§ Sheppard, p. 292.
¶ Sheppard, p. 189.
Velimir Khlebnikov
INCANTATION BY LAUGHTER
translated by Paul Schmidt
Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Hlahla! Ufhlofan, lauflings!
Who lawghen with lafe, who hlaehen lewchly,
Hlahla! Ufhlofan hlouly!
Hlahla! Hloufish lauflings lafe uf beloght
lauchalorum!
Hlahla! Loufenish lauflings lafe, hlohan utlaufly!
Lawfen, lawfen,
Hloh, hlouh, hlou! luifekin, luifekin,
Hlofeningum, hlofeningum,
Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Hlahla! Ufhlofan, lauflings!
INCANTATION BY LAUGHTER
translated by Vladimir Markov
O you laughniks, laugh it out!
O you laughniks, laugh it forth!
You who laugh it up and down,
Laugh along so laughily;
Laugh it off belaughingly!
Laughters of the laughing laughniks, overlaugh the laugherthons!
Laughiness of the laughish laughers, counterlaugh the Laughdom’s Laughs!
Laughio! Laughio!
Dislaugh, relaugh, laughlets, laughlets,
Laughulets, laughulets,
O you laughniks, laugh it out!
O you laughniks, laugh it forth!
The Lady from Arezzo
On its main street, the Corso Italia, this Tuscan town offers a most spectacular view, that of the Chiesa Santa Maria della Pieve. Stepping out of the church through one of its Romanesque arcades, I spotted her on the other side of the street. She dwelt in a shop window now connected to a private art collection – not one of the mannequins that used to be part of a painter’s studio’s inventory but a specimen of the Baroque era manufactured to display women’s attire while nevertheless retaining the features of a Piero della Francesca Madonna. After all, the place where this happened to me was Arezzo, where Piero created his sublime cycle of murals in the Church of San Francesco.
There are portraits whose eyes follow you everywhere. The Lady from Arezzo avoids you wherever you are. Without seeing the viewer, her eyes are open. Vividly, they gaze into her inner world, into the egg on top of her head. Below the waist, the creature makes do with a long-legged wooden frame, the abstractness of which lends her an eeriness worthy of Giorgio de Chirico. In its place, the shape of a female body would appear unimaginably profane. Nothing should imperil the dominance of the lady’s head and its demonstration of Piero’s nobility, notably that of his Marias who accept their impregnation in stoic innocence. In Piero’s Pala Montefeltro, the Virgin towers over six saints and four angels while one of the most notorious villains of the Quattrocento, Duke Federico, kneels in the foreground, presenting his broken nose. Hanging above the Madonna, an ostrich egg vouches for purity and divine perfection. Franco Fedeli, a local Arezzo artist well versed in dealing with historic dressmaker’s dummies, applied the egg directly to the lady’s head – an inspired idea, without which the figure would lose all its mystery.
Beside its nobility, the lady’s face shows a considerable amount of freshness. But is she still unapproachable? The slight parting of the beautifully modelled lips, the barely visible hint of her teeth, seem to leave the sanctity of Piero’s Madonnas behind. If I now speak of love, I shall begin with her lips.
Franco Fedeli, Lady from Arezzo. Private collection
Charles Amberg
ICH REISS MIR EINE WIMPER AUS
Ich reiß mir eine Wimper aus
und stech dich damit tot.
Dann nehm ich einen Lippenstift
und mal dich damit rot.
Und wenn du dann noch böse bist,
weiß ich nur einen Rat:
ich bestelle mir ein Spiegelei
und bespritz dich mit Spinat.
CABARET SONG
translated by Alfred Brendel
After tearing out one of my eyelashes
I’ll stab you dead with it.
Whereupon I take a lipstick
and paint you red.
Should you, however, keep sulking,
I know what ought to be done:
I’ll ask for some fried eggs
and sprinkle you with spinach.
Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words
On the occasion of a performance by the Hagen Quartet
This work is unlike any other. It relates to the last utterances of Jesus as handed down by the Bible. In 1786, the prebendary of the Church of Santa Cueva in Cadiz had commissioned seven slow instrumental movements, which, in dealing with these texts, should deepen the religious contemplation. The Brotherhood of the Holy Grotto met in a large subterranean cave that had been unearthed beneath the church. During the first performance of the work, the whole interior was covered in black. Paintings by renowned artists, Goya included, and a richly decorated altar turned this Capella de la Cueva into a house of God. Between the pieces of music, there were sermons. I shall not comment on the biblical texts but rather speak about Haydn, the revered musician, who took it on himself to compose this extraordinary work.
Is there, apart from Shostakovich’s Fifteenth String Quartet, another multi-movement composition that consists exclusively of a succession of slow pieces? If we include the introduction (Maestoso ed adagio), there are eight. Contrary to the image of Haydn as the ‘classicist who put the house of music into order’ I see him rather as a grandmaster of risk and surprise, an inventor of musical forms such as the double variation, and a composer who introduced humour into instrumental music. His mixing of musical means that were supposed to serve either the sublime or the profane made his contemporaries cringe, or smile. Salieri complained about the ‘mescolanza di tutti generi’ (‘confusion of genres’) in Haydn’s Masses.
Haydn, much more than Mozart and even Beethoven, was adventurous in the choice of keys and the way they appear next to one another. The key sequence within the Seven Last Words is astonishing: D minor, B flat major, C minor, E minor, F minor, A major, G minor, E flat major, and C minor. Lining up largos, graves, adagios and lentos, all in sonata form and yet presenting different characters without sacrificing inner unity – such an extraordinary challenge Haydn was unable to resist. At the end of the work, however, such almost static absorption in slowness is briefly contradicted by the turbulence of the concluding terramoto (earthquake).
Next to the Andante-composer Mozart, Haydn, in his slow movements, shines as the master of Adagio. A friendship of such warmth and generosity between two superlative but temperamentally different composers is unparalleled in the annals of music. Haydn, in his later years, was the biggest musical celebrity of his time. The nineteenth century then tended to relegate him to the second rank. More recently, steps have been made to correct this and emphasise his merits as the creator of the string quartet and the classical piano sonata, as groundbreaking symphonist and master of memorable Masses. To quote Goethe: ‘We are once more reminded that Haydn is facing us not perhaps as an accomplished follower but as a genius of veritable originality who in form and substance rises above his time like a phoenix.’
Of course, Haydn was the master and initiator of musical humour. According to his biographer Georg August Griesinger, he had the knack ‘of luring the listener into the highest degree of the comical by frivolous twists and turns of the seemingly serious’. Griesinger further reports that ‘the theoreticians were screaming about music being demeaned by comic trifling’, an attitude among seriousminded people that has remained alive to this day. At the same time, gravity, if not deepest grief, have always remained within reach.
Haydn’s Seven Last Words swiftly became famous as an orchestral work, and soon also in the subsequent string quartet version that has remained the most familiar. The composer who was the first to reveal what string quartets were presented here his strangest and most unusual contribution to the genre. What Haydn aimed for was to create music that was worthy of the sacred
texts to such a degree that it might, as he himself put it, ‘kindle the deepest impression even in the soul of the most unexperienced’. This places extraordinary demands not just on the performers but also on a listening public that must have related to religion, and religious music, differently during the composer’s lifetime.
Haydn’s musical mastery stretched from folk song to fugue. No one had fused fugues with string quartets and the variation form before. In Haydn’s personality Rococo and Enlightenment, devotion and wit, are close neighbours. To quote Goethe once more:
Our Haydn is a son of our region. Whatever his accomplishments, he achieves them without heat; who, after all, would enjoy being overheated? Temperament, sense, intelligence, humour, sweetness, power, and, ultimately, naivety and irony, those true hallmarks of genius, must be conceded to him with the utmost certitude.*
Mozart cautioned Haydn about travelling to London – after all, he couldn’t even speak English. In actual fact, during his extensive stays in England not only was the musician appreciated but also the man. The royal family invited Haydn some forty times and enjoyed his singing of some of his own canzonettas after dinner. (As a boy in Vienna, he had been a member of the choir of St Stephen’s.) Haydn’s London notebooks testify to his lively mind and the multitude of his interests.
The Seven Last Words is fundamentally removed from such worldliness. Stripped of anything distracting, the movements are musical meditations trying to achieve a simplicity that communicates an essence of feeling and, by means of musical restatement and repetition, establishes a kind of mantra. It is the task of the players to unite intensity with utter unpretentiousness, cantabile with expressive eloquence. When this happens, which is rarely enough, we may be able to imagine why Haydn himself held this work in such high regard.
It was a remarkable decision by the Spanish gamba player and conductor Jordi Savall to invite José Saramago, the Portuguese writer and atheist, to be involved in the performance of the Seven Last Words in the Cadiz cave in 2006. Saramago’s literary contributions to the occasion are titled The Last Words of Man. Here is an extract from his text dealing with the lament ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’: ‘Whoever has said that God is the silence of the universe, and man the scream that gives meaning to this silence, has spoken correctly.’ For Saramago, Jesus emerged as just a man.
One of Haydn’s contemporaries reacted to the ‘Fourth Word of the Cross’ in a kindred spirit. Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs includes the visionary prose poem ‘Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, daß kein Gott sei’ (‘The Dead Christ Proclaims that there is no God’). I quote from the translation by Alexander Ewing:
And at this point a lofty, noble form, bearing the impress of eternal sorrow, came sinking down towards our group, and rested on the altar; whereupon all the dead cried out, ‘Christ! Is there no God?’ He answered, ‘There is none.’ … How every soul in this great corpsetrench of an universe is utterly alone? I am alone – none by me – O Father, Father! where is that boundless breast of thine, that I may rest upon it? … And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of worlds, and beheld the coils of the great serpent of eternity all twined about those worlds; these mighty coils began to writhe and rise, and then again they tightened and contracted, folding round the universe twice as closely as before; they wound about all nature in thousandfolds, and crashed the worlds together, and crushed down the boundless temple to a little churchyard chapel. And all grew narrow, and dark, and terrible. And then a great immeasurable bell began to swing in act to toll the last hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the universe to countless atoms …
Here ends Jean Paul’s nightmare.
* Both Goethe quotes are taken from Theater und Schauspielkunst. (Haydn’s ‘Schöpfung’.)
Music: Light and Darkness
‘Let there be light. And there was light.’ The tremendous C major chord in Haydn’s Creation, which overwhelms the listener after the ‘desolate and obscure’ musical introduction, remains one of the most stunning illuminations in all music. Here, as in Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, Schubert’s ‘Great C major’ Symphony and Wanderer Fantasy, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations or Schumann’s Fantasie, Op. 17, the key of C major stands for light and brightness. As it happens, it consists, on the piano, of white keys only.
In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the triumphant emergence of C major in the finale has the power of a personal liberation while the prestissimo coda of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata scythes down any possible doubt. The conquest of darkness generates a euphoria that rids us, for the time being, of all that is Saturnian.
In the Adagio of Beethoven’s Op. 111 the key of C major redeems us in a profoundly different way. After the strife (con brio ed appassionato) of the first movement, the following Arietta transports us into a realm of calm and elation. Just once within the variation movement does the music leave C major: a trill gradually ascends to E flat before it leads, step by step, back to the recapitulation of the theme. Here we seem to have come closer to a mystical experience than in any other piece of music I know.
Musical light and darkness corresponded, for a time, to major and minor. In Schubert, the kinship became so close that it leads into a kind of musical chiaroscuro, if not into explosive tension, as in the G major String Quartet.
In Beethoven’s late music, the use of the diminished seventh chord in passing harmonies is already starting to cloud the musical waters.
Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, variation 3, bars 20–24
The mysterious four bars that persevere on the diminished seventh chord introduce us to a harmonic sphere quite alien to Diabelli’s waltz. More and more composers of the nineteenth century succumbed to the lure of this harmonically exterritorial chord, which, applied with moderation, enabled them to express the ominous and disconcerting. On the other hand, the effect of chromaticism, already so significant in Gesualdo, Bach and Mozart, continued progressively to undermine the solidity of functional harmony. Tonality and diatonic harmony became porous, and started to disintegrate. In the early twentieth century, some of the most enterprising composers drew the necessary conclusions: works such as Schoenberg’s Op. 11 or Busoni’s Sonatina seconda inaugurated the new, ‘atonal’ phase. Where traditional triads crop up in later music, as in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, they can sound, to my ears, almost obscene.
There are composers who wrote predominantly in major keys. Among Mozart’s many symphonies, piano concertos and piano sonatas, there are just a couple of minor-key works in each genre. Next to the splendour, warmth, gracefulness and classical completeness of Mozart’s major-key music, the ‘minor-key’ Mozart strikes me as fundamentally different. His C minor is not defiant or heroic as in Beethoven; it seems rather to represent the superior power of fate. Here are the demons that, in Mozart, Busoni didn’t care to acknowledge. In his piano music in particular, in pieces that appeared to be written for himself, such as the A minor Rondo and B minor Adagio, both C minor Fantasies and both minor-key sonatas, a private and solitary Mozart comes to the fore.
The contrast of major and minor had become particularly evident since Haydn’s great C minor Sonata, if not before: slow movements in the major are now the focus of light in minor-key works such as Mozart’s K. 466 and K. 491, while those in the minor provide concertos including K. 271, K. 482 or K. 488 with a melancholy, grave, if not tragic core. In Beethoven we may even find works in which the outer movements keep exclusively to the minor while the middle movement never leaves the major. I am thinking of two of his most famous sonatas: Op. 27 No. 2 and Op. 31 No. 2.
Although in much music of our time the notion of major and minor seems as remote as a mythical planetary system, our emotional reactions to it have remained alive. Even today we would scarcely perform a gavotte at a funeral or dance behind a cortège. Some of us have also learned to listen to post-tonal music with discriminating ears. But light and darkness can be suggested in various ways. Within the tonal range, we receive sig
nals from the lowest to the highest, from the obscurity of the bass to the blinding brightness of the treble. György Ligeti, in his Études, presented breath-taking ascents and descents covering the whole keyboard. One might, in such a context, speak of brightly lit minor where it occurs in the treble, and dark major in the lower register. Chopin, in his Préludes in F minor and D flat major, gives us a juxtaposition of nocturnal uproar and luminous cantabile. As for the piano’s bass register, it was Liszt who unleashed its full might. In Funérailles and Sunt lacrimae rerum there are sounds in the lowest register the shattering blackness of which had not been experienced before. Sunt lacrimae rerum, after all, is more than a lament about the failure of the Hungarian Liberation Wars 1848–9. Liszt dedicated the work to Hans von Bülow in 1872. In the same year, he visited Bayreuth and told Wagner and Cosima that they were responsible for Bülow’s devastated frame of mind.
When we describe the sound of a pianist as being bright or dark, transparent or opaque, we are talking about the balances the player himself produces on the instrument. A too heavy bass line prevents the upper register from radiating. If the sound is bottom heavy it will be unable to float. Here, the mental concept that gives the bass as much prominence as the melody is partly to blame. A number of atmospheric possibilities connected to the pedal can be realised only when the balance favours the higher frequencies. In the Rondo of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata we are high up on a mountain looking into the delicate haze (pianissimo dolce) and listening to a mountain song, a chant montagnard. Here the pedal is supposed to remain active over prolonged stretches. In the valleys, by contrast, there is dancing (quasi senza pedale) to Russian-flavoured tunes.
The Lady from Arezzo Page 3
