungalow, before
eventually assuming and settling on the vertical magnitude of a full-fledged
skyscraper. For Gould this is an
absolute, non-Luigian, non Nuria Schoenberg-affianced nono. The essential “structures” of a musical work
for him are its finite and mutually inimplicable vocal subdivisions: multiply
or diminish the number of these subdivisions and you are damaging the integrity
of the music. By all means (says Gould):
arrange The Art of Fugue or A Musical Offering for a collection
of instruments that were not invented until long after Bach’s death, but make
sure that there is only one such instrument (or a group thereof playing in
unison) per voice, lest you engender phantom voices in certain episodes (and
thereby unjustly magnify their importance) and conjure away real voices in
others (and thereby unjustly diminish their importance). “But wasn’t it precisely such a distortion of
the relative importance of episodes that you said Rosen implied was the chief
sin of Gould’s interpretation of K. 332?”
Indeed it was. “Why, then, was
Gould incapable of appreciating that what was bad for the Bachian goose was
equally bad for the Mozartian gander (or, to put it in more Gould friendly
terms, ‘that what was necessary to the Bachian gander was likewise necessary to
the Mozartian goose’)?” Because he was
incapable of imagining that two episodes that were very close to each other
melodically and harmonically could differ from each other in any way that was
worth emphasizing or downplaying, in any way that bore any “structural”
significance. Perhaps even beyond or
beneath counterpoint, the quality that Gould prized most of all in music was discursiveness,
the setting down and forth of an attempt at a logical argument, a quality that
depended entirely on relations of pitch and rhythm (although according to such
a conception even rhythm is really only the handmaiden of pitch); accordingly,
his notion of “structural” interference encompassed only such performative or
transcriptive acts as occluded or enhanced the significance of a given pitch or
rhythm. But in addition to its
discursive dimension, music, just like discursive speech or prose, has a gestural
dimension that can (and to a lesser or greater degree always does) play a
load-bearing part in the structure of a composition. In written and printed scores, this dimension
is addressed via virtually every sort of mark that can appear above or below
the stem or base of a note, and by tempo indications, as well as indications of
pedaling and dynamics (ff, pp, <, >, etc.). Granted: in the music of Bach, this dimension
is less elaborately addressed than it is in that of his later
eighteenth-century successors, but it is certainly present, notably in the very
sorts of indications that Gould ran so roughshodly over in K. 332—viz.
staccato-izing dots and legato-izing slurs.
Therefore, to the not insignificant extent he acknowledged such gestural
indications in his playing of Bach, he should have acknowledged them in his
playing of Mozart, for the sake of wringing out of such discursively
impoverished music every microgram of structural interest it possessed. But because Gould viewed all gestural
elements as mere expugnable, superficial embellishments, the notion of such
out-wringing presumably never occurred to him.
Granted, though, because Gould’s Mozart cycle was conceived from the
outset as an exercise in making WAM look bad, K. 332 is not an ideal
illustration of Gould’s apparent obliviousness of the structural significance
of gestural elements: we cannot, after all, be sure that in the case of this
sonata Gould was not aware of such significance and was not simply deliberately
disregarding it. A better such
illustration is his recording of a piece that, as he held its composer in very
high regard, we may safely assume he was trying to show to its best advantage. I am referring to his recording of Haydn’s C
major sonata, Hob. XVI:50. The first
movement of this sonata is perhaps most remarkable for what may be termed a double
recapitulation: rather than being merely restated once in its final section
(or, as is not uncommon in Haydn, restated and then immediately elaborated), the
movement’s principal theme comes around for an exquisite second full
restatement pianissimo with echoing octaves and an expressive indication of open
pedal (in English), most likely a direction to keep the sustain pedal depressed
without interruption. When this
indication is followed (as, for example, by Emmanuel Ax in his late-80s CBS
version), there is a proto-impressionistic smudging of the theme, as the point
where the initial sounding of each note leaves off and its octaval echo begins becomes
virtually impossible to distinguish; and when juxtaposed with a passage of such
delicate, shimmering (I shan’t use the ‘d” word [i.e., d**ph*n**s]) softness,
the long-postponed forte re-entry of the bravura final theme is doubly
triumphant. When the indication is
ignored (as in Gould’s recording) the effect of the octave echoes is still
striking, but not so striking that a listener accustomed to more letter-perfect
renditions will not wonder whether he is not after all listening to the
earlier, more nearly verbatim restatement, or, failing that, feel that the
movement has gone on a tad too long. So
here, in Gould’s version of XVI:50, we have an apodictic example of
non-observation of gestural elements that is clearly not an instance of
interpretative sabotage and that does indeed result in a “glossing over,” and
hence a vitiation, of one of the work’s significant structures. And on the evidence of this example one can
at last arrive at a fair and complete appraisal of Gould’s and Rosen’s relative
merits both as pianists and as exegetes-cum-philosophers of music. First of all, then, Gould’s lack of
appreciation of gestural structurality is a genuine and serious flaw—he might
perhaps have termed it “a blind spot” himself—in which his merit as an interpreter
in both senses (those of the interpreter qua performer and the interpreter qua
verbal analyst) is implicated; such that for recorded performances of and
written reflections on music in which gestural elements are closer to dominant
than recessive, one is better advised to turn to Rosen, who can be counted upon
to give these elements their due—even while giving proportionately condign
treatment to discursive elements. (I
append this “even while” phrase by way of emphasizing that Rosen was certainly no
romantic pianist of the old school, hell-bent on milking every last ounce of rubato-driven
expressiveness out of every measure whatever the score might say. Indeed, one of the chief complaints leveled
at his performances of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, et al. was that they were
too “dry” and insufficiently “passionate”—the very sorts of complaints that
tended to be leveled at Gould’s infrequent performances of the same
repertoire.) On the other hand, as
tempting as it may be, one cannot with justice simply erect two partitions, one
at the year 1750, the other at the year 1860 (or thereabouts), and declare the
intervening space a Gould free-cum-Rosen rich zone. For there is no denying that Gould’s
a-gestural approach can work wonders with some if not quite much of late eighteenth through middle
nineteenth-century repertoire, particularly when the deadpanness is coupled
with his already-noted predilection for slower tempos. Take his recordings of two other Haydn
sonatas: XVI: 48 in C major and XVI: 51 in D major. The first movement of XVI: 48 is marked Andante
con espressione, and in Emmanuel Ax’s safely sub-moderato version,
it is seven minutes and 40 seconds in length.
Gould’s version, on the other hand, runs to a gargantuan 12:52 , nearly twice as long, an increase owing to his ratcheting
of andante down to an impossibly slow largo or perhaps even a grave. When I first heard this version I literally
felt like laughing and figuratively actually did so. I found it genuinely comical, like one of
those sketch show bits where the actors mimic a slow-motion instant video
replay in so-called real time. But by
and by I came to be able to listen to it with a perfectly straight face, and
eventually I even came to prefer it to the more accurately tempo’d Ax version. I have come to see how it makes XVI: 48.i
into an instance of one of Haydn’s patented and virtually unique achievements, the
“genuinely reposeful adagio”; as well as into something properly unique among
such adagios—viz., one that inaugurates the piece in question rather
than following up a more agitated first-movement allegro or second-movement
minuet. (Many early Haydn pieces—notably
several of the symphonies—begin with adagios, but being first-movement sonata
form-esque in structure these adagios do not even aspire to being reposeful.) In the case of XVI: 51, it is the finale that
benefits from the slow and detached Gouldian treatment. Its tempo marking is presto, and when
it is played at the rapid-clip pace denoted by that marking (as, for instance, in
Rudolf Buchbinder’s recording of it), one hardly notices it: it whizzes by in a
bagatellish minute-and-a-half that at its most evocative suggests a kind of rushed
trial run for the proto-Prokofievian opening movement of XVI:34, whose first
subject its second subject superficially resembles. But in Gould’s moderato con moto al
massimo reading it comes across as almost stately, with the major-moded
first subject now making a much stronger impression and the formerly
undanceably fast ¾ meter now stolidly tapping out intimations of the dance
crazes of later decades. Indeed, I
cannot forbear observing that this version of XVI:51 reminds one of nothing so
strongly as the prevailingly dancey piano miniature cycles of Schumann—an
observation that doubtless would have made Gould wince and might even have
driven him to re-record the movement prestissimo. On the other hand, the fact that something by
Haydn performed in a ruthlessly un-gestural manner can sound Schumannesque
suggests that the Schumannian innovations so prized by Rosen—including,
signally, RS’s above-mentioned exploitation of the sustain pedal, are less
central to Schumann’s idiom and modus operandi than both Rosen and Gould would
like to suppose—that Schumann was a more discursive and less gestural composer
than he is cracked up to be (by Gould, Rosen, and others). And the same could be said of all the other
great romantic composers. Essentially,
between the two of them, Rosen and Gould encapsulate the basic aporia of
western serious music. (In principle I
prefer to call it “serious western music,” but that syntactical variant unignorably
suggests music that has been composed as the soundtrack of a cowboys-and-Indians
movie, most likely to accompany such scenes as that of the lead good guy’s
funeral.) The aporia amounts to this:
that while the gestural elements introduced in the late eighteenth century made
music more subtly and capaciously expressive and added to it a new
register of structural complexity, they did so only at the cost of disrupting
and attenuating the formerly hegemonic and more intrinsically complex—or,
rather “complexifiable”—discursive register.
A symphony or string quartet by Haydn—or, indeed, by any of his disciples
from Mozart right on up to Mahler and Bartók—breathes in a way that a
Bach fugue never bothers to do, partly through its more elaborate expressive
indications, partly through its ever-shifting relations among principal and
subsidiary voices (the above-mentioned obbligato accompaniment), and partly
(perhaps even mostly) through its infinitely more liberal yet infinitely more
judicious placement of silent passages, of rests. There are various ways of extending the
metaphor of breathing by way of more fully capturing the innovation: one can
say that in the works of Haydn et seq. we have the sense for the first time of
watching a real human being moving about the world, or of listening to someone
tell us a story, or of watching a play, or of reading a novel. None of these conceits is entirely
commensurate with its object, but all of them are accurate in implying some
impediment to or incompatibility with the kind of work performed to a turn by a
Bach fugue. Neither an ambulating human
being nor a story nor a play nor a novel presents an argument anywhere nearly
as straightforwardly or uninterruptedly as does a mathematical proof or (more
contestably) a philosophical treatise or indeed a fugue: all of them are
constantly engaged in activities that bear no obvious relation to their
ostensible purposes (such purposes as going to the fridge for a can of
orangeade, relating the history of a man named Jed, portraying the travails of
two star-crossed lovers, and the like), and all of them pause along the way to
engage in additional seemingly non-purposive activities, activities indeed
whose purposiveness one will have to make a case for, often not without a
certain amount of Jesuitical (or casuistic) ingenuity. One will have to attempt to excuse the
orangeade-seeker’s side-trip to the utility room, the play’s inclusion of comic
episodes having nothing to do with the lovers, the novel or story’s unseemly
dwelling on the unorthodox sexuality of Jed’s banker’s secretary—ideally by
somehow showing that these apparent excrescences highlight the importance of
the main purpose through their contrast with it, but at a pinch by showing that
the main purpose is not the main purpose after all, and that the excrescences are after all the main purpose. But the Heraclean exegetic labor required to
tidy up these mare’s nests of impertinences is all worth it—at least so the
champions of such activities and productions aver—because in their unruly
complexity they testify to the wonderfully exuberant fecundity (or the
wonderfully fecund exuberance) of “what it means to be alive and/or human,” as
mathematical proofs and philosophical treatises do not. This averral may very well be true, or it may
very well be bullshit. Or it may be true
and yet not to one’s taste; one may be interested in other phenomena than the
exuberance and fecundity of human or even non-human life. In either case, one must surely be forgiven
for retiring into the colder but hermeneutically less dodgy realm of
mathematical or philosophical speculation and demonstration, at least for a
spell. So anyway: vis-à-vis this
horribly but necessarily quasi-Snovian caricaturistic schema, music may be seen
as having reached its first (and perhaps, some would argue, last) great apogee
either with Bach or with Beethoven, with the composer who took the discursive
register as far as it could go on its own, or the composer who brought the
gestural register into its most eloquent relation with the discursive register. And there is really no possibility of having
it both ways on this subject: one must choose sides, as one must in spectating
on a so-called subway series between two athletic teams in the same metropolis;
which does not mean that there do not exist music-lovers who are equally
passionately devoted to Bach and to Beethoven, but that such music-lovers are
never simultaneously devoted to one or the other, and that as their
passion for the one rises, their passion for the other cannot help receding;
that whenever they find themselves reveling in the discursive involutions of
Bach, they needs must find themselves simultaneously bidding the gestural articulations
of Beethoven to perform the biologically impossible act, and vice versa. I suspect that at bottom both Gould and Rosen
were music-lovers of this intrinsically ambivalent type, or more specifically
(and in-common-ly) Bach fans with pronounced Beethoven-fannish
tendencies. Why, then, is this
ambivalence so differently and unevenly reflected in their performances and
writings? Why does Gould present himself
as the stalwart champion of Bach who seems to feel obliged to construe every pre-or-post
Bachian composition he admires as a prolepsis of or homage to JSB? And why does Rosen feel obliged time and
again to make the case for the greatness of not only Beethoven, but of such
patently sub-Beethovenian gesture-maniacs as Chopin and Liszt? At the risk of coming across as something of
a “cultural racist”—nay, of a veritable cultural Uncle Tom—I will dare
to hazard that both of these distortions are attributable to the two men’s
respective enthrallments to two characteristically American—or, rather, and
more broadly—Anglo-Saxon) intellectual habituses, namely dogmatic realism
and pluralism. Now, far be it
from me, DGR, categorically to impugn or belittle either of these habituses,
for I am as ready as the staunchest Tea Partier or UK Independence Party member
to aver with a perfectly straight face (yes, the very same one that I sport
while listening to the first movement of Gould’s version of Hob. XVI: 48) that
the obdurate embodiment of one or the other of them saved continental Europe
from Nazism, or brought down the Berlin Wall, or what have you. (I am indeed even willing to concede that
when self-reflectively converted into ethoses they may possess a certain
philosophical validity; I concede, in other words, that there are cases in
which dogmatically maintaining (a la Gould) that a club is a club and a diamond
a diamond and there’s an end on’t, or pluralistically maintaining (a la Rosen)
that there is always room for one more, will bring one closer to the truth than
will other ethoses.) And at least equally far be it from me to hold up Hegelian
idealism or any of its offshoots as a model for one’s understanding of the
human world and its cursus and Schicksal;
for I am equally ready as the staunchest above-mentioneds (at least that
presumptively tiny minority of them who have heard of Hegel, Marx, et al.) to
aver that the scourges of Nazism and totalitarian Communism would never have
come into being, let alone overwhelmed the best part of Europe, had HI itself
(note the sequence, DGR—Hit) not come into being beforehand. But in the case of the history of music, it
seems to me that the only way of making any damn(ed) sense atoll of it is
through the [your favorite optical device qua metaphorical vehicle here] of
some sort of broadly Hegelian W************g, an it-to-me-seeming to
which the aura of for-everybody-being might just stand a chance of being
imparted if only the reader will reflect that (in Charles Rosen’s words) “the central
[musical] tradition [is] indeed German” (Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p.
71). What I meantersay in drawing
attention to this centrality is that in our musical outlook we “Westerners”
(and once again I am not thinking of the principals in a cowboys-and-Indians
movie) are all basically Germans (just as in our literary outlook we are all
basically Englishmen and Russians and in our culinary outlook we are all
basically Frenchmen), and that accordingly it makes much more sense to try to
make sense of the stages and elements of the German musical tradition that put
us off by considering them in the light of those stages and elements of that
tradition that do the opposite of put us off, than by considering them in the
strategically flattering or unflattering light of some other tradition or
pseudo-tradition. This second, less
rational, alternative is one that both Gould and Rosen are guilty of availing
themselves of—Gould through his championing of such minor non-German
contrapuntalists as William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, Rosen through his
championing of the self-consciously non-developmental and (equally
self-consciously!) non-German Debussy and Stravinsky. And ultimately, in the final analysis, at the
end of the &c., it seems to me that only Theodor Adorno—the Adorno whom
Rosen (on the whole) reviled and Gould idolized in apparent ignorance of the
bulk of his oeuvre (the only Adorno work mentioned by title by any of Gould’s
biographers is Prisms, in which is included the essay “Bach Defended
against his Devotees,” from which the otherwise Adorno-uninitiated reader would
be bound to conclude that JSB was A’s favorite composer)—has seriously bothered
to try to work out what was lost and gained in the transition from Bach to
Beethoven. On the one hand, Adorno
writes (in the above- parenthesized “Bach Defended”), “Anyone who has returned
to Beethoven after prolongued [sic (presumably one or both of the translators,
Samuel and Shierry Weber, rather than TWA himself, is to blame)], intensive
study of Bach sometimes feels as though he were confronted by a kind of decorative
light music, which only the culture-cliché [one again suspects that something
is homographically identical to the title of a much-feted Sophia Coppola movie,
and conjectures that the ‘culture cliché’ is personifiable as an Alistair
Cooke-ish bloke in a leather armchair solemnly holding forth on what might with
equal probability be Hamlet or some period bodice-ripper published last
Tuesday] could consider ‘profound’” (Prisms, p. 141). On the other hand, Adorno writes, “It is only
when we use the criterion of truth content—the emancipation of the Subject from
myth and the reconciliation of both—that Beethoven emerges as the more advanced
composer [i.e., as the unquoted context makes clear, of a specific pair of
composers, Beethoven and Bach]. This
criterion outweighs all others in importance.”
The entity that Larkinesque residual piety alone prohibits one terming
the elephant or two-hundred pound gorilla of these two quotations is undoubtedly
(though not necessarily “of course”) God.
From a purely technical point of view, says Adorno, Beethoven’s music comes
across as a precipitous falling off from Bach.
Technically speaking (implies Adorno), there is simply no contest
between the first movement of the C minor fifth symphony and the C minor prelude
and fugue from either of the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier: the
prelude and fugue win hands down, as they say.
But Bach’s contrapuntal mastery is inseparable from his enslavement, his
lack of “emancipation,” from the God-myth.
(This enslavement is, incidentally, the corollary or flipside of Bach’s
above-mentioned ability to inspire genuine religious awe in contrast to mere
kitschy Mendelssohnian religious pseudo-awe.)
True, Bach’s God was in some respects a very modern God, and was
certainly not the medieval Aristotlean God of Aquinas, for Bach’s
eighteenth-century Pietism, “like all forms of restoration, absorbed the forces
of the very Enlightenment that it opposed.
The subject which hopes to attain grace by becoming absorbed in itself
through reflected ‘inwardness’ has already escaped dogmatic order and is on its
own, autonomous in the choice of heteronomy” (Prisms, p. 136). In other words, Bach and his fellow Pietists
did not simply unquestioningly accept the “dogmatic” assertion of God’s hegemony
like a passel of gaping pre-reformation peasants; rather, they arrived at their
faith after long and laborious “autonomous” introspection—introspection
encouraged by the successes of enlightenment humanism, with its impressive
track record of revelations both secular and sacred vouchsafed to individual
men and women going it alone. For all
that, the position at which they ultimately arrived was one of “heteronomy,” of
ceding sovereignty of their wills to an alien power, of rendering back
unto God what had originally been his but that for a spell had been their own. And in Bach’s music this cession is expressed
by the very mastery of contrapuntal logic for which he is so admired as an
individual genius. The Well-Tempered
Clavier indeed demonstrates Bach’s peerlessness as a composer, his
superiority to all other composers who have preceded him, but it does not express
or assert this peerlessness. What
it asserts, rather, is something to the effect of “this is the way the world
that God created is; it is a world in which individual pitches do not have
specific personalities, a world in which a first-rate fugue can be composed in
any key, and played on any keyboard instrument without producing jarring
discords. This is a world that I have
discovered, not created. I fully expect
you, the listener or performer, to be impressed by my ingenuity and penetration
as a discoverer, but all credit for the thing discovered belongs to God alone.” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, on the other
hand, does assert and express Beethoven’s peerlessness as a
composer, his superiority to all preceding composers (including J. S. Bach),
without consistently even attempting to demonstrate it. Why?
Because such a thoroughgoing demonstration—perforce a demonstration of
contrapuntal mastery a la JSB—would merely duplicate JSB’s assertion of his
willing obeisance to God. And so
Beethoven asserts his independence of, his emancipation from God, not as one might expect, by doing
something daringly and flamboyantly original, but rather by forbearing
to demonstrate his mastery, and simply declaring his bare presence with
a gesture, by clinging tenaciously to, and banging away obsessively (not
unlike Khrushchev with his shoe at the U.N.) at a most unoriginal four-note
motif describing a simple minor third, a motif that has of course become the
most famous of all musical motifs, and that functions in the argument of
the first movement of the fifth precisely by refusing to allow itself to be
immediately and permanently absorbed into a longer melodic unit—for example,
the first subject of a fugue. But
“emancipation” from myth is of course according to Adorno only half of
Beethoven’s “truth content,” the other half consisting in his “reconciliation”
therewith. But in which episode or
episodes of the first movement of the Fifth is this “reconciliation”
effected? Why, in those episodes in
which Beethoven temporarily relinquishes his gavel-hold on the motif and allows
it to follow a more familiar Bach-esque cursus; for example, that bit
very early on in the movement, in measures 6 through 21, when after merely two
statements of the motif in two different pitch-classes (G-E-flat and F-D), it
is briefly treated as a miniature sequence, and undergoes several of the common
contrapuntal (in other words, not un-fugue-like) transformations (contraction,
dilation, elaboration, retrograde inversion,
and liquidation)—only to be restated yet again in its original form (transposed
upwards a minor third from its last appearance, so that it describes a non-mode
specific cadence on the subdominant or tonic-substitute, F), at which point the
reconciliation party is temporarily over.
And time and again throughout this movement we see this pattern
repeated: the Lord giveth and taketh away from man in the form of Beethoven by
letting him assert himself motto-esquely and homophonically, and forcing him to
conform to the rules of contrapuntal extension and distribution, and Beethoven
qua man giveth and taketh away from the Lord by complementary means. But even this oscillatory pattern does not
describe the entire psychotheolontological picture or structure of the first
movement of the fifth. For what to our
wondering ears should appear during the recapitulation, immediately before the
restatement of the second great statement of the four-note motto, the one
describing a cadence on the dominant (G major), but a compact, yet, for all
that, extremely incongruously florid cadenza on the oboe, a cadenza bearing no
discernable relation to the thematic material of any other part of the
movement. This cadenza, in virtue of its
baroque operatic quirkiness and its solitariness in both the motivic and
timbral registers, would seem to be acknowledging the legitimacy of all the
reservations the listener has so far accumulated on the matter of the
motto-theme qua assertion of subjective autonomy. “You may think,” says the cadenza, “that you
are breaking away from the great contrapuntal-cum-theistic tradition and
feeling your autonomous subjective oats in hammering away ad nauseam at this
two-pitch, four-note motif, but what you are really doing is regressing back
into some sort of animistic pre-theistic (and hence pre-pre-subjective)
condition in which repetition is everything (proleptic shades of Stravinsky’s Rite
of Spring). I, on the other hand,
although hailing from a time long before Johann Sebastian Bach (namely the
period of the early baroque, the early-to-mid seventeenth century), with its
more intimate ties to the human voice, am the real subjective deal.” But then, of course, this little cadenza does
not get the last word; the recapitulation picks up precisely at the point where
it was interrupted—and yet the protractedness of the ensuing coda with its
heavy reliance on old-school contrapuntal technique does rather give the lie to
the conclusion that simple, repetitive, antitheistic assertion wins out in the
end.
In short, Adorno seems to
be assuring us, Beethoven is a heck of a lot more philosophically
complicated than Bach, and “by this criterion” trumps him. But it is practically impossible to be certain
that this is what Adorno is assuring us, inasmuch as his oeuvre is depressingly
underpopulated by detailed analyses of particular compositions, and is utterly
barren of any such analysis of any work by Beethoven, let alone of the first
movement of the fifth. (In his essay “On Popular Music” he does devote a
hundred or so words to the fifth’s scherzo, but this is a far less complicated
movement, and a hundred or so words are obviously not the thousand or so one
wishes for.) Certainly Adorno never
attempted anything at the super-fine grained measure-by-measure resolution that
one takes for granted in the writings of Gould and Rosen, as exampled (for
example) in the following paragraph on Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 50, No. 6 in
D major (the so-called “Frog” quartet):
No
tonic is defined by the first measure; we start on an unexplained,
unharmonized, and therefore ambiguous E. If a dissonance is a note that
requires resolution, then the E, standing in by itself, is dissonant although
we are only aware of its dissonance after it has disappeared; surprise will,
however, keep it ringing in our ears long enough to realize that we have been
fooled. The line then descends to the E
below, and we resolve it with the cadence II-V-I. The diminuendo is the wittiest stroke of all
and the tonic chord, when it arrives, does so unassumingly. The good humor of this opening is boundless (The
Classical Style, p. 128).
The above sentences on the
first movement on Beethoven’s Fifth are my own eighth-hearted super-supine layman’s
attempt to bring Adornonian insights to bear at the just-exampled Rosenian and
Gouldian level (with perhaps a dash of Hans Keller-esque Devil-may-care
imperiousness thrown in). I certainly
would have put more work into it had the god-awful law of diminishing returns—a
sort of hideous, watercress-coiffed Loch-Ness monster-esque beastie—not reared
its head all the more stroppily and peremptorily the more deeply I plumbed the
score. Yes, I have learned much from Gould
and Rosen; but I am surely far from cut out to apply what I have learned from them
in a thorough and systematic way to the fresh soup-to-nuts independent study of
a work. Most signally, I suppose, I lack
Gould’s and Rosen’s ability—an ability I assume they share(d) with most other fully
trained pianists—instantly to expand or contract a score written for any size
or sort of ensemble, from a sonata for unaccompanied cello to a symphony for
the full-blown late-Romantic orchestra of R. Strauss and Mahler, into its
essential voices, into the precise enumeration and apportionment of keystrokes
required for the score’s realization (timbral considerations aside) on a piano. Just to figure out which chord is being
delineated by an orchestral tutti, I actually have to start at the top of the
page and write down the letter corresponding to every note on every staff-line
or space from the piccolo’s highest to the double-basses’ lowest, and cross out
all the repetitions once I am finished. (And
don’t even get me started on transposing instruments.) Proceeding in such an exquisitely laborious
fashion I require an entire week (not counting tea and wee breaks) to plot the
harmonic schema of a single sonata-form movement. Clearly what this world now needs (along with
a good five-cent cigar) is a music-scholar who has mastered both the work of
Adorno and the art of piano-playing; and—what is even more important—has
thoroughly familiarized himself with the critical corpora of Gould and Rosen,
so that he is aware of just how high the bar of wit, urbanity, breadth of
knowledge, and attentiveness to the actualities of composition and performance
has already been set for writers on music.
Ten or perhaps even five years ago I would not have thought it at all
likely that such a figure would ever emerge.
But now that I see that the formerly mutually immiscible milieus of
classical music performance (wherein philosophy of any sort was largely
unknown) and theory-gourmandizing hipsterism (wherein classical music of any
sort was largely unknown and Adorno was habitually conscripted in the defense
of certain forms of pop music) are beginning to merge, I am more sanguine. One hopes that now that Schoenberg has at
last taken his rightful place as a modern classic, the young pianists and
string players who love performing his works are taking an interest in the
writings of his foremost champion and will wish to build on them;
complementarily, one hopes that now that it is no longer good form among young
intellectuals to be ignorant of serious music, the writings of this new
generation of performer-critics will find a large and receptive
readership.