• I think that the old pianists were able to read the score in the profound sense of the word, much better than many piano players of today. In the sense that they were not satisfied with just seeing the P in piano, or where the C in the word crescendo was written. It’s basically the relativity - piano in relation to what? What comes before and what comes afterwards. Well, all this is not in the score. And it is all of that area, which is actually the area of music making. This was a totally natural phenomenon for all of these pianists, regardless of where they came from and what school they came from. The Bible for them was the sound, not the printed page.

    -Daniel Barenboim in discussion of Claudio Arrau and the Golden Age of pianism.

    Vanity… Vanity is the most terrible, the most broken of things for an interpreter. If you are sure that what you have to say is unique, then you are not out to please or not to please, or out to impress or not to impress. You have your message, and that’s it! If they like it, it’s alright, if they don’t, I don’t know if it is clear.

    - Claudio Arrau

    This is our duty: to bring what we are convinced about to other people so that everybody can enjoy it. And, you know, people come to visit someone, and they bring a bottle of wine or flowers for the lady. I come to a concert and bring the piece which is touching my heart, and I want to share it with these people. I don’t want to impose it on them. I’m just convinced that since I love it so much, they might too.

    - Krystian Zimerman

  • There are few composers with whom I see eye to eye as much as Robert Schumann. He is a composer whose music demands that you become a part of his spirit. Perhaps it demands that you have equally-lived experiences on either pole of the emotional gamut; from the most anxious of darks, to the most exuberant, even manic highs. His spirit is profoundly woven into his music, surpassing that of any other composer I have encountered; it tells a story of an entire inner world, of an entire lifetime. No doubt, his counterparts, Clara and Brahms, and the Davidsbündler at large, exist within this shared universe.

    Schumann’s stories are told via the inward and outward as personalities at play with one another. Eusebius speaks via Florestan and vice versa. They may only exist alongside one another; there is no other way they could hold their respective fortitudes. I have never encountered another composer who speaks through a sonic medium in near-literal poetry and prose. Late Beethoven may come close, but even so, the linguistics differ in their idiom, and I thoroughly believe that all great art expresses sentiments akin to one another via different media. In the practice of Schumann’s music, one encounters imagery: a countryside never visited yet intimately familiar, where a lone tree stands against a naked, liminal hillside. One can travel in time to different places with no limitation whatsoever, so long as the hands are free from his discombobulous metrics.

    R.S’ music sounds and registers as speech in the most artful, well-crafted oratory; he plays with form, often small structures, that can be itemized and subsequently rebuilt into large-scale commonplace classical schema. Carnaval is one such piece demonstrative of a large ternary form comprised of many small constituents.

    His world is a private and confusing one when taken at face value. I remember hearing a few of his large-scale works as a young person, not understanding exactly what it was my ears were taking in. It was not until my late undergraduate years that I heard something ringing true in his music, a soundscape of sorts. I heard something important being said, but I was not exactly sure what that was. I can only think further back to my musical catalysts: the Bach Cello Suites of Zuill Bailey and in this case, Simone Dinnerstein’s album of Bach and Schubert: Something almost being said.

    In this innigkeit, it first manifests as only a soundworld, a whisper asking you to draw yourself nearer. One can loosely perceive an important sentiment, but it is only within direct study and confrontation with this world that one can truly begin to come to terms with the inexplicable weight of Schumann’s emotions and alter-egos.

    This deep world of Schumann’s holds true and exists in everything I feel as an individual. I feel a general discontentment with modern society, and music is the sustenance and the balm to these woes. No composer delivers a remedy such as Schumann. In the Davidsbündler, this stands as directly representative: this society of the League of David stood for the appreciation and philanthropic interests of art, chiefly the musical and literary. Schumann writes from his heart and soul. He writes out his love for C.W, for the beauties of the world, and in equal measure, his anxieties about love, the world, and nearest the compositional date of this particular work, his proximally secret marriage to Clara. He leaves absolutely no leaf unturned in his oeuvre.

    A microcosm of this sentiment exists in the Ungeduldig of his Davidsbündler(tänze). The German “Geduldig” suggests a maturity, tolerance, and enduring character. The counterpart, Ungeduldig, suggests the precise opposite. (E.F.)

    This “Tanz” speaks to the unwillingness and restlessness of Florestan. The character piece encapsulates both worlds, even though it is spoken outwardly in anxious, even fearful fashion; it leaves one limp. Music of this type often suggests both the violently anxious and deeply sorrowful. One may, in experimentation, take the Ungeduldig at a lento and find that it is equally moving, where the sentiment shifts from angst to deep tragedy and nostalgia. Both of these manifestations are sprung about from the characteristics, becoming and unbecoming, that love arouses within a person. Particularly, the circle of fifths progression in mm. 29-36 holds true to this duality. The progression never fails to be ever-so-powerful across all periods of music. It can be interpreted in so many different ways, each saying something slightly different - in possession of a different accent, if you will, but never at odds with the intensity of emotion on either extreme. In tempo, the sequence smolders with passion and worry. When played slowly, it becomes absolutely tragic, particularly the alto voice; the most definitive in this case. What I mean to articulate is just how fear, anxiety, and love are, at their core, birthed from the same wellspring. Love can incite fury or deep empathy - every emotion is spun from the same thread. It is the tone in which something is articulated that rings true to its reception, not what is said. As tempi are to a phrase, tone is to a sentence.

    I can’t imagine a composer for whom this proverb is more befitting.

    This is why I adore the large-scale works of Schumann’s that are comprised of many constituents - they suggest a whole built upon atomization. It is not dissimilar to how our universe functions via quantum mechanics - everything is built from small pieces, and what we often see is only what we can see. As many know, it was Einstein who spoke of his love for the violin. Science, philosophy, and well, everything is never removed from the other - all is connected. One can only think of the beloved Leon Fleisher when it comes to “cosmically-informed” pedagogy. It is people like these who kiss the ontological. May they rest ever-so-peacefully.

    It is with R.S’ music that you can only know it truly from the groundwork and atoms themselves. There is simply too much being articulated to just “hear and understand.” This stands true of all great art.

    Schumann stands for every aspect of our human condition. Unfortunately and fortunately, most people do not experience both sides equally as strongly as he did. It is for this that he suffered so profoundly. I guess he truly took one for the team. Be well in the great beyond, Robert.

    The practice of music is a great catharsis, no matter the subject matter. It is food for the soul, and one will always emerge more alive than before.

    As Brahms wrote in retort to “Frei aber einsam” (FAE):

    “FREI ABER FROH!”

    May we all see and bask in the life-affirming, though again, it would not be so without the other. It is what we choose that creates definition.

    CJ

    —

    Alter Spruch
    In all und jeder Zeit
    Verknüpft sich Lust und Leid:
    Bleibt fromm in Lust und seid
    Dem Leid mit Mut bereit

    Old saying
    In each and every age
    joy and sorrow are mingled:
    Remain pious in joy,
    and be ready for sorrow with courage.

  • This evening, I was listening to the classical station between students, and I heard something ubiquitous, yet uncannily striking. Perhaps this reaction was prompted by my perceptions of how contemporary culture has evidently lost its bearings with what it means to notice and appreciate beauty. We hear what we know and feel inside, and we see ourselves in others.

    The host on the radio station expressed something to the likes of: “If not yet fully realized, our popular culture is at a precipice, a crossroads, where classical music is ‘soon’ to be fully novel again.” It was heard by my ears, though perhaps not his direct intent, that what he spoke of did not explicitly comment on contemporary music, Western art music, nor classical antiquity. Instead, he spoke of a colloquial classicism, the word “classicism” that is loosely strewn about with little grasp of its precision, and firmly misconstrued through contemporary lenses. What I wish to extrapolate pertains to our collective understanding of where we are in time, the adjacent counterparts of classicism, and how we interpolate ourselves into this lofty art form via study and education. The misconceptions of today’s youth are but only a product of the falling acid rain of the superpositioned and monetarily-driven; it all just seems to hastily cascade from the “top.” I heard from this host what is currently absent in this culture: how one’s position in time is made fully realized only by a deliberate understanding of where we are by the virtues of the crusades to reach this point, or rather, to find ourselves in such a predicament! Purportedly, he was not alluding to classicism firmly as it is known in a Greco-Roman sublimation, in antiquity, but via the more ardent qualities of what classicism is to us presently, after a bygone era. The “classical” definition to which he alluded underpinned the appreciation of music’s beauty at large, free of academic precision, and existing transculturally - it made room for the collective. With this spaciousness, however, was equally acknowledged what we have lost in classical music: the heady tapestries of the beautiful, moral, and ornate.

    He went on to articulate this duality. Today’s youth, in particular, no longer get to absorb classical music as others once did. Classical music is now only latent in the rapid digestion of material and offered as mere extremity to ostensibly more “prudent” noise. The host went on to express how the creatives of the past, in all of their glory, at the absolute limits of human creation, are now close to completely and desolately removed from all things in life. Classical music today purports to be but a mere disjunct foil to what it truly is, and is often heard and accepted as background to ridiculous skits on social media, used as study noise, or the like. Insinuated was not only how our culture fails to see these qualities as problematic, but also how we lack but an inkling of thirst to extricate ourselves from the utterly banal and mundane. I maintain that there are exceptions. I like to think to myself that for every backward step a society takes into its aesthetics, so shall there equally be that outlier on the other side who stands to challenge such a circumstance. This person wishes not to make an ass of themselves for the sake of it, a devil’s advocate, but rather to stand up for what they hold to be true. Such is the artist - a beacon of truth, no matter the circumstances. Everything is shoveled into our stupid faces, and people seem to be complacent with this gluttony. There is an overarching apathy in America, and especially in midwestern culture. No, not everything is happy-go-lucky, and we must have the wits about us to face difficult truths. We may be seeing changes in this zeitgeist, given the happenstances of the last lustrum, but still, the tone remains. This is “midwestern nice.” I maintain that these words are my very own.

    The host kept speaking into this Fata Morgana, the mirage persisting only insofar as the other was equally true.

    Where there is little hope that today’s youth and people at large do not know the depths of beauty in most things because of their self-professed unwillingness to seek it out, it also stands as valiantly erect as an obelisk, that because of this current misfortune, we are presented with an immense gift. This gift comes into complete fruition only if one may realize that their time here is so very finite; that one’s decisions, philanthropy, and love persist timelessly. This gift is such that in our future, near or far, we may be oncemore presented with the chance to find the beauty of old as entirely new once again. In h(I)s tone rang an intrepid whisper, a notion of a Renaissance. When something is completely forgotten, as rotten a state of Denmark may it be, presented to us is the powerful and probable chance that it will be found again. Without complete remission, so shall there never be full actualization.

    Such is politics, such is art, such are people, such is death, such is life, such are cycles, such is time. Such is everything. Such is the coincidentia oppositorum.

    Birth and death - without either, there stands nothing meaningful. If we lived forever, nothing would be salient. I fear that an indignation for life and its circumstances may blunt the quality of life itself. Life is simple, and we must not think too deeply as to just live it, but when we fail to put words to our problems, to our shadow, so shall that shadow grow ever so dark.

    Just as in a Baroque painting, when light quarrels with dark, the chiaroscuro maintains balance, and so shall we in our daily lives, for without it, a Baroque painting not.

    Is his voice a potent, painful truth, but with that truth, immense hope. And in that hope, a fervent drive to continue and to push forth with what we hold to be true.

    —

    What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.

    - Carl Jung

    This is the secret of great art. The creative process activates an archetypal image in the unconscious, which the artist shapes into a work that speaks to the present. By drawing a primordial image up from the unconscious and transforming it into a form the present can accept, the artist compensates for the one-sidedness of the age. In this way, art becomes a process of self-regulation in the life of individuals, nations, and epochs. We tend to assume that strange archetypal visions come from deeply personal experiences, as if the artist were hiding their source. This easily leads to the idea that such art is pathological or neurotic, especially since visionary material can resemble the fantasies of the mentally ill. Yet, at the same time, psychotic works often contain a depth of meaning usually found only in the creations of a genius.

    Reducing a vision to a personal experience makes it seem unreal and inauthentic, turning it into a mere symptom rather than a true creation. The chaos is reduced to a psychological disturbance, which reassures us, and we turn back to our picture of a well-ordered cosmos. The truth is that it deflects our attention from the psychology of the work of art and focuses it on the psychology of the artist. While the artist’s psychology matters, the work of art exists in its own right as an autonomous complex and cannot be dismissed as just a personal association. At times, we must even defend the seriousness of the visionary experience against the artist’s personal resistance to it.

    Artists who have fallen out of fashion are often rediscovered when our consciousness has evolved enough to understand them in a new way. Their meaning was always in the work, hidden in symbols, but only a renewal of the spirit of the age allows us to perceive it.

    Fresh eyes are needed because the old ones could see only what they were used to seeing.

    -Eternalised (pseudonym)

    —

    Written in deep gratitude to Dr. Nikolaus Hohmann, and the timeless words of Carl Gustav Jung.