Nine Lives 6: Richard Wagner

Our book today is The Perfect Wagnerite by George Bernard Shaw. He wrote it quickly – he wrote everything quickly – in 1898 in order to express his enthusiasm for Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring), and as usual, Shaw’s method of expression enthusiasm was to teach, to quip, and to provoke.

This presents us with a conundrum, which is also something Shaw would have loved. In my opinion, he’s one of the greatest critics who ever lived: smart, shrewd, funny, strong, flexible, and wonderfully pragmatic. His plays, despite the performances and festivals they garner, are often still underestimated for their power, but in his criticism – that surging, almost unreadably vast ocean of prose – there is a happy, almost unalloyed greatness that can scarcely be approached by any other author, much less equaled.

And thereby the conundrum: what do you as a reader do when one of the greatest critics of the last 400 years writes an enthusiastic, deeply intelligent, passionately argumentative book on a great big pile of garbage? Do you avoid it, because garbage smells bad and is unsightly, or do you read it, because truly great criticism is not to be missed in this life?

These are the questions any sensitive reader must bring to The Perfect Wagnerite, because in the brief course of that highly entertaining book, as Shaw describes the stage actions and plot lines of Der Ring’s four interminable parts, Das Rheingold, DieWalkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdamerung, he’s also sure to convey his enthusiasm for the whole work, but the whole work is garbage-and so, the conundrum.

Shaw spent many an unoffending afternoon and evening squirming in his chair as this adolescent nightmare of a stage monstrosity unfolded before him. He lived through two separate Wagner vogues in Great Britain and saw some truly innovative and, one supposes, impressive attempts on the part of stage managers, working in wood and cloth, to reproduce even in small part the long list of lunatic demands Wagner put in his stage instructions. Listen, for instance, to Shaw’s narration of the notorious conclusion to Die Gotterdammerung and then try to imagine how on Earth a London stage of 1870 could pull it off:

Finally she [Brynhild, obviously] flings a torch into the pyre, and rides her war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middle of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize the excessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows its banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried’s finger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drown him; and in the distant heavens the gods and their castle are seen perishing in the fires of Loki as the curtain falls.

Lovely stuff. We can get the vicar’s wife to darn up some lovely orange flames. And while we’re at it, we’ll get the Royal Corps of Engineers to divert the Thames once a night, and matinees on Sundays.

Of course it’s not just that The Ring Cycle is garbage, nor is it really that virtually everything Wagner wrote is garbage (although one must search into the foothills of the 21st century to find a equally frightening Coldplay-esque divergence between a miniscule speck of talent and a mighty engine of popularity) – it’s that Wagner himself was garbage. Willfully ignorant, proudly rude, a seducer of other men’s wives, an arrogant traducer of other men’s prides, a debt-dodger, a liar, a cheat, a tone-deaf melodist, a fatuously self-deluded folklorist, an idiotically ham-handed dramatist, and a disgustingly outspoken racist and anti-Semite. We’re taught endlessly – and we’re taught true – that we must divorce the worth of the artist from the worth of the art (else who would ‘scape whipping?), but damn, Wagner makes it hard. It would be different (well, a bit different) if this vile scrap of human trash had produced truly wonderful music; we wouldn’t forgive, necessarily, but we’d be more inclined to overlook. But the music is of a piece with the man: loud, overbearing, coarse, and empty-headed.

And yet, Der Ring at least provoked this nifty little book by Shaw (almost all other books on Wagner, according him ‘great artist’ status but not, alas, being written by Shaw, are necessarily also garbage), and despite Wagner’s presence all throughout, it very often produces a smile – almost always when some fine point accidentally taps into the boiling sub-strata of Shaw’s ever-present all-purpose outrage. When that happens, rants occur, and they’re always fun:

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the younger generation of our educated classes as it as forty years ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the absolute truth of the Church’s teaching, even to the extent of asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale’s throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and credulous people are still teaching their children that. When Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror to all, except persons of exceptional force of character and intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are still groveling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against “blasphemy.”

You finish The Perfect Wagnerite with a thorough understanding of the Ring Cycle, which is quite an accomplishment on Shaw’s part and which is the smallest reason to recommend reading this great little book. Of course, if you finish the book with any desire to actually see the Ring Cycle, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

Nine Lives 5: Robert Schumann!

Our book today is Schumann, Eric Frederick Jensen’s 2001 entry in the “Master Musicians” series from Oxford University Press, and it has some fairly thankless work to do. The divide between an artist’s life and work is always pitiless to those poor ink-stained wretches who feel called upon to bridge it for the elucidation of others, but Schumann takes that problem to a more frightening level than most, because the divide in his case was so wide it forms a chasm (a poet might say that Schumann eventually fell headlong into that chasm at the end of his life, but thankfully, I’m no poet).

Of all the musicians of his era (he was born in 1801, the same year as Chopin – Liszt, Wagner, and Verdi would all be born within the next few years), he is biggest enigma and, despite the completely compulsive journal-keeping and letter-writing in which he indulged for the whole of his life, the least knowable. Jensen makes good and industrious use of his subject’s endless diaries and household books (what he bought, where he bought it, what he needs to buy, what he’s likely to be overcharged for it, etc.), and his account does all the things a standard musical-life is supposed to do. There are good solid analyses of the major musical works, brief and well-done potted descriptions of the musical and social institutions of the time, and a month-by-month account of the composer’s famous – and famously troubled – courtship with the celebrated pianist Clara Wieck.

At every turn, Jensen is ready with precise details of what took place, to whom, and where. And yet, Schumann isn’t there. Or rather, two Schumanns are – the Schumann of the life, and the Schumann of the music. And they’re so different it’s doubtful they’d even have recognized each other if they’d met on a crowded Dresden street.

The Schumann of the life was a solid, boring, plodding, workaday fellow, a lowbrow German who liked his endless cigars, his beer in the afternoon, his leisurely flip through a flimsy newspaper of entirely subservient political adherence. That Schumann became quite well known for the strong, steady stream of musical criticism he wrote for the Zeitshrift and other German periodicals. That Schumann could spend whole days worrying about money or fame, and purr like an engine when he had some (in 1849 he said “I am completely content with the recognition which has come my way in ever greater measure” – impossible even to imagine Chopin saying something similar, or Berlioz, or Liszt).

That Schumann was the predictable Teutonic catastrophe in his lovemaking, at one point writing to poor Clara, “I often think of you, not as a brother thinks of a sister, nor as a boyfriend thinks of a girlfriend, but as a pilgrim before a distant shrine.” And whenever that Schumann completed a work – especially the work of the late 1830s and 1840s, he unfailingly sent copies to every major German music critic, as faithful and insistent as a Hollywood publicity hack. And ‘hack’ is the word – his output during those 15 years equaled or surpassed what many other composers produce in a lifetime, and productivity at that level exacted its usual price: nine-tenths of those countless productions are stiff, formalistic, completely unoriginal (if there was major composer who recycled himself more often than Schumann, I don’t know who he is) and instantly forgettable.

Ironic, then, that so much of it was inspired by its own exact opposite: Jensen reports the famous encounter:

On the day before Easter Sunday 1830, [Schumann] traveled to Frankfurt to hear the violinist Niccolo Paganini. Paganini, without question the most flamboyant virtuoso of his day, was then at the height of his success. His technique dazzled and astounded those who heard him, including seasoned musicians. For Schumann, Paganini’s performance on 11 April was a revelation. Although disturbed by Paganini’s showmanship – the beginning of Schumann’s questioning of the role of virtuosity – he was enthralled by his artistry and musicianship. Paganini’s performance had a profound effect on him.

Unfortunately, some of the very same defects the worldly-life Schumann so often displayed have been picked up by his impressionable biographer, and so passages like that one abound in bloated redundancies. “Dazzled and astounded,” “artistry and showmanship,” “revelation” and “profound effect” … all jostling to tell an exciting story boringly.

Partly this is just Jensen’s writing – the prose of his book won’t remind you very strongly of any great musical life you might have read – but part of it also is his determination to do his full biographer’s duty by his subject. To this end he naturally – if regrettably – over-praises pretty much everything Schumann ever wrote. Great locust-clouds of compositions come flying at him, and he admires them all:

Given the many pieces Schumann sketched or contemplated writing (and taking into consideration the tribulations of his personal life), the actual number of pieces completed to his satisfaction during the years 1830 to 1833 is impressive: The Abegg Variations op. 1, Papillions op. 2, two sets of Paganini etudes (op. 3 and op. 10), the Intermezzi op. 4, the Allegro op. 8, the Toccata op. 7, and the Impromptus op. 5.

That the composer of some of these pieces might have been ham-handedly trying to ape the loonier Romantic excesses of his time seems not to be on Jensen’s mind, and even when he comes across hints of the other Schumann, the art-Schumann, he just beetles forward, neatly folding into his narrative some contradictions that might have given a more poetical biographer pause. The syncopation, the weird, rattling tonal constrasts, the hemiola of the Intermezzi, for instance, sidled cheek-to-cheek with so much bland recycling, bespeaks a mind at the brink of a chasm.

And even in such a buttoned down programmatic biography as this one, that other Schumann – the vaguely dangerous one, the strange one, the terminally sad one – peeks through all the time. Yes, he send fawning copies of all his work to music critics and chortled over his bank balance a little more often than was good for the Romantic public image, but as often as he did those things, he also did things like compose his Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, a work, as Jensen points out, that’s as flat-out weird today as it was 150 years ago:

Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust is not an opera: there is no recognizable dramatic flow, and a staging of the work would make little sense. But neither is it an oratorio in the conventional manner. What Schumann produced were musical setting of excerpts from Faust,  settings that assume the listener’s familiarity with Goethe’s two Faust dramas.

(To make matters worse, the majority of its scenes are taken from Faust II, Goethe’s far less popular self-indulgently wandering extended coda to his world-famous Faust I).

At least as much as the fairly commonplace ‘domestic turmoil’ to which Jensen always alludes, the tension between those two different Schumanns took an enormous toll on the artist. He was always going through one neurasthenic complaint or another, and in 1844 he suffered a so-called nervous breakdown. There were suicide attempts, and another, far more serious breakdown in 1854, after which Schumann was confined to an asylum (Jensen is particularly good at evoking the horror of such incarcerations during this period) for the rest of his life.

I myself have a personal illustration of the divide between the two Schumanns. In 1986, I was lucky enough to hear the world’s greatest pianist give a wide-ranging concert of powerful works to a packed house. If that pianist had announced beforehand that his entire program would consist of Schumann, there would have been plenty of empty seats, and that’s part of the enduring mystery of Schumann that I’m trying to describe here. He’s there, in the canon, unhummable, incapable of being referenced or synopsized – a terror in large doses because we still don’t know what to think about him.

But after the riot of applause for that pianist had died down, he laid his enormous hands on the keyboard and slowly released the sweetest, most delicately melancholy little piece into the suddenly total silence. In an instant, the eyes of bored matrons became almost girlish with wistfulness; Brezhnev-faced businessmen wept openly; the melody twisted and gently flowed up and down aisles like strong fog, and none of us could remember where it has started, and even though it wasn’t really a happy sound, nobody wanted it to end. And it was Schumann, new and strange again despite everything fourteen decades could do.

“My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose,” Schumann once wrote (to his mother, naturally – Germans!). Pity poor Jensen trying to mediate that struggle. He does a creditable job – we have yet to see a biographer who could do it perfectly.

Nine Lives 3: Felix Mendelssohn!

Our book today is R. Larry Todd’s doorstop 2003 biography of legendary 19th century musical prodigy Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, whose posthumous reputation has been a funhouse-mirror style enlargement of the conflicting extremes he experienced during his own life. On the one hand, critics have always accused him of a certain stylistic vapidity (“moonlight with sugar water,” as one of them put it), a formalistic love of tradition that could lead him to take the easy, safe, and sometimes derivative road in his musical choices. And on the other hand, his major works have always been popular, his concerts packed in audiences to the rafters, and he’s responsible for the single most-played and most-recognized piece of classical music ever written.

He was perhaps the most unfailingly friendly polarizing figure any discipline has sported this side of Einstein. Todd makes elaborate use of Mendelssohn’s letters (and those of his equally talented sister Fanny, who’s of course overshadowed by her brother … as was commented at the time, if she’d been born the only child of some poor farmer and displayed her same prodigious abilities on the piano, she’d have been the most famous performer in the world) and the accounts of his contemporaries, and the picture that emerges is of a genuinely likable and outgoing man, a workhorse performer who never lost his taste for work. Robert Schumann’s memory of meeting him for the first time may stand in for the great majority:

I told him I knew all of his compositions well; he responded with something quite modest. The first impression was that of an unforgettable man.

And the legendary musicologist Sir George Grove concluded his groundbreaking biographical essay on Mendelssohn with this quintessentially Victorian summation:

It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow.

And what is perhaps most revealing, he enjoyed a close friendship with our old friend Hector Berlioz, who had fairly rigorous standards for friendship and often wasn’t himself all that easily liked. In 1831 circumstances threw them together in Rome and they spent a chunk of virtually every day with each other, exploring the city, seeing the sites, laughing and talking, and most of all using their extraordinary musical talents to ameliorate the sweltering heat. But even amidst such personal harmony, there was polarization, as Todd dutifully reports:

Personally Felix found Berlioz likable, a skilled conversationalist with stimulating ideas. The two shared an enthusiasm for Gluck, and they escaped the oppressive sirocco by reading arias from Iphigenie en Tauride, with Felix accompanying Berlioz’s singing. Felix played Beethoven sonatas and shared a recently completed, “fine-spun yet richly colored work,” the Hebrides Overture. But Felix could not abide the quirky, temperamental qualities of Berlioz’s musical style.

The feeling was mutual; Berlioz often complained about Mendelssohn’s excessive enthusiasm for the music of dead people. And the tempered professional reservations Berlioz felt were as nothing compared with the famous lengthy, vilely anti-Semitic tirade Wagner published in 1850 – Todd cites that tirade as one of the major factors in dimming Mendelssohn’s posthumous reputation for so long, and he’s certainly right to do so.

Todd’s judgements throughout the book are so balanced, so meticulously grounded on fact and plausible supposition, that the reader finds himself borne along on a wonderful tide of assurances – in a no doubt unconscious echo of his subject, Todd produces a singularly mellifluous, old-fashioned example of the biographer’s art. There are family trees, there are musical explications aplenty, there’s a vast forest of endnotes and bibliographical references (virtually every word ever written on Mendelssohn in any language has been consulted – you’d applaud if it all weren’t so terrifying), there are carefully-chosen illustrations … and best of all, there’s Todd himself, ever the genial host, ushering us through Mendelssohn’s crowded, busy life with unfailing courtesy and a great corrective sense of perspective. For example, after he’s described a series of concerts Mendelssohn gave in February and March of 1838 – one in which “a succession of the most famous masters from one hundred or more years up to the present time” – he tells us why we shouldn’t care about their playbills, and why we should:

Today these concerts seem utterly naïve – Handel and Bach challenged by Viotti, Haydn by Righini, Mozart by Salieri, and Beethoven by the eccentric, (perhaps) charlatan, Vogler. The coupling of musical giants and now largely forgotten figures as “the most famous masters” in fact betrays the beginnings of European canon formation in music. Discernible in Felix’s programming is a main line of German music descending from Bach and Handel through Mozart and Haydn to Weber and Beethoven. Also implicit is the recognition of distinct historical styles – the baroque, classical, and modern (romantic), and further, the notion of a classic-romantic dialectic, under development in the intellectual discourse of the 1830s before it became a conceptual commonplace.

But the best part of Mendelssohn: A Life in Music is also the part Todd should never have needed to include: his repeated defense of his subject’s worth in the face of those polarizing accusations of “moonlight with sugar water.” Even here, his touch is deft:

The persistent idea of Mendelssohn as a genteel lightweight, whose refined music buckled beneath the dramatic cogency of Beethoven’s or elephantine mass of Wagner’s scores, also requires reassessment. We may yet realize that imposing a Beethovenian or a Wagnerian yardstick on Mendelssohn does an injustice to his music. The essentially dramatic model of the Fifth Symphony and Wagner’s revolutionary theories about music drama do not fit Mendelssohn’s music, but not because of its intrinsic inferiority … And as for Mendelssohn’s “excessive” reliance on history, his music concerns exploring the continuity of the European musical tradition more than celebrating its rupture. As a result, Mendelssohn’s music constantly mediates between the past and the present: his revival of Bach and Handel – and his attempt to reconcile the classic-romantic dichotomy by overlaying onto richly expressive music the classical attributes of poise, balance, and clarity – has much to do with restoring and preserving, in an age Schumann decried for its philistinism, timeless values drawn from the exemplars of the past.

But even so, biographies of Bach and Beethoven don’t have to make such disclaimers at all, and I wish Mendelssohn were afforded the same courtesy … especially from critics (Wagner most certainly included) who couldn’t write something as beautiful as the E minor Violin Concerto if their miserable, carping lives depended on it.

Nine Lives 2: Hector Berlioz!

Our book today is really two books, David Cairns’ massive two-volume biography of the problematic Romantic-era composer Hector Berlioz. Cairns published the first volume, The Making of an Artist, in 1999 and the second volume, Servitude and Greatness, in 2000, both having been written after many years of intensive labor. The first volume covers the first twenty-five years of Berlioz’s life, from his backwater boyhood in and around Le Cote St Andre (at the foot of the Alps), through his torturous crawl toward classical instruction and greatness, to the triumphant concert he gave on 9 December 1832, with Liszt, Paganini, Chopin, and even Victor Hugo in the audience. The second volume covers the remaining thirty-seven years of the composer’s life, through fame and spotty fortune as a composer and especially as a conductor, through his friendships with some of the greatest musical figures of his day (including that with Richard Wagner, which was predictably problematic), and his initially happy but ultimately tragic marriage to actress Harriet Smithson.

For 1200 pages, Cairns follows every tiny contour of his subject’s tumultuous life, and in all that verbiage, he’s never once less than intensely interesting. It’s a feat of almost unbelievable writing concentration.

I purchased the first of these volumes in 1999 intent on giving it as gift to a friend; I had no interest in Berlioz at the time and nothing but a kind of vague hostility to most of his music. And even though I thought the ‘formation of an artist’ motif in the first volume was rather drastically overdone (Cairns’ best use of the unfettered access he was given to vast hordes of the family papers would have been to ignore 99 percent of them), I was completely drawn in by the biographer’s prose style, relaxed yet scholarly, informed but almost informal:

Even when one takes him for himself and not as a symbol, there remain barriers. His is not consoling music. Its nerves are exposed. With all its ardours and exhaltations it is disturbingly alive to the torments of human existence, outside and within. Its passionate sense of beauty carries an acute awareness of how frail and ephemeral beauty is. It understands the tragic limitations of life, the discrepancy between imagination and fact, the chaos that waits beyond the edge of civilization, the terror of isolation in an empty universe. There is a core of reserve at the heart of its most fiery intensities. You cannot wallow in it. It can be intoxicating, but to the spirit more than to the senses.

(And yes, of course I read most of my book-gifts to people before I give them – doesn’t everybody?)

Berlioz’s odd status in relation to his more stereotypically Romantic peers becomes more and more evident as the books gather momentum. In her diary, Cosima Wagner relates an anecdote about how Wagner once went for a long walk in the country and kept uttering a single word: “Berlioz!” And Paganini, overcome with emotion upon first hearing Berlioz’s Harold, kissed the composer, fell on his knees before him, and sent him a check for the staggering amount of twenty thousand francs (Berlioz immediately paid off all the friends and acquaintances to whom he owed money and cancelled plans for further loans). Wagner and Paganini (and many less obviously insane figures) were both motivated in part by the mania gripping the Romantic movement to find and hail ‘Beethoven’s successor,’ the great one having died only about thirty years ago and no Star of Bethlehem having made the choice of successor obvious to all (the lachrymose Berlioz more than once nominated Liszt, who’d been heard to nominate Mendelssohn).

Cairns is very perceptive on the subject of Berlioz’s music, but he keeps the bulk of his attention on the composer’s personal life, including an unprecedented and charming amount of attention given to Berlioz’s relationship with his son Louis. Given how problematic Berlioz’s dealings with his own father were, it was inevitable that he himself would make a problematic father, and things between him and Louis are initially tense and fraught with misunderstandings. But as Cairns patiently shows, by the mid-1860s father and son were extremely close (as Berlioz himself put it, more like brothers than father and son – with Louis being the elder brother). And Louis himself comes across as an extremely likable person, somebody who can utter without pretension the wonderful line, “I defy any intelligent man, even if he knew the complete works of Shakespeare by heart in English and French, not to feel a strange thrill on starting to read one of them.” (An apt sentiment from the son of the composer of such works as Otello, Beatrice and Benedick, and Romeo and Juliet).



Necessarily, the second volume here, though absorbingly written, ends up being a chronicle of triumphs won in the face of decline. The rapturous reception given to the composer’s series of St. Petersburg concerts in 1867 is dramatically retold (thunderous ovations, repeated curtain calls, etc), and there’s a haunting moment where Cairns muses on the last picture ever taken of his subject:

Perhaps it was in this last week [February], just before the final concert, that he posed for the full-length studio photograph which shows him standing in evening dress, baton raised, left hand on hip, decoration in lapel, eyes staring from dark sockets beneath a mane of snow-white hair; a ghost, yet awesome, still a force.

“No doubt,” one critic wrote, “they [the French] are waiting until he is dead to discover that quite possibly he was something of a genius.” You feel that Cairns is in more or less complete sympathy with such a sentiment, but he doesn’t allow the triumphs to outshine the decline, or to spot that decline when it starts. Berlioz was the music critic for the Journal des Debats, and in 1860 he wrote a long piece on Wagner’s music that ends with a windy peroration on “The Music of the Future.” Cairns is clear-eyed in his assessment:

Perhaps inevitably, he loaded the dice. Worse, he did it in a way that made him appear both disingenuous and fuddy-duddy. His positive catechism was a very mild affair. It presented modern music as an emancipated art, free to do as it wished in response to the new needs of the spirit even if it meant breaking old rules; but his specific propositions offered nothing that an enlightened musician could disagree with and little that was interesting, apart from “sound ranks below idea, idea ranks below feeling and passion.” For the rest, he rode his ancient hobby-horses, like a nodding, rambling Don Quixote, across ground long fought over and peripheral to the debate: vocal decorations as the enemy of dramatic expression, singers’ licence, the absurdity of Kyrie eleison bawled out as by a chorus of drunkards in a tavern, Gluck’s bold use of upper pedal-notes and the sublime effects he produced with them. For the first time Berlioz begins to sound like an old man.

In his life, Berlioz had little use for most idle flattery, and he prized hard appraisals as long as they were fair. He once wrote “If I could only live till I am a hundred and forty, my musical life would become decidedly interesting.” Perhaps the highest tribute that can be paid to David Cairns’ work is that Berlioz would have considered it worth the wait.

Alligators and Music!

Our book today is the delightful Alligators and Music, published in Boston in 1976, written by Donald Elliott and filled with the captivating illustrations of Clinton Arrowood. The book is another perfect example of that wonderful middle-ground I often write about, a presentation that is so simple, so playful, so thoughtful, that it can instantly be enjoyed by adults and children alike.

Elliott and Arrowood take us on a brief, decidedly up-tempo tour of the personnel behind any symphony orchestra. We get emotional first-hand (first-claw?) impressions of what it's like to be a member of the various constituent groups of any orchestra.



There are the strings, like the 'cello:

I'm so grateful to be a string instrument that doesn't need to be blown upon or struck, and I'm particularly grateful that I am neither one of those tiny, high-pitched violins nor one of those huge double basses. My sounds, like my size, are right in between, not frivolous and not ridiculously serious, but warm, full, and - well - just right.

And there are the brass, like the French horn:

I know what you want to ask: why must I have all those curvy tubes like noodles on a dish? I need them, that's why, to produce my music, and I'm proud to be so complicated. Life isn't simple, you know, and if you want to make a real contribution to it, you must do and be many things.

There's the percussion section, whose timpani player manages to look just as harried and ill-tempered as timpani players everywhere:

The only thing really important in life is rhythm; rhythm, beat, and timing; everything depends on these. It's all well and good to bring forth grand melodies, and I must admit that they often entrance me, but when it comes down to basics, where would anything be if it weren't for my rhythm-keeping and my booming voice.

And there are those instruments that exist apart from the crowd, foremost of which is, of course, the piano:

I stand alone. I am the prince! I am the prince of instruments, the prince of music-makers. Loud, soft, fast, slow, happy, sad - I can be and I am all of these things and more. I can produce sounds that are just like the soft sighs of lovers, the thunderings of storms, the jokes of clowns, the joys of life, the pains of death. I can be shallow, I can be deep, I can be like nature, or I can be as precise and careful as arithmetic.

And when all the pieces come together, something far, far more magical than the sum of their parts is created. Anyone who's ever appreciated a live symphony performance will agree:

I am the symphony orchestra, and through the guidance of the conductor and under his firm control, I unite all my separate elements into a creation far greater than wood, brass, silver, or gold, greater than sounds, greater than the people who compose, the people who play, than the conductor himself. And although I know that I can never completely escape my earthly limitations and that in the midst of the serious there always lurks a touch of the ridiculous, I know, too, that I can create a sublime kind of beauty unsurpassed by anything in this world.

And in case you're wondering "Why alligators?" - our collaborating creators have the perfect riposte in mind: "Why not alligators?"