The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

I have noticed a slight uptick in the irritability of the universe lately. My evidence? The other day, I was in Starbucks minding my own business (so all these stories begin), typing nonsense at my too-cool-for-school laptop, when I noticed a man set something down at the empty adjoining table. Perhaps a minute later, another man put something at another spot by the same table. Both left to get in line, and both, sadly, came to the table with their drinks simultaneously, intending to sit and occupy (veni, vidi, vici): a childish spat ensued. I couldn’t believe how stubborn each was to the cause, which was, after all, just a table (or perhaps more: a moment of repose?). The dispute ended by “sharing”; they each refused to relinquish, and sat the same table, glowering, sucking up each other’s negative energy. One was in his early 20s, impeccably dressed, indubitably gay, and somewhat on the sniffy side of the spectrum; the other probably early 60s, peccably dressed, squarely straight, far on the grumpy side of the spectrum (almost invisible to the genial eye), and reading–of course–the NY Post. A mini culture war for my benefit. The younger one talked loudly on his cellphone to irritate his table mate, while the older read his Post, crinkling and uncrinkling, folding and refolding: a motion like the flapping wings of a giant, tired, grimy bat. Needless to say, I was quite irritated and distracted by this tempest in a teapot, perhaps even enraged, and eventually got up, pulled my handy chainsaw out of its case, and made a clean slice…

Just kidding.

I also witnessed this morning a similar dispute between a burly construction worker from Long Island and a small elderly Jewish lady, in Tal Bagels, revolving around the eternal issue of “where the line begins.” (If only we could always know!) Luckily this dispute did not come to blows; I feel sure she would have embarrassed him rather badly.

These, along with several other instances of New Yorker irritability, have made me sense the vague winds of a trend… And this trend has even carried over into this very blog (heavens!) since my snarky post “BS of the day,” in which I took a Mr. Wilson to task for some vague comments about Mozart, inspired quite a few reactions, and even the unimaginable: criticisms. I suppose this is to be seen not as a sad outcome, or even as a loss of innocence (a de-virginization of the blog) but as a positive thing, an act of birth, even: something has engendered a “discussion.”

Let me just say a few more things toward this discussion, to try and mend some fences.

1) “BS of the day” was a self-conscious attempt to imitate other, snarky blogs such as Wonkette. I do not intend to adopt this style permanently, and I apologize to those readers who felt offended. Occasionally is it OK, though, if I just rant about something? Thanks.

2) I think opera is fantastic.

3) I was disheartened by the disintegration of the discourse into (sigh, as usual) a maligning of analysis. This happens so easily! I saw it in one of the comments: it began with the coupling of the words “erudite” and “analysis,” which makes it seem a bit elitist already; and then, sure enough, the word “dissection” made its way in there; and then “there’s no pleasure left.” People say “you are analyzing this to death!” as if discussion and contemplation of music were some sort of murderous activity, some sort of science-lab experiment in which a frog must die, pinned to the table.

I have my own gripes with analysis, believe me. But I don’t think the answer is this kind of dismissal, this kind of easy getaway, as in: what’s the point of analysis anyway? followed by “meet you at the Redeye Grill for martinis.” Specifically to keep my vision fresh, I feel the need to keep asking the same unanswerable questions about the music I am playing over and over again, to reach into verbal language for what it has to offer and cross back into the language of tones like a returning tourist. I feel this is similar to when I sing a phrase to myself in my head, when I imagine the music without sound (or at least anything that anyone else could hear); things are almost always better back at the piano–wider, freer–after this kind of removal, the removal of music from sound, its temporary passage into gesture, thought, imagination. If you are still thinking about martinis, I don’t blame you.

I spent a great deal of time on Op. 111 this week, verbally and mentally, thinking how to communicate something about it to 25 freshmen. Of course I think the happiest, most enlightened person after the hour-and-a-half lecture was me. For the umpteenth time I felt I “finally” knew what I wanted to say (notice how we use that phrase as a compliment: “his playing really SAYS something to me, really SPEAKS to me”–even for non-verbal music!) with this piece, and the next day on the train back down the Hudson, this happiness became more pronounced. Scarfing my stir-fry in Penn Station, amidst a hassled underground crowd, I was singing inaudibly over and over again thirds, fourths, fifths from the Arietta. Well, perhaps not inaudibly; in my blissful imagined solitude, I might have moaned a little, enough so that the man who had cooked up my stirfry looked up and asked “It tastes good?” He looked either amused or concerned; food in that place wasn’t really meant to be “enjoyed;” I smiled like a good little deranged maniac and said yes, it was delicious; he really didn’t need to know the truth.

How was it that magic dust had been sprinkled again all over that theme, in that ugly place? Maybe it was partly the article that my colleague had xeroxed for me, in which I read that Schenker (a hardcore theorist if there ever was one) broke off from the world of technical terms and called the cadenza of the Arietta a “strange dream;” maybe it was the little technical/emotional phrase in the article “vertiginous fall of fifths” which showed me a pattern I had been too lazy to notice, while feeling all the while something frightening about that place–that it was too much to absorb, that everything was slipping away, that it was gravity-free, like the sense of (infinitely, impossibly) falling in a dream; maybe it was the part in which Schenker talks about the one high F which means so much to him, at a moment when the movement leaves off, loses track of itself, in which its ecstasy is so extreme that it cannot possibly continue along the path it is taking; and maybe it was partly a phone conversation with my friend C who said he was struck again, freshly, how in the wild, syncopated variation Beethoven seemed to see, ahead of time, the joyfulness of jazz, to anticipate so amazingly things which are now part of our lives, and C’s use of the word “joyful” which is probably the perfect word to define on what side of an invisible fence the movement’s austerity and transcendence lies.

How is that these little “academic thoughts” managed to whip me up into a frenzy of enjoying the movement all over again? It was not analyzed to death; it was analyzed to life. Only the three notes, long-short-long: just that, and the path leads off into a labyrinth in which the means of escape is never twice the same, in which the focal moments can change according to the observer or the day… Each time to play it: like entering/creating a universe. There is always the moment of being “too full,” the sense that the adventure has reached a crisis point, that the emotion or invention has gone so far that you or the piano will explode; and always the balancing moment where things are slipping away, and dangerously “empty;” and always the starry conclusion, resolving or disappearing, twinkling with the high frequencies of the piano, promising, always promising…

“The close of the Arietta variations has such a force of looking back, of leavetaking, that, as if over-illuminated by this departure, what has gone before is immeasurably enlarged. This despite the fact that the variations themselves, up to the symphonic conclusion of the last, contain scarcely a moment which could counterbalance that of leavetaking as fulfilled present–and such a moment may well be denied to music, which exists in illusion. But the true power of illusion in Beethoven’s music–of the ‘dream among eternal stars’–is that it can invoke what has not been as something past and non-existent. Utopia is heard only as what has already been. The music’s inherent sense of form [emphasis added by blogger] changes what has preceded the leavetaking in such a way that it takes on a greatness, a presence in the past which, within music, it could never achieve in the present.”

–Adorno, musing on Op. 111 Beethoven

and then:

Poetry

I

The agonizing question
whether inspiration is hot or cold
is not a matter of thermodynamics.
Raptus doesn’t produce, the void doesn’t conduce,
there’s no poetry a la sorbet or barbecued.
It’s more a matter of very
importunate words
rushing
from oven or deep freeze.
The source doesn’t matter. No sooner are they out
than they look around and seem to be saying:
What am I doing here?

II

Poetry
rejects with horror
the glosses of commentators.
But it’s unclear that the excessively mute
is sufficient unto itself
or to the property man who’s stumbled onto it,
unaware that he’s
the author.

–Eugenio Montale, musing

Though the mountains of BS we as a species create each day make it difficult to choose, today this seems like a winner to me:

His work appears on the surface to be something very simple, but at the same time it’s very complex,” Wilson said. [editor’s note: ugh.] “That’s something that fascinates me in the work of Mozart. Secondly, the body of the work is the light that he creates, the mental light, the mental landscape, and one could say the virtual light. That’s very different from Wagner, Puccini. It’s a special light I associate with the music, with the Requiem, the Magic Flute.

Only an opera person (he says, gingerly) would place Mozart in the context of Wagner, and Puccini, and I must say it is very perceptive of him to notice that the music of Mozart is indeed quite different from either of those two LATE-ROMANTIC COMPOSERS. I’d like to take this moment to perceptively and brilliantly observe that I find the mood of Jane Austen quite different from that of Kafka.

As to the whole mishmosh of “mental light, mental landscape, virtual light”: give me a break. I mean I get it, he’s putting it in the terms of his art, but some specificity would avert my encroaching nausea. And: “the work is the light,” but later “It’s a special light I associate with the music.” And wandering around in circles like this we could spend days and days learning nothing.

Read the whole article for yourself here; this man has redecorated Mozart’s birthplace, and I have to admit, after all that snark, that it looks pretty cool.

I realize now–and as always, too late–that one of the great purposes of the blogworld is interconnection, the ongoing dialogue of concerns, weaving in and out of the worldwideweb. A virtual, impossibly sprawling watercooler. Everyone else on the in blogland seems to be constantly quoting and linking–linking like a giant string of idea-sausages, held thinly in their word-casings–and buzzing back at the buzz of the day, week, or month. Added to the giant list of my faults (something like Don Giovanni’s list, as enumerated by Leporello) is a general lack of links on my site to other sites, and a reluctance to engage in “current topics.” I hesitated to blog about fluorescent green pigs a week or so ago; and when Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge manuscript surfaced, you read nothing of it here either.

But yesterday I read (with some envy) a short and sophisticated post by Alex Ross (“Truthiness.”) I came to its powerful final sentence, something about totalitarianism depending upon myth, and I thought: there’s someone who can sum up a thought in a decent amount of space; why does it take me so long to offer an opinion? At the same time, I felt vaguely uneasy at the swiftness and totality of his judgement, and yearned to ask qualifying questions. Ross is hard on Frey; he is skeptical of the “essential truth” defense (in which the spirit is somehow more important than the literal facts); he refers to a general “diseased attitude toward truth in American society.” I do not attempt to refute the main thrust of his post (the usefulness of truthiness for political deception and power)… But I wonder why people are so attracted to “true stories” in the first place? What is the appeal of novels and movies “based on real events”? I’m not sure that “truth” itself is not a more dangerous entity than we are giving it credit for; perhaps the desire for truth is part of the problem.

Though an avid and sheepish consumer of TV, I abhor “reality shows;” they bore and disgust me. What could be more ridiculous and sad than swallowing those cued-up, coached, crocodile tears? Feelings are not as easy to record as all that. If they were, then Beethoven et al would be out of business. Alex Ross might say (leading the witness, your honor!) the problem with reality shows is also a kind of truthiness, a kind of lifeyness masquerading as life. But I think this issue is not graphable on the axis true/false; these shows are too true and too false simultaneously; because of the desire for truth, they downplay aesthetic consideration (which makes them aesthetically false) and to compensate for this, leaping into the gap, there is the choking falsehood of coerced emotionalism. Why do people buy into this? I always wonder. Is it that people want gritty reality, people want stories that they can either identify with, or which represent a “more real” life than the sheltered existence they lead? Perhaps the lie begins with this urge for reality.

Last night, looking at the dresser in my bedroom, I realized I felt light again. I wondered why “again.” I realized I had struggled against the obvious, and there was now just the obvious path of being light, and doing what’s necessary, and practicing the piano, and loving the art. But there always seems to be, preceding the realization of the obvious, a long period of denying it, of being sure the truth is elsewhere. Working harder against the imaginary obstacle. Even Narcissus manages to figure out he’s been looking in the wrong place:

I burn with love for my own self: it’s I
who light the flames–the flames that scorch me then.
What shall I do? Should I be sought or seek?
But, then, why must I seek? All that I need,
I have: my riches mean my poverty.
If I could just be split from my own body!
The strangest longing in a lover: I
want that which I desire to stand apart
from my own self.

–Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Mandelbaum

…and subsequently Echo, the aural mirror who cursed him with his visual reflection, comes to regret her curse and take pity on the boy she loved and killed. Is this myth totalitarian? I guess I find myself, at my moments of realization, wishing in some way that I could be in constant possession of the truth as I see it then (but always then, then, then). I blame myself for being temporarily blind and climbing downhill. Why couldn’t I have seen it sooner? In some way one wants the time between epiphanies to get shorter and shorter, towards some infinitely small limit, meaning eventually: constant total awareness. But really I think truth is part of a myth, and always at the end of the struggle, following denial or quest: the end (but not necessarily the purpose) of a narrative. And my life constitutes so many of these little myths, ending in discoveries or blank walls; all dovetailing, and of necessity taking time. My desire to free truth from time, to have more and more truth all the time, may be as fatal and unnatural as Narcissus gazing at himself in the pond.

Readers will groan if I make a musical parallel? But good old Beethoven and his Sonata forms … if you know enough Beethoven, you are familiar with the myriad moments at the ends of the development sections, when he hovers suspensefully on the dominant. Even those who love and revere Beethoven must have thought on occasion that he dips into that well rather often, for the same (generic) suspense. And what is he holding back, anyway? The most obvious possible thing: the tonic, the home key. Hmmm. What kind of truth is that? Has anyone else ever thought impatiently, while listening to one of those passages: just resolve it already!? Perhaps I was wrong to call it generic: sometimes this suspense is humorous, sometimes otherworldly, eerie, thrilling… etc. (In a side-note I think Brahms wins the prize for best returns to recaps…more later?) But it is funny, all this drama around the obvious, necessary solution; pretending you can’t find it. Musical narratives are full of these kind of myths, enacted, “pretend” struggles, like the ones I realize I am waging within myself. They depend on not knowing the truth all the time. Eagerness for the truth would not necessarily make them better works of art. The recurring quality, the sense of deja-vu, of reenacted pattern and ritual, of formal conformity, cannot be totally explained by my cynical side, which points and says “he did this before!” Call it if you will a trick, a gimmick, a falsehood; its pretend wonder seems more sincere than many other people’s truths.