Three years ago I wrote my first essay on six epiphanies I’d experienced from listening to classical music. Here are three more. If you want to remind yourself of my definition of epiphanies / frissons then please read Tremble and Transcend (1).
Music epiphanies are deposited in a bank of feeling. A money analogy isn’t a flippant one but a statement of a different definition of wealth. In this rich zone of musical taste a high interest (of pleasure) accrues significantly more than any interest on the money in my savings account or ISA. Each time I return to playback this music it still turns me on – a very 60s phrase and applicable to the time when I first discovered all 3 works on vinyl and cd.
(1) Scheherazade – Ravel
The young Ravel’s beautiful song cycle setting of three poems by Tristan Klingsor operates on a dual level. First as a 1904 version of orientalism (Long before Edward Saide’s important critique) with its depiction of the other and the allure of the East as being mythically dangerous, exciting, fearful, enchanting and mysterious: words that fancifully adorn a complex reality. The 1001 Arabian Nights still inhabits the cultural background of our perception of the East despite the problematic geo-politics of many parts of Asia. Yet at the beginning of the century Ravel and Klingsor centred very sensually on the Eastern romance of their composition: not only the fairy tale element but secondly an early modern view of individuality repressed by societal constraints.
Asie, The Enchanted Flute and The Other (Or better still in French L’Indifferent) are intoxicating songs. If I had to only choose only one then it would be Asie (Asia) and to be precise the very opening when the word Asie is sung three times by the great female soprano Victoria de los Angeles. Her voice has a beguilingly warm sweetness, technical ease and unsentimental lyric power. When I was nineteen I first heard her recording of Scheherazade and loved it. I hadn’t yet travelled abroad. Western Europe was out there and enticing – though Asia was the greater challenge. Victoria cried out Asie to accompany Ravel’s wonderful orchestration. I was seduced and literally wanted to fly to the East. Not on a plane but by flapping my wings. This is an Asia “where fantasy sleeps like an empress in her forest filled with mysteries” and a schooner will “spread its violet sails like a huge bird of night in the golden sky.”
The promise of Scheherazade is also generalised into a deep need to escape your circumstances, overcome the often crushing routines of life and achieve a greater imaginative freedom. In Tristan Klingsor’s case it might have been because he was a gay man. Ravel might also have been gay but there is no real evidence of his sexual preferences.
In my case I was a comfortably heterosexual teenager who vaguely wanted to escape from Liverpool. In 1969/70 I had a good friendship with a woman 10 years older than me. Pauline kept telling me that she thought Liverpool was a dump and that young people like me ought to leave. Ravel and Klingsor were members of an artistic group called Les Apaches (The Hooligans) and their creative ‘mischief’ was to create a fourteen minute musical disruption. Scheherazade had me itching for new possibilities. Asie, Asie, Asie, magically sung as a stretched out Aaa-sie finally had me singing Get-out, Get-out, Get-out over De Los Angeles’s compelling voice.
(2) Symphony no 1 in D Major – Mahler
My first encounter with the symphonies of Mahler was through Charles Groves, now sadly forgotten. Once he was the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic and championed Mahler at the many concerts he gave. Yet I don’t recall going to hear his performance of Mahler’s 1st. I came to that through the CBS recording that Bruno Walter made with the CBC orchestra in 1962.
Nature inhabits Mahler’s first symphony – even the sound of a cuckoo is depicted in the opening movement as we hear the return of Spring. The symphony’s nickname is Titan: presumably meaning the titanic power of nature. We’ve had previous musical descriptions of nature – eg. Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony and Schumann’s Spring symphony yet not so violent. But the last time I listened to Walter’s recording was the day after I’d put on my CD of Songs for Swinging Lovers by Frank Sinatra. The song I was most drawn to was You Make Me Feel so Young with its great line “You make me feel that Spring has sprung.” Just what I felt Mahler had achieved, although Spring being sprung in his first symphony produced an orchestral scream moment that rudely shocked the audience at its premiere in 1889.
The symphony is superbly realised by Bruno Walter (Who as a young man met Mahler) and by 1962 was an elderly disciple making his second recording of a work that had so convinced him of Mahler’s greatness. Walter’s performance is timed at 52.03 minutes. About 3 minutes before the end of the symphony I experience a real heart beating epiphany with the last movement called the “victory chorale.” At this point the Mahlerian hero has escaped the blows of fate, the orchestral screaming, and comes triumphantly through. There are times when I’ve just played, as if injecting a needle into my arm, those last 3 minutes of Mahler 1. That ending echoing ideas of the opening, comes organically round full circle to its wonderfully resolved D major climax.
I now know Mahler’s “victory chorale” so well that I don’t even need to listen to the CD. It’s internalised: locked in my memory and, of all places pops into my head. The pulse of its musical triumph calms me when I’m in a supermarket and irritated that a certain item isn’t in stock, but an epiphany definitely is.
(3) Piano Sonata opus2, no 3 in e flat minor – Beethoven
A protean restlessness is my first reaction to this early Beethoven sonata. In their liner notes for records and CDs music critics tend to employ too much technical language. With a few exceptions (Bryce Morrison, always astute and literary) they often go for musical terms over metaphors.
“Employing elaborate figuration, original pedal effects and a brilliant use of trills.”
That’s one least bad example: a description of this Beethoven sonata by William Kinderman and true enough. But the work is also mercurial, inventive, irrepressible and humorous. Here is Beethoven already imposing a Beethoven identity on the piano sonata form assisted by what he’d learnt from Haydn. He would compose 32 piano sonatas. Masterpieces like the Waldstein, Pathetique and The Hammmerklavier were to come. And 30, 31 and 32 would enter a new pianistic sound world.
Of all the epiphanies I’ve written about in these two essays only the Beethoven Piano Sonata opus 2, no 3 in e flat major comes closest to depicting so much of my basic personality and individuality: especially so in its first movement. I simply see myself; hear the rhythm of me, my identity, moving through life: trying to escape, outwit death, and lesser disappointments, in a defiantly childlike manner. All the while testing social parameters and exerting my freedom to question authority.
Allowing for many different interpretations, and I do, of this sonata then the recording made in mono in 1951 by Wilhelm Kempf is the one that contains so much of me. Praised for the spirituality and poetry of his playing Kempf was from a golden age of pianists. He was born in Germany in 1895 (When the world still had the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and died in 1991. There’s a lovely story of him meeting Sibelius in 1957 and playing the Hammerklavier sonata. According to Kempf when he’d finished playing Sibelius said “You did not play like a pianist, you played like a human being.” I can’t verify how true that remark is but it feels right. Wilhelm Kempf sensitively playing in a human and direct way: naturally conveying the very human qualities of late and early Beethoven (that pesky yet genial sonata no 3) to my ears and subsequently my sense of what it is to be identified as being human.
Recordings
Ravel: Scheherazade – Victoria de los Angeles Orchestra de la Societe des Concerts de Conservatoire conducted by Georges Pretre. Great Recordings of the Century EMI 1962
Mahler; Symphony no 1 CBC Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter, 1962 Sony Classical
Beethoven; Piano Sonata opus2, no 3 in e flat minor – 1951, Wilhelm Kempf in the box set of Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Deutsche Grammophon
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