Stabbed by Beethoven's C-sharp
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ShareI don’t identify with the listener who responds to the Eroica by saying, “Ah, civilization.” I don’t listen to music to be civilized; sometimes, I listen precisely to escape the ordered world. What I love about the Eroica is the way it manages to have it all, uniting Romanticism and Enlightenment, civilization and revolution, brain and body, order and chaos. It knows which way you think the music is going and veers triumphantly in the wrong direction. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen once wrote a monologue for the spirit of Music, in which he or she or it says, “I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it.”
Around the time I got stabbed by Beethoven’s C-sharp, I began trying to write music myself. My career as a composer lasted from the age of eight to the age of twenty. I lacked both genius and talent. My spiral-bound manuscript book includes an ambitious program of future compositions: thirty piano sonatas, twelve violin sonatas, various symphonies, concertos, fantasias, and funeral marches, most of them in the key of D minor. Scattered ideas for these works appear in the following pages, but they don’t go anywhere, which was the story of my life as a composer. Still, I treasure the observation of one of my college teachers, the composer Peter Lieberson, who wrote on the final page of my end-of-term submission that I had created a “most interesting and slightly peculiar sonatina.” I put down my pen and withdrew into silence, like Sibelius in Järvenpää.
My inability to finish anything, much less anything good, left me with a profound respect for this impossible mode of making a living. Composers are in rebellion against reality. They manufacture a product that is universally deemed superfluous at least until their music enters public consciousness, at which point people begin to say that they could not live without it. Half of those on the League of American Orchestras’ list of the twenty composers most frequently performed during the 2007-2008 season Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokoev, and Copland hadn’t been born when the first draft of the repertory got written.
Throughout my teens, I took piano lessons from a man named Denning Barnes. He also taught me composition, music history, and the art of listening. He was a wiry man with tangled hair, whose tweed jackets emitted an odd smell that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just odd. He was intimate with Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin, and he also loved twentieth-century music. Béla Bartók and Alban Berg were two of his favorites. He opened another door for me, in a wall that I never knew existed. His own music, as far as I can remember, was rambunctious, jazzy, a little nuts. One day he pounded out one of the variations in Beethoven’s final piano sonata and said that it was an anticipation of boogie-woogie. I had no idea what boogie-woogie was, but I was excited by the idea that Beethoven had anticipated it. The marble-bust Beethoven of my childhood suddenly became an eagle-eyed sentinel on the ramparts of sound.
“Boogie-woogie” was a creature out of Bernstein’s serious-fun world, and Mr. Barnes was my private Bernstein. There was not a snobbish bone in his body; he was a skeleton of enthusiasm, a fifteen-dollar-an-hour guerrilla fighter for the music he loved. He died of a brain tumor in 1989. The last time I saw him, we played a hair-raising version of Schubert’s Fantasia in F Minor for piano four hands. It was full of wrong notes, most of them at my end of the keyboard, but it felt great and made a mighty noise, and to this day I have never been entirely satisfied with any other performance of the work.
By high school, a terrible truth had dawned: I was the only person my age who liked this stuff. Actually, there were other classical nerds at my school, but we were too diffident to form a posse. Several normal friends dragged me to a showing of Pink Floyd The Wall, after which I conceded that one passage sounded Mahlerian.
Only in college did my musical fortress finally crumble. I spent most of my time at the campus radio station, where I had a show and helped organize the classical contingent. I fanatically patrolled the boundaries of the classical broadcasting day, refusing to surrender even fifteen minutes of Chamber Music Masterworks and the like. At 10:00 p.m., the schedule switched from classical to punk, and only punk of the most recondite kind. Once a record sold more than a few hundred copies, it was kicked off the playlist. The DJs liked to start their sets with the shrillest, crudest songs in order to scandalize the classical crowd. I tried to one-up them with squalls of Xenakis. They hit back with Sinatra singing “Only the Lonely.” Once, they followed up my heartfelt tribute to Herbert von Karajan with Skrewdriver’s rousing neo-Nazi anthem “Prisoner of Peace”: “Free Rudolf Hess / How long can they keep him there? We can only guess.” Touché.
The thing about these cerebral punk rockers is that they were easily the most interesting people I’d ever met. Between painstakingly researched tributes to Mission of Burma and the Butthole Surfers, they composed undergraduate theses on fourth-century Roman fortifications and the liberal thought of Lionel Trilling. I began hanging around in the studio after my show was over, suppressing an instinctive fear of their sticker-covered leather jackets and multicolored hair. I informed them, as Mr. Barnes would have done, that the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg had pre-figured all this. And I began listening to new things. The first two rock records I bought were Pere Ubu’s Terminal Tower compilation and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. I crept from underground rock to alternative rock and finally to the full-out commercial kind. Soon I was astounding my friends with pronouncements like Highway 61 Revisited is a pretty good album, or The White Album is a masterpiece. I abandoned the notion of classical superiority, which led to a crisis of faith: If the music wasn’t great and serious and high and mighty, what was it?
For a little while, living in Northern California after college, I thought of giving up on the music altogether. I sold off a lot of my CD s, including all my copies of the symphonies of Arnold Bax, in order to pay for more Pere Ubu and Sonic Youth. I cut my hair short, wore angry T- shirts, and started hanging out at the Berkeley punk club 924 Gilman Street. I became a fan of a band called Blatz, which was about as far from Bax as I could get. (Their big hit was “Fuk Shit Up.”) Fortunately, no one needed to point out to my face that I was in the wrong place. It is a peculiar American dream, this notion that music can give you a new personality, a new class, even a new race. The out-of-body experience is thrilling as long as it lasts, but most people are eventually deposited back at the point where they started, and they may begin to hate the music for lying to them.
When I went back to the classical ghetto, I chose to accept its limitations. I realized that, despite the outward decrepitude of the culture, there was still a bright flame within. It occurred to me that if I could get from Brahms to Blatz, others could go the same route in the opposite direction.
I have always wanted to talk about classical music as if it were popular music and popular music as if it were classical.
For many, pop music is the soundtrack of raging adolescence, while the other kind chimes in during the long twilight of maturity. For me, it’s the reverse. Listening to the Eroica reconnects me with a kind of childlike energy, a happy ferocity about the world. Since I came late to pop, I invest it with more adult feeling. To me, it’s penetrating, knowing, full of microscopic shades of truth about the way things really are. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks anatomizes a doomed relationship with a saturnine clarity that a canonical work such as Die schöne Müllerin can’t match. (When Ian Bostridge sang Schubert’s cycle at Lincoln Center a few years ago, I had the thought that the protagonist might never have spoken to the miller girl for whose sake he drowns himself. How classical of him.) If I were in a perverse mood, I’d say that the Eroica is the raw, thuggish thing—a blast of ego and id—whereas a song like Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” is all cool adult irony. The idea that life is flowing along with unsettling smoothness, the dark C-sharpness of the world sensed but not confirmed, is a resigned sort of sentiment that Beethoven probably never even felt, much less communicated. What I refuse to accept is that one kind of music soothes the mind and another kind soothes the soul. It depends on whose mind, whose soul.
Photo (partial) by
© David Michalek courtesy of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
© 2010 Alex Ross
