DOES MUSIC REFLECT THE COMPOSER’S LIFE?

Overview:

Does trauma correlate with a distinctive kind of music?  

    -- Tchaikovsky, Beethoven

Traumas that don’t show up in music -- Handel, Schubert

Serious breakdowns-- Schumann, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff

Professionals who ride it out-- Bach, Haydn, Brahms, Debussy

Smooth sailing all the way-- Liszt, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky

Opera composers: the plot sets the music

         -- troubled: Mozart, von Weber, Wagner

         -- smooth: Rossini, Verdi, Puccini

         -- I Pagliacci: the crying clown

         -- opera failures

Bottom line: writing program music about oneself -- Richard Strauss

It is widely believed that music reflects life. Intensely traumatic events and life crises inspired such-and-such piece of music. Tchaikovsky writes his Symphony Pathétique transmuting his anguish over homosexual scandal and collapsing relationships into a beautiful testimonial before he kills himself. Beethoven battles through deafness to create his ringing notes of musical heroism. Chopin, the romantic sufferer, distills bitter experience into delicate flowers of musical sensitivity. 

Does this really explain how music composers work? Do moments of inspiration come from the emotional peaks and troughs of one’s extra-musical life? To answer such questions, we need comparisons: comparisons of  what individual composers composed at different points in their lives; and comparisons among different composers to see if they all reacted to crises in the same way.

Perhaps we will find that some types of composers-- the most inspired of all?  were those who built their greatest compositions out of their strongest personal emotions. Or perhaps, musicians live most intensely inside their profession, their metier of techniques for making new music within their network of predecessors, peers and rivals. In this case, we may find great musicians are those who have the techniques for riding out whatever befalls them in their personal life.

Does trauma correlate with a distinctive kind of music? Tchaikovsky

Line up the life-traumas with the dates they happened, vis-à-vis when the music was created. Tchaikovsky was sent off to boarding school when he was 10, and stayed 9 years in an all-boys atmosphere. One should not judge this experience by 21st-century standards; children often left home for training and career (Napoleon was sent off to military academy when he was 10.) He was happy and popular with the other boys, entertaining them with music. Tchaikovsky’s mother died when he was 14, reducing still further feminine presence in his life. As in English boarding schools of the same time, male friendships flowered into homosexual affairs. Although commentators have considered this a long-festering social conflict and the fundamental trauma in Tchaikovsky’s life, recently discovered letters show he got over whatever personal and public uneasiness he had about his homosexuality. When he was 37, an infatuated student declared her love and he agreed to marry her -- perhaps to change his bachelor lifestyle to a conventionally respectable home as he became professionally successful.  The marriage was a disaster and lasted only a few weeks. Tchaikovsky was temporarily very upset, but his music creation soon picked up where he left off. Tchaikovsky left his wife and embarked on a series of European sojourns; as a result he became very up-to-date with European concert music, and well-known to its audiences. Fame came to Tchaikovsky as much from Europe as in Russia.

Tchaikovsky’s music career was a mix of successes and failures. He produced his first opus at age 26-- no child prodigy-- and had his first big success at 36. He wrote 11 operas, starting early and continuing late; only 2 of them successful, starting with Eugene Onegin (from Pushkin’s famous poem) at age 38. As his reputation grew, he got commissions for the Czar’s ceremonies, including the instantly popular 1812 Overture (age 40). His biggest success was in ballet, which Tchaikovsky elevated to a field for major musical compositions by writing longer, thematically-connected scores with modern orchestration. Swan Lake came first, in 1876 (although early performances were not well received because of poor settings and choreography); Sleeping  Beauty (1889) and The Nutcracker (1892) near the end of his life. By that time, Russian ballet dancers were becoming the hot thing in Europe, and Diaghilev (Tchaikovsky’s young admirer) would soon launch Russian ballet and Russian music in Paris on their pizzaz.

Tchaikovsky was an all-round professional, writing every kind of music. He was a hard worker, revizing pieces sometimes over a period of 20 years. Much was large-scale: six symphonies (the successful ones were the last three, after his career take-off around age 37); three piano concertos, similarly spaced across the decades. Like many composers, he started by transcribing famous works (from piano into orchestration or vice versa); it was his apprenticeship with dozens of composers, starting with Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt in his early 20s, and he was still at it with Mozart transcriptions in his late 40s, perhaps to get himself in the mood for his greatest ballets. If we want the main traits of his personality, it would be dedication, incessant hard work, and ambition. He became a loner, traveling in the music world, and withdrawing to compose in solitude. Like those who produce a large amount of work, some of it was repetitive, hurriedly written, and un-memorable. Perhaps he discovered, as he went along, that thorough working-over makes inspirational sound exquisite.

Tchaikovsky’s music is famously sweet, but in person he was irascible. His reviews and correspondence are full of  caustic evaluations of other composers (harsh swipes at Liszt, Wagner, and even Brahms) as well as ideological tussles with the Russian nationalist composers. Tchaikovsky is almost exactly the same age as Mussorgsky, and they criticized each other’s work. Tchaikovsky wrote: “Mussorgsky’s music I whole-heartedly send to the Devil; it is the cheapest, the vilest of parodies of music!” Mussorgsky’s break-out came just before Tchaikovsky’s, although the latter would quickly take the lead with his larger and more successful output.

In fact, Tchaikovsky was very well sponsored in the Russian music establishment, just then coming into being. He was in the first cohort of students when a Music Conservatory was established in St. Petersburg (1862-5), and he was one of the first teachers when the Moscow Conservatory was created (Tchaikovsky taught there 12 years, until age 38). His caustic comments express his professional ambition, measuring himself against the European greats, and sucessfully struggling with the Russian nationalist movement to blend European techniques of instrumentation and complex chordal harmonies with Russian literature and folklore. Despite the image of Tchaikovsky as a precious wimp, he was a fighter for his creative trajectory, unintimidated by rivals. There is a seeming contradiction between his sharp tongue and the sweetness and sheer pleasure of his music; but he is far from the only creative talent (or stage performer) whose frontstage performance has a different tone than their backstage professional life.

Tchaikovsky went through a period of stage-fright, when he avoided conducting. But after an last-minute fill-in for a colleague at the Bolshoi in Moscow, Tchaikovsky found he could conduct successfully, and at age 47 began a series of conducting tours in Europe, England, and the U.S. that continued until he died.

Now for the “tragic” ending. Did his life end in a culmination of traumas? He premiered his alleged open-heart emotional surgery, Symphony Pathétique, in October 1893; got a mixed reaction from the audience; drank tainted water and died in a cholera epidemic 9 days later. Suicide was rumored. What was the trauma? On the negative side, a few years earlier a rich widow who had long supported him with a monthly allowance went bankrupt, cutting off the stipend. Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky was an international concert star, composing at the top of his game. His most successful ballets, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker were produced in 1889 and 1892; his most successful opera, Queen of Spades (another Pushkin adaptation) in 1890. His greatest symphony (no. 6, Pathétique) was begun in February 1893 and premiered 8 months later. Any retrospective melodrama making him into a Russian Oscar Wilde (whose downfall would come in 1895) is biographical fiction. Tchaikovsky was 53 when he died, only 3 years younger than Beethoven; for that historic period, it was not an early death.

Do times of anguish produce the most poignantly emotional music? Not in Tchaikovsky’s case. Take a look at some characteristic passages, first “The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker, bars 1-12; then Symphony Pathétique bars 1-16.

Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy  begins with a plunking drone-- E in double octaves in the bass clef, alternating with a series of chromatic chords above. It is a bouncy tune: mostly tonic/subdominant, with lush-sounding minor 6th and diminished chords.

(Bars 1-4): E minor - A minor 6th - E diminished  - A diminished - E minor - A minor diminished - E minor - A minor 6.

Similarly when the tune starts on E minor in the high treble octave (bars 5-8, repeated in bars 9-12). The chords become increasingly complicated: E 7th with a flatted 9th in bar 6; D sharp diminished chord over a dissonant bass E (bar 7), the dissonance less painful because separated by 2 octaves; similarly with widely spaced dissonances in bars 10 and 12.  The effect is a slightly weird sound, but light, a melodic pattern for little fairy feet.

 

Symphony Pathétique  has a more continously flowing melody, but similar kinds of chords. It it titled in B Minor but it starts in the related major key. The tone center is mostly in D, varied chromatically with D diminished, D 7th with flatted 9th; the subdominant G is often given as lush G 6th but also dissonant G 6-4 and G augmented 5+ (low B over high B sharp); such chords are found in bars 5-8 and increasingly in bars 13-16. The result is a pleasant high-soaring melody with picquant chords underneath, quickly resolving and ephemerally clashing again. The same technique used to depict the children’s Christmas fairy is put to use for a more yearning tone. 

Before he began this symphony, Tchaikovsky had abandoned another symphony, fearing he had dried up; but after a few months break, he wrote the first movement of his new symphony in 4 days. The last movement takes a different tone, and the finale trails off into silence-- what alarmed his audience and gave it the name Pathétique. The pathos was not in Tchaikovsky’s life; if anything, it was a musical worry about his music.

Beethoven

Lining up Beethoven’s life problems with the sequence of his music, we get: First, childhood stress. His father, a court musician in Bonn at the Archbishop’s court (similar to Mozart’s father in Salzburg), touts Ludwig as a child prodigy and takes him on tours for several years from age 7, none too successfully. The father was apparently harsh and a drunkard.  Ludwig quickly becomes expert at the organ, harpsichord, piano, and viola and plays in the  court orchestra by age 11. At any rate, young Beethoven has Mozart as an ambitious model, and makes several trips to Vienna to meet him and Haydn and take lessons. He grows up wild and uncouth: stocky, pock-marked, hairy in an era of curled wigs, untidy. Viennese society puts up with him for his music, but his romantic life suffers: he pursued a number of his female pupils, but was repeatedly rejected and never married. (Für Elise was written for one of them.) Perhaps because his way of life was too well-known: unable to keep servants, he changed lodgings 44 times during his 35 years in Vienna. A workaholic, he would stay up for nights on end while composing, leaving meals untouched outside his door. We can add sexual frustration to his problems.

Moving permanently to Vienna at age 21 (1792), he quickly makes his reputation and acquires aristocratic patrons playing in their palaces. Within a year, he demolishes a local favourite in a piano duel, astounding him with high-speed ranging across the keyboard and dazzling improvisations. Beethoven comes along at just the time the piano is being made a bigger and heavier instrument, allowing resonances in the low notes that become one of his trademark sounds. Even before arriving in Vienna, at 18 Beethoven was frequenting piano makers and eagerly encouraging their improvements. He and the new technology of music production drive each other.

From 1792 to 1802 (age 21-31) Beethoven produces some of his most famous piano music (Sonata Pathétique 1798, Moonlight Sonata 1801), and his first two symphonies (1800, 1802). His music is published since age 24; at 25 he makes a concert tour of German cities. It is also the time when Viennese connoiseurs are promoting repertory concerts-- instead of the existing custom of writing new music for each occasion, now music lovers revive the work of Bach and Handel. For the first time, the concept arises that composers can be a “genius” -- painters held that esteem since Michaelangelo -- and Beethoven was the first to be tagged with that label. Composers of immortal music that will join the “classics” are among us right now-- (poor Mozart, he came along a little too soon). Concert halls developed rivaling the previously dominant opera house. Beethoven’s reputation expands from aristocratic salons to a new, middle-class audience who treats music with awed respect; gone are the days when audiences gossiped and strolled during the performance. Perhaps Beethoven’s reputation for wildness and eccentricity grew in tandem with the new cult of the living genius: where older musicians like Haydn still wore wigs and knee-breeches, Beethoven lets his hair grow long and wild (his early portraits show it shorter). Beethoven resembles the rock star of the 1960s.

Nor should we overlook the political events of this period. The French Revolution broke out in 1789 and turned violent by 1793-4, guillotining aristocrats and dissidents. Austria and the German states were at war with France  repeatedly through 1800, the French reaching the gates of Vienna in that year before a treaty was made. Again in 1805 and 1809 the Austrian army was beaten by Napoleon. After Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in 1812, the Austrians were in the coalition that ended his rule in 1814 and again in 1815. Like many others, Beethoven was an early enthusiast for the French Revolution, and some of the styles he adopted-- wearing your own hair, dressing in trousers-- came from revolutionary France. But he had the good sense to get along with his aristocratic Austrian patrons. One could add that the cult of music in Vienna was a way to rise above the (for them) disastrous political situation-- not too dissimilar to hunkering down at home listening to music during the coronavirus epidemic.  And Vienna became the undisputed center of musical innovation, Paris and Italy knocked out temporarily by political upheavals and war. At any rate, Beethoven’s radical sympathies played into his pride as a living genius. A characteristic incident: in 1812 Beethoven and Goethe were walking in a park when the Austrian Empress surrounded by Dukes approached. Goethe was the idol of the literary world, but he took off his hat, moved out of the way and bowed, while Beethoven kept walking straight ahead-- the royals greeting him cordially and dividing to let him through. Afterwards, he told Goethe: They should make way for us, not us for them. [Goulding 132] The new era of celebrities was at hand; and Beethoven knew it.

The big catastrophe was his deafness. By 1798 he was having trouble hearing, and in 1801 he was very alarmed. In 1802 he was totally deaf and doctors told him there was no chance of recovery. Beethoven wrote that he expected to die soon. Nevertheless, he was soon back at work. From now on, people had to communicate with him by written notes, to which he would reply vocally. How could he compose music if he couldn’t hear it? One can hear inner sounds, in the same way that everyone can have a silent conversation with oneself; you can sing a favorite tune to yourself inside your throat and head. In addition, professional musicians learn to read music-- not just the way a piano player can read the score while playing it, but without any instrument at all: if you look at a piece of sheet music and are familiar with the notation, you can in effect “play the music in your head.” *

* Germans call this "Augenmusik" ["eye-music"]. Some music is said to be better on the page than hearing it (e.g. Schoenberg); sometimes vice versa.

A couple of incidents illustrate the point. A pupil (Ferdinand Ries) recalled a summer day in 1804 when they were walking in the countryside. Beethoven was “all the time humming and sometimes howling, always up and down, without singing any definite notes.” When they returned, he went immediately to the piano and spent an hour working out the fingering, for what would be his “Appassionata” sonata.  On the whole, Beethoven did not compose at the piano, but always at his writing desk; thus after he stopped performing in public (in 1814-- after playing while deaf for many years) he could still write music. His manuscripts also show a lot of crossing-out and corrections: he could see and mentally hear what he wanted and didn’t want.  Beethoven was not alone in this; most composers were capable of it.

In 1823, Beethoven met Carl Maria von Weber, who had recently had a resounding success with his opera, Der Freischütz. Beethoven greeted him effusively, shaking his hand repeatedly, “So you’re the very devil of a fellow I’ve been hearing about..”  Hearing about? He certainly kept up on the music news, and if he hadn’t seen Weber’s score he knew what innovations were making such a furor (considered to be the breakthrough to what became called “Romanticism”).

To recap: Since 1798 Beethoven was going deaf, and he was totally deaf by his traumatic moment in 1802.  What happened to his music during this time? Bear in mind that during the period of growing deafness he composed some of his most famous sonatas (including the fluidly beautiful “Moonlight sonata”). From 1802-1812 is considered his greatest creativity, including the 3rd symphony (“Eroica”) in 1803 -- notable for doubling the length of previous symphonies in the Haydn/ Mozart era (and his own 1st and 2nd symphonies), as well as for its deep, pounding beat and resonant sounds. All of his great symphonies (except the 9th) were composed in these years.  Did his deafness drive him to noise, thunderous strokes, and a new kind of emotion-laden music? But other things were at work; in the new concert halls and with the income of big audiences, the size of the orchestra could be bigger; Beethoven set in motion a trend that would be successively expanded by Berlioz, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. Beethoven evolved a symphonic style that took advantage of the big sound-- the counterpart, actually, to the deep resonances he was already exploiting with the new pianos. At the same time, he retained his light and graceful touch when he wanted it; the premiere of his 5th symphony, with its da-da-da-DUM! hammer-of-doom motif, was the same night in December 1808 as the premiere of his 6th, Pastoral Symphony, the happiest and most lilting of any composer’s. Did he personally feel happy while doing this? It is irrelevant; he knew how to do it. His 7th and 8th symphonies, short, light and exuberant, came in 1811.

The distinction between Beethoven’s music of the 1790s and the early 1800s can be overdone. To a considerable extent, he transferred his piano technique to orchestra composition, as we can see by comparing motifs from the 5th symphony [bars 1-24] with the Sonata Pathétique.  [bars 1-6]

The 5th Symphony starts with a loud but ambiguous chord-- is it E flat or C minor? (bars 1-2) Next, is it D minor or G 7th? At bar 7, we are in C minor and the previous chord was G 7th-- wait a minute, briefly it’s A flat, but (bars 8-10) definitely C minor. This is confirmed after a brief ambiguity at bar 11: the A flat is really the top note of a G 7-flatted-9th chord, becoming the dominant G 7th leading back to C minor at bar 15.

Then we alternate C minor and G 7th down to bar 18; modulating conventionally from D 7th to G, held for emphasis at bar 21. Then it’s off again, the hammer-of-doom transposed to A flat - F minor, and on through the same sequence of chords.

Sonata Pathétique is likewise in the key of C minor and modulates through a similar chord sequence. Both have the same syncopated stop-and-start rhythm-- although faster in the Sonata; both use a lot of parallel octaves, giving a heavy resonance. Both like to anchor their 7th chords in inverted position (the 3rd or 7th note at the bottom instead of the usual walking bass on the chord’s fundamental 1st note). The Sonata modulates farther and faster; both like to modulate through ambiguous-sounding diminished chords (in the 5th Symphony, these come later than the excerpt above). Both start loud, go suddenly soft-- with dramatic cresendos and diminuendos.  Composers get a lot of mileage (AKA sustained creativity) by recycling the techniques that worked well in the past into a new medium.

Biographers describe the period from 1813 onwards as Beethoven’s most personally troubled, with health, business and family problems. He spent years in litigation with relatives over custody of his dying brother’s son, Karl. Beethoven finally was awarded the boy in 1818 (perhaps feeling himself  in his 40s ready to take on the role if not of husband at least head of family). More trouble followed; Karl was rebellious (surprise!) failed his university exams, and attempted suicide. A dispute with a brother while staying at his home in the country led to Beethoven leaving in a huff in winter weather, catching a chill, and dying at age 56.  He bequeathed everything to Karl.

What effect did these down times have on his creativity? For the most part, they inhibited it; he didn’t write more fiery emotional pieces, he just didn’t get much done. In the late 1810s, he was commissioned by a favorite patron to write a choral mass for his installation as Archbishop. Beethoven didn’t get it done on time, but he decided to combine the choral music with a grand symphony -- more instruments than ever, complete with pounding kettle drums, a reversion to the style of the 5th when he was at the peak of his popularity. This was the 9th, which audiences in 1823 immediately took as Beethoven’s last testament. Still, he was getting commissions to write string quartets, a form he had not worked in since 1810.  In practical terms, this was easy, only a few parts to write, and Beethoven was himself a skilled viola player. In his deafness, did he try out sounds that it would take a century to recognize, the forebears of modern abstract music? His last quartet, finished during his terminal illness, is sometimes interpreted as a last cry of anguish and transcendence. It is hard to disentangle this from the experimenting in unknown territory Beethoven did in his waning years.

Traumas that don’t show up in music -- Handel, Schubert

At first glance, Handel seems to exemplify the trouble-free life. He produced grand and glorious music from youth to old age. Trained in north German church-style organ playing, in his early 20s he was invited to Italy where he charmed patrons with his keyboard virtuosity; out-dueling Domenico Scarlatti; meeting and collaborating with top composers such as Corelli and Vivaldi. Handel was hosted everywhere by Princes and Cardinals, and when he returned to Germany he had an abundance of offers. He took a position with the Elector of Hannover (soon to become King George I of England); while in the meantime accepted offers from London, where his reputation had preceded him.  The story that his Water Music (for a 1717 summer party on the Thames) was composed to get back into the King’s good graces, turns out to be false; he was never in disfavor and the King had the entire hour-long concert replayed three times before the night was over.

What could go wrong? In London,  Handel resided with aristocratic patrons and wrote Italian operas for the lively commercial music scene. Handel became a music entrepreneur, joining with his elite connections and other impresarios from the Continent in a series of opera companies. As music director, he hired theatres, players, singers and composers; he traveled around the courts of Europe luring away the best singers to London, where the pay was better. But England was awash in financial speculation, and in 1728 his company collapsed, its backers destroyed in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble. Handel organized a new company for Italian opera, but now there was competition from another, producing operas in English. Both suffered financially from the competition, and both companies failed, deeply in debt, in 1737.  Handel had a physical breakdown and was paralyzed by a stroke.[Harvard; Chambers] Nevertheless, he resumed his intense round of composing, revising and playing.

Did his music change with this life-threatening event? There is no discernable break. A few years earlier, Handel had already started a new line of work: producing oratorios based on biblical themes, cheaper than opera since it needed no stage sets, costumes, actors and supernumeraries. Since he already had an orchestra on hand, Handel decided to keep them playing during the intermissions, while he entertained the crowd with his famously popular organ playing. These organ concertos, produced from 1735 to 1751, were to become perennial favourites, outlasting his operas as their traditional formality came to sound stilted. (The best of Handel’s opera music is probably not lost, since he recycled earlier passages into his organ concertos.) The oratorio business continued up-and-down, some hits, some financial failures on until the time Handel went blind (at age 66), strained from incessant work by candle-light.  Nevetheless, the tone does not change. In 1742 (age 57) came his greatest hit, The Messiah (which includes music from love duets in his operas). [Cambridge] Handel continued to conduct it through his years of blindness, dying the day after his last performance in 1759, at age 74. 

In good times and bad, Handel produced the kind of music his audiences wanted: glorious, up-beat, magnificent. They resemble Handel’s own portrait, painted in 1727 at the height of prosperity: beautifully dressed, a long flowing wig, stout and happy at his keyboard. Beethoven, another expert at big, impressive sounds, said Handel was the greatest composer who ever lived. They had very different emotional lives, but their kinship was in their music.

Schubert

Schubert is a another story, much further down the social class ladder. His father ran a small elementary school. But young Franz (born 1797)  happens to live in Vienna at the height of Beethoven’s fame.  He spends five years in a boarding school for choir singers-- age 11-16. The school has its own orchestra, the students performing every night the works of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart. Schubert plays violin in the orchestra, conducts, and starts composing: his first symphonies are performed by his classmates. It is a professional apprenticeship of the most intimate kind: learning the masters’ music from every angle, and internalizing their techniques. But Schubert is no dazzling piano player and cannot follow that path to success. He teaches at his father’s school (age 16-19-- adult life started much younger in that era). Finally he quits and launches out on a life of Bohemian poverty, sponging off his circle of friends, artists and opera singers.

Schubert has been composing hundreds of songs, some of which become very popular. His friends organize coffee house evening “Schubertiades” devoted to his performances. Schubert invents the “art song,” composed in the fashion of serious music, to be sung with piano accompanyment. It becomes a very popular German specialty for middle-class home entertainment. Schubert’s ambition is higher, and he produces in many genres, including several unsuccessful attempts at opera. During this period (in 1822) he starts and abandons two movements of a new symphony (later called “the Unfinished”) where he attempts a new style. In 1824, full of enthusiasm over Beethoven’s newly performed 9th, Schubert writes his own “Great” symphony, i.e. in Beethoven’s grand style. But other than his songs, he is ignored, and after much ill health he dies in 1828 of typhus, age 31.

Schubert had a tough life, but you wouldn’t know it from his music. His songs are pretty, and as sentimental as the famous poems they are based on; there is no personal complaint in them. He rides out his troubles; his musical evenings keep him energized.

The popularity of his songs leads to retrieving his posthumous works. His “Great” Symphony is discovered by Schumann (zealous advocate of new music) and performed in 1839-- star treatment, conducted by Mendelssohn. Still later, in 1865 -- the era of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde-- the Viennese court conductor finds out an old friend of Schubert has an unfinished symphony. The famous critic Hanslick described its premiere: “When after a few introductory bars clarinet and oboe begin their sweet song in unison above the quiet murmuring of violins... the half-suppressed exclamation ‘Schubert!’ runs round the hall in a whisper.”  The secret of rediscovery is being famous in one genre, leading to searches for other work after you’ve become a classic.

Serious breakdowns-- Schumann, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff

Schumann had a lifetime of emotional problems, possibly congenital mental illness. But his melancholy (now called depression) didn’t start until age 15. Robert’s childhood was full of enthusiasms: he formed a home orchestra at age 12;  he loved literature even more, reading at his father’s bookstore (which also sold music). He particularly admired Byron, who set the fashion of the disillusioned wanderer and lover for the generation after 1815. After a year studying law at Leipzig University, he turned to a career in music. From age 22 he boarded in the house of a famous piano teacher, Wieck. Schumann was already showing signs of depression.  At age 16, his older sister drowned herself in a lake, following illness and mental problems; then his father died with a nervous disorder. At age 23, Schumann was sick, then after learning his sister-in-law had died, tried to kill himself by jumping from a fourth-floor window. Around this time he injured his left hand from a finger-strengthening device-- young pianists were trying to stretch their hands to match the keyboard feats of Liszt-- and had to give up his ambition to be a great pianist, turning instead to composition and music journalism.

At age 24, he had a new enthusiasm, launching a public-relations campaign for new music, an explicit revolution against classical forms and rules. Young composers had already decided that Beethoven had done everything possible in his style, and other lines had to be opened up. Schumann called his twice-weekly journal Neue Zeitschift fur Musik-- New Music Newspaper-- and edited it for years, along with frequent contributions to other newspapers. Leipzig was a good location, being a center of the publishing industry as well as Germany’s largest and traditionally most prestigious university. Schumann became the first modern music intellectual. He publicized his new favorites-- Schubert, Mendelssohn,  Chopin, Berlioz-- while lambasting some, especially Wagner and Liszt. *

* Which is to say, his most immediate rivals. Though 3 years younger than Schumann, Wagner at age 19 was already having overtures performed in Leipzig by Schumann’s music teacher. Later when both were living in Dresden in the 1840s, Wagner again overshadowed him as Court Music Director, while starting to produce his famous operas. Schumann also attempted operas, like Wagner breaking with the Italian tradition of recitatives and arias. But Schumann, trying to be different, went in the direction of choral dramas, somewhat like Handel’s oratorios, again to be overshadowed by Wagner.

All this time, his teacher and landlord Wieck was mainly concerned with his daughter, Clara. A brilliant pianist and composer in her own right, she gave her first public concert at age 11, and her father took her on frequent tours during her teen years. Schumann, 9 years older, fell in love with Clara, but her father separated them when she was 17 and Schumann 26. It wouldn’t have been an unusual age or age difference for marriage, but Wieck clearly thought Schumann was unsuitable for his brilliant daughter-- too unstable, maybe just too crazy; perhaps he didn’t like his fanaticism about new music. Nevertheless, they became secretly engaged; and after a lawsuit lasting 3 years, Schumann was able to marry her at age 21, without her father’s consent.

Now age 30, Schumann had made a reputation publishing art songs in the vein of Schubert; many of them short pieces for the home market; piano books for children, uncomplicated but beautiful, as parents rushed to make their child another Beethoven, another Liszt, another Mendelssohn. In effect, Schumann was continuing his father’s business, as writer, bookseller, and music publisher.

After their marriage, Robert and Clara toured together; then Clara toured alone, a much better performer than her husband. Perhaps in compensation, she encouraged him to compose in a more ambitious form. At age 31, his First Symphony was successfully introduced by Mendelssohn, now conducting at Leipzig. At 33 (1843), Schumann was appointed professor at the newly founded Leipzig conservatory. At age 35, he produced his famous Piano Concerto in A minor. It had taken 4 years to complete; Clara played its premiere in the great hall of Leipzig on New Years Day 1846.

The years following marriage were some of his most creative. Clara shelved her composing career in favor of his (this couldn’t have made her entirely happy), and promoted Robert’s work at her concerts-- she would continue doing so for years after his death. He composed in concentrated bursts of work, then was exhausted from nights without sleep. Bouts of depression increased over time. They moved to quieter German cities than Leipzig, the center of musical action, and eventually fled from Wagner at Dresden.

Schumann took to occultism, seeking spiritual contacts in table-turning seances. He had periods of ringing in his ears.  At times he heard “alternately sublime and hellish” music in his head-- the negative counterpart of the composing in their heads Mozard and Beethoven were famous for.   At age 44, fearing he was going insane, he attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine during a rainstorm, but was saved by fishermen. He spent his last 2 years in an asylum, having voluntarily admitted himself, and died there at 46.

In his music journal, Schumann wrote: “music is the state of the composer’s soul.” It is a statement of Romantic spiritualism, and a claim that one’s total personality drives the music. We could reverse the proposition: music creates the soul-- what we experience as soul. Music creates moods, even more than it expresses them. This is one of the things composers are good at, if they and their audiences want emotional-sounding music. That was certainly true of Schumann’s era, and his crusade for new music.

Do his personal crises drive the kind of music he wrote? His music is not particularly melancholy or anguished; listening or playing it on the piano doesn’t make you depressed. His life crises, mostly self-caused, were chronic, but his musical creativity grows as he mastered one genre after another. Reviewers were even starting to call him the successor to Beethoven.

Mussorgsky

Mussorgsky is the most innovative of composers. He also is the most poorly prepared in the techniques of writing music. He has long difficulties in getting his works finished and performed. He becomes a heavy drinker and eventually drinks himself to death at age 42.

Is this reflected in the sounds of his music? Or the other way around-- the strange sounds of his music cause his career troubles, hence his drinking and his death?

How was he able to write music at all? He lives in St. Petersburg, the administrative and cultural center of Russia, where he attends military Cadet school, and has an off-and-on career as a minor official in various government ministries. These institutions housed networks of other young and/or amateur musicians in other training schools and government bureaucracies (for instance, Rimsky-Korsakov, a navy officer who becomes an opera composer and teacher of composition). At just this time (the 1860s-- when Mussorgsky is in his early 20s) a movement is formed to create Russian music, against the previous generation of Westernizers importing “modernity”. It is the musical counterpart of the Slavophile movement in politics, when nationalism spread in eastern Europe. The Russians are the equivalents of  Grieg in Norway, Dvorak in Bohemia (Czech), and Sibelius in Finland, but much more radical and innovative (the above being offshoots of German music training). How do we explain this? Mussorgsky’s career is a key to understanding the explosion of Russian music on the world scene.

His music training consists of learning piano from his mother and singing in the Cadet school choir. He starts to compose songs on his own, based on Russian folk stories and children’s songs. After 2 years in his regiment, he resigns his commission (1858, age 19), following a “nervous crisis.” Perhaps this had something to do with meeting, the previous year, the core of what would become the movement for Russian national music. One of them, Balakirev, has some network connections to training in the West, and teaches Mussorgsky rudiments of composition in the style of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. It would take 10 years before he and the others do enough work to get the nickname the “mighty handful”  (or Five Fingers) for a concert they did together.

Meanwhile, Mussorgsky has reacted to the emancipation of the serfs in 1862 (the equivalent of Lincoln freeing the slaves in 1863) by joining a commune-- while still working in a St. Petersburg ministry. It is reminiscent of American hippies in the mid-1960s, living in communes but also holding a day job (weekend hippies). Like all communes, it is short-lived. Within 2 years, Mussorgsky has his first serious alcohol problem; he leaves the commune to live for a while on his brother’s country estate. His song-writing changes to a more naturalistic-satirical vein, with a song called “You Drunken Sot!” (1866)

Mussorgsky starts many projects, most of them neither performed nor published. He has made abortive attempts at writing operas since his late teens. He spends 3 years writing one based on Flaubert’s novel Salammbo, an exotic Carthaginian setting. He abandons this and begins Boris Godunov, based on a historic Czar who gains his position by murder, then falls through guilty remorse and peasant rebellion (good theme for a would-be revolutionist).  The opera is rejected, among other reasons because it has no roles for a soprano. He rewrites it, and it is finally produced  in 1874, after 6 years of work.

Meanwhile he has two other eventual successes. During 1860-67 (age 22-29), he completed an orchestra piece, Night on Bald Mountain, a dramatic and terrifying evocation of a Russian Walpurgisnacht with demons flying through the air until they are finally dispersed at dawn by the tones of church bells. It was premiered posthumously in 1886 by Rimsky-Korsakov, after revising the orchestration. In 1874, following the death of a painter friend, Mussorgsky writes a piano piece, Pictures at an Exhibition, where the viewer acoustically walks from one picture to another, scenes of Russian folklore or magnificant views like “The Great Gate of Kiev.” It became famous after Ravel orchestrated it in 1923.  The sounds are so powerful that this last part was chosen for a debut demonstration album in the mid-1950s, when an American record company introduced “high fidelity”.  There would be nothing like it until Richard Strauss wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, later used as the grand opening for the 1968 epic film, 2001.  At the time, however, almost everyone rejected it.

Mussorgsky spends 8 years writing a follow-up opera, Khovanshchina, another historic Russian-peasant spectacular, but his heavy drinking makes him increasingly unable to work, and he leaves it unfinished. He dies in 1881 of alcoholic epilepsy in a military hospital. Khovanshchina  is completed by others. The bare-bones orchestration of Boris Godunov  is re-orchestrated by the far more professional Rimsky-Korsakov, and through this revival enters the world repertoire during the Russian music invasion of Paris, 30 years after Mussorgsky’s death.

Why the self-destructive drinking? Career frustration, certainly; though he is admired and supported in his immediate circle. He is a fervent, even revolutionary nationalist-- which in this case means an anti-internationalist, trying to break free musically from the West (like the back-to-the-soil movement of Narodniks who would lead to terrorist assassinations and eventual displacement by the internationalist Bolsheviks).  At the same time, he works for the government and depends on musical colleagues more skilled in Western techniques and better connected to the West. And he is a weekend composer, slowed by his day job. The contradictions crush him personally; but they do not crush his music. The combination, in fact, is what made Russian music such a powerful force in world history.

Rachmaninoff

By the 1890s, Russian orchestration had become world-leading, through the Conservatories at St. Petersburg and Moscow under Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky.  Rachmaninoff connected with both of them. By age 19 (1892) he had published the perennially favorite Prelude in C-sharp minor (AKA “The Bells of Moscow”). But in 1897 (age 24), the premiere of his First Symphony was a disaster. The conductor was unprepared, the orchestra was not well-rehearsed and played badly. Both audience and critics thought it was awful. Rachmaninoff is described as hunkering down in a stairwell with his fists clenched against his head (already a noted player of piano concertos, he was not on stage). He was so upset that he destroyed the score, and it was never played again. Rachmaninoff lost all self-confidence. For three years he composed nothing, until his family arranged for him to be treated by a psychiatrist through hypnosis. By 1900, he was back in form, composing his Second Piano Concerto, to great success in Moscow, and everywhere. He went on to a career of fame as composer and flamboyant pianist, touring world-wide and settling in the U.S. after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He had huge hands and could play rippling chords all up and down the keyboard of a concert grand. He became a great conductor as well. All that was left of his 3-year trauma, perhaps, was his demeanour: Stravinsky called him “a six-and-a-half-foot-scowl.”

Is there trauma in his music? Compare his work of the early 1890s with his work from 1901 onwards: it is all of a piece. The dramatic melancholy was a style, perhap a bigger and more pianistic version of Tchaikovsky. They are  two of the most popularly loved of all composers.

Professionals who ride it out-- Bach, Haydn, Brahms, Debussy

Johann Sebastian Bach is as about as professional as you can get. He is surrounded by a family of musicians. There are several dozen Bachs who are organists, town and court musicians all over north Germany, going back to the 1550s. He is born in Eisenach, near the medieval castle where Martin Luther, hiding out from his enemies, wrote A Mighty Fortress is our God. When his father dies at age ten, he is brought up by an older brother, an organist who teaches him the profession. By 15 he is making a living as a choir singer, then as violinist in a Duke’s orchestra, then town organist when his brother leaves to become a musician in the Emperor’s army. He goes on to have 11 surviving children (9 others died in infancy). When his first wife died, a Bach cousin who sang in the same choir, he married a woman (another singer, and daughter of a court trumpeter) 20 years younger than himself and writes a Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach to teach her the harpsichord; it becomes a favorite for teaching children down through the present. Four of his sons become notable musicians; one of them (Wilhelm Friedemann) like his father was considered the greatest organ player of his time; another (Johann Christian) goes to London, collaborates in the opera-producing circle of Handel, and teaches young Mozart on a visit; another (Carl Philipp Emanuel), plays in the house orchestra of Frederick the Great, and goes beyond his father to make the transition from Baroque counterpoint to the homophonic (tonic/dominant) style that would become standard in the age of Haydn.

J.S.Bach in his own lifetime never reaches his son’s fame. He has plenty of troubles. Deaths of wife and children; but it was a time of high infant mortality, an atmosphere that fed the always-present tones of church services for the living and the dead. There were a lot of jobs to be had in a region where music gave prestige and the church organ was the grandest venue in town, and there were numerous courts of the small states in still-feudal Germany. Job-switching got Bach in trouble repeatedly; trying to break with a Duke to go work for a Prince got him thrown in jail for a month before he was able to leave. He was often at odds with authorities, such as the town fathers in Leipzig, where he finally settled down for his last 27 years. His job entailed writing new church music every week, plus special occasions. He wrangled with town authorities over his pay and what he was composing; but he knew how to play politics, got himself the additional title of court composer to the Duke of Saxony, and stuck to his course.

His troubles leave no discernable trace in his music. Not that it is always the same; but it varies by what kind of employer he has. When he was church organist, he composed hymns, cantatas, organ preludes and fugues; in the strict Calvinist style where that was prescribed; in more florid anthems where that was appreciated. For a 7-year stint with a secular-minded Prince and his own orchestra, Bach composed dignified, up-beat overtures and concertos, including the famous Brandenburg Concertos. At Leipzig he was in charge of church music as well as everything else. One cannot say there is no emotion in his music; some of his church hymns are extremely touching in a quiet way: the soothing effect church music is supposed to have. Bach also gets grand and awe-inspiring sounds out of the big organ with its harsh rumbling bass tubes below the flute-like figurations floating above from the smaller tubes.

He never runs out of things to do. His job demanded a continuous stream of new music-- the concept of a repertoire was still 75 years in the future. He has a professional interest in how to get everything you can out of the forms that are available. Ironically, during this same time, the French composer and music theorist Rameau writes that the possibilities of variations from the 12-note musical scale are not infinite, and would soon be exhausted. Bach proves him wrong-- of course, so would the next two centuries of composers.

Bach creates by systematic exploration. In 1722 he wrote The Well-tempered Clavier, containing preludes and fugues in every major and minor key; it would be a model for Mozart and Chopin. At the end of his life (he died in 1750 at age 65), he was engaged in The Art of the Fugue, a massive working through the possible architecture of musical sound combinations.

Bach is the epitome of the Baroque. More crucially, he works at the time when polyphonic church music reaches its highest complexity, in the mingling of separate voices whose combinations make unexpected effects on the ear, and for which the huge church organ is the perfect instrument. But also it is the time when, elsewhere in the music world of Europe, the homophonic, melody-with-chords style-- tonic key center and dominant chord transitions--is taking over as the standard; it spreads with the popularity of opera arias with harpsichord accompanyment, and Haydn would make it the standard for the newly created symphony orchestra. Bach is expert at both organ and harpsichord; he has diverse experience with the audiences for church and court music. Thus his musical technique is rich with both the Baroque and the coming “Classical” tonic/dominant form; the combination makes his work so appealing.

It is also why Bach never expresses personal emotions in music; listening to the combinations he generates, one can read all sorts of things into it (though his contemporaries would never have thought of music in that way). Music is a world of its own that Bach shows how to explore.

Three of the most popular pieces of music of all time were composed within 8 years of each other: Handel’s Water Music (1717);  Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (1722); Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1725).  There is a reason for their coincidence. There are all at the cusp, when Baroque is showing signs of the inner transformation into the tonic/dominant style that would become so natural to our ears up through the present. Baroque is pure music, and it makes us happy, whatever else is going on in our lives. It is the music of professionals.

Haydn

Haydn’s problems are small ones. Most of his life, he is a servant. He wears the livery of his master, Prince Esterhazy, amidst a small army of uniformed domestics in a palace. But it is a grand palace with its own orchestra, and Haydn is given free rein to compose what he wants. His life trajectory is continuously upwards. He comes from a modest background, and learned music by singing in a Vienna cathedral choir school. When his voice broke (it was the era of boy-sopranos) he played in street orchestras, until becoming valet and accompanist to an Italian opera singing teacher and composer. Learning by informal apprenticeship, his master’s connections led him to the Esterhazy palace outside Vienna. There he spent 30 years (1760-90), rising to become not only music director but eventually a famous composer-- rivalry between Viennese aristocrats over who has the greatest house orchestra was taking off.

Haydn progressed slowly. He himself said that, since the Prince approved of everything he did, he could experiment with the orchestra, adding and cutting, seeing what effects it could achieve with his captive audience.  He composed 104 symphonies, most of them short, along with string quartets (one of them would provide the tune for the German national anthem), oratorios, hymns, and much more. Haydn invented the symphony as we know it: four movements, varying slow and fast in different keys, one of them (usually the third movement) a dance rhythm (scherzo or minuet in 3/4 time); leading up to a brisk finale and signing off with the emphatic chord sequence that every concert-goer is so familiar with: tonic-dominant-tonic (repeat as long as you think the audience will take), or going up and down the tonic chord by 3rds until ending on the tonic note. Baroque polyphony was definitively replaced by the melody-and-chord system that would hold on down through Brahms.

Finally, at age 58, his Prince dies, and Haydn is free to take a commercial offer from London to produce a series of  symphonies. These are Numbers 93-104, his longest and best; and they are received with great acclaim. He had been corresponding back and forth with Mozart, and both learned from each other.

All up-and-up? His main problem was domestic. He married at age 28; his wife turned out to be sharp-tempered. He complained that she invited too many clergy to dinner, had too many Masses said (since on-demand Masses had to be paid for), and gave more money to charity than he could afford on his salary. [Goulding 161] It sounds like they quarreled about money; he himself was religious but apparently thought she was showing off, making a bigger splash than he felt was appropriate to his position. Nevertheless, his music was famously cheerful. It is what his audiences wanted, and what he wanted to give them. In his public life, he was content.

Brahms

I used to think, if I could choose to be anyone, I would be Brahms. His music was so wonderful, it must have been a wonderful life creating it. Well, maybe so, if you ignore the rest of his life.

The first shock is his personality, depicted in his years of success in Vienna. He is rude, dresses sloppily, he is abrupt and insulting. He is sardonic. He is remembered as saying, taking his  leave from an evening gathering, “If there is anyone here I haven’t insulted, my apologies.” [Goulding 172] Habe ich jehmand hier nicht beleidigen.., entschuldigen Sie bitte. How did this come about?

His father had a light orchestra in Hamburg, just scraping by, but he was able to provide piano lessons for young Johannes and give him experience making musical arrangements. By age 10, he was playing piano in tough waterfront bars in the red-light district. At age 20, he met a wandering Hungarian violinist and went on the road with him. This led to meeting a more famous violinist, who gave him letters of introduction to Liszt and Schumann. Brahms, who one gathers was something of a roughneck, was unimpressed with Liszt or at least his adoring entourage; although Liszt was very friendly, Brahms was ill at ease (rumour has it he fell asleep while the maestro was playing), and got no further with that connection.

He did better with Robert and Clara Schumann, who by this time were in the anti-Liszt camp. They loved Brahms’ lyrical piano playing and his new songs, and hosted him for several months. Schumann wrote an article called “New Paths” extolling Brahms as the one who would lead music into the promised land. This was true, in a way, except that the movement for New Music had split: Schumann vs. Liszt would foreshadow Wagner vs. Brahms. Unfortunately, the year is 1854; Schumann soon attempts suicide and goes into an asylum for the rest of his life. This connection, too, had no practical results; but Brahms fell in love with Clara, helped tend to her husband, kept in touch with her ever after, and never married.

The next 15 years are an ordeal. He gets a minor appointment conducting a town choral society and a few local Court concerts. He is passed over for the post of conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic. He struggles to get his compositions performed. The premiere of his First Piano Concerto arouses no enthusiasm, and its second performance in Leipzig ends with faint applause drowned out by hissing. This was probably musical politics, since he signs a manifesto against “the new German School” of Liszt and Wagner, and Leipzig is one of their strongholds. Finally, in 1872, when Brahms is 39 years old, he is appointed conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. This was politics too, since Brahms is now adopted as the standard-bearer of the anti-Wagner faction; audiences become enthusiasts divided between the two, sometimes rabidly. His four magnificent symphonies followed, along with his widely popular piano concertos and violin concertos, all written between the age of 43 and 54. He did large-scale choral music, his own German Requiem (which first made him famous in 1868, age 35), and revivals of Bach’s St. Mathew Passion and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.  When his First Symphony appeared, it so clearly continued the grand classic style that it was nicknamed “Beethoven’s Tenth.”

There was a real difference behind the faction fight. Rimsky-Korsakov, who taught orchestration to the innovative Russian composers, said this in his 1891 textbook: “A work is thought out in terms of the orchestra, certain tone-colours [of the instruments] being inseparable from it in the mind of its creator... Could the essence of Wagner’s music be divorced from its orchestration? ...Was Brahms ignorant of orchestration? And yet, nowhere in his works do we find evidence of brilliant tone or picturesque fancy. The truth is that his thoughts did not turn towards colour; his mind did not exact it.” [p.2] Wagner triumphed by making instruments like horns carry the melody as never before; Brahms’ instrumentation is the same as Beethoven’s.  He had internalized Beethoven’s music by playing it throughout his youth.

Brahms’ music is so smooth and flowing that it seems inspired. But in fact Brahms did not work by inspiration; he toiled over his compositions, sometimes many years, polishing them, ruthlessly pruning what he thought was imperfect. He dies at 64, not long after his beloved Clara Schumann. In his later years he would sign his letters, “Frei aber einsam,”  “Free but lonely.” Nevertheless, his work is not melancholy. He is a tough guy and a  professional, soldiering through.

Debussy

Debussy is essentially a gentleman of leisure. As a child, he is tutored at home in a comfortably well-off family. He never holds a salaried position, nor makes music for money until he became well-known around age 40 when he conducted and performed his compositions across Europe. He enters the elite Paris Conservatory at age 10 (1872) --not an unusual age at that time-- and spends 12 years there. He is critical of his teachers for their old fashioned musical traditions, and receives poor marks in most classes. Nevertheless, he wins the Prix de Rome and spends 2 years there, traveling also to the Bayreuth Festival to hear Wagner operas. His network of friends are the avant-garde literary world (Mallarmé, Pierre Louÿs) whose writings he sets to music, along with Verlaine and Baudelaire.

At age 32 (1894), his breakthrough orchestral piece Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune is performed; at 37 (1895), Noctures: Nuages (Fog), Fêtes (Festivals), Sirènes (Sirens); in 1905, La mer (The Sea);  all dispensing with a unitary tone center, like his innovative piano music, creating new techniques for nuance and atmosphere. In 1902, after 10 years of leisurely preparation, appears his only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. It is anti-Wagnerian, sound-painting instead of drama, message, or ringing emotional pitch; thereby contrasting as well with the intense melodramas of Puccini, another modernist in orchestration. Debussy could be a sharp-tongued critic of rivals, a forceful stance which is exactly what we do not find in his music.

Debussy’s life is pretty much without problems, let alone traumas. There are his contests of will with his teachers, but he just blows them off and goes his way. The only occasion he is at all emotionally stressed is entirely social. Debussy had numerous love affairs, often adulterous. In 1899 he married a dress-maker (one can picture something out of La Bohème), then divorced her in 1904 for the wife of a wealthy banker. His former wife attempted suicide, which lost Debussy some friends. He blamed his friends for causing him pain: “I have never seen so many desertions in my life.” [Goulding 335]  Two years later, his new wife was disinherited, and Debussy had to do some work for a living by writing music criticism. None of these events constituted turning points, or show up in his music. Whatever we think of him personally, he was living in his art and that was all that really mattered.

We can count Chopin among the professionals who ride it out, as I have shown elsewhere. CHOPIN'S ANTI-NETWORK CREATIVITY

Smooth sailing all the way: Liszt, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky

Liszt is the Elvis Presley of classical music. Then he becomes the God-father, the facilitator, and the self-effacing saint. It is questionable how great his music really is in the overall picture. But Liszt was quite possibly the greatest and certainly the most influential pianist of all time. And he was the network center of music, just when modern music was being socially organized on a new basis. The end of wigs and aristocratic courts; the era when musicians no longer depend on patrons or the church for a living; instead becoming free-lancers in the world of ticket-selling concerts and sheet-music sales. Also the era when musicians are trained in conservatories rather than by apprenticeship, thereby creating teaching positions where composers can shelter from the commercial world. This is the world we have lived in ever since, even as the ways of making money off of music have shifted (different ways recordings are propagated; different venues for live music; different amateur markets to cater to); and alongside this, teaching institutions where esoteric, non-commercial music too can support careers-- in short, the split between popular and high-brow music that did not previously exist. Liszt is at the transition and he thrives on its possibilities.

A very few musicians made a bigger splash-- Beethoven and Wagner splashed deeper, so to speak, and made bigger and longer lasting waves. But in his day-- the late 1820s through the 1840s-- Liszt was IT -- the big thing. This was the opening era of big concert halls and big publicity-driven tours, the era of fans. Elvis or the Beatles are a weak analogy because they lasted less than 10 years; most of the big-hit stars of the 1950s and 60s lasted 2-3 years. Liszt did it for 20.  And yes-- there were teenage girls, weeping with joy, screaming to be near him, throwing themselves at him, mobbing him to cut a lock of his trademark long, long hair.

Liszt was probably the first real sex-object celebrity. He was famous for his love affairs, and the situations it sometimes got him into with aristocratic fathers and husbands. But he was more true love-romantic than one-night hookups; his affairs were like the staple of Hollywood fan magazines since the 1920s. With one of his early lovers, a French Countess, he spent several idyllic years in Switzerland, composing music and fathering three illegitimate children.  It was a generation of rebellion against marriage as a constraining institution (for women too, a theme of early feminists); a view shared by Friedrich Engels on down to James Joyce, who as a matter of principle did not marry the women they lived with. Liszt carried the belief that jealousy-is-property to great lengths. One of his illegitimate daughters married the conductor von Bülow; then she left him for Wagner-- while von Bülow went on conducting Wagner and remained part of his intimate circle. It was not exactly free-love communal orgies, but another way that Liszt and his circle epitomized the cultural avant-garde.

God-father and facilitator: Liszt liked to help fellow musicians. Some people thought he over-did it. Schumann wrote about him: “...he gives me the impression of being a sploilt child. He is good, over-bearing, amiable, arrogant, noble and generous, often hard with others.” [Goulding 192]  And Schumann didn’t like his taste or his work as a composer. Certainly Liszt liked being in the center of attention; it was natural to him, a big star since age 14. When Chopin, in his years of ill-health, gave a public concert to raise money and nearly fainted at the end, it was Liszt who leaped up and carried him in his arms. (Liszt was 6 feet tall, and Chopin was tiny.) And he believed in New Music (his name was always associated with it by both its friends and its enemies). He encouraged and promoted Mendelssohn, Chopin and Schumann; he championed Berlioz when no one else did, and arranged concert performances of his music; later in his life he encouraged Grieg, Smetana, Cesar Franck, Saint-Saëns, Rubinstein and the Russians. Liszt was not into rivalries. He was there first, anyway; and he was the trend-setter in piano technique. The myth went around that he had extra fingers on each hand, which fans tried to spy with their opera glasses.

He would become even more the facilitator of others’ careers as he got older. In 1848, tired of constantly being on the road, and perhaps of all his high-class (and sometimes overly possessive) mistresses and patrons, he quit touring and took a position as music director at Weimar. It was famous as the cultural center of Germany in the literary heyday of Goethe, Schiller, et al. Now Lizst had an orchestra to promote new music. He has Wagner’s early operas performed. He offers asylum to Wagner when he is on the run from the police for taking part in the violent revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1849.  (Wagner came temporarily, then moved on to a villa in Switzerland offered by a wealthy admirer).

Tchaikovsky wrote: “Liszt...is an old hypocrite who replies to any piece submitted to his august judgment with the most exaggerated flattery. By nature he is kind; indeed he is one of the few famous artists who has never been touched by jealousy or the temptation to impede the success of his fellow man... But he is too much the hypocrite to be trusted for sincere criticism.” [Goulding 211] This tells us as much about Tchaikovsky as it does about Liszt.

Self-abnegating saint: This is a weird one. After 10 years at Weimar, Liszt decides to become a Catholic priest. That doesn’t quite work out with the Pope, but he moves to Rome, and for the rest of his life dresses in clerical gowns and is addressed as Abbé. He turns to writing smoothly beautiful music on religious themes, rather different from his cascades of piano notes that created sounds heard never before and left his audiences gasping. Perhaps Liszt was attracted by a composing niche that no one else of his calibre was filling, in an era when religion was becoming passé.

The transition from Liszt the super-star to loyal admirer of Wagner the super-star is sort of unbelievable, if we weren’t so familiar with it. How often does one public idol retire into the cheerleader role for the one who takes their place? I can’t think of any others. Perhaps Liszt, whose ego was completely self-secure, felt his days were fading. He was greater as a performer than as a composer. He preached New Music, as did Schumann and Mendelssohn, but none of them really delivered it in a convincing way. He genuinely saw Wagner as doing what he advocated: creating totally memorable new music. After Wagner, of course, there was Debussy, Stravinsky, and others, but by that time Liszt was dead. To be a saint, says the religious tradition, you have to genuinely live it, without wanting to be a saint. I think that was Liszt.

Smooth sailing all the way? Nothing bad ever happened to Liszt. He had a few scrapes with his mistresses, but he always got out, with no hard feelings. In my mind, Liszt was the most likeable of all composers. (Who would be second-- Handel?) His music varied across his career, from early flashy piano to late religious music. But there are no traumas in it, nor any peak celebrations. Liszt was always up, and he shared it.

Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn is from a rich and famous family. Trained by expensive tutors from age 3, by 9 he is performing for celebrities in Berlin, by 10 making tours as a pianist in Europe and England. By 17 (1826) he is famous for theatre music to accompany Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream; at 20 he conducts his own symphony in London. A trip to Scotland’s Hebrides results in a famous tone poem, Fingal’s Cave, inventing program music. He becomes Europe’s most famous conductor, taking the lead in establishing the classic repertoire, conducting festivals, reviving Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and regularly performing the classics from Handel to Beethoven as well as his own work. In his early 20s, the Berlin government commissions him  to write a Reformation Symphony for an anniversary celebration of Martin Luther. Like other prominent Jewish families of the period-- the parents of Karl Marx and Benjamin D’Israeli-- Mendelssohn’s father had converted to liberal Christianity. He is involved in everything and invited everywhere. He writes the now-customary wedding recessional -- Wagner would add “Here Comes the Bride” -- and a very popular violin solo, a dancing swirl of happy notes. He is invited to establish an Academy of Arts (i.e. a music conservatory to train composers) in Berlin, and another in Leipzig, where he becomes director of a great orchestra. All goes swimmingly, music bright and entertaining. He is a great favorite in England, where he often premieres his new works.

A sudden end: a favorite sister dies. Mendelssohn is hit with depression, has a series of strokes, and dies in 1847, age 38. Dying young, but he had been performing non-stop as an adult for almost 30 years. His music never suffered.

Stravinsky

Few composers had better network sponsorship than Stravinsky. His father was the leading bass singer at the St. Petersburg Opera, a friend of the important composers including Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. After studying with Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky was recruited by Diaghilev, just then (1909) launching the Ballets Russes in Paris. The previous year Diaghilev had presented Mussorgsky’s great opera Boris Godunov, gloriously fleshed out in Rimsky-Korsakov’s instrumentation. Now he assembled the greatest ballet-production team ever, the top choreographers, scene-designers, and dancers. Stravinsky was given a tryout turning Chopin piano music into ballet orchestration (orchestrating other composers’ music was a specialty of Rimsky-Korsakov, and French composers like Ravel followed suite, including making Mussorgsky’s piano music famous in the orchestra repertoire). In short, Stravinsky was in the heart of a multi-skilled collaborative network. Debussy himself helped him play a four-hand piano arrangement of The Rite of Spring during its early tryouts. For his Paris ballets based on Russian folklore, Stravinsky consulted with the leading Russian expert on myths and rituals, and they sketched out the ballet together. He spent almost two years working over the score. The music was unusually difficult for orchestra players to comprehend, but unlike some other composers whose works failed at first for lack of adequatelly skilled performers and rehearsals, Stravinsky had a huge orchestra at his disposal, with the full backing of Diaghilev, already flushed with success. There were over 20 rehearsals (most orchestras have four or so for a new piece). Stravinsky was no self-absorbed prima donna; he took the conductor’s suggestions as to how instruments drowned each other out and fixed problems.

Stravinsky’s ballet music in this period (1910-13), The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, was the most forcefully innovative yet-- the unmistakable break into “modern music”-- and it aroused a storm of controversy. This is not necessary bad for one’s reputation, rather the opposite, since he had the most famous composers on his side, and the Ballets Russes was a great financial success. It is probable that no other great innovative work of music was so well-supported and publicized at its debut.  Stravinsky was for ever after world-famous, welcomed and sponsored everywhere, and he had a lifetime of producing music in a variety of innovative styles.

Does it make any sense to relate his music to his personality, his extra-musical life? Stravinsky was known as a rather sardonic personality, making cutting remarks about other composers, and in retrospect, some of his collaborators. But although he became an exile from the 1917 Russian Revolution, he was already established abroad, and this life-event had no effect on his musical style, nor did his flight from Nazi Europe to America in 1939.

What about the harsh passages in The Rite of Spring, the ferocious drum-beats, clashing trumpets and horns, as the sacrificial maiden dances herself to death on stage? (In the climax of Petrushka the lead character is also crushed to death.) But these were produced in Stravinsky’s most glorious period. The Rite of Spring, the most dissonant of these works, nevertheless has plenty of smooth, Debussy-like sections with sweetly floating melodic phrases. It is not all non-stop clashing horns and pounding drums. Like all musicians since Vivaldi and Haydn, Stravinsky can alternate loud and soft, fast and slow, dissonant and harmonic; he just does all this in a much more extreme way-- and with hugely amplified wind and percussion sections, and long dramatic crescendos. Bits of  Stravinsky sound like Boris Godunov, the pioneering work of Slavic/Asiatic folk tunes turned into dramatic rhythms and orchestrated by the Russian masters of instrumentation. Stravinsky is much more professional than Mussorgsky: deliberately creating tunes played in clashing keys at once; playing different rhythms simultaneously against each other. But he also has the sense, which all good composers have, of when the dissonance has driven the musical tension as far as it can, and when it needs to end-- although instead of resolving back to a home key, he produces some of his most striking effects with abrupt stops and moments of silence.

Stravinsky was no spontaneous-inspiration type of composer; he worked hard over his ballets (almost 2 years for 35 minutes of music), and kept on tinkering and revising. He himself said he was dissatisfied with the harsh noise that is the death-end of Rite of Spring, but he never came up with a revision he fully liked. No, it would be silly to assume that the harsh and deadly parts of Stravinsky’s ballets have anything to do with how he was feeling. He was a professional, and creating moments of utmost musical trauma was one of the things he could do.

Opera composers: the plot sets the music

Opera is a special case, as the nature of the opera dictates the particular emotions. As before, I will divide composers into those with serious troubles and those without.

Troubled: Mozart, von Weber, Wagner

Mozart’s problems are legendary. They are fairly accurately portrayed in the film Amadeus, itself based on a Russian play by Pushkin in 1832, Mozart and Salieri. Except the plot to kill him is romantic fiction, based on rumours circulating after his death that he was poisoned. Briefly put, Mozart’s problems are money and independence. His father’s employer, the  Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, is liberal about allowing Leopold to show off young Wolfgang on tours. But later he wants him working at his palace in the prestige game such people are now playing. Mozart has to insult him to get free.  But now that he is free he has to hustle for money, in the world of commercial opera just opening up.  And it is a risky business; having sponsors underwrite the cost, then as now, is helpful if not absolutely essential. It also involves him in court politics in Vienna, where Italian vs. German opera styles are beginning to be fought out. The fight would go on for 75 years before Wagner throws the balance definitively, at least in central Europe.

So Mozart is caught on the horns of a dilemma between independence and money. In the end, he quite literally works himself to death. Do any signs of this struggle show up in his music?

Here we have to put the question in larger perspective. Opera is not just music; it is also theatre. It has characters, costumes, scenes, a plot. Sometimes not much of a plot; until Mozart’s time, everything was sacrificed to one segment: the aria, where famous singers got to show off their voices. Holding the high notes; how much quaver and resonance you could generate out of the sounding chambers of your body; what trills and scales you could run up and down-- really, how long and how well you could sing without taking a breath. The opera singer’s body was the only important instrument, and a composer’s job was to provide tunes for the soloist to improvise upon. Between arias, the pretence of a plot was sung in rather monotonous recitatives accompanied by harpsichord chords.

Opera, in the 150 years it had been in existence, had little in the way of actual emotion; it was just actors striking postures from mythical themes and heroic histories of Greece and Rome, histrionics not to be seen in the real world. Mozart, in his early operas, produced this kind of thing too: Mithradates, King of Pontus;  Idomeneo, King of Crete; etc. (he wrote 16 operas, most of them rarely heard since). But in the 1780s, opera became more interested in plots. Contemporary plays were being set to music. Playwrights like Beaumarchais in pre-Revolutionary Paris used the theatre to push political boundaries. Theatres and opera houses were virtually the only places where public crowds could gather; here began to stir the sentiments for reform that boiled over in the Revolution.

Mozart picked the most controversial. The Marriage of Figaro [1786] is about a servant at odds with his master-- the Count wants to exercize the traditional feudal right of jus primae noctis-- the right to deflower the virgin bride when one of his servants marries. Mozart and his librettist lighten it up with the standard devices of theatre comedy, disguises and substitutions, so that the Count ends up making love to his own wife. Don Giovanni (1787) takes the attack on aristocrats even further: a serial rapist, who in the end is sent to Hell; again Mozart and Da Ponte play it with plenty of comedy, provided by his uncouth valet. This takes some of the edge off the class conflict theme; most of Don Giovanni’s targets are upper-class women, but the most famous song is a duet, La ci darem la mano, where the Don breaks up a peasant girl’s marriage by offering to marry her himself-- a twist on jus primae noctis. It is an unanswered question why this scene should produce Mozart’s most famously beautiful music.

Mozart may have been attracted to these plots because he himself had been a servant, trying to get out from under the thumb of the aristocracy and live his own life and loves. But we come back to the general point: each opera plot demands its particular emotions. Whether the composer feels the same emotions or not is irrelevant; he needs to create the emotion in the audience by musical techniques. What techniques? When Mozart was an 8-year-old touring England with his father, the English naturalist Daines Barrington put him to the test: Compose a love song for an opera. Mozart immediately plays a recitative and a “symphony” (multi-part accompaniment with a song line) in the operatic style. Play a song of anger: Mozart does it again, this time strumming heavily on the bass keys and “working himself up to such a pitch that he beat on his harpsichord like a person possessed, rising sometimes in his chair.” (Barrington goes on to say that otherwise little Mozart acts like a child; when a cat comes in, he leaves his instrument to play with it; he runs around the room with a stick pretending to ride a horse.)

Mozart already knows how to simulate emotions; it is part of the musician’s repertoire. He has as yet no traumas in his life; he composes the kind of music he hears from others, he just grasps it more quickly, internalizes it, and as he gets older, improves it. In opera, he puts his orchestra skills to work writing overtures and setting scenes; the recitatives and arias are still there, but the whole becomes better integrated, like the full-scale symphonies he is also writing.

Do the events of Mozart’s life come out in his music, operas or otherwise? It is said that his nagging landlady is parodied in The Magic Flute; it is conjectured that the murdered man’s statue who comes to drag Don Giovanni to Hell is Mozart’s dead father (but that was already in the story). Such examples are trivial; they are like Wagner recalling the storm he sailed through when traveling from the Baltic to France, and the song of the sailors as they made shelter in a Norwegian port, which provides a brief moment at the beginning of The Flying Dutchman. What is important is the emotions, in life and in the opera music.

Again, in Mozart’s Requium Mass, there is an anguished section of dissonant chord-leaps with kettle-drums and thundering orchestra alternating with aetherial high voices of the choir. But this is where the sinner faces the Last Judgment. Try reading the Latin words out loud:

Confutatis maledictis,

Flammis acribus addictis:

Voca me cum benedictis.

[When the wicked are counfounded,

Doomed to flames of woe unbounded,

Call me, with Thy Saints surrounded!]

Lacrimosa dies illa,

Qua resurget ex favilla,

Judicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce, Deus:

Dona eis requiem.

[Oh! that day of tears and mourning!

From the dust of earth returning,

Man for judgment must prepare him.

Spare, O God, in mercy spare him!

Grant them Thine eternal rest.]

Mozart was paid to write music to accompany these traditional words, and the fact that he was sick and dying in financial straits at the time cannot be distinguished from his professional skill in creating the appropriate sounds.

On the whole, Mozart’s music sounds just like it should for the setting at hand-- theatrical or otherwise. If anything, his beautiful music makes the listener happy, even when it is depicting distraught scenes on the stage: Don Giovanni’s outraged ladies sound more melodious than real persons in these circumstances would be. Mozart has been living in music since he was little; nothing brings him down.

von Weber

The father of Carl Maria von Weber was a impoverished minor nobleman; he has an itinerant theatre troupe, with his wife, a singer, while he plays violin. Young Carl played whatever role was needed, learned the piano, and composed several operas by age 14. The family was always in debt and frequently on the run. At age 20 Carl was not only a conductor but secretary to a German Prince; his father’s manipulations got him charged with embezzlement and both were ordered to leave the country (Württemberg-- Germany being not yet unified). These were the years of the Napoleonic wars when Germany was conquered, rose in rebellion, and liberated itself in a wave of national patriotism. von Weber now got opera appointments, was encouraged to create German operas, and wrote popular  patriotic songs.

In 1821 (age 35), he finally has an opera hit. Der Freischütz  -- which means the sharpshooter, or free-lance shooter-- almost literally what in American comics and radio entertainment became the Lone Ranger. The hero sells his soul to a demon in return for magic silver bullets that always hit their target. (If you don’t remember, the Lone Ranger fired silver bullets from his six-guns.) The opera was a terrific success when it premiered in Berlin, and had fifty performances all over Germany in its first year.  The music continued a lot of classical elements, but it did integrate the recitatives into the orchestra music; introduced the repeating leitmotif for the main themes that Wagner would make his trademark; and scored musical thunderstorms, hunters’ horns, and various occult horrors. The power of the opera was more in the effects of its stage setting: a Wolf’s glen deep in the forest, skulls and corpses strewn about, the kind of Romantic setting that would be featured in Edgar Allen Poe’s stories a decade later.  Young Wagner loved it as a teenager, and so did the French would-be rebel, Berlioz. Weber went on to produce another successful opera in London, Oberon (based on Shakespeare’s magic comedy). He died soon after (age 39), worn out from working at a furious pace-- he too had been hustling non-stop for over 30 years.  Do his hard times show up in his music? Not really. He could produce all sorts of effects; he was known for making the clarinet a solo instrument. Der Freischütz, for all its Sturm und Drang, ends with a happy ballroom dance tune out of the previous century.

Wagner

The first thing to know about Richard Wagner is that he comes from a theatre family. His mother was formerly the mistress of a German prince (i.e. a beauty), who married several men, one of them an actor/playwright whose illegitimate child Richard may have been.  Two older sisters were actresses, and his mother moved from city to city following their careers. Wagner gets his start when his brother, a theatre singer, got him a job as chorusmaster. He takes a job as music director of a failing theatre company because he falls in love with its leading actress, Minna; after the company folded, she moves to another theatre and charms the management into hiring Wagner as conductor. They marry, but Minna has gentlemen “admirers” and Wagner, hustling for a living, has to put up with her infidelities, including deserting him to live with one of them. They make a trek across north Germany from one bankrupt company to another. In Riga (then part of Russia, now Latvia) Wagner makes her reject the advances of the theatre director, who retaliates by telling the authorities about the debts he had fled from in Germany. Wagner’s passport is confiscated, but he has a wealthy friend who smuggles them across the Russian border-- running past the rifles of the Cossack sentries; reaching a port, they evaded the harbour police in a small boat, hid from the customs inspectors, and finally sailed-- into a series of storms and near shipwrecks, before they finally arrive in France and make their way to Paris.

Meanwhile Wagner has been learning his trade.  He has been writing librettos and operas since age 20 (1833); he learns the existing repertoire by conducting dozens of operas. He learns their scores even more thoroughly when he arrives in Paris; unable to get his own operas produced, he is reduced to working for a music publisher, copying out parts for every instrument in the orchestra, arranging famous arias for piano and home vocals. Popular composers like Donizetti and Meyerbeer were just what Wagner would avoid sounding like; but he knew his rivals’ music as intimately as if he had composed it himself. His three years in Paris (1839-42) are the low point of his life. He does meet Berlioz (10 years his senior) and hears his Symphonie Fantastique, from which he learns how new combinations of instruments and an oversize orchestra can make entirely new sounds. Wagner pawns everything, down to Minna’s costumes and jewels; they stay afloat by borrowing from friends who are beginning to recognize his music; his furniture is confiscated by creditors and he finishes Rienzi in prison. Finally, he sends it to Dresden, where he grew up and had contacts at the theatre; Rienzi is accepted, is performed to great success, and Wagner is appointed music director to the Duke’s court.

Age 29, his fortunes have turned. He completes several to-be-famous operas, starts many more, but is interrupted by politics: the great revolutionary years 1848-49 have uprisings all over Europe, twice in Paris, where the monarchy is overthrown and a socialist commune is put down. In Dresden, Wagner joins the revolution, supplying it with hand grenades; when Prussian troops intervene, he has to flee into exile. It would be 12 years before he was allowed back onto German territory, by which time he would be 48. His operas were being performed, by friends like Liszt, but it would be years before he could hear them in person.

What makes his music so different? His first efforts at opera are conventional. Die Feen (The Fairies) is like von Weber’s Oberon ; Das Liebesverbot (Love Forbidden), is a version of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure; Rienzi is a  historical drama in Donizetti’s manner, about a rebel in the 1300s who briefly drives the nobles out of Rome. By the end of his Paris ordeal, Wagner is creating a new style, eliminating recitatives -- although The Flying Dutchman still has beautiful songs-- and unifying the entire opera into one musical mood. Eventually the arias disappear too, the voices completely integrated into the orchestra, which now carries the themes. From now on, Wagner would write his own librettos, unlike almost all other composers.

Wagner is not atonal or dissident-- that kind of modernist would come later. He works in the tonic/dominant form; differing only that his chords are often carried by the resonant sounds of horns instead of the usual strings, making his operas sound like echo chambers (the equivalent of the studio electronic revolution that separated the Beatles and Rolling Stones from the rock ‘n roll that went before). Wagner also makes great use of empty fifths and leaping octaves (as in the famous Ride of the Valkyries), as well as modulating through numerous and remote chord changes and inventing chromatic effects and complex lush-sounding chords (like the famous love scene in Tristan und Isolde). This is why so many of his orchestral excerpts would become universally familiar: the overtures to Tannhäuser, Die Meistersinger, the Bridal Procession from Lohengrin played at every wedding. Eventually, as audiences got over the absence of Italian opera conventions, his operas acquired a fanatical following.

His later operas, especially The Ring cycle, can be hard to get used to. But there is a secret to hearing them: listen to the orchestra, not to the soloists. Reversing the gestalt, Wagner uses voices as accent marks against the harmonious flow of orchestral music. George Bernard Shaw pointed out another feature: Wagner’s music builds up a tremendous amount of tension, as it modulates far from the original key center (this is especially true of the singers).  Since his rhythm is often slow, the resolution back into a familiar chordal cadence is a prolonged build-up, heading towards home with an increasingly pounding beat. This gives his music a yearning quality.  When it finally arrives, the climax is like a sexual orgasm. No wonder he had such adoring fans, many of them women.

Wagner is the most erotic of all composers. It is easy to see this by comparing him with Beethoven, who can reproduce all kinds of emotions but none of them sexual. Of course conventional operas are full love/sex plots; but Cosi Fan Tutti and Don Giovanni just make sex a game; no one is deeply, yearningly in love with anybody and the music certainly never sounds sexual. Even Verdi, whose melodramatic plots often center around sexually-motivated violence, never gets beyond an artificial theatrical tone. The main exceptions are Puccini and Richard Strauss (Salomé, Der Rosenkavalier) at the turn of the 20th century, but they are Wagner’s followers and use his musical techniques. (Rosenkavalier is an eroticized version of Marriage of Figaro, which points up the difference.)

Where does Wagner get it from? Is he reflecting his own affairs into his music? Tristan and Isolde parallels Wagner’s adulterous relationship with Mathilde, wife of his friend Wesendonck; this devoted patron financed him during the 1850s while writing The Ring, even providing a house next door to his own, where Wagner and Mathilde carried on until Minna finally grew so hostile to her rival that they had to move to Venice. The scenario would repeat again 10 years later. Tristan wasn’t performed until 1865 in Munich, where Wagner had a new patron, the youthful King Ludwig of Bavaria.  The conductor was Hans von Bülow, married to Liszt’s daughter Cosima; she and Wagner fell for each other, a scandal that caused him to withdraw to his villa in Switzerland; Cosima left her husband and joined him there; eventually they married (she got divorced, his wife Minna died) in 1868: Cosima was 27, Wagner 55. Von Bülow kept on conducting loyally-- it was the mores of the theatre.

But there is more to consider here. Love and/or sex by themselves are not enough to create a narrative. If two people meet, fall in love, desire each other, have sex, and lay back happily, what drives the plot? There has to be some tension, some obstacle to overcome; light comedies do it with mix-ups and misunderstandings in the early part of the sequence; the accompanying music usually conveys the lightness, the don’t-take-it-seriously of the stage. One could write music to simulate sexual build-up to orgasm; Ravel’s Bolero does it, with a repetitive tune saved from monotony by the crescendo of increasingly insistent rhythm until its crashing ejaculation. But can you put together a whole opera by playing Bolero over and over again? Plot tension requires some kind of obstacle, and love triangles and rivalries have filled that bill for a long time. Wagner didn’t invent the Tristan/ Isolde/ King Marke plot, but he did add some twists. That it resembles something in his own life does not tell us how he could write the music that makes that opera such a landmark.

In fact it isn’t close to anything in ordinary reality. Tristan is a warrior who killed Isolde’s betrothed; but he is wounded and goes to her in disguise, for she has magic cures. Later, his King sends him back to Ireland to bring Isolde for his bride. On the ship, she drinks a poison potion with him, but it turns out to be a love (-plus-death) potion. The King is angry at being double-crossed; Tristan lets himself be mortally wounded, and the lovers die in each other’s arms--- well, actually Tristan dies, and Isolde returns to the King; the way of the world.

The music is built around the famous “Tristan chord”: F - B - D sharp - G sharp. It is a mysterious tension that finally, at the very end of the opera, finds resolution in a B major chord. Play it on the piano; it says what Wagner said could not be said in words. 

Two years before Wagner composed the opera, he wrote to Liszt: “I have never in my life known the true happiness of love.” So he’s sketched it out in his head-- Tristan and Isolde. What was he thinking?

Wagner was reading Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which pulled it all together. Kant said we never see the real world; all we see is what is shaped by our conceptual eye-glasses. Schopenhauer replied that the thing-in-itself is will, the energy of striving, the energy of life. For a man, the ultimate reality is located in the center of a woman’s body in the act of sex (and vice versa?). Schopenhauer also wrote there is another path: music reveals the thing-in-itself. Is the equation then: music = sex = ultimate reality?

We have some sociological evidence. The ethnographer Claudio Benzecry interviewed opera fanatics (the ones who buy the cheap seats in the balcony to hear every performance). What they focus on are the moments during an aria when the soprano’s voice resonates inside their own body; they won’t talk to anyone as they leave the opera house, preserving the thrills and echoes to take home with them. Interviewees said they didn’t like to listen to opera while having sex; it was too distracting for either to feel right.

Wagner was proud, self-centered, flamboyant, a prima donna. Is there anyone like him in his operas? No-- nearest would be Die Meistersinger, about a singing contest in the music guilds of late-medieval Germany. But the hero is not Wagner, and the play is one of Wagner’s least erotic. A foolish carping critic of Wagner’s hero is patterned on a real critic from the Brahms camp; but that is hardly central to the music. No one’s opera characters are less like real people than Wagner’s; they are symbols of larger forces. This goes for his romantic plots too. In The Flying Dutchman,  the sea-captain is doomed to sail forever until he is redeemed by a woman’s pure love. Tannhäuser is about a knight who ascends a mountain of erotic magic-- in translation it is mons veneris-- to test himself and win release from the bonds of lust. There are plenty of orgiastic scenes in the stage setting, but the tone that emerges is heroic. The Ring and Parsifal are full of metaphysical and religious meanings. Just what these are is open to debate. G.B. Shaw thought The Ring is about the struggle between capitalism and socialism.

Audiences, then and now, don’t attend Wagner’s operas for the symbolism; they go for the music, and its integration with the most imposing of all stage settings and with the plot tension fused out of human drama and musical tension-and-resolution. His techniques for achieving this would be his legacy, not the memory of his personality, loves and grudges.

His troubles continued to the end of his life. With fame and material luxury, his ambition kept raising his goals. He always overspent, overborrowed, demanded more than what most audiences could accept; but in the end he accomplished. Of his 13 operas, his third was a contemporary hit; the next 10, though meeting initial difficulties, were adulated and entered the permanent repertoire. The trajectory of his love life was not quite parallel. In 1883, in his 70th year, he started an affair with one of the Flower Maidens in newly permiered Parsifal. Cosima found out about it; they had a stormy confrontation. A few hours later Wagner had a heart attack and died. He was in the midst of writing an essay about “the eternal Feminine.”

Smooth sailing: Rossini, Verdi, Puccini

Rossini grows up in a family of musicians, his father a horn player, his mother an opera singer. He himself sings in minor roles. By age 18 he is composing operas; while playing harpsichord for an opera season in Bologna, he starts having successful productions. He launches into an extraordinary pace of composition: 5 operas in a year, 6 operas the next year; 18 more operas in 7 years. Opera is the favorite form of entertainment in Italy, and the land is full of opera houses. Rossini travels all over, riding his popularity; he can turn out an opera in 2 weeks, slapdash in his methods, but lively and upbeat, full of melodies. No doubt he composed tunes so easily because he had heard and sung so many of them since childhood; it was a language he had learned at an early age.

The Barber of Seville -- a remaking of the Figaro story -- produced in Rome in 1816 makes him famous throughout Europe at age 24. He slows down a bit in the 1820s. He is invited to Paris, London, Vienna, given grand titles and lavish pensions; he has a house and a summer villa in Italy; his wife and star soprano spends extravagantly and takes up gambling. In 1829, Rossini has one more all-time hit, William Tell, whose overture would become famous a century later in America as theme music for the radio cowboy serial The Lone Ranger. In his overtures, Rossini had invented a style of starting quietly, slowly building up to a  rousing crescendo, filling the audience with expectation. Some said he over-used the device. Perhaps bored with himself musically, Rossini gave up writing operas in 1829, age 37. He lived another 40 years, writing little, getting fat and in ill health; but rich and honored for his 20-year run.

Verdi

Verdi comes out of nowhere. Except that the little village where his father is an inn-keeper is in northern Italy at a time when opera is a national fervour. He takes music lessons from the village school-teacher/organist, and composes music for local occasions-- marches and church events. He gets support from a wealthy merchant who wants to send him to the Milan Conservatory. But he is rejected as over-age: he is 19 (it is the year 1832); unlike today, it was customary to enter around age 10, at the most 14. Verdi does get private lessons from the chief harpsichord player at La Scala, then goes home to take over as music teacher and organist.

But he has a contact with the music publisher Ricordi, literally right next door to La Scala, whose opera scores it published. Verdi sends them some music which they publish in 1838 (he is now 25). His first opera is not produced, but in 1838 his second is performed at La Scala with enough success that he gets a commission for 3 more operas. His next opera is a fiasco (a failed comedy); but his fourth-- Nabucco -- is a box-office success in 1842, and at age 29 Verdi’s upward career is on its way.

By this time, the route to musical fortune was through the great conservatories. Verdi is rejected but he manages to get into opera by the side door. Paralleling Chopin’s career in Paris, the music publishing business has become so big that a network connection with an important publisher opens the opera house, too. Ricordi and other publishers would broker many of Verdi’s collaborations with librettists throughout his career.

Verdi now turns out a long series of operas, most of them modest successes, enough to live off the voracious Italian appetite for new operas. He is 38 before he moves up to the first rank: Rigoletto in 1851 is his breakthrough, followed by Il trovatore and La traviata in 1853. After a few let-downs, there are Un ballo in maschera (1859), La forza del destino (1861), and Don Carlos (1866). By now he is producing operas all over Europe. His other mega-hit, Aïda (1871) is commissioned for the opening of the Suez canal; and there are two works of his old age, Otello (1887 -- age 74), and Falstaff (1893 -- age 80), showing that he has kept up with the modernist tendencies of the age.

Throughout, Verdi is a hard-bargaining businessman, and he amasses a considerable fortune. He was already a political hero of the nationalist movement for a unified Italy freed from Austrian and French occupation. His rousing opera choruses (not just in his top repertoire) were taken by patriots as expressing anti-Austrian sentiments, and often led to political demonstrations. His name itself    V-E-R-D-I was written on walls as a political slogan (Victor Emmanuele Rei D’Italia).  After Italy unified in 1870, he was made a Senator. Eventually he tired of politics; opera audiences have never tired of his music.

What makes Verdi so memorable? Two examples: Rigoletto is an ironic title; it means “the man who laughs”. It comes from a French story, Le roi s’amuse -- “the King amuses himself” -- and exposes aristocrats as far from interested in the welfare of their subjects, but rather in this case as a carousing rapist. This would have had strong political resonance in 1851, in the aftermath of the failed revolutionary wave of 1848-49; though that doesn’t explain its continuing popularity. It also includes a sinister assassin and a pretty young female victim. Its most famous song, La donna e mobile (women are fickle) puts the blame on women for being teases. It plays an ironic role in the plot, since this is the tune by which the bad guy announces his approach, disguised as a happy drunk.

It is more like a popular song than an extended aria: a short 8-bar melody repeated several times, with trills on the long-held high notes so the tenor can show off. The tune is  constructed of simple tonic/dominant chords, quite a lot like the famous love duet in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The main melody is harmonized A - E7, E7 - A, (repeated twice).

Then comes the bridge (bars 27-32), chords cranking upwards towards the climax: B7 - E, C sharp minor - F sharp minor,  E7 - A (hold the high note at bar 32)--

Then back home (bars 33-34): B  minor - A - E7 - A. (Plus a final high octave leap to high-high E at bar 35.)  

Verdi creates his effect by rising through a cycle of dominant 7ths.

Compare Mozart’s most famous song, La ci darem la mano. The melody is harmonized to G - C - A minor - D7 (bars 1-4, repeating several times), and followed by alternating G - D or D7 down through bar 17.

Bars 18-22 are the struggle of male and female voices in seduction and resistance, a struggle between A7 and D, climaxing on a victorious high D7 (bar 22).

The melody comes back at bar 23, and starts yet again at bar 27, before modulating into a high, drawn out C--- and resolving back into familiar D7 - G, C - A minor - D7.

Taking up the struggle of alternating G - D7 chords from bars 33-37, we get a final sequence of chord modulations: G - B7, E minor - G7, C - A minor, D - B minor, E minor - C,  and climaxing on a long high D turning into D7 at bar 42. (The rest is omitted, the male/female struggle winding down in an alternation of  G, C, and D7 chords ending in the home key,  G.)

Both melodies consist entirely of pretty, pure diatonic tones, the most familiar kind of sounds, with mild musical tension supplied by the chord progression and the operatic high notes.

Second example: Aida is a tragedy, in the classic sense of a heroic downfall which is also a moral victory. The hero has a love affair with the High Priestess, and is punished by being buried alive in a tomb. The same plot becomes the back story for the classic 1930s horror film The Mummy, where it is played simply for shock value as a team of archeologists find him alive in the pyramid, no longer a tragic hero but just a movie monster. Note also that Aida is familiar to everybody for its triumphal march, because it is played by every high school and college marching band at half time of football games. In sum, Verdi is a big energetic sound, tuneful and easy to understand, both in happy major and picquant minor keys. It is the epitome of popular music, for the pre-jazz era.

Puccini

The beginning of Puccini’s career is quite a lot like Verdi’s. He comes from a small city in northern Italy, in this case from a family of church choir-masters and organists, and this is the path he follows. But in 1880 at age 22 he gets a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory (the age requirement having changed), where he receives training in advanced orchestral techniques. The same music publishing house, Ricordi, likes his first opera well enough to encourage him to write another; the second fails, but Ricordi  hooks him up with Verdi’s last librettist, Boito. In 1893, Manon Lescaut  makes him internationally famous, and he is on the road to wealth, eventually earning millions of dollars. Then comes his big three all-time hits: La Bohème  in 1896, Tosca and Madama Butterfly both in 1900.

His only troubles are at their premieres. Tosca is attacked by critics in Rome because the plot involves a corrupt police chief who tortures the hero to find out where he is hiding a political prisoner (we can hear his screams off stage while Baron Scarpio sings); the prima donna Tosca offers to give herself to him if he will release her lover, then murders him with a carving knife; one treachery follows another and she jumps to her death at the final curtain. The fact that Scarpio sings of his lust in the church while a mass is being sung does not endear Puccini to the conservatives, either.

Madama Butterfly is hissed and booed at its premiere at La Scala, apparently because of opera politics at this headquarters of Italian music. Puccini withdraws it but gets it on the circuit in 1904 by starting at a minor city. Do his experiences with hostile audiences affect the emotions Puccini puts into his operas? Obviously not in the case of the operas which had already been written; nor are there any such signs in his later operas, most of which are of lesser note. In the era when societies took opera seriously-- from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s-- demonstrations by one faction or another (or even against each other) were just the way things were. Puccini understood the politics, and he knew he was the favourite of a strong faction. Photos show him with an air of insouciance,  a boulevardier in elegant clothes, hat at a rakish angle. With success he became something of a roué and a ladies’ man.

In his great operas he is meticulous with orchestration, which means paying attention to the nuances of every combination of instruments. He takes great care with the sound of bells in Tosca and of Japanese music in Butterfly. He is the most successful exponent of Wagner’s method of wall-to-wall orchestral music. He even gets rid of the overture, which Wagner had retained.  Tosca starts off with a sinister crash of minor chords, and we are in the dark cathedral while the escaped prisoner looks for shelter in the chapel of his sister. It is non-stop drama from beginning to end, music and voices carrying the plot tension equally, making for a near-hypnotic listening experience. Perhaps another reason for the opposition to his greatest operas was their announcement of the full-fledged victory of Wagner’s style in Italy. Puccini differs from Wagner in two important respects: Where the German’s literary sources are the mythological world, heavy with cosmological and religious meanings, Puccini is more modernist; part of the movement of verismo, taking its plots from the ordinary life, especially the joys and tragedies of the downtrodden. (Granted, this is more Bohème and Butterfly than Tosca; but its violence is verismo in spades.) And Puccini is lighter, shorter, better at melodies that leave you weak in the knees. No wonder his greatest three operas are at the top of every list of the most performed in the world.

I Pagliacci: the clown who cries

The strongest case for life events being expressed in music is Leoncavallo, a one-time friend and collaborator of Puccini. If Bizet’s Carmen is a one-hit wonder, Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci (1892) is a one-song wonder. (The title means “the players” or “the actors”.) Vesti la giubba (put on the costume) is sung by a clown who has just seen his wife making love to another actor, crying as he gets ready to go on-stage.  It is probably the most famous aria of all time, and it made Caruso (the so-called greatest tenor voice of all time) famous.

Leoncavallo did have a hard life, although it wasn’t about lost love. His first opera was slated to be produced in 1878, but the impressario absconded with the money. Leoncavallo went off to the Middle East playing piano; sponged off a relative who was a government official; fled the Anglo-Egyptian war; ending up in Paris where he scraped by as café pianist and vocal accompanist, until after 10 years he made a connection with Ricordi that brought him to Milan. Ricordi took options on Leoncavallo’s operas but put him to work as a librettist for Puccini’s Manon Lescaut-- Puccini didn’t like his work and had him replaced. Then Ricordi rejected Leoncavallo’s completed operas. In anger, he wrote I Pagliacci for Ricordi’s publishing rival; its success was his revenge. Unfortunately for Leoncavallo, his own production of  La bohème came out in competition to Puccini’s; he had enough reputation to keep on getting operas performed (16 in all), but never again a big hit.

Can we say the frustration of Leoncavallo’s life comes out in I Pagliacci ? He is successful in giving the opera’s theme a very sad tone. How does he do it?

Vesti la giubba is the saddest-sounding music I know of.  It is in the key of D minor, but the saddest parts are not the minor chords.* Look at the sheet music of Vesti la giubba. Where is the sadness in it? (There are no words here.)

* Every major key scale contains 3 minor chords: 2-4-6 (D minor in the C major scale); 3-5-7 (E minor); 6-8-3 (A minor). Most music in a major key sounds some minor chords, without sounding sad. And music in a minor key is not necessarily sad either, e.g. Brahms’ Hungarian Rhapsodies. 

Where is it, then? It is in the dissonances, and how they are emphasized; plus the chord sequences-- the relationship between the last chord still ringing in your ears, and the next.

The melody is in D minor, but the chords rarely follows the tonic/dominant sequence (which would be D minor - A 7th). Instead, the first time through the melody (bars 1-8), it modulates through B flat 7th; then to the conventional subdominant G minor (bar 5); then a sequence through A minor 6th, F 7th, and B flat--- and this prepares the way for the second time through the melody (bars 9-16) to be played in the relative major key, F. Here too it avoids the tonic/ dominant pattern; dominant should be C 7th, but we don’t get to that until bar 15, when it prepares to close back on F.

The dissonances are created by playing high C sharp over low D (bar 1); the high note is only a passing tone, but it is emphasized by being held longer (a dotted 8th note). Same again at bar 3, where high A is played against low B flat. Again at bar 10, G is in double octaves but its augmented 5th (E flat) is held longer than the following passing note.

These top-note dissonances are even stronger when we get to the peak of the aria, the anguished high notes of the tenor in the clown suit. At bar 26, he sings F over a G minor 7th chord, then dropping to E (top note in a G minor 6th); this is repeated at bar 27, like screaming and catching your breath. Then it flows upward still higher, holding the high G in bar 29-- only this time it is the 4th above a D minor chord, resolving to F on the next note. The peak of the aria descends back to the home key, D minor (bars 30-31).

Then comes the most surprising part of the entire sad song: at bar 32 we get an A major 7th (it had been A minor up til now); and the entire key signature changes to D major. Happy ending? Not at all. As the melody fades out, the melody’s downward leap (same as bar 1) plays C sharp over low D; the dissonance is repeated 3 times (bar 33, 35, and 36), each time sinking deeper into the bass clef. The final D is 3 octaves below middle C, about as low as you can get on a piano.

Leoncavallo’s technique is innovative; a relatively simple, cleanly-harmonized melody; but what for other composers would be passing notes, quickly resolved, are dissonances emphasized by the length they are held. He manages to make a major key sound even sadder than the minor.

A good composer, or even an average one, can create sounds that will make listeners feel happy, or sad, or creeped out, or whatever-- think of movie background music. What difference is there between a professional creating these effects on demand, and expressing your own emotions in music? Is there any way we can tell the difference?

Opera failures

It is hard to have a good batting average as an opera composer.

Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio. He said it was his own favorite composition of all his music, but he tried three different versions over 12 years (1804-5, 1805-6, 1814) before he could get it performed, and it was never really popular. He was at the height of his fame and productivity; you might think an emotional person like Beethoven would be perfect for opera. Quite the contrary-- the requirements of operatic emotions have to take precedence in shaping the music. Beethoven did create successful vocal music-- the choral movement in his 9th Symphony includes soloists, but they don’t sound at all like opera singers in dramatic situations. It is a useful comparison case for what makes an opera composer successful. 

Von Weber wrote 7 operas; 2 of them were contemporary hits; none made the long-term repertoire. Der Freischütz was enormously influential, but was superceded. Historical batting average: .000 (2 for 7)

Rossini wrote about 50 operas, of which 2 remain in the repertoire. HBA: .040 (2 for 50)

Bizet wrote 9 operas, starting at age 19; his only hit was his last, just before he died of an illness at 37. But what a hit: Carmen, probably in first place all-time for number of performances.  HBA: .111 (1 for 9)

Mozart wrote 16 operas. Of these, 3 are all-time greats, another 2 are in the standard repertoire. HBA: .313 (5 for 16)

Verdi wrote 28 operas; 4 of them are among the most popular ever, and 6 more are in the repertoire.  HBA: .357 (10 for 28)

Puccini wrote 12 operas. Three of them are in the all-time Top Ten list; 2 others are in the repertoire. HBA: .417 (5 for 12)

Wagner wrote 13 operas; 10 are in the repertoire. HBA: .769 (10 for 13)

There are different criteria for comparison. Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini tie for most operas in the Top Ten. Wagner has the longest winning streak (10 hits in a row; Verdi is second with streaks of 4 and 3 consecutive hits; Mozart and Puccini also have 4-hit streaks. Wagner and Verdi are tied for most all-time hits. Rossini wrote the most operas  (among the big stars; but there are little-known Italian composers who wrote a hundred or more, mostly of the 1700s when operas were shorter; the great Vivaldi wrote more than 40 operas, none of them remembered). Puccini had the earliest perennial hit (his 3rd try); Wagner’s was on his 4th try; Mozart on his 12th; Verdi on his 17th; Rossini’s was about his 16th try, and he would write another 3 dozen before he had another classic hit, whereupon he retired. Mozart is not quite the spontaneous it-all-comes-easy genius people think he is. Winning at opera takes something else.

My point is not the ill-posed question “who was the greatest of all time?” but what determines what kind of composing careers would produce these different profiles. This takes us deeper into the how and when of creativity.

Of the total perennial-repertoire operas produced by the big four names (Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini), 24 of 30 operas --80 percent-- come in bursts of 3 years (Verdi’s 3-hit streak), 5 years (Mozart’s 4-hit streak), and 7 years (Puccini’s 4 hits); plus a 26-year victory span with long gaps for the aging Verdi (starting age 54), and 40 years of continuous work for Wagner (starting age 29). And these bursts contain all of their most famous operas; the ones outside these bursts are marginal to their reputation. They ride the same vein of “inspiration” from one great opera to the next. The word is just a marker; we need to unpack what it is pointing to.

A clue is that Wagner, the most successful at sustaining a string of hits, conceived them all about the same time, a family related by a continuous thread. They were unified by his new musical methods and a new topic, the mythologies of Nordic history. (Previously everyone lived off the mythologies of the ancient Mediterranean.) It was easiest to do this when you write your own librettos. In this respect, Wagner resembles Homer, who produced long epics of the dramatic mythology of Greek gods and heroes.

Verdi’s streak of mega-hits, from Rigoletto to La Traviata, is also unified by its literary themes-- bloody melodramas but set off by wonderful songs and chorus. All really popular operas have fresh, memorable plots and music to match. Wagner, the most literary of the bunch, was best at it. But then, he did come from a theatre family.

Bottom line: writing program music about oneself 

Does music exist to express the emotions of composers’ lives? No one before Beethoven would even think of such a thing. For them, music was what you created for the occasion and the audience. Even after Beethoven, composers like Rossini and Verdi wrote to entertain their audiences, even if Verdi or Mussorgsky might want to stir up their nationalist feelings.

But what if you want to use your music skills to make your own life a subject for music? By the 1890s, this was a plausible thing to do-- even if it shocked traditionalists, which might also be the point. Richard Strauss made his career by seeing how much theatrical shock he could get out of Wagner’s techniques. The 1890s is the decade of modernist sophistication, and Strauss is its enfant terrible. His father is a famous horn player in the Munich orchestra, a partisan of Brahms, but Richard becomes assistant conductor to von Bülow for an elite orchestra at age 21, and converts to the Wagner camp.

At age 25 (1889) he launches a series of tone poems-- highly condensed operas without words, telling their story entirely through the instruments of the orchestra, helped out by Strauss’s program notes. Wagner has been dead since 1883; Brahms and Verdi are on their last legs; and Strauss is soon the most famous musician in the world. Tall (6 foot 3 inches), elegantly dressed, supremely self-confident, his premieres and tours are events of the first magnitude, in music-crazed Germany, in New York and everywhere.

He feeds on controversy and always pushes the envelope. In 1890, Death and Transfiguration is a musical depiction of an old man’s train of thoughts on his deathbed, the rhythm of his faltering pulse in the background; 60 years later, the dying Strauss said it was just like he had composed it. In 1895 Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks depicts the life of a medieval folk hero/rogue, on down to when he is hanged and his spirit flies away mockingly with the piccolo playing his leitmotif. 

In 1896, it is Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s recently discovered philosophical testament -- Nietzsche himself is now silently insane, but suddenly famous after years of obscurity. The text contains the famous line “God is dead; churches are his tomb”, and preaches that Christianity must be replaced by a return to the Dionysian ecstasy of earliest Greek religion, when man will become Superman. Strauss opens with a stunning octave leap, trumpets above a deep organ bass, culminating with a major third suddenly turned minor; followed by a triumphant chordal march upward to orchestral infinity. It has an enormous orchestra, 30 woodwinds and brasses, all manner of drums, cymbals, harps, with a large contingent of strings and a final tolling bell, 150 players in all.

In 1897, Strauss conducts Don Quixote, a more conventional theme but rendered with extra effects like a wind machine to turn the windmill sails; bleeting sheep are mimicked by the sounds of muted horns. Audiences and critics were split but on the whole dazzled by the array of effects Strauss can get out of orchestral instruments as he depicts the contents of Quixote’s mind.

What next? In 1899, Strauss cheekily conducts Ein Heldenleben  (A Hero’s Life). It seems fairly obvious that the hero is himself. In a section called “His Works of Peace” he quotes themes from his previous works. There is a section called “His Adversaries” where solo woodwinds play ugly, stuttering music easily interpreted as his critics. “His Consort” is a picture of his wife, a Wagnerian prima donna; the musical directions are not just “andante” or “allegro con brio” but “frivolously,” “haughtily,” “insolent,” “scolding,” and finally a duet of instruments to be played “tenderly and lovingly.”  The rest of it is more of a fantasy; the Hero’s theme is loud trumpets; there is a long Battle Scene with kettledrums, the thunder of a bass drum, and the sounds of troops and horses rushing in every direction. The last section is called “Escape from the World and Fulfillment of Life”, recalling some of the metaphysical/ religious moods of  Death and Transfiguration  and Zarathustra.

So Strauss has done it: he has used his expert tools at musical portrait-painting to express his own life. Or does he? For one thing, he is only 35 years old and he has certainly not escaped from the world. He is not a soldier and his music is not militaristic; the only adversity he has had is with his critics, but he thrives on succès de scandale, and has always come out ahead. The most realistic part is the portrait of his moody wife, but that is not a picture of himself.

Moreover, in private life, Strauss is quite different than proud and heroic. He is an energy demon and a workaholic, who will stay up until the small hours of the morning; conduct a long string of concerts on the road, writing out orchestra parts at odd moments during rehearsals. He stops to call out instrumentalists for special praise. Although he is surrounded by musical factionalists, he is not one himself; he conducts all sorts of music besides his own; classics like Mozart, Tchaikovsky whom he introduces to Berlin; when a journalist marvels at the complex scores Strauss writes interweaving themes among instruments, he points out his young protégé, Arnold Schoenberg, who needs 65 staves for his avant-garde music [Tuchman 346]. In company, Strauss often engages in humorous buffoonery, sometimes cordial, sometimes sarcastic. He has detachment on what he is doing; he is out to astound the world, and he has the bag of tricks to do it.

He gives up tone poems and turns to opera. This is a hard league to play in; his first efforts, in the vein of Wagnerian-Germanic mythology, are failures. His nose for scandal helps him to a new direction. Oscar Wilde had written a play, Salomé, which was banned in England as sacreligious and pornographic. But German theatre was in an avant-garde mood, and Max Reinhard in Berlin produced a German version in 1903. Strauss sets it to music; it is prohibited in Berlin and Vienna, but Dresden (Wagner’s old stronghold) allows it. It is a tremendous scandal and a tremendous success. Salomé lusts after the imprisoned John the Baptist; when he righteously rejects her as the devil incarnate, she seduces her step-father into granting her any wish: the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. The opera ends with Salomé kissing the bloody lips and King Herod ordering his soldiers to crush her to death with their shields. It is all rendered in Strauss’s most dramatically controlled dissonances. At the premiere, there are 38 curtain calls demanding to play it again.

Strauss makes a tremendous amount of money on this production. Searching for a sequel, he takes up another Max Reinhard production, Elektra, Greek tragedy rendered by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, centering on a maiden who kills her mother Clytemnestra for murdering her father. The music is as avant-garde as anything ever heard in an opera house; it too is a huge event in 1909; it is so eagerly awaited that Strauss receives the equivalent of $1 million in today’s money for the publication rights. It is another succès de scandale, enormously controversial, all the more sought out for being banned.

After that, what can you do for an encore? Strauss suddenly reverses course. In 1911 appears Der Rosenkavalier, beautifully conventional music in the style of Mozart, anachronistically echoing the sounds of Viennese walzes by that other (Johann) Strauss. Well, not entirely conventional. The opera opens in an 18th century boudoir, a couple making love: it turns out to be two women, both in powdered wigs, but one of them in the trousers of a man. Strauss sustains the cross-dressing lesbian theme all the way through; there are no important male characters and he writes unprecedented opera combinations for three sopranos.

Strauss’s most permanent triumph is also his last. In 1913, Strauss creates a lavishly erotic ballet for the sensational Ballets Russes in Paris; Stravinsky upstages him with Le sacre de printemps.  Strauss would live to age 85, but the avant-garde had moved beyond him. Avant-gardes have a way of doing that.

The bottom line, really

We started with the question: does music express the emotions of the composer’s external life? The answer, almost across the board, is no. In my view, this makes composers not less interesting or less human; but takes us more deeply inside the life-experience of what it’s like to be a great musician. Yes, composers sometimes have traumas. When they have the skills that make them great, music carries them above it all. It is a mistake to assume that the only emotional events can be in the external part of a creator’s life. Composing is the biggest part of your life, if you spend many hours a day at it for months on end-- sometimes years with or without taking a break. Yes, many of the great composers worked themselves too hard for their health. But then, they were obsessed with it; they were addicted to it, they enjoyed it-- the best and most meaningful hours of their lives. If we find listening to their music a great experience, imagine what it must have been like to hear it taking shape in your head or beneath their fingers.

In your head is also what you know from your network: what you have internalized of them; some to go beyond; some as rivals, some as collaborators and allies. It is a social world of musicians playing in your mind.

References

Chambers Biographical Dictionary

Cambridge Companion to Music

Harvard Dictionary of Music

Phil Goulding, Classical Music:The 50 Greatest Composers.

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style

Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation

Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna.

Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: the World Before the War, 1890--1914.

Daines Barrington, “Account of a remarkable young musician,” Transactions of the Royal Society, 1770.

George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Principles of Orchestration.

Claudio Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic.