Pamina Still Lives

“…Accept the certainty / That thou hast borne proportion in my bliss.” – G.M. Hopkins

A long-time friend, celebrating an anniversary of several years with her husband, recently asked which music I found most “romantic,” or best suited to celebrating a love that has endured amid any number of corrosive cultural forces. She hoped for suggestions, and I had many: Classical music’s bounty is inexhaustible, and taps currents of feeling for which words are inadequate.

She may have felt I was uniquely qualified, considering that my college roommate and I revved our adrenaline into overdrive before nights on the town by singing the roles of the Commendatore, Don Giovanni and Leporello, at times mixing our singing into a heady blend of Mozart and AC/DC. (Don Giovanni finds his own highway to hell, of course, by defying the Commendatore’s demands for repentance; my roommate and I often defied our neighbors’ demands for a little peace and quiet.)

(As a sidebar, for those who distort romantic love by subscribing to the Playboy Philosophy, Don Giovanni is instructive. “We fly to Beauty,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.” The Don strives figuratively to outwit death and its terrible finitude by seeking to achieve immortality through the perpetuity of his seed, spread by endless erotic conquests. As music marks time, so the Don marks his efforts to efface time by encyclopedically tallying his conquests, enumerating thousands of women in a “big black book” kept by Leporello. But there are only so many women, and so many moments in time; all of his conquests will become dead names on a dead page, and so the Don’s ravenous appetite works overtime to find replacements. Death and time will not be outfoxed: The dead Commendatore, the father of one of the Don's victims, arises as a living, towering statue to inform the Don that his time of reckoning is near. A figure of the Don’s past, the Commendatore proves that one’s past becomes a ruinous future if one fails to repent in the present. Mozart consigns Don Giovanni to the flames of hell, breathing musical life into Brahms’s apothegm that “life robs one of more than death does.”)

Back to my friend: She would find her answer in a gleaming quarry of centuries of music, whose inestimable rewards have become a part of me, sounding in my mind every day of my life. Who can forget Tamino’s outpouring of love, gazing on Pamina’s picture, in The Magic Flute; the gauzy tapestry of strings and harps of the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, composed as a “love letter” to Mahler’s wife; the twilit innerscape of Tristan and Isolde’s liebesnacht when their selves, emptied, strive to merge with each other and with the Godhead; or Siegmund and Sieglinde’s duet, in Act I of Wagner’s Die Walkure, which Wagner, whose massive genius excused his equally monumental immodesty, believed was the most beautiful music yet composed?

You are the spring
for which I longed
in the frosty winter…

You I recognized
plain and clear;
when my eyes beheld you,
you belonged to me.
What I hid in my heart,
what I am, emerged as light as day…

You are the likeness
that I hid in myself.

Of Act I of Die Walkure, Bryan Magee writes, “Not only utterly abandoned love but the disconcerting...vulnerability that go with it are uninhibitedly expressed. It is as if the living creatureliness of these emotional beings has been skinned: the intensity of their experience borders on the intolerable...what reaches us in the audience is something that has never before found expression in art.”

Just so, Arnold Schoenberg’s incandescent Transfigured Night, set to poems by Richard Dehmel, depicts, in the lushest sonorities, a springtime of redemption in a cold night. A pregnant woman is alone in a moonlit forest; her lover arrives and learns that the child she is carrying is not his. The man responds that the child, transfigured by their love, will become the child of that love, “by this miracle in the night.” Forgiveness and transfiguration, and beauty of the highest power, finally reign in the night.

Wagner’s Flying Dutchman is forever questing for his ideal mate. Mahler, setting portions of Goethe’s Faust to music, in his Eighth Symphony, alights upon the Eternal Feminine as a theme. Feminine muses were sources of boundless inspiration for Wagner, whose incredible Wesendonck Lieder were inspired by the second-rate poetry of a patron’s wife. Wagner’s most human, and beguilingly gentle, composition, Siegfried Idyll, was composed by the light of his wife Cosima’s love, as a birthday present for her. And the Adagio of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto combines pathos and autumnal tenderness in equal measure. In dedicating it to the widow of Robert Schumann, Brahms wrote: “I am painting a tender portrait of you.” And so it is.

Pressed, I would advise my friend to seek out Mahler and Brahms for the most luminescent of “moody food,” Shakespeare’s trope for the music of love. To plumb untapped geysers of feeling, to absorb arabesques of sound which are untranslatable but still intelligible – such are the rewards of imbibing the “communion wafers” of art, as Saul Bellow put it. The rewards cause all materialist reductions of art to ring hollow.

I would urge her to experience Mimi and Rodolfo’s duet in Puccini’s La Boheme; the saccharine libretto fails to reflect the perfect fusion of music, words and feeling which must be heard to be believed:

Now my treasury has been robbed
by two thieves: a pair of pretty eyes.
Tonight, they came in with you,
and stole my dreams of the past.

I think also of the radiant, intoxicating musical conversation of Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, or Verdi’s Desdemona and Otello:

Your tears ennobled my story,
Your lovely face trembled; your lips sighed, and made my darkness a glory, a paradise, and I was blessed by the stars...

From your dark face, I saw the eternal beauty of your spirit shine.

I think of Saint-Saens’s Samson et Dalila, and Dalila’s declaration, “With your voice, my heart unfolds.” I try not to dwell on Puccini’s characterization of Tosca, who comes across as an insufferable manic depressive, or on Turandot, whose star is a veritable femme fatale, murdering male volunteers incapable of answering her riddles.

I think of Emerson, who said, “I read for the lustres.” We listen for the lustres. Enjoying music in solitude raises the question of knowing, even partially, another human being, let alone one’s deepest self. Such revelatory knowing of another – often sudden, always unforgettable – is the subject of my favorite John Cheever story, “Pot of Gold.” Its concluding words strike that rarest ore, that apprehension in another person of the likeness hidden in oneself: “Here it was, here it all was, and the shine of the gold seemed to him then to be all around her arms.”

Tamino sings director Ingmar Bergman’s favorite line in The Magic Flute: “Does Pamina still live?” “Pamina, Pamina,” the chorus intones, “still lives.” “The answer comes,” Bergman writes, “quivering but hopeful…Pa-mi-na still lives. Love exists. Love is real in the world of human beings.”

Our September Songs

Composer John Adams, whose operas treat subjects as disparate as the Nixon Administration's foreign excursions and the Achille Lauro highjacking, memorializes Walt Whitman’s nursing of the Civil War-wounded in his magnificent The Wound-Dresser. Over 125 years after the Good Gray Poet's acts of love, Adams repays Whitman’s favor on our behalf, applying alms of sound, instead of cloth, to our own wounds.

Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning On the Transmigration of Souls, composed in response to the events of September 11, has been called a “memory space” for a soul-scarred nation. The description is apt. Adams’s narrators tally the victims’ names and recite prose fragments from newspaper memorials and missing-persons posters. The composer combines these with recorded city noises and ethereal choral intonations to create a tapestry of sound ripped apart by moments of piercing orchestral violence. Though I have owned the CD for over a year, I have been able to listen to it only twice. Be forewarned, but do not be deterred. A few of Adams's fragments set to music, culled from New York Times interviews with victims' relatives:

The father says: "I am so full of grief. My heart is absolutely shattered."
The mother says: "He used to call me every day. I'm just waiting."
The lover says: "Tomorrow will be three months, yet it feels like yesterday since I saw your beautiful face, saying: 'Love you to the moon and back, forever.'"
The man's wife says: "I loved him from the start...I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is."

A greater work – our national threnody – is Barber's Adagio for Strings, performed at the funeral of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and played on the radio following the death of President John F. Kennedy.

Another document to absorb this week is Britten’s War Requiem. I had the pleasure of hearing a performance of Britten’s masterpiece in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1990, nearly thirty years after its premiere at the restored Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed, in 1940, by the Luftwaffe. Elgar urged Britten to note “the thousands who will be craving to have their grief glorified and lifted up and transformed by an art like yours…surely it would be wrong to let them lose this help and consolation.”

Britten’s own recording of the work sears itself into one’s memory and nearly rises to the level of inspiration of Wilfred Owen's war poetry, which it incorporates. These are among the lines two enemy soldiers – in a phantasmal netherworld – chant to each other in Britten's Requiem, composed by the poet (Owens) who was himself killed in World War I:

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined..
...as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world…
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress…
Miss we the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even from wells we sunk too deep for war,
Even the sweetest wells that ever were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Two soldiers of the Requiem sing “Let us sleep now,” as choral forces, a soprano, and children’s voices softly intone, in Latin, “Let them rest in peace. Amen.”

For heroes of the War of Attrition, or those in the Twin Towers who chose earth over fire, Owen’s perfect monody rings true: “But many there stood still / To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge, / Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.”

Only Whitman, our national oracle, could conjure a deeper pathos in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” our poem of collective mourning for our profoundest national wound, and Whitman's elegy for President Lincoln and the Civil War dead: “O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? / And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?”

Barber, Whitman, Britten and Adams, chanting their “psalms in the night,” deck the songs of Whitman’s thrush; their Orphic “retrievements out of the night” devote themselves to “comrades mine…and their memory ever [to] keep.” They meet us in the ghostly pines to give form to our grief, helping us achieve the final form of consolation, which is self-consolation – in solitude, among the cedars dusk and dim.

In Love with Night

How do duty and passion intertwine in Aida? Radames’s solemn duty is to conquer the invading Ethiopians, though it entails destroying Amonasro, Aida’s father; Aida chastises herself for wishing to see Radames return to Egypt triumphant, recognizing that her lover’s victory is predicated on her father and her country’s destruction. Aida may fufill her duty to become queen of Ethiopia – queen of its “green hills and perfumed shores” – or be first in Radames’s heart, but not both; Radames may become king of Egypt or first in Aida’s heart, but not both. Aida’s liberation from Egyptian bondage, ascension to the Ethiopian throne, and the survival of her people rest on Radames’s failure, even his death; the fulfillment of Radames’s duty ensures a “prize” of marriage to the Egyptian princess Amneris upon the annihilation of Aida’s people – both of which would destroy Aida’s heart.

Will love of country (or is it duty toward country?), or Radames’s love, hold sway? “For the one, for the other,” cries Aida, “confused, trembling…my prayer changes to a curse.” Radames’s love renders Aida’s life as a slave worth living. And yet, as her rival for Radames’s affection, the Egyptian princess Amneris, notes, “this love can mean your death.”

Under pain of disinheritance, and the threat that her country’s fate rests in her hands, Aida agrees to elicit from Radames the Egyptians’ battle plan, as Amonasro listens in hiding. Aida’s sense of duty (or is it love?) leads to Radames’s unintentional betrayal of his duty and his country, as well as his demise – and Aida’s.

The force of destiny is at work, as Amonasro explains to a distraught Radames: Love, as Verdi’s audience well knows, will have it no other way. Indeed, Radames’s answer to the high priests’ indictment of treachery is silence; he will not allow Amneris to intercede; his fate is clear. (Just so, Tristan can provide no answer to King Marke, in Tristan und Isolde, when asked to account for his deceit; the innermost workings of love are beyond the conventions of mere speech, and pleadings will not alter the inexorable workings of fate.) Not surprisingly, Amneris, the embodiment of duty and conventional love (had Ramades married her, their love would have been the most conventional love of all), cannot persuade the dutiful high priests to spare Radames’s life. Radames’s life is one of destiny, not choice, much as Aida’s “choice” to join him in death is no choice at all, but mandated by her eternal love.

Aida, wishing to flee with Radames, sings of “virgin forests, perfumed with flowers,” where “in blissful ecstasy we shall forget the world.” But Aida and Radames’s love can be attained only by renouncing the world through death, slipping from the mortal coil of a realm whose politics and prejudice – the “harsh passions of [Egypt’s] barren plains” – impede their love.

As Tristan betrays King Marke, so Radames is a traitor – unintentionally – for love. Prior to “betraying” Egypt by spilling its battle plans, Radames expresses his naïve dream of returning triumphant to Egypt, whereupon the king will grant him his wish of marrying Aida: “We shall live blessed by eternal love.” But Radames’s final allegiance to a love beyond the mere conventions of this world was always beyond doubt; such love, like Tristan and Isolde’s, is always antinomian. Though Amneris offers Radames “country, throne and life” in exchange for his love, power cannot purchase it. Radames forsakes this-worldly power for a love that will never submit to entombment, and Amneris’s “beloved corpse” is its tragic result. Hence power – even civilization itself – is finally incompatible with love, as it is in a plethora of operatic visions, whether we speak of Egypt and Valhalla; Aida and Radames; Freia and Alberich; or Tristan and Isolde. In the clash between civilization and its discontents, civilization wins on its own terms; but its discontents become whole – and discover their true selves – via “easeful death.”

Egypt metes out its justice as Aida submits to entombment with Radames (Act IV, Scene 2) because she “wishes to die in [his] arms.” Her words match music of supreme resignation and gentleness: “Already I see heaven open – there all torments cease and begins the ecstasy of an eternal love.” The light of day, and the false, worldly values it represents, which so tormented Tristan, will also be Radames’s undoing. Only in the suffocating darkness of an Egyptian tomb or under the star-spangled sky of Brittany may the love of an Egyptian for an Ethiopian – and a married Irish princess for the noblest of Breton knights – find fulfillment.

In Tristan, the emancipation of love parallels what Schoenberg calls Wagner’s “emancipation of dissonance.” Only on the final chord of Tristan is the opera’s musical discord – the “Tristan chord” which elicits a yearning for resolution in listeners – resolved. And only upon that resolution are Tristan and Isolde united forever in love, in the noumenal domain of night and death. In perhaps the most beautiful “love duet” ever to ravish our ears, both sing rapturously as the cover of night gives way to what Isolde calls the “lies [of] evil day”: “Let day yield to death… grant oblivion that I may live…release me from the world.” Here Wagner’s conception of the unity death provides far surpasses his treatment of the theme in Tannhäuser and Der Fliegende Hollander. Like Radames, Tristan knows, in his words, that “the day’s illusions – fame and honor, power and profit – have the glitter of mere dust in the sunlight into which it disperses.” The domain of dreams becomes the empire of true reality: Beyond the illusion of day lies the oceanic realm of night and death, in which the lovers will be united – nameless and eternally one. In its sense of spiritual release, Isolde’s ecstatic Liebestod (“love-death”), which concludes the opera, is matched only by the final bars of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.

Six years were to pass between the first performance of Aida and the four-hour love song which is Tristan und Isolde, but the lovers’ deaths in both operas – in Aida and Radames’s case, “beneath the sky that first witnessed our love” – ensure that eternally they will remain “in love with night / and pay no worship to the garish sun.” Only in death may their duties to each other become their love fulfilled.

Verdi's Passions

Recently, I wrote of Aida, one of Verdi’s most popular operas (in no small part owing to its Grand Opera conventions). Aida powerfully conveys the age-old conflict between duty and passion, embodied perhaps most famously in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and ecstatically portrayed in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Aida is, moreover, a tutorial on harmony – and not just of the musical kind. Music, as understood by the ancient Greeks and others, gives form to one’s unchanneled, untutored passions, rendering one whole by harmonizing passion with the good and granting pleasure to one’s duties: The whine of a bagpipe enthralls the soldier marching to war; the choir hymn stirs the believer to serve God’s will.

In Aida, music emboldens Radames’s heart, linking the mandates of the civic good with the force of his passions. In Act I, Scene 1, he is impelled by the trumpets which accent his praise for “Celeste Aida”; he is motivated to fulfill his duties – to conquer the invading Ethiopians – by his love for Aida. “For you I fought,” he cries, “and for you I conquered!”

Here, music and love perfect. Love for the beloved, as much of Romantic literature teaches, may provide the fuel to transcend one’s vices to serve a higher duty. When passion is channeled, the conflict between passion and duty is eased: True happiness derives from dutifully cultivating the intellectual and moral virtues which enable one to become worthy of the beloved. (This seeming harmony in Radames will, tragically, be illusory.)

Love may serve as the link between a citizen and the polis: Serving one’s beloved and one’s family means serving one’s community, because the state of one’s community affects the state of one’s family. Hence the family enables civil society to flourish. By cultivating one’s character so as to be admired by the beloved, one practices those virtues which make for good citizens.

At times, however, an indissoluble conflict persists between the Byronic passions within and the sober duties which are required of us as citizens and social beings. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy intimates that acquiescing to a great passion may not prove a satisfactory substitute for the deeper rewards of community and family life. As I will show in tomorrow’s post, Aida portrays a scenario in which duty and passion are hopelessly confused and intertwined – Radames’s duties and passions can never achieve harmony – and that hope for Aida and Radames resides in a world beyond ours.

Ambrosia for the Oppressed

Today, Wilhelm Furtwängler is remembered – and revered – as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. During the Nazi reign of terror, however, Furtwängler assumed a role of enormous controversy: He remained in Germany – so he claimed – to keep Beethoven alive amid the barbarity, to instill hope through music, to compel a frame of mind and spirit for Germans marinated in absolute evil. “One cannot play Mozart and Beethoven,” said Furtwängler, “and turn away from those who live and die for them.” Targeted by the Nazis for disloyalty, living at the razor’s edge of death, he escaped to Switzerland. He died in 1954, having lived to see the Thousand Year Reich crumble 988 years short.

Did Furtwängler’s performances, and his public acts of defiance, enable hope to thrive as Germany's criminal government worked to quash it? Or did he lend his prestige to an evil regime by continuing to conduct in Germany, giving aid and comfort to tyrants? These are the inescapable questions NPR asks here.

One thing is certain: Furtwängler’s performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in March, 1942, in war-worn Berlin, remains one of the most sublime of all Beethoven recordings, perhaps even surpassing Carlos Kleiber and the Vienna Philharmonic’s miraculous performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (a recording which prompted one critic to compare Kleiber’s distilling of Beethoven’s intentions to Homer returning to recite the Iliad).

If architecture is frozen music, Furtwängler’s Ninth is a monument erected in response to moral perversity. Furtwängler conjures an apocalyptic cauldron of sound in which ferocity and fury take center stage, every mesmeric bar seething with visionary intensity. Its thundering timpani, wringing every ounce of terror from the score, mirror the explosions of Allied bombs. (Within two years, the concert hall would be destroyed by the Allies.) Moments of piercing beauty overtake Furtwängler’s rage; the Adagio is easily the most moltenly beautiful Beethoven adagio ever recorded. The pianissimo beginning with which Beethoven begins his symphony – compared often to the sound of order arising from chaos, of the earth unformed and void as the spirit of God moves over the face of the deep – may have granted some measure of solace to resistant Berliners, foreshadowing Germany’s rise from ruins of its own making.

One can scarcely imagine the atmosphere. The land of Goethe and Rilke – the most highly-educated nation in Europe – was peering into the abyss. Furtwängler’s professed mission was to prevent Germany’s soul from drifting entirely Letheward. “People never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans,” Furtwängler said, “who had to live under Himmler’s terror.”

Furtwängler may seem, to contemporary minds, astonishingly naïve: Political and military solutions, enforced by the Allies with the turret of a gun, were the only possible solutions. Yet what may we say to those who absorbed Furtwängler’s resistance as their very own, and who were animated by the desire to right offenses against humanity, including the offense of forgetting the unforgettable?

Stephen Ambrose called D-Day “a love song to democracy.” Just so, listening to Furtwängler's 1942 performance – an assaultive outpouring of song which bears the weight of inconsolable tragedy – is one small way of bearing witness to atrocity. Those in the resistance who heard it live, and subsequently on record, must have recalled vividly the memories that tied them irrevocably to terror – recollections which gave birth to the vow first uttered when the smoke of Dachau’s crematoria still lingered over Germany: “Never again.”

Nearly fifty years later, Leonard Bernstein conducted the same symphony near the pockmarked remains of the Berlin Wall, memorializing the demise of another regime of infinite evil. Bernstein substituted the word “joy” (freude) in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” in the fourth movement, for “freedom” (freiheit). A document of spiritual resistance, it puts beauty to the service of truth, enabling poetry and power to become one. It is musical ambrosia for those who still yearn to breathe free.

Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, says that to forget an act of genocide is to kill twice. For contemporary ears, Bernstein and Furtwängler 's performances advance the work of remembrance, quickening our moral awareness while aiming to make good the democratic promise of “eternal vigilance.” By bequeathing documents of terrible beauty, they impart Beethoven's vision of the universal brotherhood of man, and help us never to forget.

Debussy's Birthday (First posted on Espressostraight.com, on Aug. 22)

Today is Claude Debussy's birthday. He was born August 22, 1862, and died March 25, 1918.

Debussy is arguably the most influential composer France has yet produced and ranks among the most important composers, period.

A lush, languorous wistfulness pervades his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune; Claire de lune is likely his best-known composition (Victor Borge's translation into English - "Clear the Saloon" - isn't quite right). My favorite performance, by Leon Fleisher, is an act of heroism, as Fleisher's biography will attest.

Even in a landlocked desert, La Mer, which rolls on the air in a vast tide of sound, incites us to taste and smell the sea; the strings glisten, as if drenched. No small feat.

O Patria Mia

I’m pleased to post my first in a series of columns devoted to musical happenings in Phoenix and elsewhere, as well as random musings about classical music. By posting an excerpt of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto on Espressopundit.com, Greg Patterson paved the way for discussing music on a site devoted primarily to politics. (I think Ayn Rand was wrong in favoring Rachmaninoff over Beethoven, but that’s the subject of a future post.)

What are my qualifications? I have a couple of undergraduate and graduate-level music courses under my belt, as well as the dubious distinction of having bought up nearly the entire classical music section at Tower Records before it closed. But mainly I’m an autodidact who holds the (perhaps romantic) belief that music can serve to educate the heart’s passions, fostering an understanding of one’s deepest self as it relates to itself and others.

“With what, in this modern democracy,” asks Saul Bellow, “will you meet the demands of your soul?” The demands of which he writes are not religious, for which we have God, but aesthetic. (Romantics, with a capital “R,” have been known mistakenly to conflate the two.) Music answers the call of such demands, if only we are open to it.

Music is itself apolitical, though it can, of course, be used for political ends. On its surface, one opera, in particular, depicts obscure political maneuverings in ancient Egypt, but proves to represent so much more. It was my first opera, with Aprile Millo in the title role, and suffuses my memory with a nostalgic, sepia-tinged glow. Dwelling on it seems an appropriate way to begin these posts.

It is Verdi’s Aida. Here is its eponymous heroine’s famous aria, “O Patria Mia,” sung by Cheryl Studer in a 1994 Covent Garden production. Will Aida betray her beloved, Radames, or her country? Will her father’s love, or Radames’, hold sway? It’s a dilemma that only opera can fully drive home, the ramifications of which I’ll explore in an upcoming post.