by Greg Baxter
As we drive, Saskia and I, in our taxi, toward the centre of the city, I remember that a tour guide and amateur historian once informed me, when I asked where Baroque architecture came from, because almost every building in the centre is Baroque, that it was essentially a happier, more theatrical and entertaining form of Renaissance architecture. Renaissance architecture, for its part, was a revolution from Gothic, or Opus Francigenum, as it was known then. It introduced a new vocabulary. Strange proportions and asymmetry were abandoned. The bewildering detail and staggering heights of Gothic cathedrals were replaced with clean semicircular arches and hemispherical domes. The leap from Renaissance architecture to Baroque, in comparison, was not a great one – just as the leap from Romanesque to Gothic had been small. Baroque vocabulary remained the same as Renaissance – classical shapes, symmetry, geometry, orderly arrangements – but the rhetoric had changed. It was a humanist, accessible rhetoric.
According to the historian, with whom I spoke after the tour he gave, in a little café across a small square from a little Romanesque church, which he said was the oldest operating church in the city, Baroque architecture was the first grand diminishment in human evolution in the West. He said that humanism was the victory of man’s inner desire to be stupid in order to escape pain and to feel surprise, that the drive to re-establish classical literacy and eloquence had been impossible under the Catholic Church, and was doomed, in architectural expression, to be nothing more than naïve triumphalism, populism, and a retreat from intellectual honour – a retreat that would cost man everything, that would send human history spiralling into the abyss that would ultimately lead to modernity, from which there has been no escape. The historian was in his sixties, and wore circular, wire-framed glasses, and said all this very softly, without rancour, without even disappointment. Renaissance architecture, he said, born in Florence, could not travel. It was exceedingly difficult and inaccessible. It expressed human inconsequentiality. But Baroque, which was exceedingly easy to appreciate, and which expressed, as a deliberate lie, human significance, was like a plague, driven forth from Rome by wealth, or the pretence of wealthiness, and war, one hundred years of virtually continuous war in Europe, and colonialism, so that one may find as much Baroque in Mexico or Chile or even in the Philippines as one finds in France or Spain. Now mankind, said the historian, sinks forever into the despair caused by humanism and liberalism, which are nothing more than doctrines of flight from man’s real nature. He fights wars to spread Enlightenment, democracy, freedom, rights, but what he spreads is a despair of which he is entirely unaware. I told the historian he should say such things during the tour, and he said he had, for a short period of time, become known for such tours, tours that took tourists into the heart of the crisis the city was, all around them, quietly expressing, locked inside the pretence of imperial majesty, reluctantly inhabiting the intimidating forms of absolute power. But after a few years people simply came to heckle him, and call him a coward and traitor. Once a man threw an egg at him. Once he was punched by a skinhead and called a Jew. So he decided to go back to regular tours, polite tours, and the more glorious side of history. Why didn’t you quit altogether? I asked. Because I am a citizen, he said. I am a citizen. He paused, because my expression had not changed, and repeated: I am a citizen. He’d repeated himself with a tone of disdain that momentarily – though he would immediately go back to being polite – suggested my question was a hundred times more insulting than egg on his face.
After the historian and I had finished our coffee, he took out a huge map – a map that he stretched across the table so that it hung like an oversized tablecloth – and started drawing circles around streets where I would find exemplary works of late Baroque, and some authentic Renaissance. This took, embarrassingly, longer than the coffee itself – embarrassing because I had already shaken his hand, already wished him well. My mistake was to tell him that I’d moved here and had nothing in particular to do. We stood over the map, and the historian annotated the circles in handwriting I would never be able to read, and scratched his head, rubbed his eyes, and succumbed to a fever not unlike you imagine a great archaeologist might have succumbed to, suddenly aware he has stumbled upon the ancient tomb he alone believed existed. A waiter at one point asked us a question, and the historian did not so much respond as say, Ts! Ts! Ts! Ts! until the waiter left us alone. He circled a place where violins were once made and that is now a museum and a small venue for recitals. On Tuesday evenings, he said, the music school gave free recitals. So on the Tuesday that followed, I decided to go along.
I got there early and was told I’d have to wait. I was given a cheaply made black-and-white flyer with pictures of two young Japanese girls and a list of composers below them. I walked outside and smoked two cigarettes, and when I realized that had killed less than ten minutes, I walked around the block to look for a place to get out of the cold. I found an empty basement bar called New York New York. Inside, it was pretty dismal. A lot of purple light could not disguise the fact that in daylight it probably resembled an office cafeteria. A woman in her fifties, wearing a conspicuously conservative black skirt suit, sat at the bar by herself. I smiled and sat beside her, but left an empty stool between us. She spoke to me, and I stopped her immediately – I only spoke English, I told her, and I was very sorry about that. I ordered a glass of water and lit a cigarette. The bartender, an American, said, Hey, buddy, could you not spend a few bucks on a drink? He was maybe thirty, and wore a black bowling shirt with a pink collar. His hair was short at the sides and back and sort of spiked on top. He had the kind of American accent you have if you are born in New Jersey but leave when you’re young, and live all over America. I said, Sure, I’ll have a beer. Small or large? Small, I said. The woman fished a baby onion out of her cocktail. She threw her head back and held the onion above her open mouth as though it were a tiny little man and she were a giant lizard. She put it in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed, then turned to me and said, What do you tell an old hippy? I said, I don’t know; what do you tell an old hippy? She delivered the punchline, which I didn’t understand, either because she had slurred it or because she had momentarily departed from English, but I laughed anyway.
The bartender seemed to be happy I was there to deflect some of the woman’s attention; he left the bar to wipe some perfectly clean tables, and he turned some music on. The first song was ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’, and the woman got up off her seat and did a very slow and sexy dance against her chair. I watched her, because there wasn’t anything else to do, nor anyone else for whom she could dance. When the song was over, she picked her chair up and moved it close to mine, and said, I used to be a jazz singer. Then she sang two words of a Louis Armstrong tune, gutturally: I … see … – I started coughing, loudly, the loudest cough I ever coughed, before she could sing anything else. The bartender returned. The woman held her empty martini glass up and said, Give me a whiskey or fuck me! Nobody said anything to that, and it disappeared into the pathetic darkness of the bar. She asked what I was doing here. Going to a recital around the corner, I said. I mean, what are you doing in the city? I began to say the usual thing I said, which was that I had no real reason, but that it seemed like a nice place, etcetera, when she interrupted me: What recital? I said, Just a free violin recital around the corner. Students. She looked me up and down. What are they playing? she asked. I said I didn’t know. Someone had recommended it to me, and I knew nothing more than where it was. You’re going to a concert, but you don’t know what is playing? she asked. I remembered the flyer, and showed it to her. She pointed to the first girl and said, Kreisler, Glazunov. She looked under the second picture and said, Ah, Ciaccona. She said it as though she had suddenly become Italian. How much does it cost? It’s free, I repeated. She said, Okay, I will go with you. The bartender, who had been polishing some perfectly polished glasses, stopped to see what would come of that. I didn’t know how to respond, so I stuttered something out, just words like mayb
e and um and well. She turned angrily away and said, as though she were Poirot, casting accusations, Perhaps you only like teenage girls. I said, Well, it was nice talking to you. I’d finished only half my beer, but it was pretty tasteless. I walked out. It felt a whole lot colder, because I had not wasted enough time, and I had to go back to the recital hall thirty minutes early and hang around the front door like a creep.
The street was empty, but over a period of about fifteen or twenty minutes it began to fill with cars parking. Japanese people stepped out of them. The women carried large umbrellas – it was intermittently sleeting – and the men carried bouquets of flowers. There were young children everywhere. This was the crowd that developed around me while I waited. First there were five, then ten, and soon there were at least two hundred Japanese people standing outside the museum and recital hall. When they finally opened the doors, I was one of the first to go inside. The recital hall was a large white room with multiple thick white pillars and a vaulted sky-blue ceiling. There was a raised stage with a single chair on it, and a music stand. I took a seat in the front row. This seemed to annoy a lot of the people who subsequently filed in and wondered, I presume, who the hell I was and what I was doing there. I nearly stood up and went to the back row, except a man came out – a Professor Schmetterling – who obviously managed the recitals and taught at the school, and addressed us. For a while, nobody understood a word he was saying. He said, Would it be better if I spoke English? The Japanese crowd nodded and one man at the back shouted, Yes, please! So he introduced us to the evening in English. Tonight, he said, it is my privilege to present two of our most promising students. The girls were Umiko Chigama, age thirteen, and Shino Moroto, age fourteen. Chigama went first. She was very good, for thirteen. She was probably very good for thirty, but I would not really have known. There didn’t seem to be any mistakes, though she played without much feeling. Moroto was better. She played the Ciaccona, or Chaconne, the fifth and concluding movement of Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2. I believe I sat next to Moroto’s father, since she looked at him while she was playing, and winked at him during applause. And since he wept when she played, and nobody else wept. Chigama had been very expressive – her shoulders dived from time to time, and her eyes rolled back. Moroto played with no expression at all, and seemed, at times, to mumble numbers to herself, but the music was somehow more powerful, louder.
When the recital was finished, I hung around in the hall for a little while. There was a large crowd around the exits, talking, not moving, and I didn’t feel like walking through the congestion. And anyway, it was nice to sit and play some of the music back in my thoughts. When I had been sitting there for five minutes or more, Schmetterling approached and asked me what I thought of the evening. He was a tall, well-built man, with silver hair, obviously gay, and sat down when I said I had really liked the Chaconne. You’ve never heard it before? he asked. Never, I said. Do you know classical music? he asked. A bit, I said, like everybody. And then I realized where I was, and who I was talking to, and said, No, I wouldn’t say I knew much. We chatted for a few minutes about what had brought me to the city, and the things I had seen since arriving. And I spoke a little bit about my past. He had a weird habit of saying the word fascinating in response to almost everything I said, as though I were explaining the solution to a problem that had stumped him for decades. Our conversation stopped for a few moments, and Schmetterling said: Speaking on the Chaconne, the composer Johannes Brahms, the most influential, greatest, and most profoundly visionary composer of the Romantic period, wrote to Clara Schumann – and here Schmetterling lifted his head, exactly the way Saskia does when contemplating – On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind. Schmetterling then lowered his head and looked at me. I said that it was very good. He dismissed my comment with a wave. What you have seen this evening is a teenage girl with a little talent play it, he said. The Chaconne, said Schmetterling, which lasts about fifteen minutes, depending on the interpretation, was the supreme artistic achievement of the Baroque era, across all forms, and is without argument the greatest piece of music ever written for the solo violin. He looked around him. The room was almost empty. He seemed to want to express a sadness about the way people came and went. Someone waved at him and he lifted a hand in response and smiled politely. Returning to the Chaconne, he said, It’s not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements across all human endeavour. When a real violinist plays it, the true breathtaking complexity of the piece becomes apparent. Bach was able to achieve a uniquely complex counterpoint – a conversation between multiple instruments – with a single instrument. He could do with many voices of a single instrument what another genius – I am speaking here of geniuses, only geniuses – could never hope to achieve with many instruments. Schmetterling leaned back in his chair, and checked behind him again. There were people standing and chatting at the back, and every few minutes someone would come to shake Schmetterling’s hand and tell him he was a very good teacher. The Chaconne, he said, is technically one of the most difficult pieces of music for a violinist to play, but technically more than a few have mastered it. It is a requirement now for young musicians – in order to win a major competition, it must be in one’s repertoire. In many ways it has become an important technical challenge for teenage violinists, and my students are always boasting about how this will be the year they learn to play it. It required, at the time of composition, every technique known to violin music, and not many techniques have been introduced since. What you have witnessed tonight, as I said, is a young violinist on the verge of competence. Competence, of course, with regard to the Chaconne, is nothing to be ashamed of. Yet a spiritual sympathy with the piece – which is not to say spiritual mastery, because no such thing is possible – is far more rare, and virtually non-existent in violinists under, say, the age of thirty … perhaps forty. Today, there are perhaps three people in the world who can play it well. Schmetterling leaned forward, stood, walked to the music stand and took the music that Moroto had left, perhaps in a nervous rush to get out of the spotlight, or perhaps it was not hers to keep. He sat back down and showed me the cover. This contains, he said, all of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin. He opened it to the Chaconne, which was only seven pages long, and pointed to a line approximately halfway through the piece. Here, he said, in variation number forty, we see one of the most complex moments in the piece. Up to seven separate voices are in conversation here. He waited for me to respond, and when I did not he simply let a bit of silence pass, so that, perhaps, I could imagine the music playing in his thoughts. Then he said, It is really impossible to explain in words exactly how difficult it must have been to conceive this, not only as a line of music in itself but as part of a fifteen-minute musical conversation that is in many ways nothing more than a perfectly finite rearrangement of the constituent parts of this line. And these parts are nothing more – nothing more! – than variations of a single four-note theme that flow seamlessly into each other and are all four measures long. Do you follow? he asked. A little, I said. He nodded. One very interesting thing is the fact that Bach’s theme – or we should say the essence of his theme – is an old four-measure bass line that was around long before he wrote his piece, and is still prevalent today, mostly in pop music. It was from this old and catchy foundation that he built his theme, and from that theme he built the Chaconne. You see, said Schmetterling, Bach was not an innovator. Nothing he wrote, at the most basic level, introduced a new form. In this way he is usually seen as inferior to Mozart, who in many ways was the supreme innovator, the supreme revolutionary. Mozart, at his worst, lacks feeling, but he is never sentimental. Bach, at his worst, is sentimental, grossly sentimental, but at his best he achieves an
emotional expression that Mozart, the innovator, never dared allow himself to contemplate. Bach looked out across the landscape of music that had come before him and gathered it all up, every sound and every theme that ever existed, and to him they were bricks and wood and stone and glass, and he refined them into a musical cathedral that was unimaginable to anyone living in his age and unrepeatable to anyone after. The Chaconne, said Schmetterling, at least to me, combines in a single spirit the most extreme ends of a man’s sacred and secular capacities. It is both a celebration of man and a proximity with God, or the story of how that might be possible, compressed into a single violin with many voices. It is a declaration of war on baseness and brutality and scepticism. But it was also written, quite certainly, in memory of his wife – he had been travelling, and returned home to find she had died. So it is a personal statement, I think, rather than a political one. Had it merely been political, said Schmetterling … no, it could not have been achieved. Without her death, I believe, the Partita might well have finished on the fourth movement, on the light and positive Giga. Instead, he plunges us into a profundity and intensity theretofore unknown in music. I also believe that the Chaconne – not alone but by itself, if you understand the distinction – resulted in the ascension of the violin as the most venerated of all Western instruments and, yes, the central cultural object in the West.
