Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
I'm too busy to post. I have a deadline looming for the first draft of my book and a lot of research still to do for it, and I have a copyediting job to start and finish over the next month, and then I start teaching at community college again, as well as doing what I swore I'd never do, viz., homeschooling. All that is for another post. I simply wanted to drop in to share this lapidary paragraph by Jeremy Denk in his review of a new Beethoven biography by Jan Swafford. Denk writes: I found myself aching to replace the “Triumph” in Swafford’s subtitle with “Consolation” [the book is titled Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph]. Of course we love Beethoven’s movements of triumph: the C major fanfares that conclude the Fifth Symphony, the lust for life in the dances of the Seventh Symphony, the “Ode to Joy.” They are a crucial part of his persona, but not the center. . . The pianist Leon Fleisher observed that Schubert’s consolations always come too late; his beautiful moments have the sense of happening in the past. Generally, Romantic consolations tend to be poisoned by nostalgia and regret. By the modern era, consolation is mostly off the table. But Beethoven’s consolations seem to be in the now. They are always on time — maybe not for him, but for us. What a brilliant exegesis of Romantic music -- the ethos of consolation come too late, leaving the musical protagonist in the sorrow of his regret. The idea of Schubert (who worked very much under the long shadow of Beethoven) composing beautiful moments which seem to have already gone by is breathtakingly apt. One hears, for example, the straining, yearning nostalgia in the opening theme of the Sonata in B flat, D 960, played here by Fleisher himself. In many of Schubert's pieces, there's a tentative quality in the opening notes, the sense that the theme has begun already, somewhere to the left of the first measure, which I think is related to this notion of consolation that has happened in the past, a gentler version of Dante's famous aphorism: "There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery." (Incidentally, former Vox Nova contributor Mark DeFrancisis, a classical-music connoisseur, sent me a recording of Mitsuko Uchida playing the same piece, and I listened to it while driving, and had to pull over because I was crying too much to see the road.) Read Jeremy Denk's entire marvelous book review here. He is one of those rare musicians who writes as well as he plays.
Where does it start, our downhill slide -- a slide into serious sin for the most damaged; for the rest. at best, into lukewarmth and mediocrity? I suppose it begins with our desire to be happy, which is quickly corrupted by our belief that we deserve to be happy. I've known few people who don't secretly harbor this belief, including the very best of men. Our self-regard, our amour-propre, is so deep and intractable that even those of us who strive for holiness find it hard to escape the notion that this holiness, once attained, will curry favor with God and loosen up all kinds of neat stuff for us. It's hard to escape the thinking that if f I, say, pray and work for a sincere conversion, or go to daily Mass, or give lots of money to the poor, or pray for the people that I hate, then God, noticing with approval, will send me a really nice guy, or put in a word with my boss about a raise, or at least make my life just a little less painful and difficult. This belief is reinforced by a popular narrative in Catholic writing, which features the protagonist's turning or returning to God, after which everything falls neatly into place. This narrative is (no doubt unintentionally) deceptive, because it implies cause and effect, actions and consequences. It doesn't acknowledge the untold numbers of people who turn or return to God -- who turn or return to Him daily, in fact -- and who strive to orient their lives and wills completely in the direction of His own, but who nevertheless suffer, who continue to suffer, and whose sufferings persist and even get worse. We all want the shiny stuff, and to shore up our uncertain futures with the goods which, in a logical and just world, might be purchased by our holiness. But I doubt it really works that way, and am more inclined to believe that, at best, we have our brief moments of triumph and delight, before we're kicked right back down to the curb again, which is, essentially, where we belong: for, as Hamlet said, "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" And why should it be otherwise? I used to know a sedevacantist mother of many children, whom I once overheard telling one of them about Jesus cursing the fig tree. She finished by explaining that the Lord would condemn those who squandered their gifts, adding (smugly, as it seemed to me), "So I had ten fruits." Nevertheless, I think we should probably ponder, and should perhaps shudder, before we assume that anything we've done is actually good, since we're no more than unprofitable servants doing our duty. When I was a child and later a teen, I would often propose certain activities or situations to my mother, explaining that doing or having something, or becoming something, or going somewhere in particular, would make me happy. I bitterly resented her standard response, which was the sobering "You're not here to be happy. You're here to make the world a better place." But I know now that she was right. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the only reason we're actually here. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem "God's Grandeur": The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. I believe that, when Hopkins says that the world is "charged" with God's grandeur, he means two things: that God's grandeur is immanent in all things, that the created world is imbued and shot through with it; but, also, that it is the duty of creatures to bear, to maintain, and to reveal that grandeur: that revealing it is, in fact, our charge. It is our duty, as unprofitable servants, as my mother would say, to make the world a better place. A friend of mine who follows an eastern religion told me his guru compared enlightenment to one's mother being home all the time. I loved that analogy, but it made me wonder whether enlightenment is or is not synonymous with happiness. Is having mother home happiness? Is mother happiness? One would think so; but as the German Romantic poet Klaus Groth put it in his poem "Heimweh II" -- Heimweh meaning, essentially, grief over the lost home, which is not just a house, but is a whole universe: O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück, Den lieben Weg zum Kinderland! O warum sucht' ich nach dem Glück Und liess der Mutter Hand?
In translation:
Oh, if I only knew the way back,
the dear way back to childhood's land!
Oh why did I seek happiness
and let go of my mother's hand?
That image of letting go of mother's hand to seek happiness is so wrenchingly poignant, and it seems not only to suggest that happiness is not a worthy goal, but also to assert that happiness is not mother. Mother is something else, something different -- something more than happiness. In fact, in my own mother's formula, mother, while not happiness, makes the world a better place.
I don't believe that being a mother makes one happy, nor should it. I don't even believe that mother, or children, or anyone else deserves to be happy. But the ethos of having mother -- of having mother home all the time -- is better, somehow, than happiness, is beyond happiness, and I suppose it's what heaven must be like.
I was thrilled to read this poem today at The Writer's Almanac. Whether or not Brahms and Clara Schumann had a sexual relationship has been speculated about for many years -- it is undeniable that they loved each other profoundly -- but, although they burned most of their correspondence, the evidence is against it. Brahms biographer Jan Swafford has suggested that, after the death of Robert Schumann in an insane asylum in 1856, the younger composer had the opportunity to propose marriage to Clara, but instead left her disappointed. The two remained friends, and Clara, one of the greatest pianists of her age, premiered many of Brahms's works.
The Intermezzi mentioned by Lisel Mueller are opp. 117, 118, 119. Brahms called the three op. 117 pieces, which he wrote while Clara was in her final illness, "cradle-songs of my sorrows." Here is the great German pianist Wilhelm Kempff playing op. 117, no. 1, with beautiful directness and simplicity. The piece was inspired by the text of a Scottish poem, "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament," and Brahms inscribed in the score an excerpt from the poem in Herder's German translation. The English words are:
Otepoti and I have sometimes disagreed about the great Fischer-Dieskau. My personal preference is for a more direct expressive style than his -- one which, through the singer's masterful use of his body, allows an unfettered and elemental emotional resonance to join with the music; this may be heterodox, but I prefer Hans Hotter and Dame Janet Baker in this repertoire. Fischer-Dieskau could be too cerebral at times, too nuanced; at his worst, his singing lectured the listener, so to speak. But still, I loved him. Few singers, living or dead, could approach the humanity with which he sang.
The Times article notes that, unlike his frequent collaborator Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau never had to defend a decision to join the Nazi Party; he never joined. Like the Pope, he was conscripted into the German army, and while he was at the front, his cognitively-disabled brother was killed by the Nazis in one of their many institutions for this purpose. Fischer-Dieskau became a prisoner of war, and made his first Lieder recordings only days after being repatriated (because of food shortages, he sang without so much, I recall reading, as a sip of coffee in the morning of the recording session). I daresay that his emergence on the international music scene did much, in intangible ways, to rehabilitate the world's perception of Germany in the post-war period.
I know something about longing, especially about longing for a past that may have never been what I now imagine it to be; I know reasonably well the dull ache for people and places gone forever, even when that longing is ontologically misplaced. I know all this not only from my own long and neurotic experience, but also from my schooling in the soundtrack of German romanticism, in which the keenest longing -- Sehnsucht -- is a guiding ethos.
My new son wakes up in the middle of the night and cries for hours and will not be consoled. My husband suggested that he, too, knows Sehnsucht. The present is better than the often-idealized past, but it's hard to explain that to a post-institutionalized, pre-verbal toddler in culture shock.
So this goes out to Jude; music by Schubert, text by Goethe:
As any classical musician in America can tell you, the Glee-like social ostracism of band, orchestra, and choir geeks doesn't end in high school, unless you go to conservatory right after graduating. This was not the case for me; while I received my M.M. at a conservatory, and my doctorate in the music department of a large university, I attended a liberal-arts college, where I was a socially-ostracized-music-geek undergraduate voice major. To complicate things further, I had a work-study job in the music library, with a shift on Friday nights, which limited my extra-musical weekend socializing, and to make matters even worse, the music building, which was open all night, drew me like a scrap of iron ore straight to the motherlode. Turn down the chance to practice at two in the morning? Not this girl. And, having a key to the music library, I could also sneak in and study scores and listen to obscure recordings all night long, which is what I did, and which, moreover, is how I first discovered such gems as Harry Partch's Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Transcriptions:
and a large chunk of John Cage's recorded oeuvre, among many other treasures.
One year, my piano professor wanted me to audition for the music department's annual concerto competition -- on the piano. I knew I would never be able to practice enough to get to the technical level required, and that it would be folly to compete against real pianists when I was not one. Professor R. was a real pianist with a solid performing and teaching career who commuted to my college from New York, where she also served on the faculty of a major conservatory, so I was surprised by and a little mistrustful of her enthusiasm for my playing. She explained to me that I had innate musicality, a gift, she said, which can't be taught, and she wanted to bring my piano technique up to the level of my natural musical proficiency. I was flattered, but I turned her down. I was a singer, and it was hard enough bringing my technique up to snuff as a singer, let alone spreading it thin between two equally-demanding instruments.
I was nevertheless delighted and honored when Professor R. asked me to be her page-turner for a performance of the rarely-heard Brahms Piano Quartet Op. 60, no. 1 in C Minor. Chamber music is my great love, and I knew I would learn invaluable lessons about ensemble music-making by observing her and her colleagues at close range in their rehearsals, and I did. I also came to know and love the gorgeous third-movement Andante, with its heart-stopping cello solo, truly one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written:
There was a beautiful young man at my college, with long, flowing hair, about whom I began to concoct elaborate romantic fantasies to the soundtrack of the Brahms Op. 60 no. 1 Third Movement Andante. I never expected him to cast a glance my way. Why would he? The other girls at my school were beautiful and rich, and I was ethnic-looking, and from a family that my best friend described as "middle-class poor." And to top it off, I was a music geek down to my very bones. Besides, he had a long-time girlfriend.
One night I saw him eating dinner in one of the campus's smaller dining rooms. On the table across from him lay a white rose. "Would you like to have dinner with me?" he asked, as I walked past with my tray. "I'm having dinner with a rose." I couldn't believe it. In a swoon, I sat down. I have no idea what we said, but I remember that he was sensitive, poetic -- and he had that hair.
In the middle of our dinner, his girlfriend walked in, saw us, wordlessly plucked the white rose off our table, threw it with dramatic flourish into the nearest garbage can, and marched out. So much for Brahms.
Brahms, you old Master! You weaver of dreams, you
liar! You encourage my “hopeless romanticism” and you know it! Life is
not as colourful as you would have us believe! Of course you know that
I know, and I can hear you laughing.
You dear Master, you! You—and the worthless dreams
you sell me! No, keep them coming. Weave on and on. Go from here to the
depths, then further into the depths, then rise up again—portray that
impossibly rich, romantic world as you always do. If only life were
really as romantic.
. . . . If only life were so rich.
If only life were so rich.
Last weekend I participated in a house concert here in my new town, to which, it seems, the toniest local classical musicians were invited to perform. While most of the singers sang transcriptions of opera arias, I sang Brahms's incomparable art song "Unbewegte laue Luft" (my translation here), which has been called a "Tristan und Isolde of the Lied." When I had finished, a sort of sigh rose up from the audience. A very old woman told me, afterward, that she had cried, and the head of the voice faculty at the local public university (who knows
me and my work, but can't offer me even an adjunct position because of a
statewide hiring freeze) said afterward, "I'm so glad you sang that.
People need to hear it."
Oh, yes, I agree. People need to hear Brahms; they need that stirring, rushing, choking, devastating beauty, that beauty that makes their veins throb with teeming life. Or maybe they don't. It made an old lady cry, after all. Perhaps the writer of the short-lived "Nihilism, Optimism" blog had it right after all, and Brahms -- or better, all music, all beauty, of which Brahms is only the exemplar -- is a deceiver, making us believe that life is so much richer, more poignant, more unifying, more exquisite, more imbued with meaning and deep feeling than it really is.
It seems to me sometimes that, as we grow up and grow older, we become more and more diminished by life. It as if life strolled up to us with a surgeon's scissors every now and then to cut off a different little piece of us. But we must go on, and so we go on wounded; and, if we're lucky, our wounds will remain open and tender, so that we can learn how to truly love other people. Nonetheless, it is very hard for me sometimes to wake up and realize that my life is not at all the same as the music I spent most of my life studying, that it bears little resemblance to the mystical world of beauty hinted at, even whisperingly promised, by Brahms.
When I was a young soprano, I studied with a teacher who had herself studied in Germany with the great post-war coloratura Rita Streich. My teacher said to me once in a lesson --it must have been a particularly good one -- "You sound like Streich!" to which I replied, in proper soprano fashion, "Who?" She proceeded to tell me about the great Streich, adding, as an aside, "What a Nazi." I later found a recording of Streich, somewhat in her dotage, singing a concert for French radio of duets by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms with the Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester, who died earlier this summer. This recording, sadly, is now out of print, but it is at the top of my desert-island list (in fact, I've already listened to it three times today).
This recording was very important to me for a number of years. Not only is it wonderful -- the pared-down honesty and simplicity of expression demonstrated by these two singers, both of whom were past their prime at the time of the concert but whose artistry remained at the highest level, is both instructive and deeply moving -- but it also accompanied me during a very painful time in my life, a time of wrenching loss and longing which, while it lasted, was nonetheless beautiful, and still glows a little in the light of memory (the loss and longing that were to follow for me were far less lovely).
One song I particularly loved was the Mendelssohn duet "Gruß" (Greeting), set to a poem by the Romantic poet Eichendorff. In a translation by Jakob Kellner, it goes thus:
Wherever I go and look,
in field and forest and plain,
down the hill to the mead;
most beautiful noble lady,
I greet you a thousand times.
In my garden I find
many flowers, pretty and nice,
many garlands I bind from them
and a thousand thoughts
and greetings I weave into them.
Her I must not give one,
she is too noble and fair;
they all have to fade,
only unequalled love
stays in the heart forever.
Eichendorff's sentiments nicely captured the longing in my own heart for a distant beloved, and Mendelssohn's setting, lyrical and at the same time pulsing with an energy which subtly undermines, with its freshness and optimism, the sadness of the text, provided a wistful soundtrack to my heavy heart in those long-ago days. Here is a recording (sung in English) by the great British singers Isobel Baillie and Kathleen Ferrier.
It was at this time of year exactly that I began to see my own life as both illustrated and illuminated by this particular song. And then, a few years later, I found out that Eichendorrf's poem was not in fact called "Gruß," but, rather, "Der Gärtner" (The Gardener), and that Mendelssohn had left off the last verse, which goes:
I seem to be of good cheer
and work to and fro,
and, though my heart bursts,
I dig on and sing,
and soon I dig my grave.
The last verse is the crux of the poem, and catapults it from wistfulness to heartbreak.
Brahms set the entire text in an early work for women's choir, harp, and two french horns; here is a rather lovely recording of what appears to be a Chinese (or Taiwanese, or Singaporean?) girls' choir, singing it in English.
In advance of the month of May, here is the great Lotte Lehmann singing one of Brahms's loveliest songs, "Die Mainacht." The text is a pre-Romantic poem (by
Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty, 1748-1776) which is nonetheless steeped in the major concerns of German Romanticism: the night landscape, the protagonist's alienation, and his longing for the absent, or perhaps nonexistent, beloved. This translation was made by composer Leonard Lehrman:
When the silvery moon beams through the shrubs
And over the lawn scatters its slumbering light,
And the nightingale sings,
I walk sadly through the woods.
I guess you're happy, fluting nightingale,
For your wife lives in one nest with you,
Giving her singing spouse
A thousand faithful kisses.
Shrouded by foliage, a pair of doves
Coo their delight to me;
But I turn away seeking darker shadows,
And a lonely tear flows.
When, o smiling image that like dawn
Shines through my soul, shall I find you on earth?
And the lonely tear flows trembling,
Burning, down my cheek.
The home page of my web browser is set to The Writer's Almanac, and to be introduced to a new poem at the start of the day rarely fails to provide me with a thrill. (For a while a couple of years ago I was also the crank lady who sent them exasperated emails about the lack of research and sloppy editing in their writer profiles -- things like getting the plot of my favorite novel, The End of the Affair, entirely wrong, and making assertions along the lines of "the novels of Thomas Mann have now fallen into neglect" -- but they've improved.)
Although today is the birthday of William Wordsworth, the Writer's Almanac poem of the day is the text of a song by bluegrass legend Bill Monroe:
Sittin' alone in the moonlight,
Thinkin' of the days gone by,
Wonderin' about my darlin'.
I can still hear her sayin' good-bye.
Oh, the moon glows pale as I sit here.
Each little star seems to whisper and say,
"Your sweetheart has found another,
And now she is far, far away."
It reminded me of a recent conversation with Melanie B in the combox here, about the notion that all poetry is about nostalgia for a never-to-return Golden Age. And I was struck by how much the Bill Monroe song resembled the premise of Schubert's great song cycle Winterreise, the first number of which, "Gute Nacht" (Good Night), is sung here by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, accompanied by an unidentified pianist:
Having been disappointed in love, the nameless protagonist of Schubert's song cycle goes off on foot across the winter countryside, growing more and more alienated from society as his journey continues. In the last song, he throws in his lot with an outcast, mentally disabled organ grinder who he sees wandering barefoot over the ice.
Here is the text of "Gute Nacht," by Wilhelm Müller, translated by Arthur Rishi:
As a stranger I arrived,
As a stranger again I leave.
May was kind to me
With many bunches of flowers.
The girl spoke of love,
Her mother even of marriage, -
Now the world is bleak,
The path covered by snow.
I cannot choose the time
Of my departure;
I must find my own way
In this darkness.
With a shadow cast by the moonlight
As my traveling companion
I'll search for animal tracks
On the white fields.
Why should I linger, waiting
Until I am driven out?
Let stray dogs howl
Outside their master's house;
Love loves to wander
God has made her so
From one to the other.
Dear love, good night!
I will not disturb you in your dreaming,
It would be a pity to disturb your rest;
You shall not hear my footsteps
Softly, softly shut the door!
On my way out I'll write
"Good Night" on the gate,
So that you may see
That I have thought of you.
While doing research for my book project recently, I came across an essay entitled "Wounds and Beauty" by the painter and scholar Bruce Herman. Herman suggests that the prevailing Western notion of beauty since 1750 has been an emblem of the Romantic longing for the lost Golden Age: "Beauty," he writes, "is everywhere colonized by the Romantic longing for perpetual youth." Herman posits
the possibility of a clear-eyed adult aesthetic that bears the marks of Christ's resurrected body -- marks that memorialize suffering but move beyond it to redemption, healing, and eternity. The ascended Christ still bears earthly wounds, and his new body can be treated as a starting point for a new aesthetic -- a broken beauty if you will -- and a means of working through and beyond pain to a perfection that need not participate in [Romantic] idealization.
Herman suggests that Romantic yearning is not only untenable, but unsavory, even antithetical to the Christian longing for heaven. Indeed, the thread of complete personal annihilation, certainly antagonistic to the Christian ethos, hangs heavily over the Romantic quest for a lost Golden Age. We should, Herman exhorts, long for the future in heaven, not for the past.
The Bill Monroe song has all the elements of the Romantic argument: grief, loss, rejection in love, yearning for the past, solitude, and the countryside by night; but its protagonist restrains himself from the more Wertherian extremes of disappointed lovers of the previous century. I suppose that if we are to mourn in this life -- and we are -- it's better to do it sitting alone in the moonlight for a spell than wandering off across the frozen landscape into ever-increasing neurosis and alienation. It's worth remembering that the words of the most famous song by Bill Monroe's contemporary, Hank Williams, are “I'm so lonesome I could cry,” and not “I'm so lonesome I could die."
There are numerous performances of the Bill Monroe song on Youtube, but none by Monroe himself, so I'll leave you with this particularly fine one:
-
"[The] radical idea . . . that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit . . . has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. 'that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.' This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem 'Il Penseroso': 'Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.' The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, 'Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?'
[The] great Romantic symphonists [are] great companions, especially on those nights when talk is impossible, when the only understanding companion is the radio. Some of the greatest pleasures I’ve had in life are late nights in bed, tired and restless, and turning on a low-fidelity clock radio. Classical music stations not infrequently abandon the Baroque and Classical top 40 late at night for the longer, deeper, darker works of Romanticism. I first heard [Ralph Vaughan Williams's] 9th and Prokoviev’s 7th in just those moments, and was utterly fascinated. It seemed I was hearing a profound riddle of a bed-time story, a lullaby of contemplation, and in my own moments of fear and doubt knew that there were others listening in tandem to the broadcast, and that the radio was offering companionship to us, and that we were not alone.
Update: A great radio tradition is going on right now: the annual Bach Festival on WKCR, Columbia University's radio station. From December 21 to December 31, WKCR plays something like Bach's entire recorded output, and there are some neat oddball segments like jazz commentator Phil Schaap's show featuring Bach in jazz. Lots of room for great radio moments. Listen here.
This song is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking I know: "Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär" (If I were a little bird), a folk poem set by Robert Schumann. I've always loved it, and once sang it for a dear friend while we were driving from the suburbs back into New York City. She told me afterward that she found it so beautiful that she almost crashed her car.
While looking for a clip of it, however, I found many performances of the original folk song, which is exactly the same as Schumann's version, with the exception that it's in a major instead of a minor key -- which makes it a shockingly different song with an entirely different meaning. Here is a delightful performance.
The translation:
If I were a little bird and had two little wings, I would fly to you. But since it cannot be, I must stay here.
Although I'm far from you, in sleep I'm beside you, speaking with you. But when I awaken, I am alone.
Not an hour of the night goes by that my heart doesn't awaken And think of you, and imagine that, many thousands of times, you give your heart to me.
Above: "Solitary Tree" by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the greatest artists of German Romanticism.
I've been reading an article about Schubert's virtuosic song "Auflösung" (Dissolution), an 1824 setting of a poem by his at-one-time close friend Johann Mayrhofer, which has prompted me to revisit the song.
Schubert shared his great thematic concerns -- the landscape, the wanderer, and the suffering caused by memory -- with his Romantic contemporaries in the German-speaking lands, but Mayrhofer's poem speaks to another theme, no less Romantic, that would find further exposition later in the century: the idea of renunciation of the external world in favor of the internal powers of the soul. It is a decadent theme, and yet the song is full of primordial energy. The repeated command "Geh' unter, Welt!" -- "Sink under, world!" -- would be more disturbing were the final statement not resolved in major. Perhaps it's not surprising that Mayrhofer met his death in a typical Romantic fashion -- by his own hand.
Here is a translation of Mayrhofer's poem by George Bird and Richard Stokes.
Conceal yourself, sun, for the fires of delight are singeing my bones; fall silent, sounds, spring beauty, flee, and leave me alone.
There flows from every recess of my soul loving powers which embrace me, celestially singing. Founder, world, and disturb never more the sweet celestial choirs.
And here is Schubert's remarkable song, sung by the incomparable Dame Janet Baker. Though the pianist is unattributed, I'm pretty sure it's Graham Johnson.
Joan Baez's self-titled debut album was released in 1960, when the singer was nineteen years old. Politics and larger cultural issues aside, I've always had mixed feelings about Baez as a folk music icon. Although I grew up in a left-wing household, it was not a Baez household; the primary musical influences on my childhood were Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Kurt Weill, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the wonderful children's vinyl records I'd inherited from my older brothers. It was a wonderful friend of mine in adulthood (a fellow heir to the pink-diaper tradition, who had had himself baptized in secret) who introduced me to Baez's music, making me a gift of her first album.
At first I was stunned by the innocence, beauty, and purity of that distinctive voice (I did find her vibrato a trifle excessive in the upper register, however, and was surprised to read later on that Baez had worked to develop it by manually manipulating her larynx). I also found much to admire in her finger-picking guitar style. But there was also an element of her musicality that repelled me: it was cold -- even calculated -- mercilessly four-square, and especially bad in traditional Black repertoire, where her musical rigidity stood out like a sore white thumb. As a singer who has specialized in neglected (classical) repertoires, I appreciated Joan Baez's attempts to excavate a forgotten musical past and give it the fresh face of youth, and I recognized how influential she'd been culturally, if not musically (the most important of her peers in folk music, like Bob Dylan, shown with her above, were soon moving away from traditional ballads and writing original material).
The most interesting thing to me about Baez is what she stood for at a brief moment in time, before the Vietnam War and the resulting market for protest music. In the early 1960s, Joan Baez was the poster child for the post-Romantic condition: the longing -- expressed musically and aesthetically -- for some sort of authenticity in the face of a vulgar, commercialized culture; the hunger for the truth; the desire to return "home," to one's roots, to the primordial state of unsullied childhood. The tragedy of Romanticism, however, is the truth that home can never be returned to, and that, perhaps, there never was any such home to begin with.
Here is a beautiful number from Joan Baez's first album, "Fare Thee Well," which is an illustrative display of all that is good about her singing and playing; the song's last line is a reference to Matthew 23:34. And here is a song by Brahms, "Heimweh II" (he wrote three songs with that title, translated as "homesickness," or "grief over home"), which is, I think, the most succinct statement possible about the nature of Romanticism. Its lyrics, in a fine rhymed translation by the composer (and pink-diaper baby) Leonard Lehrmann:
Oh, if I only knew the road back, The dear road to childhood's land! Oh, why did I search for happiness And leave my mother's hand?
Oh, how I long to be at rest, Not to be awakened by anything, To shut my weary eyes, With love gently surrounding!
And nothing to search for, nothing to beware of, Only dreams, sweet and mild; Not to notice the changes of time, To be once more a child!
Oh, do show me the road back, The dear road to childhood's land! In vain I search for happiness, Around me naught but deserted beach and sand!
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