Kurt Nemes' Classical Music Almanac
(A love affair with music)
I’ve written about this Mahler piece before, and it still grips me every time I hear it. Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911)
Third Symphony : 4th movement
Frightfully, I know very little about Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007) save that he was the life partner of Samuel Barber and founded the annual music festival in Spoletto.
Menotti’s Piano Concerto “Violin Concerto” (1.Mov.)
When I entered Indiana University as a sophomore in the fall of 1974, I began taking Latin. Fellow baby boomers might cringe when I admit this–many had to take Latin in public or Catholic school. Parsing sentences, declinations, and conjugations must have seemed really irrelevant in Cold War America. By the time I got to high school, Latin had been dropped from the curriculum altogether, which disappointed me because I had wanted to take it from an early age. You’re probably wondering why.
I found myself usually drawn to one book–Caesar in Gaul, which was third year reader that had a long introduction on Roman warfare, a selection from Jason and the Argonauts, and Caesar’s Gallic War. The book was published in 1917 and they had spared no expense on the illustrations. The part on the Roman military had intricate drawings of weapons, siege engines, uniforms, troops in battle formation and maps in color showing Caesar’s routes. What really drew me to it was the very lurid picture of Caesar being stabbed in the Senate by a vicious electorate, his red blood trailing down the white marble steps and mixing with the inlaid cippolina marble and red granite of the Cosmatesque inlaid paving stones. As a young boy I used to stare at this picture in awe, which probably makes me less critical than some of the fascination with blood and gore video games like nowadays.
After the introduction, the rest of the book was entirely in Latin, which fascinated me and sparked my interest in the language. When I began studying French seriously in college, I learned it had evolved from Latin and thought it would help with my studies. Latin wasn’t offered at my first university, but Indiana University had a great classics department so I enrolled in Latin 101 when I got there.
In my second year at IU, we began working through a Roman reader and then Virgil’s Aeneid. My teacher was a cool bearded guy named Joe Day. A fellow classmate, named Mike Casey, happened to live in the German House next to my dorm and he and I became friends. We got in good with Joe and from time to time sat around with him drinking a few beers and debating Marxism, the classics and opera. We called him “doc” short for doctus the Latin word for teacher or tutor.
Joe loved Latin and did a great job of motivating his students by his passion. He had a gift for making the classics come alive, not only through his retelling of the stories, but also by enthusing about the poet’s use of language and meter in exciting ways that modern poetry lacks. Joe was responsible for igniting an interest in classical writers. He also turned me onto debaucheries of Catullus. Maybe if they had taught that stuff in Catholic school, Latin would have stayed in the curriculum.
In French class that semester, we read Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, “The Flies,” which retells the story or Orestes who slays his mother Clytemnestra to avenge the death of his father, Agememnon, whom his mother killed with the help of her lover Aegisthus. (Whew!) Sartre used the plot to explain the ideas of his philosophy, existentialism. Orestes makes a willful decision to act, in spite of knowing the consequences–that he will be plagued for all eternity by the Furies in the form of a cloud of stinging flies. Even though his mother deserved it, Orestes was still guilty of matricide, a real no-no.
Around this same time period, the Italian film dierctor, Pasolini, released a film version of the myth of Medea. Medea was a witch who married Jason, a mythological precursor to Odysseus and Aneas. Medea is so pissed off by her husband’s infidelity that she murders most of his children, cooks them, and then serves them to him on his return. Pasolini chose Maria Callas for the starring role.
I found something appealing about all these old myths, which despite the intervention of the whimsy of gods, seemed a bit more sane than our current Zeitgeist. The people sometimes just can’t help acting in spite of being for the most part rational. Those who are driven to great deeds and acts–the lust for power or influence–may sometimes obtain their goals, but at a very high price. And though they might think they’ve cheated death or won the contest, fate has a way of coming round and humbling them. Or as Lily Tomlin once put it–“the bad thing about the rat race is the even if you win, you’re still a rat.”
I discovered Barber’s Medea Meditation and Dance of Vengeance quite by accident. It was included on an album with his Adagio for Strings, which I wrote about in my previous post. In my junior year of college, there were days when I was so blue that I would wallow in self-pity and listen to the Adagio. Other days, I would pump up the volume and energize myself by listening to the Medea’s Meditation. While the Adagio demonstrates Barber’s mastery of more traditional lush orchestration and melody, Medea’s Meditation shows he had also assimilated the modern trend toward dissonance and Stravinsky’s emphasis on rhythm as a vehicle for affect in music.
The piece starts out lyrically enough, with lush strings, with just a touch of Hollywood schmaltz. After this calm introduction, the piano plays a syncopated tune on the lower part of the keyboard–kind of a boogie-woogie–which sets the rhythm for the killing frenzy into which Medea whips herself. I can’t think of a piece that better expresses the horrific side of humanity envisioned by a myth about infanticide and cannibalism. Yet, I don’t find it a horrifying piece, and it certainly never made me go out and imitate Medea–or enter politics.
CD or MP3 of Samuel Barber: Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance
After Kristy dumped me early in the fall of 1975, I returned to spending most of my time with the arsty-campy crowd that gravitated to Mark Z*’s room in the French House. Almost all of the usual suspects had returned–Cynthia, the voice major, Michael, the Chinese/composition major, David, the intense Russian/German major, Thom Klem, and Lacy anwho was majoring in comparative literature and string bass. A new person also joined the group–a small, neat little girl named Elizabeth whose father owned a factory. She and Cynthia eventually became lovers.
David’s record collection was awesome. Most were Deutsche Gramophon recordings of German music–Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. On our visits to his house he would pull out some new purchase and play it for us on his wonderful stereo, whose speakers he had built himself. David liked modern music as well, especially avante garde works and once drove us all away by playing some god-awful piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the most unlistenable composer who ever lived.
Someone in our circle bought a new recording of Thomas Schippers conducting Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. In the 24 years since then, this piece has become one of the most overplayed pieces, being used to flog almost every product or as the swelling background music in some poignant death scene of movies. Back then, however, no one had so profaned it yet, and it pretty much took our clique by storm. I immediately went out and bought a copy and spent a number of hours sitting in my room listening to it while bemoaning my fate at having been dumped by Kristy.
Barber originally wrote this piece as the second movement of his String Quartet, Opus 11 in the late 1930s. Arturo Toscanini liked it so much that he convinced Barber to rescore it for orchestra and he premiered it in 1938. It is probably the most-played piece by any American composer. It starts out quietly with a sad melody. The strings then begin to overlap one another as they building to a frenzied climax before finally returning to the sad melody of the beginning.
Re-reading the above, it seems I’ve painted a picture of myself back then as a morose, depressive type. Extravert Geminis rarely stay blue for long, however, and I spent many a fine moment hanging out with my clique. I use the term “extravert” in the Myers-Briggs sense of one who derives their energy from being around people. In many way, I remained shy and having been rejected by Kristy made me even more timid around women. That is probably the reason I ended up gravitating toward and spending more and more time with Lacy.
Lacy didn’t live in the French House but in another dorm in our large sprawling complex. As I said, she majored in comparative literature and string bass. She was thin and the sight of her hoicking around a huge upright bass when she performed in her orchestra was quite comical. I found her quite attractive. She had high cheekbones and cute freckly skin. What caught everybody’s attention, however, was her huge mane of fiery red hair. She wore it long and combed out, but it had a natural wave which gave her a kind of wild air. This was belied by her breathy, little-girl voice. People would stop and stare at her hair, constantly remark about it, or even just reach out and touch it, which I’m sure didn’t at all make her self-conscious.
Lacy had a sweet disposition, coupled with a wicked sense of humor. For that reason she liked hanging around the artsy-campy crowd that met in Mark’s room. I suspect that like me, she lived vicariously through watching the antics of the theatrical, extroverts in that group.
After Kristy dumped me (there I go again), I found myself talking more and more with Lacy at the cafeteria. Like me she loved literature, studying languages (French and German), and listening to good music. We had a lot to talk about. But I was so retarded, I never would have put the moves on her hat it not been for a Vittorio de Sica film.
Lacy liked foreign movies almost as much as I did, and we both got excited to learn that the local art-house cinema was going to show that Italian film maker’s latest film, “A Brief Vacation.” We didn’t go together, but we were surprised and happy to see each other at the cinema and I sat a few rows behind her.
This movie has to be one of the most poignant and heart-breaking flicks I have ever seen. An Italian housewife has a pig of a husband, disrespectful teenage kids, and lives near poverty in a tiny flat in some dreary suburb of a large industrial Italian city. She works long hours in a factory and then must come home to work like a slave. Everyone yells at her and treats her like a doormat.
She develops a cough and goes to the doctor. He diagnoses her as having tuberculosis. The National Health Service orders the standard therapy for her–rest and recuperation at a sanitarium in the Alps. There she blossoms–she reads books, people pamper her, she meets a young buck and has an affair, she gets involved in a protest to improve the working condition of the nurses and aides who work in the sanitarium. The ugly duckling becomes a swan. Cinderella finds her fairy godmother and marries the prince. One day on her visit to the doctor, he tells her she’s completely recovered and can return home. Her lover begs her to run off with him, but she decides she cannot. The final scene is burned in my mind–she steps off the train in a grimy station. Her family instantly launches into her, making fun of her new image and berating her for having abandoned them while she went off and pampered herself. The camera pulls away and we see a person very alone.
When the lights came up, there was a stunned silence in the theatre. I had tears in my eyes and when I looked over at Lacy, she looked up at me and I saw she was crying. I hurried over to her and she hugged me and sobbed. We went to a quiet café and talked and then she and I walked back across campus holding hands. She remained my girlfriend for the next two years.
Eventually, I learned the secret of her timidity. Her parents had divorced and she had a an older brother who had developed schizophrenia. He had started out a genius, but then had a psychotic episode. He ended up living at home. That was one of the first broken families I had ever spent any time with (the divorce rate was much lower back then) and attitudes toward people with mental illness was even worse that it is today. So much pain hung in that family, and I admired how Lacy took it in stride.
I don’t remember any more why we broke up. That was over 30 years ago. Being the type of person I was back then, I can well imagine that I found some excuse based on “my needs” or some reason why she didn’t measure up to my standards. This is the curse and blessing of middle age: we’ve learned how to be nicer people, but we remember all the people we’ve hurt along the way. Hope I haven’t damaged my karma too much.
When I entered Indiana University as a sophomore in the fall of 1974, I began taking Latin. Fellow baby boomers might cringe when I admit this–many had to take Latin in public or Catholic school. How could nuns do justice to the bloody, internecine civil wars and the debaucheries of Catullus? By the time I got to high school, Latin had been dropped from the curriculum altogether, which disappointed me because I had wanted to take it from an early age. You’re probably wondering why.
I found myself usually drawn to one book–Caesar in Gaul, which was third year reader that had a long introduction on Roman warfare, a selection from Jason and the Argonauts, and Caesar’s Gallic War. The book was published in 1917 and they had spared no expense on the illustrations. The part on the Roman military had intricate drawings of weapons, siege engines, uniforms, troops in battle formation and maps in color showing Caesar’s routes. What really drew me to it was the very lurid picture of Caesar being stabbed in the Senate by a vicious electorate, his red blood trailing down the white marble steps and mixing with the inlaid cippolina marble and red granite of the Cosmatesque inlaid paving stones. As a young boy I used to stare at this picture in awe, which probably makes me less critical than some of the fascination with blood and gore video games like nowadays.
After the introduction, the rest of the book was entirely in Latin, which fascinated me and sparked my interest in the language. When I began studying French seriously in college, I learned it had evolved from Latin and thought it would help with my studies. Latin wasn’t offered at my first university, but Indiana University had a great classics department so I enrolled in Latin 101 when I got there.
In the second year, we began working through a Roman reader and then Virgil’s Aeneid. My teacher was a cool bearded guy named Joe Day. A fellow classmate, named Mike Casey, happened to live in the German House next to my dorm and he and I became friends. We got in good with Joe and from time to time sat around with him drinking a few beers and debating Marxism, the classics and opera. We called him “doc” short for doctus the Latin word for teacher or tutor.
Joe loved Latin and did a great job of motivating his students by his passion. He had a gift for making the classics come alive, not only through his retelling of the stories, but also by enthusing about the poet’s use of language and meter in exciting ways that modern poetry lacks. Joe was responsible for igniting an interest in classical writers.
In French class that semester, we read Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, “The Flies,” which retells the story or Orestes who slays his mother Clytemnestra to avenge the death of his father, Agememnon, whom his mother killed with the help of her lover Aegisthus. (Whew!) Sartre used the plot to explain the ideas of his philosophy, existentialism. Orestes makes a willful decision to act, in spite of knowing the consequences–that he will be plagued for all eternity by the Furies in the form of a cloud of stinging flies. Even though his mother deserved it, Orestes was still guilty of matricide, a real no-no.
Around this same time period, the Italian film dierctor, Pasolini, released a film version of the myth of Medea. Medea was a witch who married Jason, a mythological precursor to Odysseus and Aneas. Medea is so pissed off by her husband’s infidelity that she murders most of his children, cooks them, and then serves them to him on his return. Pasolini chose Maria Callas for the starring role.
I found something appealing about all these old myths, which despite the intervention of the whimsy of gods, seemed a bit more sane than our current Zeitgeist. The people sometimes just can’t help acting in spite of being for the most part rational. Those who are driven to great deeds and acts–the lust for power or influence–may sometimes obtain their goals, but at a very high price. And though they might think they’ve cheated death or won the contest, fate has a way of coming round and humbling them. Or as Lily Tomlin once put it-“the bad thing about the rat race is the even if you win, you’re still a rat.”
I discovered Barber’s Medea Meditation and Dance of Vengeance quite by accident. It was included on an album with his “Adagio for Strings,” which I wrote about yesterday. There were days when I was so blue that I would wallow in self-pity and listen to the Adagio. Other days, I would pump up the volume and energize myself by listening to the Medea’s Meditation. While the Adagio demonstrates Barber’s mastery of more traditional lush orchestration and melody, Medea’s Meditation shows he had also assimilated the modern trend toward dissonance and Stravinsky’s emphasis on rhythm as a vehicle for affect in music.
The piece starts out lyrically enough, with lush strings, with just a touch of Hollywood schmaltz. After this calm introduction, the piano plays a syncopated tune on the lower chord, which sets the rhythm for the killing frenzy in which Medea whips herself. I can’t think of a piece that better expresses the horrific side of humanity envisioned by a myth about infanticide and cannibalism. Yet, I don’t find it a horrifying piece, and it certainly never made anyone go out and imitate Medea–or enter politics.
CD or MP3 of Samuel Barber: Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance
After Kristy dumped me early in the fall of 1975, I returned to spending most of my time with the arsty-campy crowd that gravitated to Mark Z*’s room in the French House. Almost all of the usual suspects had returned–Cynthia, the voice major, Michael, the Chinese/composition major, David, the intense Russian/German major, Thom Klem, and Lacy anwho was majoring in comparative literature and string bass. A new person also joined the group-a small, neat little girl named Elizabeth whose father owned a factory. She and Cynthia eventually became lovers.
David’s record collection was awesome. Most were Deutsche Gramophon recordings of German music-Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. On our visits to his house he would pull out some new purchase and play it for us on his wonderful stereos, whose speakers he had built himself. David liked modern music as well, especially avante garde works and once drove us all away by playing some god-awful piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the most unlistenable composer who ever lived.
Someone in our circle bought a new recording of Thomas Schippers conducting Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. In the 24 years since then, this piece has become one of the most overplayed pieces, being used to flog almost every product or as the swelling background music in some poignant death scene of movies. Back then, however, no one had so profaned it yet, and it pretty much took our clique by storm. I immediately went out and bought a copy and spent a number of hours sitting in my room listening to it while bemoaning my fate at having been dumped by Kristy.
Barber originally wrote this piece as the second movement of his String Quartet, Opus 11 in the late 1930s. Arturo Toscanini liked it so much that he convinced Barber to rescore it for orchestra and he premiered it in 1938. It is probably the most-played piece by any American composer. It starts out quietly with a sad melody. The strings then begin to overlap one another as they building to a frenzied climax before finally returning to the sad melody of the beginning.
Re-reading the above, it seems I’ve painted a picture of myself back then as a morose, depressive type. Extravert Geminis rarely stay blue for long, however, and I spent many a fine moment hanging out with my clique. I use the term “extravert” in the Myers-Briggs sense of one who derives their energy from being around people. In many way, I remained shy and having been rejected by Kristy made me even more timid around women. That is probably the reason I ended up gravitating toward and spending more and more time with Lacy.
Lacy didn’t live in the French House but in another dorm in our large sprawling complex. As I said, she majored in comparative literature and string bass. She was thing and the sight of her hoicking around a huge upright bass when she performed in her orchestra was quite comical. I found her quite attractive. She had high cheekbones and cute freckly skin. What caught everybody’s attention, however, was her huge mane of fiery red hair. She wore it long and combed out, but it had a natural wave which made gave her a kind of wild air. This was belied by her breathy, little-girl voice.. People would stop and stare at her hair, constantly remark about it, or even just reach out and touch it, which I’m sure didn’t at all make her self-conscious.
Lacy had a sweet disposition, coupled with a wicked sense of humor. For that reason she liked hanging around the artsy-campy crowd that met in Mark’s room. I suspect that like me, she lived vicariously through watching the antics of the theatrical, extroverts in that group.
After Kristy dumped me (there I go again), I found myself talking more and more with Lacy at the cafeteria. Like me she literature, studying languages (French and German), and listening to good music. We therefore had a lot to talk about. But I was so retarded, I never would have put the moves on her hat it not been for a Vittorio de Sica film.
Lacy liked foreign movies almost as much as I did, and we both got excited to learn that the local art-house cinema was going to show that Italian film maker’s latest film, “A Brief Vacation.” We didn’t go together, but we were surprised and happy to see each other at the cinema and I sat a few rows behind her.
This movie has to be one of the most poignant and heart-breaking flicks I have ever seen. An Italian housewife has a pig of a husband, disrespectful teenage kids, and lives near poverty in a tiny flat in some dreary suburb of a large industrial Italian city. She works long hours in a factory and then must come home to work like a slave. Everyone yells at her and treats her like a doormat.
She develops a cough and goes to the doctor. He diagnoses her as having tuberculosis. The National Health Service orders the standard therapy for her-rest and recuperation at a sanitarium in the Alps. There she blossoms-she reads books, people pamper her, she meets a young buck and has an affair, she gets involved in a protest to improve the working condition of the nurses and aides who work in the sanitarium. The ugly duckling becomes a swan. Cinderella finds her fairy godmother and marries the prince. One day on her visit to the doctor, he tells her she’s completely recovered and can return home. Her lover begs her to run off with him, but she decides she cannot. The final scene is burned in my mind-she steps off the train in a grimy station. Her family instantly launches into her, making fun of her new image and berating her for having abandoned them while she went off and pampered herself. The camera pulls away and we see a person very alone.
When the lights came up, there was a stunned silence in the theatre. I had tears in my eyes and when I looked over at Lacy, she looked up at me and I saw she was crying. I hurried over to her and she hugged me and sobbed. We went to a quiet café and talked and then she and I walked back across campus holding hands. We became lovers that night and she remained my girlfriend for the next two years.
Eventually, I learned the secret of her timidity. Her parents had divorced and she had a an older brother who had developed schizophrenia. He had started out a genius, but then had a psychotic episode. He ended up living at home. That was one of the first broken families I had ever spent any time with (the divorce rate was much lower back then) and attitudes toward people with mental illness was even worse that it is today. So much pain hung in that family, so it was remarkable that Lacy was able to become a functioning member of society.
I don’t remember any more why we broke up. That was over 20 years ago. Being the type of person I was back then, I can well imagine that I found some excuse based on “my needs” or some reason why she didn’t measure up to my standards. This is the curse and blessing of middle age: we’ve learned how to be nicer people, but we remember all the people we’ve hurt along the way. Hope I haven’t damaged my karma too much.
Kurt Nemes' Classical Music Almanac 