At the Philharmonic again, against my better judgment, as they're playing Dvorak's Seventh. I recall listening this piece on the outdoor speakers during the season-opening festival under Gilbert. Listening to the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth in sequence, usually the old Szell tapes from Cleveland in the Fifties and Sixties, or Bernstein at the NY Phil is a habitual choice of mine for writing music. Including the Ninth at Yankee Stadium, I think. I recall hearing the Seventh in Belgrade a few years ago, when the European war had freshly broken out. It was at their usual hall at the university, just above Studentski Park. The taut, focused energy of the playing seemed to put the politics of the moment into sound.
According to Grove, Dvorak used to write "thanks be to God" In Czech at the end of his manuscripts. I had head somewhere that he also marked the bottom of each page with a devotion to Mary, as John Paul II used to finish each page with a TT, for "totus tuus". Possibly not, but his Stabat Mater apparently went over very well in England. He had gone there at about the time the Seventh was written, which was his second published symphony. He was famous, though, for his Slavonic Dances. Even when rising into the rarified air of Vienna, Antaeus rooted himself in Czech folk music. At about the time he was received by the Emperor at court, he was conflicted about the loss of this distinct identity, this Czech sensibility. (Grove again.)
With the Seventh, perhaps in imitation of Brahms, the energy of poesis is engaged. The question of being one thing or another is secondary; music is change, and becoming. It defies understanding, because it revises understanding by its existence. Music, like all intuition, is the negation of everything we understood in stillness, and we must revise our understanding, or refuse the music.
Now, I'm not in Studentski Park. I'm in the lobby of the NY Phil, having been searched on entry by the security folks. There's noise from the cafe, people shouting. The upper west side retirees who were another part of my aversion to these JUmbotron sessions.
There was no menace in the opening, there was no sense of danger near. The first movement, which should hover on the precipice, seems an innocuous bit of embroidery. And now the thundering chords that should start the descent, but they're empty. Merely a well-crafted wall of sound in perfect synchronicity.
This reading replaces danger with grandeur. The latter is more salable as a luxury good, perhaps.
The seriously overweight old fellow in a white t-shirt sitting against the back wall of the lobby spent the intermission loudly discoursing on the Iranian war, and the f--ggots. I'm not sure which angered him more. I rebuked him on principle, and he quieted down.
I suspect that the Seventh would find a powerful reading in Tehran, or nearby countries these days. Music isn't something to be made in order to the desired and then sold to overweight retirees. It is a signal of the present time. The way that we seek out certain pieces, finding them meaningful for the present, makes that meaning palpable and perceptible in performance. (If the audience is paying attention.)
This, precisely this Jumbotron performance in a wealthy and occasionally ill-mannered neighborhood, with the cafe to the side and the sound a bit dicey through the overhead speakers, although the video images are clear as day on the immense triple screen covering the wall, with the lights turned off for some reason -- and then the musicians upstairs dutifully embroidering the luxury good to be desired and sold -- this is perhaps the death of music. Or at least the beginning of its noisy silence.
Again, the applause between movements from the folks upstairs who paid quite a bit of money for their tickets. Not a few confused folks, but a fair percentage of the house.
The scherzo, now. When it pauses to allow the brief idyll, there is no sense of the immense movement of the piece, nothing for the sense of peacefulness to oppose.
How was it that Szell and Kubelik and Bernstein found so much more in these pieces? Perhaps they all had the real understanding that nations can make the wrong choice, that forces can be unleashed against enemies without and within. The music doesn't invent this threat, it depicts it. And in the depiction, it shows the time its face.
Which, perhaps, more in the breach than the observance, is what's going on here. C.S. Lewis titled one of his books "until we have faces." We look at the face of the time and see only an emptiness. And yet there are these odd wars. But, unlike that night in Belgrade, I can't hear the Persian war in the music here. Not because it isn't there in any objective sense, but because it wasn't sought out for that.
But why was it sought out? That's the question.