Nine Lives 8: Verdi!

Our book today is Frank Walker’s grand 1962 work The Man Verdi, in which three things happen in quick succession: he discerns that despite the mountain of primary documentation available, Verdi the actual human being (hence his book’s title) usually manages to elude his biographers, he tells us he has set his biography on a slightly different course from all the others in confident expectation of finally capturing that great composer’s essence in words, and then he, like everybody else, fails completely. In Gamito’s 1872 bust, Verdi is looking down – not in shame or in repose, but in an explicit act of evasion which Gamito was perceptive enough to preserve. Many full-dress biographies have appeared since Walker’s (that by Andrew Porter and Jane Phillips-Matz is by far the best, although it lacks the personal, erudite zeal of Walker’s prose), and all of them have likewise failed in biography’s main objective.

It will likely always feel that way, despite a plethora of facts.

Verdi was born in 1813 to poor nearly illiterate parents in Busseto in Romagna, but he was lucky enough to come under the tutelage of Antonio Barezzi, who saw his potential and trained him as best he could. Verdi went to Milan for three years of desperate poverty before returning to Busseto, where he married and had two children, became the local choir master, and settled into what could easily have been a lifetime of provincial obscurity. But during his stay in Milan he had been surrounded by the music of Donizetti and deeply impressed with the theater of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, so even in Busseto he was busily composing operas. The great houses in Milan showed only lukewarm interest in these early works, but the composer persevered and began to garner attention and commissions.

In 1838 his daughter died. In 1839 his son died. In 1840 his wife died. He wrote the expected lamentations in his letters, but he never missed his commission deadlines, and he continued to attract attention – including from the great Donizetti, who recognized a kindred genius in Verdi’s compositions.

Those compositions continued to flow from his pen, and Walker takes us scrupulously through the genesis, completion, and reception of each. The roll call seems positively unearthly (especially when coming from a composer who could make un-ironic reference to his “unimaginable laziness”): L Lombardi, I Due Foscari, Macbeth (like all the Romantics, Verdi worshipped Shakespeare), Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Simon Bocanegra, The Masked Ball, Otello, Falstaff, Aida … each a thing of such awe-inspiring beauty that it hardly seems possible they were written for money. And yet, as Walker impassively points out, this was the man who could write to a friend, “Who knows that I might not wake up one morning a millionaire! What a lovely word, with a full, lovely meaning! And how empty, in comparison, are words like ‘fame’ ‘glory’ ‘talent’ etc!”

Walker’s long book is a jam-packed compendium of letters, a torrent of them from every single person who touched on Verdi’s life in any way. His second wife Giuseppina wrote stacks and stacks of letters, as did all the various performers, backers, producers, and theater officials with whom Verdi dealt during the decades of his professional life. It’s a herculean amount of work, and Walker does it all with such lively, gossipy energy that the pages fly by. Of course Verdi himself helps with this – like almost every other Romantic composer, he spent far more time writing first-rate letters than he did writing first-rate music (it was the Internet of the day, after all). Walker uses these letters with extremely good care, and their subjects range from the deepest matter of art to the razor-sharp offhand observations the maestro seems to have made as easily as breathing:

We in Italy imagine that the English don’t love music; this is a mistake. It is said that the English know nothing but how to pay for the pleasure of hearing great artists, but that they don’t understand now anything; this is a mistake that the French have spread about and that the Italians have adopted because it’s a French idea. I say that no man pays for things he doesn’t like and which don’t give him pleasure. The English have never hissed a masterpiece. They have never received with indifference a Barber of Seville, as Rome has, or a William Tell, as Paris has, and they have never hissed an Otello, as Naples did on its first appearance.

Care is needed in the handling of any correspondence, but as Walker makes clear, the Verdi correspondence is a minefield of mis-matched dates, faulty attributions, and elaborate forgeries. No previous Verdi scholar writing in English had tackled the mess with anything like Walker’s industry and intelligence, and yet more than once in the book, the man himself questions whether or not the task he’s set himself might not be impossible:

The biographer seeks the truth. How shall he find it?
He is generally working long after the events he is describing. Although he may not be able to remember what he was doing himself on the Tuesday of the previous week, he has to convince his readers that he knows that happened between certain people, say, one hundred years earlier.

(Writing about some early letters Verdi wrote in 1844 to various Milanese ladies, Walker says, “The letters are written on Bath paper, the fashionable stationery of the day, and employ, rather clumsily, the language of gallantry. They offer infinite possibilities of misinterpretation.” The last is a great line that seems to apply to most of Verdi’s correspondence, but the reader of this particular book need have no fear)

When Verdi died in 1901, nearly half a million mourners filled the streets of Milan. The coffin looked as small as a matchbox, floated along its route on a sea of murmuring humanity. It unfolded like a pageant, and it had a pageant’s unreality. The same an be said for this biography, for all biographies of Verdi, and the reason is fairly clear – in fact, it’s a reason shared in common with all Shakespeare biographies, which would have pleased Verdi a great deal: no life of the man can possibly equal the life his works take on inside our hearts. To listen to the glories of Verdi is to wander around inside a vast cathedral of passionate voice, the like of which no other opera composer (not even my beloved Donizetti) can match. Every true opera fan has had a warm summer afternoon in which they were brought to the most cathartic tears of their life by listening to Verdi.

No mere biography can compete with that. Praise to Frank Walker for trying so hard.

Nine Lives 7: Johannes Brahms!

Our book today is a modern masterpiece, Jan Swafford’s 1997 biography of Johannes Brahms. Whole lexicons of praise have already been heaped on this book from all quarters, and justly so: it’s a virtually form-perfect example of all that biography should be. It’s thick enough to do its mighty subject justice (Brahms had an unstintingly high opinion of himself; he would almost certainly have wanted to add a few hundred pages to Swafford’s 600-page total), it’s thoroughly grounded in primary documents and sources, and it’s unapologetically opinionated.

Opinions are one of the main things I look for in a biographer, and it can be a dreary search – 20th century conventions of scholarship were heavily infected with the dry heaves of academia shortly after the Second World War, and suddenly you could hardly open a big-press biography without barking your shin on phrases like “documents make it seem likely,” or “tax returns strongly indicate.” Swafford knows his subject too well to hedge his rhetorical bets in such a way.

Brahms was born into dire poverty in 1833, and toward the end of his life he began exercising a strict and inexcusable regimen on his personal papers, destroying everything he felt future biographers need not see. The first composition we have from him was done when he was 18 – a work easily complex enough to make it likely that he wrote many, many such before it. Despite his carefully-cultivated bluff exterior, Brahms had deep sensitivities. He himself often referred to his strained and chaotic childhood and youth as dark forces shaping his adult life, and we can well believe him (the readiness with which he accepted his fame, for instance, is no doubt connected to the fact that when he was a young composer and sent some scores to Schumann for comment, they were returned unopened).

It’s tricky material to navigate – it’s a big, broad, immensely powerful life, a figure who knew perfectly well that he was last of the great composers in the old classical style. Following his subject through the mountains of documentation at his disposal can’t have been easy for Swafford – and it was certainly rendered no easier by the fact that any biographer of Brahms (just like any friend of his, while he was alive) must spend half his time sheepishly apologizing for the man’s boorish behavior.

Swafford handles it all with complete assurance. After one hour of reading this book’s fluid, knowing prose, you forget that you’ve ever read a Brahms biography by anybody else. Swafford is every bit as wry and knowing on the peripherals of Brahms’ life and times as he is on the main topics. Here’s a priceless aside on what happened when Bruckner was allowed to view the exhumed skeleton of Beethoven prior to its re-burial in Vienna’s Central Cemetery:

He had to be forcibly removed. Beethoven’s bones may be decorated to this day by a lens from Bruckner’s spectacles, which fell out during the ruckus. He pulled the same stunt at Schubert’s exhumation, refusing to release the skull until they allowed him to place it in the coffin himself.

(“Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over,” Swafford helpfully informs us, “was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop”)

And of Brahms’ notorious contemporary the tone is equally informal:

As far as Brahms was concerned most of Wagner’s writings, which presaged similar tracts from generations of artists to come, were so much self-serving gobbledygook.

Brahms struck up a friendship with Liszt in 1853 (it would eventually darken, as so many of Brahms’ friendships did) and lived in Vienna for more than thirty years (he would die there in 1897), working steadily, turning out one impeccably finished masterpiece after another. More than one critic has remarked on the fact that we have no imperfect works by Brahms – each piece is finished in a way only J.S. Bach’s works ever feel finished. His mighty Violin Concerto is a triumph of forbidding complexity, and his Variations on a Theme of Paganini seems almost tauntingly to call for a Paganini of the keyboards to even attempt it.

This technical ferocity was an exponent of Brahms’ musical philosophy, which fascinates Swafford throughout his book:

There lies important and dangerous advice for Brahms’s heir in the art. Perfection before beauty, he said – perfection meaning unassailable in logic and craft, beautiful implying expressive. In preaching that ideal to a protégé Brahms exaggerated for effect; he knew nothing his perfect. But for good or ill his words echoed through the next generation of composers, some of whom did exalt thematic and harmonic logic over expressiveness (Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern were accused of that, usually wrongly. It could be argued that in lesser hands Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, which owed much to Brahms in logic and spirit, did prove amenable to pedantic elevation of logic over expressiveness.)

But there was more to it than cold method, as our biographer knows perfectly well:

Lyricism and emotion draw listeners into his music before they come to grips with the complexities – the sheer difficulty of absorbing his constant protean variation, his tonal deflections, his experiments with conventional forms. The middle-class audience loved the beauty and warmth of his music, not the logic. Surely Brahms understood that. Even if he made considerable demands on his listeners, even if he never coddled them in his big pieces, he still never forgot their feelings or his own. He made sure the warmth stayed in his work. But he would never admit it.

That warmth remained in his work and continued to invite them in (not all listeners were equally spellbound: in the 1890s the wonderfully acerbic Boston music critic Philip Hale urged a sign to be posted in the town’s new Symphony Hall saying, “Exit – in case of Brahms”) all through the composer’s life. Swafford is simply wonderful in conveying that life in all its complexity, and we’re never less than happy to have him along as our guide. Brahms was deathly afraid of seasickness, and he hated the very idea of being out of sight of land – so the orbit of his travels was comparatively narrow in comparison to the size of his fame in later life. But he kept performing for the public, and another biographer might be tempted to haul out the stock phrases of blasé praise. Swafford takes a much sharper, more insightful approach, seeking always to humanize his great subject:

From now on (after the late 1860s), as a pianist, he mainly performed his own music. Practicing bored him to distraction, and as he never tired of saying, concerts meant little to him anyway. The applause he enjoyed more than he was prepared to admit. While he generally remained competent at plowing through his own music, including the very difficult concertos, his own subtlety of touch at the keyboard gradually deteriorated to what Clara [Schumann, his shrewdest critic] bewailed as “thump, bang, and scrabble.” Still, for all that, he toured. By the 1870s he was collecting handsome fees, and his concerts not only provided income but an important means of spreading his work. Even if Brahms was not the ideal performer of his own music, as either pianist or conductor, he came up with marvelous readings sometimes, and in any case audiences showed up in force to have a look at him. So he claimed to hate performing and performed all the time, just as he hated writing letters and wrote them constantly.

“Time always treated Brahms kindly,” Swafford at one point tells us. Undeniably true, but fate has also been kind, giving him a biographer like this. I can’t recommend this book strongly enough.

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 4: Frederic Chopin!

Our book today is William Atwood’s diverting 1999 study The Parisian Worlds of Frederic Chopin, and it’s a very good example of what I like to call the ‘picture window’ biography, as opposed to the ‘banquet’ biography. I confess I prefer the ‘banquet,’ in which we get the entirety of the subject’s life and times laid out for us in painstaking, elaborate detail, preferably from the first moment that subject’s father fancied that subject’s mother right up until that subject’s invariably unworthy offspring are shipped off to some distant penal colony (usually wiping their posteriors with priceless letters from their parents the whole journey). But that could just be my oft-stated preference for very long books. I’ll certainly admit that even in the greatest lives not all the little details are important – the problem is, readers entirely divorced from those great lives are in no position to know which little details are genuinely unimportant. Even experienced biographers can’t know, which is, I guess, why the field of biography has flourished for so long.

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And my preference for doorstoppers notwithstanding, I do so love a ‘picture window’ biography when it’s done well! These are the (generally shorter) works that give us one static frame through which to view their subject, with the hope that they’ve chosen the frame – and the view – well enough so that the limited range (we don’t see the house getting built, we’re not there on move-in day, etc.) is more than offset by the freshness, the clarity of perspective.

When it works, it’s utterly refreshing, completely delightful. Peter Quennell’s Byron in Italy has already been praised here at Stevereads, and to that you could add many other such titles (Philip McFarland’s Hawthorne in Concord, for instance, or Robert Tanner’s Stonewall in the Valley).

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Atwood’s book might as well have been called Chopin in Paris, and it, too, is an utterly delightful success. Chopin left his native Poland shortly after the November Uprising of 1830 and arrived in Paris in 1831 not originally intending to stay.  He was full of his usual nasal bombast about the terrors being inflicted on his country, his home, and his family by the marauding Russians, at one point writing, “Oh, God, do you exist? … Haven’t you had enough of the Muscovites’ crimes?  - or is it – can it be – You yourself are a Russian!” But he took to Paris well enough for all his melodrama, and of the hundreds of people who left behind reminiscences of him from that period, it must be said that not all of them recall him endlessly sighing and weeping.

If ever there was a city in 19^th century Europe designed to forestall weeping, it was the Paris (Chopin’s lucky he never got to Venice –he’d have renounced his Polish nationality altogether) of the 1830s. This was apparent even to a visitor from staid, Puritanical Boston who spent only three weeks in the city in 1833 and almost immediately found himself subsumed in the filth, decadence, and sparkling frivolity of the place (he forever afterward nurtured a dislike of the French, probably because they had succeeded in wasting his time).

The population of the Paris Chopin found in 1831 was fast approaching one million people, although it was a noticeably smaller place. There were only twelve arrondissements – nine on the Right Bank and three on the Left (always factoring in the floating, mythical “fourteenth arrondissement,” where all secret, illicit meetings took place – a philandering man, like Chopin would eventually be with George Sand, was always due to meet his objet d’amour somewhere in the fourteenth arrondissement), but that space was absolutely stuffed with all manner of meeting places. Ballrooms, concert halls, palaces of art and commerce, parks, and of course the famous salons just now coming into their full vogue. And of course counterbalancing all of this splendor was an equal amount of squalor, from gaming houses to innumerable whore-houses to the rampant crime that afflicted even the best neighborhoods at night, as Atwood freely points out:

It is interesting to note here that George Sand’s predilection for men’s clothes in the early 1830s may have stemmed not so much from any lesbian leanings as a desire to protect herself from sexual assault on the dangerous Parisian streets after dark. Besides, men’s clothing was significantly cheaper than the reams of expensive fabric required to outfit a respectable lady of her time.

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It was in this brawling, bawling, captivating city that Chopin came into the full development of his musical talents, and it’s from the time of his residence there that most of his greatest successes – and happinesses – originate. Here he dealt with the great and small of the artistic world, from opera house managers (and censors) to publishers to fellow musicians – the greatest of which, at least in the public’s eyes, was Franz Liszt. Chopin always cultivated the wispy, vaguely ethereal pose so popular with the Romantics, but although he might not have believed Liszt the better piano player, even he had to doff his hat to the sheer mastery with which Liszt pulled off such playacting nonsense. There certainly couldn’t be any arguing with the effect, as Atwood describes:

Both the intensity of Liszt’s playing and the charismatic nature of his personality roused audiences to a frenzy. Ladies rose from their seats, screamed hysterically, and tossed perfumed handkerchiefs onto the stage before passing away in a dead faint. One excited lady even threw her tiara at him, but it fell short (so Berlioz tells us) and landed on the head of a German who was too busy applauding to notice it.

As Heinrich Heine (who knew and liked Liszt) put it, he seemed to make the very piano keys bleed.

Atwood is uniformly excellent in describing the whole breadth of the arts Paris boasted during this period, as for instance when he discusses the opera of the day:

During much of the early nineteenth century, opera in Paris was actually two vocal arts rather than one: besides the French school there was an equally important Italian school. The former represented the old bombastic declamatory style, which had been popular on the French stage for well over a century. It was particularly adapted to what Mrs. Trollope called “the dry heavy recitative.” The French themselves called it hurlement, which can be translated (depending on the dictionary one uses) as roaring, yelling, bawling, bellowing, screaming, wailing, or howling like a wounded animal.

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Fanny Trollope, who heard quite enough hurlement to last her a lifetime, remarked “that which is not worth saying they sing.” She might have added that their singing seemed to make the very notes bleed. As Atwood diplomatically points out, it’s not to everybody’s taste.

He’s also diplomatic on what at first looks like an essential contradiction: one the one hand, the fairytale airs so many of the Romantics put on, bursting into tears at the flicker of a candle, embracing someone with wild acclaim if all he did was make an interesting observation about Tacitus at dinner, etc. – and on the other hand, their often ruthless business dealings. I doubt that F. Lee Bailey could have danced more neatly around this point than Atwood does:

The burden of personal freedom imposed on the Romantics by their cult of individuality was clearly enormous. Those who were able to shoulder it, though, experienced not only intellectual and aesthetic rewards but often economic compensation as well. If some scorned financial gain (as a compromise with bourgeois materialism), many like Hugo, George Sand, Balzac, and Dumas were not the least bit squeamish about driving a hard bargain with their publishers. Others in the fields of music, painting, and sculpture could be equally aggressive when it came to money. Chopin, usually a model of gentility and decorum, often lashed out at his publishers in vituperative, even vulgar language. Liszt, Paganini, the actress Rachel, and a host of contemporary prima donnas shamelessly sold their talents, while painters and sculptors could be conniving and cutthroat in their scramble for government commissions. Such a crass concern for money, which seems so inappropriate among artists dedicated to the pursuit of spiritual values, was, in fact, a simple extension of the Romantic demand for individual liberty in the financial sphere as elsewhere.

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But as much as I like having Atwood’s company throughout his nimble little book, one of its strongest draws has nothing to do with his prose at all: it’s the absolute profusion of black and white spot illustrations found throughout the text. Virtually every major and minor character we meet in the text we also see, at some point, looking back at us from the pages – looking handsome (as in the case of Polish poet Juliusz Slowacki or, oddly enough, James Fenimore Cooper) or hugely insightful (as in the case of celebrated salon hostess Betty de Rothschild), or lively and intelligent (as in the case of poor George Sand, whose works are still under-appreciated among English-language readers), or else so immediately real that you expect them to turn towards you and speak their own stories (as in the case of Victor Hugo’s longtime mistress Juliette Drouet or the American force of nature Samuel F. B. Morse). Any reader with half a brain will immediately see that YouTube enjoys no superiority over such a presentation.

Which isn’t to slight Atwood – his accompanying little picture-tags almost always shine with his delight in his subjects, as in the case of the aforementioned pretty boy:

One of the triumvirate of great Polish Romantic poets, Juliusz Slowacki was a morbid, introspective individual, given to delusional fantasies toward the end of his life. At one time he and Chopin had been in love with the same girl, Maria Wodzinska, who spurned them both. Although the two men had some  social contact in Paris during the early years of their exile, Slowacki later accused Chopin of being a peacock, to which the musician responded by calling the poet a numbskull.

Hee. We must all call a poet a numbskull, from time to time. Nice to know Chopin had the same predicament.

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He ended up staying in Paris until his death in 1849, and Atwood has opened a marvelous picture window on the whole time.  There have been vastly larger and more wide-ranging ‘banquet’ biographies of Chopin, of course (and the vast Correspondance is endlessly enjoyable on its own), but you could scarcely do better than this (comparatively) slim volume just the same.

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.

Nine Lives 1: Franz Liszt!

Our book today is actually three books – Alan Walker’s monumental three-volume biography of 19th century Hungarian virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt. The size of Warner’s accomplishment – three heavy hardcover books – is dwarfed by its scope. This is one of those overwhelmingly comprehensive lives, the kind that are born of a merciless swapping alchemy of kind for kind: Walker began researching and drafting his trilogy in the mid-1970s, delivered his first volume, Franz Liszt, The Virtuoso Years: 1811-1847 in 1983, worked for another six years and brought forth the next volume, Franz Liszt, The Weimar Years: 1847-1861 in 1989, then labored for seven more years and finished his achievement in 1996 with Franz Liszt, The Final Years: 1861-1866. Thus, by sacrificing roughly thirty years of his own life to the task, Walker was able to give readers forever a perfect inexhaustibly corroborated account of the roughly thirty years of Lizst’s long and fraught productive life. You see this incredible exchange time and again in reading scholarly biographies, and the only response permissible is gratitude.

That gratitude would stand even if the resulting work were dry as dust- the archival sorting alone is too much a boon to future scholars not to be so acknowledged. The crowning glory of Walker’s trilogy is the one further element it manages: the writing itself is never anything less than engaging. Walker has submerged himself in the vast Liszt historiography (indeed, his first volume opens with a work-by-work account of that historiography, a virtuoso little performance that serve as the triumphant conclusion to any other Liszt biography but here is only the throat-clearing before the main performance) –he knows all the previous biographies, he knows the contents of every letter and legal document, he knows the corresponding details of Liszt’s contemporaries, from the obscure to the famous like Hector Berlioz and Frederic Chopin … and yet, even after assimilating such an ocean of raw data, he spares the time over and over to tell his stories well.

He also knows the music, not just as a scholar but as a sensitive listener. His explications of musical terminology are delivered with the studied casualness of a practiced teacher, and his insightful treatment of every one of Liszt’s works was certainly a boon to a reader like me, someone who’s always appreciated the better-known works of this composer but hardly guessed at the range or vitality of most of what he composed. More than all but a handful of composers (certainly more than any other Romantic composer), Liszt left the field of classical music very different from how he found it, and this presents his biographers with many of the same problems with nomenclature that the composer himself faced, as Walker time and again acknowledges:

A perennial problem for Liszt was how to get the wooden ensembles of his time to respond to “tempo rubato,” Until he came along, no one had seriously attempted to find a symbol for rubato, that most elusive of all the dimensions of musical performance, and one which is so important for a correct interpretation of his works. All the other dimensions – pitch, duration, dynamics, tone-quality – had developed their symbols in a very clear way within the traditional system of staff notation. But rubato was too esoteric to be captured.

Of course Walker then goes on to capture it perfectly in words – that double-stroke, first setting up a challenge as insuperable and then handily meeting it – is one of the intense little joys of this trilogy. You get used to him doing it.

He starts off his story with Liszt the young piano sensation, inspired by the weird, otherworldly genius of violin prodigy Paganini (Walker’s portrait of that poor melodramatic syphilis-raddled figure is perfect and terrifying), inspiring others with his own theatricality and dazzling technique, eventually growing so impatient with his chosen discipline that he found it necessary to substantially remake it in his own image. The young Liszt traveled extensively, giving some of the first things a modern audience would recognize as ‘concerts,’ and drawing near-universal admiration – including from the innumerable women who found his aquiline good looks and overpowering musical talent an extremely intoxicating combination. Walker gives as full an account of all these paramours (including the disastrous Countess Marie d’Agoult) and their various outbursts and offspring, and if the reader has a hard time keeping them straight, well, it’s likely Liszt did too.

The virtuoso years included trips everywhere – Switzerland, Italy, Russia (Czar Nicholas I’s gift of two performing bears was graciously accepted, but, mercifully, the bears themselves remained behind in Moscow), Prague, Leipzig – and of course London, where great heaping crowds of theatergoers were spellbound by his performances.

The traveling life eventually wore on Liszt, and, seeking a more stable environment in which to work and compose, he turned his eyes to that city with which he’s now most closely associated, Weimar. Walker everywhere in his trilogy sets himself the task of dispelling the myths and legends that have accrued around Liszt in the last 150 years, and he recognizes that Weimar is the epicenter of quite a bit of that mythologizing:

Had Liszt known of the trials and tribulations that lay in wait for him in Weimar, the chances are that he would have given the place a very wide berth. This may come as a surprise to those whose view of Liszt is formed by popular legend. His Weimar years, after all, are commonly supposed to have crowned a remarkable life with glory. This was the period during which he produced his major orchestral works, embarked on a career as an orchestral conductor, and began his famous masterclasses in piano playing. There is a darker side to the picture, however, and we come to understand it only when we scrutinize his life on a day-to-day basis. Liszt was too great a personality for such a small place as Weimar; he aroused envy and made enemies. The petty squabbles and malicious intrigue to which he was subjected, almost from the first day of his arrival in “the Athens of the North,” gradually wore him down and eventually forced his resignation. They produced the sorry spectacle of a giant in Lilliput.

These fascinating years are given in full detail (in my opinion, The Weimar Years as a stand-alone volume is one of the finest exercises in biography – and certainly musical biography – ever performed in English), from Liszt’s life with his mistress Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein to his dealings with the city’s ruling family, Grand Duke Carl Friedrich, the formidable Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and the Grand Duke Apparent, the kindly bumpkin Carl Alexander.

But Walker’s judgements are almost always excruciatingly correct, and he’s right to characterize the trouble between Liszt and Weimar as one of scale. Even from youth, Liszt was a grand figure, larger than life in all the best Romantic ways, and he chaffed constantly in the petty court-gossip circles of his adopted home (dealing with the Wagners couldn’t have been a picnic in the Arboretum either), eventually closing down his famous masterclasses there and moving at first to Rome. But his impact on Weimar had been enormous, and after his death (the final days are recounted with great sympathy by our indefatigable biographer), Carl Alexander – now Grand Duke – offered to erect a handsome mausoleum to the composer. Liszt’s daughter Cosima made a counter-proposal: that Liszt be buried in the royal vault, which already held the remains of Goethe and Schiller. Carl Alexander of course refused (Liszt hadn’t even been German, after all), and in his account Warner gives one of his great little asides:

Today the entire family of the once-powerful house of Sachsen-Weimar lie in leaden caskets in the royal vault. This family, whose patronage of the arts did more than anything else to lift Weimar out of petty provincialism and make of it a centre for European culture, succeeded so completely in its noble aim as to obscure its own remembrance. And this becomes painfully evident the moment one visits the royal chapel in the Weimar churchyard and descends the spiral steps into the burial chamber beneath. The coffins of Sachsen-Weimar have been pushed aside into dark recesses, where they jostle for space beneath crumbling arches, while those of the two literary giants whom Carl August brought to his city lie on a raised dais in the centre of the chamber, illuminated both day and night as the world files past in homage. It is not for artists to complain about this reverence of genius, but the extent to which the patrons have become the patronized would require a Goethe to explain the paradox.

At one point in this enormously entertaining trilogy, Walker is writing about the possibilities that Chopin heavily influenced some of Liszt’s compositions (a possibility Chopin was known to murmur on more than one occasion) and offers a caution:

This topic of influence may be a paradise for historians, but it is full of pitfalls for those who do not now their Liszt in toto.

And that’s the best part of this huge work – you know almost from the first, almost from that virtuoso opening chapter settling the hash of every biography that’s come before – that you’re in the hands of someone who knows his Liszt in toto. It’s a wonderful feeling. In fact, it’s pretty much the only feeling that can carry you so effortlessly through a work this long and detailed. And its ultimately about more than knowledge – it’s about understanding. Walker achieves an almost one-to-one understanding of Liszt, so that when he assesses the place of his subject in musical history, the reader can only nod:

Whatever else the world may debate about his life and work, one thing is generally conceded: Liszt was the first modern pianist. The technical “breakthrough” he achieved during the 1830s and ‘40s was without precedent in the history of the piano. All subsequent schools were branches of his tree. Rubenstein, Busoni, Paderewski, Godowsky, and Rachmaninoff – all those pianists who together formed what historians later dubbed “the golden age of piano playing” - would be unthinkable without Liszt. It was not that they copied his style; that was inimitable. Nor did they enjoy close personal contact with him; not one of them was his pupil. Liszt’s influence went deeper than that. It had to do with his unique ability to solve technical problems. Liszt is to piano playing what Euclid is to geometry. Pianists turn to his music in order to discover the natural laws governing the keyboard. It is impossible for a modern pianist to keep Liszt out of his playing - out of his biceps, his forearms, his fingers – even though he may not know that Liszt is there…

May 2010 in Open Letters Monthly!

When it comes to weather, you never know what to expect from May. The last bitter vestiges of winter linger in its mornings, the first decadent tastes of summer can be scented in its high afternoons, and its twilights are little hours of Eden that come from no season at all. Likewise temperaments, in May: people don’t know whether to feel the crabbed reserve of the cold months or the wanton happiness of the warm ones. And so, at least this time, with periodicals! The new issue of Open Letters is here, and it boasts our greatest variety yet: essays about video games jostle with tales of 19th century New York murder; a review of Peter Carey’s new novel sits side-by-side with the ranking of five new perfumes; 1960s radical “Mad Bomber” Melville is here, but so is 1860s critic John Ruskin; two such different novelists as Muriel Spark and Joseph Conrad vie for your attention; zombies, Olympian gods, and the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter all make appearances. And topping the issue off we have a poem from Nate Pritts, a haunting cover image from Catherine Bourassa-Hebert, and an interview with the artist. So click on over and enjoy the bounty of early Spring (and as usual, if you read something you like, feel free to use that “Donate” button! Early Springs are expensive, after all)

In the Penny Press! The Atlantic Fiction Issue 2010!

The Atlantic Fiction Supplement is here again, and the trouble once again starts right away. It doesn’t seem like I’ve had a full year to recover from the numerous outrages of the previous Fiction Supplement, but then again, I was hoping this new one wouldn’t have any outrages.

Instead, it’s chock-full of them, starting with the cover by Marcos Chin, an image of two readers: she’s got an electronic reader! He’s got an old-fashioned book! He’s got a little dog! She’s got a big dog! They’re both so absorbed they don’t realize they’re about to turn a corner and run into each other! I’m sure Chin’s underlying idea (beyond simply riffing on the motif of the covers of the last twenty New Yorker Fiction Issues) is that the delivery device of reading, be it paper or electronic, is largely irrelevant: either way, you still get absorbed, and either way, you still leave yourself open to serendipity. But the message any dedicated reader can take from the cover is very different: that reading is only a prelude, that it’s all about display, that it can’t ever be a goal in itself.

That would fit with this issue, in which there’s far more display than substance. It’s difficult to know how much of this is due to the Atlantic’s ongoing unholy alliance with the Canadian arts festival Illuminato, although surely some of it is; even the colorful full-page insert ads for the festival littered throughout this issue don’t really take pains to hide the fact that books and literature aren’t anywhere near the point of their hoopla (as far as I can tell, John Malkovich is). And the one little sop to reading and literature that’s included in those ads only increases frustration levels.

The offending item is an ad for a seminar on “Fiction in the Age of E-Books,” in which, we’re told, “four eminent writers join the deputy editor of The Atlantic to examine the most revolutionary development affecting literature today: the advent of the e-book. What does this mean for the future of literature? Is this the death knell of print or the start of something new and possibly better?”

Leaving aside the fact that the last question is misleading (it could easily be both at the same time), the fact is, if e-readers do turn out to be bad for literature, they’ll have had lots of help from The Atlantic. In the publisher’s note that starts off this issue, Jay Lauf informs us:

… and this year we have launched a direct-to-Kindle fiction series with Amazon.com, offering two new stories from both celebrated authors and emerging talents to Kindle users each month.

And non-Kindle users, you automatically ask? Well, they don’t get to see those two stories a month; they’re more effectively barred than was any hopeful peasant from a 12th century monastery library. So much for the dawn of something new and possibly better.

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Still, for the purposes of simple concentration, all this could be overlooked if the issue’s actual contents were worth the year-long wait. If you’ll recall, there were gems amidst the garbage last time around, especially “The Laugh” by Tea Obreht. It’s annoying but still possible to simply skip the exclusionary promises and the innumerable Canadian tourism ads if you’re drawn on by the promise of some really good short fiction.

Alas, that’s a mostly empty promise. There are seven short stories in this issue – a mere pittance compared to the amount that The Atlantic could be publishing and, I presume, once again a tiny fraction of the submissions they got for this issue, but still a hefty amount for most people to read in an afternoon. They could satisfy, if they were uniformly as good as a year-long wait would imply. But instead, they’re mostly place-holding exercises or turgid first drafts, so your year-long wait is rewarded by an afternoon of irritated sighs and angry page-flipping. Maybe it’ll all be easier on an e-reader.

The process can be speeded up by immediately discarding the deadweight. Since I actually read every one of these things from start to finish, I can help with that. For instance, there’s “The Silence,” an obligatory contribution by T.C. Boyle about a man and his insufferable wife at a vow-of-silence retreat in the desert. The thing is told in bobtailed little chunks, and in the first one of these, the man sees a dragonfly and longs to talk about it – a dragonfly, a creature of ponds and swamps, right there in the heart of the desert! And his wife shortly encounters a giant tarantula – right there on her bed! Boyle’s actual point of all this seems to be, “hey, what would happen if people took a vow of silence but then all this STUFF happened that they really, really wanted to talk about?” Yeesh. And this guy’s the headliner.

So you can entirely skip that one, and you can do likewise with “Bone Hinge” by Katie Williams – that’s what I was tempted to do, the instant I learned it was about two young women who are physically joined at the hip. And not at all alike, personality-wise. And who were born during a thunderstorm. This is called lazy writing, and it can be – it must be – ignored without compunction by busy people who don’t have enough time for all the reading they want to do.

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The other five stories have slightly more merit, although there are no knockout pieces like “The Laugh” (Obreht’s book is projected to appear in 2011). Ryan Mecklenburg’s “Hopefulness” is a fairly good portrait of a man driven (by his insufferable wife) to confront the emasculation of suburbia; “The Landscape of Pleasure” by Amanda Briggs, about a man’s daughter having a quick, meaningless fling with one of his friends (the man’s insufferable wife has a breakdown when she finds out), is a fairly skillfully atmospheric piece marred by a cheap, chintzy final line; and Stuart Nadler’s “Visiting,” about a man taking his estranged son to meet the grandfather he didn’t know he had (the man lied to his son, and to his incredibly insufferable wife), has some genuine intelligence behind it but eventually degenerates into a story about how amazingly cool and adult it is to smoke. Which kind of chilled my approval, as you might expect.

The two comparative highlights were stories by Jerome Charyn and E. C. Osondu. – but the stress is on ‘comparative.’ Not that either of these stories is bad. Charyn’s, “Lorelei,” is about a professional gigolo/grifter who returns home after decades and meets the girl who first initiated him into the practice of serial fakery, and Osondu’s is about a pure-hearted young man who’s briefly imprisoned because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both have interesting dialogue, professionally-deployed timing, and no insufferable wives as far as the eye can see (although the poor damaged siren of the former’s title bitterly regrets missing her chance to be one). Either story would have stood out a country mile in, say, an average issue of The New Yorker. The only reason they carry the slight whiff of disappointment in this context is because I, for one, absolutely refuse to believe there weren’t far stronger candidates among the thousands of hopefuls for their spots in this annual issue.

Perhaps some of those hopefuls might have got that shot, except that once again the Atlantic editors have seen fit to put three pieces of nonfiction in their special fiction issue. Two of these are so meaningless as to be almost contemptible: there’s an interview with notable curmudgeon Paul Theroux in which he’s forcibly made to say he has no objections, no real objections, no real objections at all to electronic reading devices (if an exclusive story of his doesn’t appear on the Kindle within the year, I’m the Shah of Persia), and there’s a little excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates that’s so passive-aggressively egotistical it’s virtually incomprehensible (and the point of it anyway seems to be that it deals with the fact that Oates’ famously dead husband was the editorial force behind The Ontario Review, raising once again the specter of Canadian dictation).

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Of more interest – and certainly of more topicality, given how many of this issue’s authors are first-timers – is Richard Bausch’s essay on the glut of ‘how to’ books about novel-writing.

Bausch is a good writer, but boy, can he be a dense one. He upbraids the young generation of would-be novelists who buy and read these how-to manuals on novel-writing, praising the pure mission of literature and urging them to praise it too:

My advice? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write. And wanting to write is so much more than a pose. To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most – suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another – are defeated.

All fine sentiments, but the denseness-factor crops up right away to derail the moral outrage:

This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines. Riches. Nothing to be skipped over in the name of some misguided intellectual social-climbing.

I think it was one of the Gabor sisters who once commented that the only important kind of social climbing was done from lower tax brackets to higher ones, and it would to cute that Bausch doesn’t seem to know this – if writing weren’t his career (and if he shouldn’t damn well have known it before he started writing this particular essay). Of course today’s crop of young would-be novelists are going to ignore the rich literary heritage Bausch is talking about here – and they won’t be ignoring it in a desire for ‘intellectual social climbing.’ They’ll be after good old-fashioned money. The fact that Bausch either doesn’t know who Harlan Coben is (or the five dozen similar authors whose works make up the stock-in-trade of every big English-language bookstore in the country) or thinks he doesn’t look on what he does as a job … well, it goes a long way toward explaining the rather steep difference between Coben’s bank account and Bausch’s. God bless Bausch for being a true believer, but the buyers of those how-to manuals want Coben’s bank account. They’d tell the Muses to go jump in a lake, if they knew who the Muses were.

With ‘special’ fiction issues like this one, I feel like those buyers are one step closer to their goal. I’ll have to hope that some real, bright talent shows up in next year’s issue, to demonstrate the desperate, valiant, shopworn truth of Bausch’s point.

Relativism Run Rampant in the Penny Press!

Keith Miller wrote a review last week in the TLS that was, as far as I can recall, utterly unique in the annals of that venerable publication. It was a review of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, but that’s not the unique part; Shields’ idiotic little collage was reviewed everywhere. No, the unique part was that Miller’s review was utterly free of actual aesthetic judgement. Right there in the TLS, in precincts long known for their fiercely opinionated pronouncements on all things literary, Miller turned in a piece that was to book reviewing what abstract painting is to photography. A lazy, sniveling cop-out, in other words.

Shields, as some of you will know, composed his little book of bits and pieces from the works of other people, and he shaped it all for the purpose of making the latest point that’s obsessed his sadly deteriorated mind: that literary ownership is a bogeyman of the 20th (or even – shudder – the 19th) century, that dutiful attribution is for sissies, and that only a mix-tape of memoir and meta-fiction mini-bursts has any chance of coping with The World 2.0. I’ve come across this mulish laziness before, many times (people sententiously proclaiming that the only literature they need to know is that written by their personal friends, etc.), and it never fails to both sadden me (because such morons literally have no idea what they’re missing) and enrage me (because if you’re lazy you should just admit it and slink away, not take pride in it –or worse, try to argue that it’s not actually laziness). And I guess I just count on the TLS being saddened and enraged by pretty much the same things that sadden and enrage me. It’s a deal we’ve mostly observed for half a century, and I’ve grown quite comfortable with it.

Not this time, however. Keith Miller – a TLS regular and a very intelligent writer, regardless – starts off his piece promisingly enough, referring to Shields as “involved with the McSweeney’s axis,"  but the glimmers of hope fade pretty quickly after that. Bad enough he calls Shields’ vile,  racist book Black Planet “engaging, and, in some ways, brave” – I could swallow such a mischaracterization if it were just a small detour on the road to roasting Reality Hunger, but what follows is as mysterious as anything I’ve read in the TLS. Miller puts the pieces of a review in place, but he refuses to assemble them.

“You may or may not share Shields’s skepticism about the possibilities of the novel,” he writes.

“You may agree that we live in unprecedentedly complicated times,” he writes.

“You may accept the hip hop/collage model,” he writes, “or you may find it constraining in its own way.”

“You may feel that the issues of authorship and collaboration which Reality Hunger both debates and embodies are by no means settled,” he writes.

And there’s the concluding line of his piece:

“But Reality Hunger has little to say about style except to repeat the old macho-modernist canard that it’s something you must get beyond before you can say what you’ve got to say. You might feel you have to disagree with that, too.”

In professional circles, this is known as giving a book a pass, and I can scarcely recall a time when it was last done in the TLS. It’s not that Miller’s piece is bad – it isn’t, I doubt it could be. Like I said, he’s a reliably talented writer who always has thought-provoking things to say, as in this essay when he digresses briefly about David Foster Wallace:

This sense of basic things overlooked in the scrabble to explore elaborate ones is to be found even in the prodigiously clever and tirelessly humane Foster Wallace, whose endless, and rigorous, wrangling with himself and his characters’ selves yields, at times, an unexpected, slightly creepy flavour, a ghostly aftertaste of a judgemental, impatient, reactionary man.

That’s good, but it says very little about David Shields except obliquely. Nothing in this piece speaks directly to the two central rotten tenets of Reality Hunger: its inherent contention that you can’t find ‘reality’ in novels, and its equally obnoxious implication that if you did find it, plagiarizing it wouldn’t constitute a moral wrong. Nothing Miller writes addresses the core boring reality behind Reality Hunger, which is that Shields’ powers of concentration have addled (Beer? Pot? Video games? Middle age?) to the point where he won’t make himself pay attention to anything. Not to anything long and complicated, but to anything at all. The book is a hummingbird’s manifesto, a cretin’s credo of codified sloth, and dammit, I expect the TLS to say that, not dance around the issue with ‘you mays’ and ‘you mights.’

Fortunately, we have recourse to life-saving alternatives. When the subject is contemporary American fiction (and for all the ostentatious breadth of his plagiarized sources, Shields is basically writing about contemporary American fiction; given how deeply a pantywaist like Jonathan Franzen bores him, it’s extremely unlikely Shields has ever even heard of Anthony Trollope, and he’d probably besoil his britches if he so much as caught sight of Clarissa), especially contemporary American fiction, we can always turn to the two best critics of that genre working today, New York magazine’s Sam Anderson, and Open Letters Monthly’s own Sam Sacks. These two can be relied upon, not only to invariably find the important things to write about, but to write about the important parts of those things (and it doesn't hurt that they’ve both got what John Adams referred to as a “remarkable felicity of expression”). Anderson is the more ruthless of the two, almost always eviscerating his subject instead of merely killing it. His take on Shields:

The book’s supposed profundities – that the line between fiction and reality is unclear, that genres an be more powerful when mixed, that narrative often imposes a simplistic order on the chaos of actual life – are, to anyone who’s ever thought seriously about any of these issues, a bunch of remedial Grade-A head-slappers. And yet Shields intones them with the air of a holy man whispering the final secret of the universe from his mountaintop.

Sacks is usually more magisterial, but that can make the final summation, when it comes, all the more damning:

Obviously Mr. Shields is perfectly capable of exercising the atrophied part of his mind that shuts down when confronted by traditional books; it takes a curious self-absorption to assume that the burden of change rests with everybody else. And ultimately, despite the interesting provocations in "Reality Hunger," that's the impression it leaves: Mr. Shields is espousing a movement that would valorize his own laziness. He'd like literature, and its millions of faithful followers, to conform to his own private version of reality.

Good stuff. Glad I can read it somewhere.

Duchess!

Our book today is Susan Holloway Scott’s 2006 historical novel Duchess, not to be confused with Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana, about the Duchess of Devonshire, which was retitled The Duchess to coincide with its movie version. Scott’s Duchess is Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, who’s never had a big-budget movie made about her, although nobody who’s ever seen Susan Hampshire’s magnificent turn as the character in the BBC’s 1969 production The Churchills will ever forget it (if this were Stevesees, I'd write up a storm about that mini-series, so good, so well done). It’s hard to know who a modern casting director would find to play Sarah – we only know the actress would be really, really skinny. A walking skeleton was found to play Georgiana, after all, and even more hilariously, another walking skeleton was recently cast to play a young Queen Victoria, who was never in her life anything but butterball-plump.

Not that it matters: who needs movies when there are books? And this is a fine, fun book – Scott has inconspicuously mined the historical sources (there are fewer factual errors in this novel about the age of Queen Anne than I found in the last history of the period I read) and transmuted them into a narrative bursting with life.

One life in particular, of course, that of Sarah Jennings, who came from an old, well-born family late of Somersetshire and by the 17th century long based in Hertfordshire. She and her sister Frances were both attached to the court of the Duke and Duchess of York while Charles II was on the throne and careers were being made. In 1675 Sarah was 15 and energetically dancing with the court’s brightest rising star, the young and stunningly handsome army officer John Churchill, who in Scott's passage semi-teasingly questions how many of her motives for serving the Duchess of York are in fact selfish:

Careful, I thought, careful, careful. “I’m loyal to my mistress, Colonel, just as I believe you should be loyal towards your master, the Duke of York.”
He smiled, pleased, I think, by what I’d said. “You’re scolding me, Miss Jennings.”
“If you need scolding, then I shall do it,” I said warmly. “The duchess has been very generous in her kindnesses to me.”
“Nothing in Whitehall is given for free,” he said. “You must have worked hard to earn that kindness.”
“I have,” I said, “for isn’t that one of the purposes of coming to court? To make oneself agreeable to those in high places, so that they will be agreeable and obliging in return?”
He laughed. “You’re an ambitious lass.”
I didn’t join his amusement. “I AM ambitious,” I said. “As are you, Colonel Churchill.”
“True enough.” His laugh had changed to a thoughtful smile: another judgment, and I passed.

Sarah’s most famous descendant, 20th century Prime Minister Winston, in his epic biography of her husband, aptly summarizes her with the line “she owned, when roused, the temper of the devil.” This is putting it mildly – Sarah Jennings was a brash, opinionated, omnivorously pugnacious woman, and that was before she became Sarah Churchill, the first noblewoman in the land. She bristled like a porcupine, and the wonder is that she never turned on her famous husband. “It was a case of love, not at first sight, but at first recognition,” Sir Winston wrote. “It lasted for ever; neither one of them thenceforward loved anyone else in their whole lives” … and then the end-note expected by anybody who’s ever read anything about her, “though Sarah hated many.”

The most famous and problematic person she both hated and loved was the woman who eventually became Queen: poor rheumatic Anne, who had for most of her life shared a sisterly intimacy with Sarah. Both of them were smarter than outsiders usually estimated, and both of them loved sharp, elbow-throwing humor. Anne called her “Mrs. Freeman,” and she called Anne “Mrs. Morley” – in part in knowing testimony to their belief that they’d have been fast friends even if they’d met as commoners, that their hearts were in sympathy regardless of titles.

Of course that sympathy could be strained, as when Sarah’s husband was off fighting the French – campaigns that cost Anne’s government heaps of money, as her advisers were forever telling her:

“Oh bah, Morley, don’t be so timid,” I said with disgust. “It’s a different tale when the messengers bring word of another victory. Then you order the church bells rung and the guns fired from the Tower to celebrate the new glory that’s come to your reign. You can’t have that without paying the piper.”
She sighed again. “I’ve never said the victories have not been appreciated. It’s only that Mr. Harley and the others believe there might be ways to accomplish the same good without spending so very much.”
“Oh, I see!” I snapped my fingers together. “We’ll pay for gunpowder with fairy dust, and sell pippins for cannon. Is there any wonder that Lord Marlborough writes to me constantly of quitting the army altogether and retiring to St. Albans?”
“I won’t allow it,” the queen said, aghast.
“John would indeed quit the army, and resign his commissions,” I said, my voice rising with emotion. “and so would I retire, and join him in the country. After all the service we have given, there’s only so much we can bear.”
The queen’s face crumpled. “Oh, Mrs. Freeman, don’t speak so, I beg of you! You know you are still my dearest friend! Why must you insist that I agree with you in all matters? Why can’t I be permitted to hold my own counsel, and you yours, the way you once did?”
I rose from my chair, unable to listen to any more. “I’ll be the same Mrs. Freeman when you can manage to be the same Mrs. Morley.”

The story of a woman who could behave so to a queen (and Scott is only nominally inventing, for this and many other such scenes) is well worth a novel or two, and this one will stand as the best of the generation. Now if only some enterprising soul, some modern Winston perhaps, would embark on the 800-page straight-up biography this infuriating woman deserves ….