At the NY Phil again, eavesdropping via lobby Jumbotron. The Beethoven violin concerto, with a conductor from Pittsburgh, so the ghosts of Hegel and Goethe hover. It's odd to think the two of them were hearing these pieces in the Germany still struggling to be born, a few years after the American Revolution, and with revolutionary France dangerously near.
In Mozart, the concerto is a contest of virtuosity; in Beethoven, the concerto is a political argument. It is the one and the many, and both have several ideas. Much of the philosophy coming out of Germany after Kant had to do with the political moment, translating the personal self-assertion of Fichte, et al. to an embryonic German national sensibility. Even Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right ('right' confusingly and revealingly meaning 'law' in many languages) and Phenomenology, rather than answering the arguments of Kant and anticipating those of his epigones, is fashioning a revolutionary mind: one's status is given by the other citizens; one only reaches the point of self creation when willing to die for a cause. Peculiarly, Rorty classifies Hegel as a Romantic, but there is no nostalgia for historicism with him. Essentially, the thought of the time divides between enlightened absolutism and romantic counter-reaction, before that conflict is consciously minimized in an effort to reach a national classicism.
So listening to a Beethoven, these thinkers are divided. Perhaps they hear in the self-assertion of the concerto both the boldness of revolutionary France and the courtly touches of historic Habsburg Austria. Especially in unsettled times, there is no such thing as an unalloyed good. It is night, and everything is grey -- and yet there are somehow no entirely black or white threads in the composition. (Hegel/Quine)
The soloist tonight is a winsome young Spanish woman -- she plays her 18th c. instrument with a gossamer ease. But there is no Fichte, no consciousness of a soul arising against everything that is not herself. She hope to please, in the way that musicians often do. But this music requires something else underneath.
Brecht: "In dark times will there be song? / Yes, there will be songs about the dark times."
For art to be of the time, it must arise from some part of the time, from one of the many contending elements, as opposed to a general historical notion of the time. The latter leads to the Broadway musical version of the revolutions of 1848. Puffed shirts and revolutionary-seeming folks. But Hegel, finishing his Phenomenologie at Jena during the battle with the Napoleonic forces was not of a unified historical sensibility, but deeply conflicted about what should be done, and what should be thought right. Somewhere deep in the massed armies of the Emperor, the spirit of Rousseau carried his humble bag, and the army of scientific discovery would range as far as Egypt in its campaign against the old monarchies of Europe. And yet. The pure, scientific answers of Enlightenment were often dispensed by authoritarian central governments. German lawyers would shorty seethe at the imposition of a uniform civil legal code on a system rich in history and tradition, and these traditions seemed to preserve essential liberties rather well.
The soloist in the violin concerto is into her cadenzas now, in a manner that seems evocative of a Roma player who knows she has the rapt attention of all the men in the room. But the defiance of self-assertion against the many is missing. Beauty can be of service, yes, but beauty that never takes the step out of the chorus simply joins in the fearful desire to please that characterized the time. I can't recall who it was, but I was reading some criticism on Hollywood, from an old director, I think, who pointed out that everybody does the same thing there very earnestly, and this was his point, that it came from fear. They had to please the right people, and this was the indicated way of doing that. The revolution will not be in a studio picture.
Now a long pause for late seating, after an abortive moment of applause between the movements. After a quick smile and shared word with the conductor, who seemed to be cultivating a Goethean placidity, the soloist closes her eyes and vanishes into herself. The orchestra with trepidation, almost apologetically states a theme, and then we are back to the thin, unprotesting strains of the violin, not speaking to the ensemble, or even ornamenting its lines, but voicing a line of tone that strains to be more delicate than thought itself. The beautiful soul.
Of course, for Hegel, the beautiful soul is not a figure to be commended. Apart from the conflicts of the time, it strains to preserve its purity, oblivious to the fact that it is a creation of these rough temporal conflicts, and will only have a meaningful existence within them. This idea, of course, would provide a foothold for the historical empiricists, the Left Hegelians, streaming bleary-eyed out of Kojeve's Paris lectures, unaware that the fellow who had just been pontificating on the nature of the master/servant dialectic was presently a ledger line in the payroll books of the Russian secret services.
And now the soloist takes the principal theme from the first movement and plays it freely, but in the manner of a mystic saint humming a tune as she leaves the room, and when the orchestra follows it with a crashing rendition of the same, it is as if someone left the television on in the room the saint had just left.
The Shakers were famous for their song, but in the oral histories, some of them ruefully note that the melodies that they had taken to be divinely inspired often contained fragments and motifs of the popular music of the time. Perhaps both the utopian communities and the sheet music publishers sensed the same melodies percolating on the sphere. Or perhaps the minds of those who had sought to escape from the temporal conflicts of the world, when they lay on their wood-frame beds, with the cold, dewey night air coming in through the cracked-open window, perhaps these minds were somehow till in motion from the songs of secular life. And the songs that dame to them were the songs they had always known, rephrased. The question then becomes whether there is something underneath these deepest memories of the world, or if the mind itself is a construction of these materials. If the latter, it would probably be best not to fly from the world; if the former, the utopians would seem to have the better argument.
But the predicate, the ground for this choice, that thing that must be done before it becomes relevant, is the self-asserion, the Fichtean claim to exist against the world, the boldness to announce at breakfast that you have received a song from an angel in the night. After this claim, the question of whether such things are possible or right domes into focus. Absent this claim, we never stand with the world or against it, but have only closed our eyes, trying to hold onto the dying fall of the note against the disturbance in the auditorium.
And now to the suite from Strauss's Electra -- the source play is very different from the clear, Greek world of the Orestia. There is no better world to be made by the courageous act. This is a mirror to the modern soul -- the heroine, after realizing the need vengeance and lamenting her dead father, will cajole the others to the act, and then collapse in a furious dance.
This condensation is a creature of tonight's conductor, and he is leading them through it with enthusiasm. Beyond the question of the work's legacy, there are the royalties, I suppose. Rarely does a classical artist have a vested interest in this manner, though I suppose it was common when Beethoven was beating out the time with the stave. Or perhaps only their publishers cared about such things. The syndics.
Adoro hated this sound and noise of Strauss, thinking it kept music from its own development. But, as some musicologists have pointed pout, his assumes that music tends ineluctably towards those sorts of things that we call new music. Perhaps the future of music, that which it is tending towards, is a deeper involvement in its own drama, rather than retiring from the world to seek its own perfection.
And now the orchestra is launched into a full-throated repetition of main theme, the slightly flushed and sweating profile of the Goethen conductor shaking in time with the beats, as the fury of his arms' gestures shakes his whole frame. And then a moment of dramatic stillness between the chords, and he raises a finger to his lips to indicate the silence. And the denouement impends.