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.