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The remarkable Evelyn Glennie
Evelyn Glennie is in the city this weekend performing the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra premier of a percussion concerto written by John Corigliano (the Juilliard School professor whose score for The Red Violin won the Academy Award). The Conjurer, first performed this February in Pittsburgh, is interesting because it wholly foregrounds the percussionist. It accomplishes this both physically (the soloist is situated in front of the conductor with the full array of instruments on which she will perform, organized as are the movements, by wood, metal and skin) and aurally, since the orchestral setting is reduced to strings only and the melodic and tonal work of the piece is wholly carried by the solo artist. Corigliano, in a pre-performance talk, explained the challenges of writing percussion-centered pieces, which include the fact that many of the main percussive instruments (like, obviously, the snare drum) do not enable melodic expression, and as a result one often leaves a percussion performance mainly remembering the orchestra and the melody they played and nothing about the soloist except that she or he was running around and expressive. Relying on the full range of available strategies to combat these tendencies, Corigliano arranges the work so that the soloist is physically in front, aurally dominating, and temporally he arranged each movement to start with a true percussion solo into which the orchestra only slowly intrudes and then fully joins.
I’m embarrassed to say that I had never heard of or encountered Evelyn Glennie, the amazing artist for who the work was commissioned. I had no idea that she has been named a Dame by the British queen or that she has been a global percussion icon for decades. Some sense of her contributions are summarized in her biography, available at her website and reproduced in the evening’s concert program:
Evelyn Glennie is the first person in musical history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist… For the first ten years of her career virtually every performance she gave was in some way a first. Her diversity of collaborations have included performance artists such as Nana Vasconcelos, Kodo, Bela Fleck, Bjork, Bobby McFerrin, Sting, Emmanuel Ax, Kings Singers, Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Fred Frith. Evelyn has commissioned 150 new works for solo percussion from many of the world’s most eminent composers and also composes and records music for film and television. Her first high quality drama produced a score so original that she was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards (BAFTA’s); the U.K. equivalent of the Oscars.
Glennie has also won two Grammy Awards and her website also refers to her design work (she makes jewelry) and her multimedia collaborations. Many online resources are available that showcase her artistry and intellect, including a quite interesting talk she gave in the TED series and YouTube clips from her performances. An award-winning documentary has also been made centered on her work; I found it mesmerizing.
The press coverage attending her performances doesn’t quite do justice to the experience of seeing her on the stage. A common theme is that Glennie (as a St. Petersburg Times report put it) “dashes around stage like a woman possessed, darting from marimba to tom-toms to cymbals to bongos to every other imaginable instrument that can be struck, shook, rattled, and rolled” (Variety described her as “bright-eyed, wiry, and pointedly articulate,” not to mention “tattooed and wild-haired”). And there is some truth in these descriptions, compounded for some when they first realize that Glennie is performing barefoot. But such labels also deflect from the incredible discipline and precision demanded of percussive performance – drumming accomplished as pure abandonment would be torture, not art or music.
For Glennie, the universe of sounds enabled by the full repertoire of percussive instruments reveal both the primal impulses of human culture (along with its wide variability) but also connect in a fuller sensory way than sound waves hitting eardrums. In a Glennie performance one is struck by the holistic manner by which sound so visibly courses through her body and gestures, and animates her clearly enthusiastic passion for the acoustic possibilities she evokes. Whether her connection to a particular instrument is mediated by sticks or whether she is physically fused with it (as is the case of the so-called “talking drum,” which a player holds between the legs and plays with the hands, where the legs themselves by squeezing against the flexible frame can reshape and contort the resulting sound), Glennie reveals how the performer actually embodies the music. As she put it in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, “We have to listen; we have to listen through the entire body, and by bringing all the senses together… It’s something that I’m refining myself every time I pick my sticks up. To have that kind of fluidity means that you’re constantly listening, and I don’t mean listening through the ears – listening through the entire body. That makes a massive difference in how you experience sound, not just music.”
It was only after watching her remarkable ASO performance that I learned something about Glennie that is widely reported but on which she prefers not to dwell: Evelyn Glennie has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12. For me this is astonishing, less in the sense of the typical artist overcomes disability sense that one hears so often when discussing Beethoven and others, but rather because here, one leaves with the profound impression that facing her own physical limits has produced artistry that far transcends the historical limits of the percussion repertoire and that curiously would not have been imagined as richly by those who can hear in the traditional sense.
SOURCES: John Fleming, “The Perfect Touch,” St. Petersburg Times, 24 August 2007, pg. 1E; Edward Ortiz, “A Feel For Music: Evelyn Glennie Hears With Her Body – And Makes Percussion an Adventure,” Sacramento Bee, 2 December 2007, pg. TK23; Amanda Henry, “Percussionist Evelyn Glennie Gets New Emphasis For the Role,” Wisconsin State Journal, 24 March 2004, pg. D1; Eddie Cockrell, “Review of Touch the Sound,” Variety, 20 December 2004, pg. 50; Donald Munro, “Flying Solo: A Long List of Accomplishments Travels Alongside this Talented Musician,” Fresno Bee, 22 April 2008, pg. E1
Paula Vogel’s “How I learned to drive”
Tonight I had the opportunity see Paula Vogel’s remarkable Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive” in production at the Georgia State University theatre. The show relies on a very small cast, only five in all, a fact that lends some irony to the fact that three of them play multiple roles described in the bill as “Greek choruses.” First performed off-Broadway about a decade ago (in a production that starred the amazing Mary Louise Parker) in a space likely not much larger than our university theatre (a fact that works considerably to the play’s benefit for reasons to which I’ll soon return), the student-led production I saw this evening was powerful in many respects.
If you haven’t had the chance to see “Drive” on stage or to read the play, you should know that in some ways it is typical of Vogel’s work in the sense that the subject matter it engages is exceptionally difficult, centered on the deeply complex and problematic relationship between Li’l Bit, a young woman who is both taught to drive and is molested by her uncle-by-marriage, Peck. The piece manages to deploy the gimmicks available to live production without ever quite seeming gimmicky, all the while speaking to unspeakable acts of exploitation without either preaching or rationalizing. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of “Drive” is that it leads its audience to a comprehension of how situations of abuse arise in ways that never fully demonize Peck even as we can see him step-by-step approach and then finally fall headfirst into the abyss. Peck is evil but also sympathetic; Li’l Bit is forever scarred but also able in some sense to move beyond the disaster of abuse and loss, and all at the same time.
For me Paula Vogel’s work comes into sharper focus when one realizes that she is a teacher by trade (head for many years of Brown University’s playwriting workshop and now newly appointed to the Yale Drama School). It seems to me that in many ways the sometimes pathological relationship between manipulator and victim can be better comprehended in the dynamics of even healthy teacher-student interaction, where differences in age and mutually performed strategies of manipulation are ever-present. But Vogel’s work cannot be so easily explained: as sensitive as she is to scenes of educational encounter, she is also deeply thoughtful about the distortions arising in the theatre itself, where innovation is both enabled and destroyed (“We have never figured out how to produce art in this country. The culture has successfully made sure that we are going to be entertainers of the ruling class, the rich… We are now nothing more than a backdrop for cocktail parties for the ruling class” – all thoughts expressed even as she challenges all this in her own work).
“How I Learned to Drive” can be read as a retelling of Nabokov’s Lolita (interviewed on the Lehrer News Hour right after winning the Pulitzer, Vogel told interviewer Elzabeth Farnsworth that “in many ways I think that this play is an homage to Lolita, which I think is one of the most astonishing books ever written”). But the play recasts almost every important detail (apart from the fact of a profoundly wrong older man and younger girl “relationship”) in ways that bring to our attention deeply vexed ethical questions. Humbert is a literature scholar whose creepy and distorted repetition complex (he sees in Dolores/Lolita traces of his past romantic failures) is wholly pathological, and the novel is narrated through his eyes; “Drive” is narrated by the girl, and Peck is married to a beautiful woman with whom he seems to enjoy sexual intimacy. Humbert and Peck are both shaped by the World War II years, but whereas for Humbert the damage is done by his true love’s premature death, for Peck the suggestion is that he was scarred by having been himself molested as a young boy.
Lolita is manipulative but also crude and finally unexceptional; Li’l Bit is in some respects more naive and less sexually manipulative but is also more fully formed and apart from the trauma inflicted on her by Peck, weirdly and fully self-aware. Humbert falls instantly in love with Dolores when he sees her for the first time at the age of twelve, sunbathing; Peck has “loved” Li’l Bit since the day she was born, from the time when he could literally hold her entirely in the palm of his hand (though of course he continues to hold her in the palm of his hand until the day of her eighteenth birthday; the “palm of the hand” becomes a repeated motif in the script). Nabakov described Humbert as “a vain and cruel wretch”; Peck, in telling contrast, doesn’t come across as vain but at times rather lonely and compellingly charismatic. Peck is a wretch, to be sure, but is motivated more by tragically misplaced affection than by cruelty. Humbert’s increasingly pathological behavior leads finally to a murder; Peck’s to self-immolation as he drinks himself to death.
Peck’s driving lessons provide a parallel scaffolding that helps make sense of and externalize his own internally considered strategies of manipulation, and also create a metaphorical apparatus by which we can see the complex patterns of exhilaration and lost control and entrapment that distort familial affection into molestation. The car is a mode of escape (even finally for Li’l Bit) and a sanctioned space of private encounter, a site where the illicit thrill of sexual exhilaration for Peck literally occurs simultaneous with the guilty pleasure of illegally driving for the girl. Nowhere is this metaphorical layering more compelling than in the last seconds of the production, when Li’l Bit, now in her mid-thirties, returns again and again to the automobile and the long drive, pressing hard on the accelerator as a means of escaping her past even as the very act of driving reenacts both the trauma and, yes, the guilty pleasures of her remembered relationship with this man in whose orbit she uneasily traveled, filled both with love and its all-too-easily recalled opposite.
Less compelling for me were the more caricatured familial dynamics Vogel enacts through Li’l Bit’s grandparents; while they convey the very real sense in which bystanders can become enablers, the nuance of the core (Li’l Bit/Peck) relationship is missing from the grandparent’s tortured marriage. And a scene where Peck seduces a nephew (this time the metaphor is fishing, not driving, and the site of molestation a tree house and not the car) is both clearly decisive in depersonalizing Peck’s distorted desires but also perhaps too completely ambiguated (an underlying dynamic that seems at work throughout is the ironic possibility that Peck has deeply sublimated homosexual desires and that part of Li’l Bit’s revulsion at his advances relates to her own coming-into-being as a lesbian).
But these are minor complaints – Peck’s seduction of the boy is challengingly ambiguous but also amazingly evocative since the scene is played in pantomine, the boy never seen – and the more commonly earth-shattering power of Vogel’s writing comes through even in those scenes that seem to fall just slightly short of perfection. One of the most striking and heartbreaking monologues in the entire play is given by Peck’s wife (Li’l Bit’s aunt), who is (and this is Vogel’s greatest gift, I think) able to articulate in a speech that lasts no more than ninety seconds all the tangled and tragic rhythms of awful knowledge and its denial, love and its capacity both to sharpen and blur one’s comprehension, and a longing wistfulness that desperately wishes for a return to normalcy that has been fully and impossibly foreclosed.
Along the way the play offers a challenging meditation on love: At what precise moment in a relationship does love lose its innocence and become guilty and wrong? To what extent, if any, can horrible behavior be mitigated because it arises out of an apparently genuine loving regard? And what is the meaning of consent? Vogel’s narrative makes plain that consent is insufficiently finalized even at steps when it is non-coercively and repeatedly requested, and it also complicates the idea that the responsibility of consent runs only one way: at almost every step of the unfolding narrative both the older man and the younger girl each comprehend what is happening at an important level of conscious realization, even as each is blinded by peculiar and tragically naive misconceptions.
The many recognitions Vogel has received (Obie, Drama Critics, Pulitzer, to name only a few) reflect the perfect affinity between the play and the physical Intimacy of live theatre. The performance I saw tonight wholly confirmed David Savran’s insight that “A Paula Vogel play is never simply a politely dramatized fiction. It is always a meditation on the theatre itself – on role-playing, on the socially sanctioned scripts from which characters diverge at their peril and on a theatrical tradition that has punished women who don’t remain quiet, passive and demure.” Lolita works better on screen because the nature of Humbert’s attraction for Dolores is itself initiated in an act of cinematic spectacle – Humbert falls in love with a distant image of the girl, and is captivated by the mirage before he ever comes to understand her more mundane true persona. Not so for “Drive,” where the ever accumulating erotic charge does not arise out of Peck’s view-from-afar as much as the more fully embodied encounters of touch and conversation and smell and taste and intimate contact, not to mention their absence.
The theatrical setting also performs another important function that would be difficult to enact on screen. Vogel’s script jumps around, scrambling chronological time even while the basic characters (Peck and Li’l Bit) are not physically altered or differently made up. The effect is that at any given time, although the audience never loses sight of the underlying inappropriateness adduced by differences in age, one loses track of how old Li’l Bit is – in this moment is she thirteen or thirty? – and so the combined mechanism of mixed up chronology and theatrical performance help us see her as Peck sees her: young and old, naive and sophisticated, innocent and maybe also guilty, all at once, blurred together in ways that distort judgment and help make Peck’s agonizingly awful missteps also more comprehensible.
SOURCES: “A Prize Winning Playwright,” Elizabeth Farnsworth interviews Paula Vogel on the Lehrer Newshour (online), 16 April 1998; Elena More, “Stage Left: An Interview with Paula Vogel,” PoliticalAffairs.net: Marxist Thought Online, May 2004; Gerard Raymond, “Paula Vogel: The Signature Season,” Theater Mania, 12 October 2004; David Savran, “Paula Vogel’s Acts of Retaliation,” American Theatre 13.4 (April 1996), pg. 46; Dick Scanlon, “Say uncle theatre,” The Advocate, 10 June 1997, pg. 61; Stefan Kanfer, “Li’l bit of incest,” New Leader, 30 June 1997, pg. 21; David Savran, “Driving Ms. Vogel,” American Theatre 15.8 (October 1998), pg. 16.
On the relevance of Lionel Trilling
I am aware of no specific anniversary that has prompted the spat of recently revitalized interest in the life work of Lionel Trilling, the legendary Columbia University professor and author most famously of The Liberal Imagination (1950). But suddenly his writing has sprung back into intellectual circulation: the first third of an unfinished novel, The Journey Abandoned, has been published this year, and New York Review Books has just reissued The Liberal Imagination. Read by today’s lights, which is to say to read it outside the culturally dominant frame of the Cold War and American anti-communism that shaped its production and Trilling’s world view, it is hard to imagine what made it a national bestseller (more than 100,000 copies were sold in paperback). All the essays had previously appeared in print, many in the Partisan Review to which Trilling was long attached, and many of the essays engage particular novelistic texts in ways one would assume rather inaccessible to the wider reading public. Still, I have found myself attracted to Liberal Imagination (and have been recently reading my way through it), in part because of the way it has been described as a “monument of humanism” (McCarter) but also just to gain purchase on the basis of his enormous influence in American literary critical circles.
Louis Menand’s introduction to the new reprint, which has been strongly attacked by Leon Wieseltier (a Trilling student) as misconstruing Trilling’s sense of the relationship between art and literature and thereby demeaning the sense of urgency Trilling saw in the literary critical enterprise, nonetheless rightly calls attention to a combination of humbled arrogance I find attractive in his work. Trilling did not mainly want to be remembered as a critic (he wished most of all to be considered a novelist); in fact, because he only knew the English language he expressed the concern that he was not even properly a scholar. “But,” writes Menand, “although he may not have wanted what he had, and he may not have understood entirely why he had it, he appreciated its value and tended it with care.” The result is deeply polished prose that, if it fails, likely does so because Trilling’s work is saturated by the expression of dialectical tendencies that can become sources of frustration when one seeks to finally understanding his position, more than any sense of overweening arrogance in his compositional style.
The central theme of the book, which was also a central problematic of Trilling’s lifetime critical production, strikes me as possessing a profound continuing relevance even if Trilling’s own position reads as less coherent than it would have more than a half century ago. Trilling was concerned to specify and sometimes to ambiguate the relationship between literature and liberal politics. Liberalism, whose ideological impulses (and this is true of all ideological formations) can lead to an inevitable oversimplification of the human condition (in the case of liberalism by reducing the aim of all politics to the attainment of equality and freedom, which when applied risk doing violence to the rougher edges of the polity that should by liberalism’s own lights be tolerated), required reflective challenge if it was to survive without lapsing into empty and dangerous dogma. Because conservatism seemed to Trilling an unavailable corrective in producing morally mature individuals (as he famously put it in the preface, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”), it fell to the novelist to interrogate the tendency to empty certitude to which liberalism in all its American variations was prone.
Why literature? Because great novels (and for Trilling this mainly meant stories to some extent historically distant from contemporary culture) offer representations that invite critical speculation and open ethical vistas. This is so because the novelist situates moral and political struggle within characters, imagined persons who make ideological abstractions concrete and on account of their embodiment reveal the limits of theory (Donald Pease has suggested that Trilling’s main contribution was to “elevate the liberal imagination [and the liberal anticommunist consensus] into the field’s equivalent of a reality principle”). Literature, Trilling wrote, is “the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” And all this is accomplished in a manner assured to interest and engage readers able to connect emotionally to vivid and rich scenes of imagined human interaction. The novel thus possesses the twin capacity to enact moral ambiguities while also attracting the interest of audiences more numerous that those who would ever read theology or philosophy or other theory. (Ironically, perhaps, John Vernon criticized Trilling’s later writing as suffering because it offered a wholly disembodied and thus cold analysis, which is to say his criticism lacked the formal virtues of the novel he so regularly praised).
Trilling did not believe that literature always apprehends or represents or has some unique insight into the Truth. He understood that not all writers see themselves as working in explicit opposition to liberalism, which for him was beside the point since any rich ethical interrogative novel poses an useful if implicit challenge to ideological certitude. Nor did he believe that writers have (either on account of their separation from the wider culture or their innate madness) special access to privileged knowledge. He simply believed that writers who attempt to offer richly plotted stories recognizable to their readers will necessarily induce critical analysis and reflection. As Menand notes, referring to Trilling’s famous essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” Trilling
…had come to believe that “art does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth and does not always point out the right way, that is can even generate falsehood and habituate us to it, and that, on frequent occasions, it might well be subject, in the interests of autonomy, to the scrutiny of the rational intellect.” …Humanism might be a false friend. This willingness to follow out the logic of his own premises, to register doubts about a faith for which he is still celebrated by people who are offended by attempts to understand books as fully and completely implicated in their historical times, is the finest thing about his work.
Along with mass culture, literary criticism can too easily become a culprit in degrading the complexity proper to a well-functioning liberalism as well, for if the critic tries to ignore the broader culture and its history altogether (and this was the major shortcoming Trilling saw in the work done under the name New Criticism), or insists on applying the strictures of scientific covering laws or a predetermined ideology, all the richness of the realist novel is erased, thereby simply opposing liberalism’s potential platitudes with the verities of alternatively over-basic theories of collective life.
In judging the contemporary relevance of Trilling’s case for high literary culture one immediately wonders if a position so intimately connected to 1950’s hyper-ideological Cold War culture makes sense given today’s arguably post-ideological times. Here is the case made by McCarter:
The “Stalinist-colored” ideas that Trilling sought to rebuke are now tough to spot, unless you’re a Fox News contributor. But even as some liberal excesses have receded, the book has lost none of its urgency. For it celebrates something that is imperiled in our high-speed, always-on media culture: imagination itself. Trilling foresaw the threat: “The emotional space of the human mind is large but not infinite, and perhaps it will be pre-empted by the substitutes for literature – the radio, the movies, and certain magazines,” he wrote, prophetically. A shrinking national attention span and eroding reading habits aren’t just bad news for liberal politics. The moral imagination excited by good books, he argues, teaches us sympathy and a respect for variety: the waning novel leads to “our waning freedom.”
Such a position is not altogether self-evident, especially given the manner by which popular culture has been vigorously defended in the last quarter-century (or more) as enabling vernaculars both of understanding and potential resistance to the stultifications of ideology. To specify the point by asking a rather mundane question: why is it that the nation’s critical faculties are raised by reading an E.M. Forster novel (a writer Trilling praised) but not by seeing A Room With a View in the cinema multiplex? I have not encountered a fully elaborated critique of popular cultural mass mediation so far in Trilling, but can imagine some lines of argument he might attempt. He might first call to mind his often articulated view that the historical distance created by great novels is required to counteract the tendency to revert to current ideological accounts, possibilities subverted by necessarily simple film or journalistic treatments that translate rich novels into the contemporary vernacular.
Trilling might also evoke the long-standing case against mass culture as inevitably inclined to conformity and utopianism, versions of which often start with the view that, organized as they are by the desire for lowest-common-denominator mass audiences and controversy shyness (since controversy can be a stigma that suppresses profits), mass cultural artifacts will inevitably lapse into intellectual quietism or outright boosterism for self-satisfying verities. As Hersch puts the potential case, “while literature encourages critical reflection, mass culture produces a predetermined emotional and intellectual response in the reader, discouraging and atrophying the ability to think independently. Such pseudo-literature encouraged passivity, paving the way for totalitarianism.” Agree or disagree, it should be noted that this view of mass culture may have contributed to Trilling’s own late-in-life pessimism even regarding the capacity of literature to break through, since (again quoting Hersch), “in a conformist culture, literature presents minority views that are likely to be scorned by the majority” (99).
Even conceding Trilling’s case, which many thoughtful observers of contemporary culture would never do (Herbert Gans and Raymond Williams would stand near the head of a long line), LT is often attacked for his tendency to read liberalism as wholly shaped by a now nonexistent monolithic middle class (that if it existed in the 1950’s certainly does not today, a point that underwrites part of Cornel West’s critique), which given current conditions of fragmentation does not exist in any meaningful way and probably cannot be rearticulated. Another common criticism is that in developing his case for interrogating liberalism Trilling only paved the way for neoconservatism (a cottage industry continues to debate whether Trilling was a closet case neoconservative: his wife Diana has adamantly refused the possibility, while Irving Kristol has claimed that LT was simply a neocon lacking the courage to say so in print).
Both arguments, it seems to me, miss the deeper commitment in Trilling’s work to a messy and complex humanism, and his recognition that for societies to proceed thoughtfully requires both a sense of common vision and purpose and also an always acknowledged sense that ideologies cannot be permitted, in the name of such commonalities, to erase or suppress what he called the “wildness of spirit which it is still our grace to believe is the mark of full humanness.” As Bender has argued, “Trilling’s very middle classness – by providing the perspective of distance – ends up, however paradoxically, providing contemporary American culture with a radical challenge, urging critics to find some space among nostalgia, politicized group identities, and specialized academic autonomy for the creation of a public culture” (pg. 344).
SOURCES: Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, intro. by Louis Menand (New York: New York Review Books, 2008 [1950]); Jeremy McCarter, “He Gave Liberalism a Good Name,” Newsweek, 6 October 2008, pg. 57; Leon Wieseltier, “The Shrinker,” New Republic, 22 October 2008, pg. 48; Louis Menand, “Regrets Only: Lionel Trilling and His Discontents,” New Yorker, 29 September 2008, pgs. 80-90; Russell Reising, “Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, and the Emergence of the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism,” boundary2 20.1 (1993): pgs. 94-124; Donald Pease, “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon,” boundary2 17 (1990); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Thomas Bender, “Lionel Trilling and American Culture,” American Quarterly 42.2 (June 1990): pgs. 324-347; John Vernon, “On Lionel Trilling,” boundary2 2.3 (Spring 1974): pgs. 625-632; Charles Hersch, “Liberalism, the Novel, and the Self: Lionel Trilling on the Political Functions of Literature,” Polity 24.1 (Fall 1991): pgs. 91-106; Robert Genter, “’I’m Not His Father’: Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, and the Contours of Literary Modernism,” College Literature 31.2 (Spring 2004): pgs. 22-52; T. H. Adamowski, “Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73.3 (Summer 2006): pgs. 883-904.
Tchaikovsky’s “unplayable” violin concerto
I’m trying to sort through my disappointment at a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra I attended last week here in Atlanta. If you’ve heard it and have even a modest level of appreciation for classical music it’s likely you have connected to the work at some point. In certain contexts the piece is a show stopper, a work that showcases the world’s leading violinists. Robert McDuffie, who heads a strings program at Mercer University of which they and the state of Georgia are rightly proud and who will soon world premiere a Philip Glass work written just for him, was the featured soloist and I admire his playing. The concerto is one of my favorites and so I rushed around to purchase what turned out to be a perfect ticket – fourteen rows back and right in the middle. But the performance was a letdown.
Part of my reaction was the context: I was there alone, sitting next to a man who kept falling asleep throughout the entire evening’s program, and that takes its toll (on the other hand, the woman sitting on my right side seemed to have been transported into a state of pure rapture). The concerto was followed by a performance of Tchaikovsky’s first symphony, which he wrote at a young age and is rather undistinguished compared to the more frequently played later works.
As I’ve thought about it, though, I’ve decided my unease with the performance reflects a more substantial underlying feature of the work itself, which relates to its historical reputation as essentially “unplayable.” As I was leaving the symphony hall, my first reaction was to rationalize my disappointment as resulting from the heightened expectations I had for the concerto that were based in part on the fact that I regularly listen to it loudly through headphones, which create a major contrast effect to my sense that evening that the playing was swallowed up by the larger space of the hall. The orchestral setting for the concerto is a little small, scored for fifteen plus strings, and my impression, admittedly anecdotal, is that it would have worked a lot better in a more intimate space.
The more I’ve read about this composition the more my original suspicion has been confirmed, in the very specific sense that for the Concerto to succeed requires the continuing conveyance of its central wild impossibility. At some of the most important moments of its reception, Tchaikovsky’s involvement with the Concerto connects most vividly with the sense of total immersion and uncontrolled abandon he was trying to induce. Writing in the spring of 1878 to his patron, Nadeshda von Meck, Tchaikovsky noted that
From the first moment that the right frame of mind came to me it has never left me. With one’s inner life in this condition composing ceases altogether to be work: it becomes unalloyed pleasure. While you are writing you do not notice how time passes and if no one came to interrupt you you would sit there and never leave your work all day. (Qtd. in Meltzer).
Tchaikovsky and the violinist with whom he consulted, Iosif Kotek, were both dissatisfied with the slow first movement, and replaced it with one whose tempo was faster and pulsatingly driven. The renowned soloist whom Tchaikovsky intended would premier the piece, Leopold Auer (the teacher of Heifetz and Milstein), refused, and it was Auer who pronounced the work unplayable. The circumstances for first performance were still friendly: the Vienna Philharmonic played it, led by one of the world’s most highly regarded conductors. Still, the famously hostile reaction of Eduard Hanslick, who was present at the premier, illustrates the flip side of abandon, which Hanslick heard as blasphemous screeching. Tchaikovsky could recite these words until he died:
The Russian composer Tchaikovsky is surely not an ordinary talent, but rather an inflated one, with a genius-like obsession without discrimination or taste. Such is also his latest, long and pretentious Violin Concerto…. The violin is no longer played; it is pulled, torn, drubbed. The Adagio… soon breaks off to make way for a finale that transfers us to a brutal and wretched jolity of a Russian holiday. We see plainly the savage vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell vodka… Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.
What I hear as the grand triumphalism of emotion in the first movement, Hanslick heard as pretention. What strikes me as a wild abandonment that stretches the limits of the instrument Hanslick understood as a form of violin torture. And the simple but exuberant excess that makes the main melody so compelling is read by Hanslick in ugly racial terms that for him simply evoke the crudest stereotypes of Russian life: savagery, ugliness, coarseness, drunkenness. Music capable of transporting me to another and more sublime place is for Hanslick nauseating, in part reflective of the wider nativism that shaped the European reception to Russian musical professionalization during the late nineteenth century.
It is, of course, these starkly opposed reactions that simultaneously illustrate the power of the Concerto, which presses against the limits of respectability and the compositional discipline. The soloist is left free to interpellate, to improvise, to riff in sometimes jarring ways. The range of the notes played run up and off the scale, at times bringing the finger and the bow within what seems like barely a half inch. And these flights of abandon are transposed onto the orchestra itself, which overwhelms the force of the soloist though only for a moment, as it asserts the main theme. The shifting boundaries between melody and harmony, navigated sometimes in partnership and sometimes in dialectical opposition between violinist and orchestra, overtake the norms of musical propriety; even the lines separating movements are erased as the two final movements blur one into the other.
Even given the emergence of romanticism, this kind of musicality was still rather alien to the 19th-century symphonic oeuvre, a small evidence for which was recently defended in a short essay by Sir Roger Norrington, who called attention to the fact that until the 1930’s major European orchestras did not even overlay the score with vibrato. Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner and others wrote mainly with the expectation that notes would be played as written, evoking a pure warm tone from the orchestra; anything else would have been considered a gratuitous and even cheap emotional and tremulous overlay. In such an aural universe, where even vibrato was only to be used sparingly to evoke emotion, the extremism of the Violin Concerto would have been jarring.
Tchaikovsky wrote the Violin Concerto at a moment of personal crisis and it had apparently redemptive force as he worked through the depression caused by the dissolution of his foolish marriage to Antonina Miliukova. It was the only piece for the violin he ever wrote. The negative circumstances of reception were vastly different from the much more favorable critical reception for the Piano Concerto, which remains one of the most beloved pieces of music ever written, or for Swan Lake, which he had written just a year prior to the violin piece. The total immersion that Tchaikovsky reported to his patron resulted in an extraordinarily quick compositional pace – the first and most compelling movement was completed in only two weeks.
Raymond Knapp has called attention to the strange development of the first movement, where the triumphant main theme I’ve referenced gives way to a sort of writhing incoherence. He writes:
…immediately after its majestic statement, the orchestra seems to founder, writhing impotently through a series of seemingly random chromatic shifts, unable to escape a particularly uninspired motivic groove until finally, after an agonizingly nineteen measures, it manages a semblance of directional force – at which point it yields to the violin variation of the majestic theme. The importance of this second event – which we might term a failed development – registers quite differently than the first, for it is generally not even heard in its entirety; most performances cut the passage by nearly half. When this traditional cut is taken, we hear what seems to be only the briefest failure of inspiration before the orchestra lurches back into purposeful motion with a somewhat artificial quickening of energy.
Knapp sees this awkward transition as evidence of an internal incoherence in the piece barely stitched over by the violin solo; but however one reads it, the manner by which the movement shifts back and forth further illustrates its hyperemotive force.
The singular exuberance of the music – is it joy we hear or the ravings of a tortured soul? – has a certain consistency with the mythologies that have arisen around the life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, including the manner by which the Soviet state came to embrace him as a hero of the working class (which was something of a factual absurdity) and by which the West read his work as excessively sentimental and typical of the stereotypical “mad Russian.” Today the biographers have a tendency to read him as tormented, mainly on account of his barely suppressed homosexuality (the idea still circulates in some circles that, contrary to evidence clearly indicating he died of cholera, Tchaikovsky committed suicide; reflecting the contrary accounts, at one point the BBC ran a documentary called Who Killed Tchaikovsky?). Some, contrarily, see him as utterly conventional, and explain his musical excesses as a sign of boredom with his mundane life.
Kotek, the man who worked with Tchaikovsky to compose a concerto that would test the limits of violin performance, ironically never publicly performed it. Rather, in a cruel twist, he died in Switzerland before reaching thirty. One of his last visitors was Tchaikovsky. Kotek died of consumption, a metaphor perhaps for the totality of his compositional investment in the Concerto.
All of this combines, it seems to me, to produce a work of astonishing virtuosity that for many reasons succeeds only when its over-the-top exuberance is manifest at all levels: especially in the magnificence of its extreme solos and in the manner by which this tiny instrument manages to effectively overwhelm the orchestra and the audience both. Dwarfed by a large hall, an otherwise impressive performance fell short not because it lacked technical virtuosity, but because it proved finally unable to overwhelm the senses.
SOURCES: Ken Meltzer, “Notes on the Program: Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra,” Encore, October 2008, pgs. 31-33; Richard Freed, Kennedy Center Notes on the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35; Lynn Sargeant, “A New Class of People: The Conservatoire and Musical Professionalization in Russia, 1861-1917,” Music & Letters 85.1 (2004): 41-61; Sir Roger Norrington, “The Sound Orchestras Make,” Early Music (February 2004): 2-5; Alexander Poznansky, “Tchaikovsky: The Man Behind the Myth,” Musical Times 136.1826 (April 1995): 175-182; Raymond Knapp, “Passing – and Failing – in Late-Nineteenth-Century Russia; or Why We Should Care About the Cuts in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto,” 19th Century Music 26.3 (2003): 195-234.
Hearing Brahms
I had the chance tonight to hear the Atlanta Symphony perform Johannes Brahms’ 1st Piano Concerto (op. 15), which was played by Peter Serkin. Serkin’s combination of technical precision and a limited theatricality are well suited to the piece, which is nearly symphonic in the ambition of its reach, a fact that likely contributed to its early negative reception.
I have a tendency to think of Brahms mainly as a figure of the early nineteenth century, when in fact he was as much a figure of transition into the twentieth – as late as 1897 he was helping to boost Gustav Mahler’s career (in that year Brahms advocated for Mahler’s appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera). Such a tendency arises from the fact, I suppose, that Brahms’ lyrical compositions are more reminiscent of Beethoven than Berg or Bartok. And as one of the last disciples of an austere Romanticism, which had its antecedents in the eighteenth century with composers like Clementi (1752-1832) and his pupil John Field (1782-1837), Brahms, along with Mendelssohn and Schubert, produced pieces that have always seemed to me to take full advantage of the piano: the music is technically sophisticated without simply showing off, and it conveys real substantive depth without surface effects of the sort one hears in Gottschalk and others who seemed more interested in showmanship and display. Part of the effect achieved by Brahms is a consequence of how he blended Romantic and classical compositional practices; a number of the commentators on his work call attention to how, for instance, his commitment to composing variations (such as his 1863 composition, Variations on a Theme of Paganini) signals an intellectual commitment to understanding the deeper architectures of musical form. And if anything the tilt was in the direction of an underscored Romanticism; Brahms was able to write music comfortably recognizable as Romantic even as he was signing manifestoes criticizing the alternative Romanticism of Franz Liszt.
Brahms was only twenty five when he wrote the First Piano Concerto in D minor (1858), and it is a little hard to imagine from the much more common impression given by the photo above that Brahms was actually rather dashing when he arrived in Vienna and started to gravitate toward Robert and Clara Schumann, the city’s musical taste makers. Robert became an early advocate and published his early positive impressions before his mental illness took a turn for the worse; in 1835 Schumann attempted suicide, which led in short order to his assignment to a mental asylum and too-early death. Brahms, from all accounts, fell into love with Clara, and the archival record is clear that he meant for the second movement, an adagio, to be written for her. But there is something a little unsettling about the second movement, as well, and critics ever since have struggled to connect the circumstances of the concerto’s production with Johannes’ dismay and grief at Robert’s decline. The concerto is eerily urgent and some have commented that it anticipates chaos; some who have recorded it (such as Curzon) stretch the movement out to more than fifteen minutes long.
This situation, of course, only makes the concerto more interesting, since it provides a tough challenge to interpretive strategies that insist on preferring a reading that sees classical composition as inevitably reflecting the turbulent life experiences underway at the moment of first drafting. Brahms has often been used in this way – some of the histories rely on now-questioned childhood stories depicting the young Johannes as raised in a family so impoverished that he was sent out as a piano prodigy to play in brothels and bars to make money so food could be put on the table, and see all this as explaining his later output. As Styra Avins has noted:
Early biographical sketches and memoirs written during Brahms’ lifetime or shortly thereafter are free of such passages, but once they enter the literature, the scenes become more lurid during each telling, until the young Johannes has recently been envisaged as manhandled by sex-starved sailors while playing dance music at the docks of St. Pauli, the notorious Hamburg suburb on the banks of the Elbe. That he and his brother were well educated at their parent’s expense and with great sacrifice to themselves, that his parents bought a piano and provided both boys with lessons on several other instruments as well – these facts are either absorbed into the framework of poverty, or ignored.
Regardless of the childhood accounts, the First is also clearly shaped by an apparent impulse to mimic Beethoven Third Piano Concerto. And so where is the urge to model on other classical exemplars confounded by the imperative to produce a musical score that reflects personal trauma?
Today, of course, Johannes Brahms is a mainstay of the classical repertoire. While Serkin was playing the First Piano Concerto in Atlanta, the New York Philharmonic was rehearsing to perform the Piano Quintet the following weekend at Avery Fisher Hall, and Menahem Pressler (formerly of the Beaux Arts Trio) was preparing to accompany Richard Stoltzman playing the Clarinet Sonata No. 1 in F Minor at the Metropolitan Museum. But as is so often the case, the first reception of his work was conflicted. When the First Piano Concerto was premiered at Hanover, there was no indication of great audience enthusiasm.
And five days later, at a Leipzig performance where Brahms himself was soloist, the reaction was considerably more hostile. The critic for the Signale said it was a “composition dragged to its grave… [F]or more than three quarters of an hour one must endure this rooting and rummaging, this straining and tugging, this tearing and patching of phrases and flourishes.” [The theme recurs much later in life; responding to the epic German Requiem years later, George Bernard Shaw claimed that the piece “is patiently borne only by the corpse.”] Brahms agreed that the First needed work and continued to revise it, especially given the unmistakable lack of audience enthusiasm (Brahms wrote a letter the next day that noted that “at the conclusion three pairs of hands were brought together very slowly, whereupon a perfectly distinct hissing from all sides forbade any such demonstration”). The piece did not receive a considerably more favorable reaction for four more years. Brahms lived to be 64, his death from cancer arguably hastened by the death just a year earlier of Clara Schumann, his close confidant.
SOURCES: Ken Meltzer, Notes on Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Opus 15 (1858), Encore, October 2008, pg. 29-32; Styra Avins, “The Young Brahms: Biographical Data Reexamined,” 19th Century Music 24.3 (2001): 276-289; Jan Swafford, “Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars?,” 19th Century Music 24.3 (2001): 268-275.
Are there images we ought not see?
If memory serves, I’ve attended at least five academic presentations spread out over the last six years or so where brutal photographs of racial lynchings were splayed onto a big PowerPoint screen as the objects of critical analysis. These are terrifying images that reveal acts of horror: bodies twisting at rope’s end, defaced and sometimes castrated, victims often killed for crimes they did not commit by vigilantes milling around in the picture apparently oblivious to the atrocity and acting more like attendees at a company picnic. And of course it is this very casualness of the crowds that compounds the shock value of these photographs.
Such images have been long available to historians of visual culture, but were launched into wider circulation in 2000, when an archival collection of lynching photographs that had been mainly assembled by James Allen was organized into an exhibition at the Ruth Horowitz Gallery in New York City. Soon afterward (or perhaps fully contemporaneous with the exhibition, I don’t know which) the display was organized into a book and bundled together with essays by Allen, Hilton Als, Leon Litwack, and John Lewis under the title Without Sanctuary (Twin Palms Publishers, 2000). The New York exhibition toured several American cities, and I first encountered it when it came through Atlanta.
I struggled with the decision to see the exhibition, and although I finally found it carefully contextualized and deeply educational, it also raised serious reservations for me then that have only been compounded in the years since. The issue is complicated, and in trying to sort through my own thoughts I mean no insult to the very careful and rightly motivated presentations I’ve seen that relied in part on lynching images. In fact, I think some measure of my confusion is revealed by my own hypocrisy – while I mainly question the use of lynching photographs in this entry, I also illustrated an essay I wrote a couple months ago on this site on the topic of Civil War battlefield deaths (I had just read Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War [Knopf 2008]) with a gruesome Matthew Brady battlefield photograph.
The arguments for showing such photographs is often persuasively made. A great part of lynching’s brutality resides in the fact that the evidence of the crime was so often obliterated or kept secret, and so the act of publication can be thought an important historical corrective, and especially so for younger students for whom lynching is too easily considered an abstraction. It is also true that the real depravity of racism may only be convincingly communicated by way of the visual evidence: the sheer shock of seeing that a lynching photograph has been made into a postcard (a postcard!), and that the correspondent has written on the other side to a family relative, “this is the barbeque we had last night,” instantly focuses the mind. I think it was Patricia Williams who at the time of the touring exhibition said that for her, attendance was required as a kind of historical pilgrimage, necessary to set the rosier picture of American history into its true and murkier context. Seeing the range and grotesque similarity of so many of these images (which quickly disabuse one of the notion that these were singularly unique or the bizarre work product of a sadomasochistic subculture) has undeniably produced (in a phrase that pops up pretty frequently on the web) an “important reflective learning experience” of America’s racial history.
All this seems compelling when brutal images are wholly contextualized in a well organized gallery exhibition or in a museum – in such cases the viewing experience is so totally controlled as to avert the risks I see – but I am currently skeptical whether building lynching images into a academic conference lecture Powerpoint is ever finally justified.
Part of my reaction is admittedly visceral – when the slide changes and it’s a lynching photograph up on the big screen I admit I become nauseous, actually for a moment sick to my stomach. I find myself turning away because I cannot resist the thought that this murder victim is someone’s grandfather or aunt, and I wonder how any of us would feel to have so brutal an image of, say, a loved one displayed even for well-intentioned academic purposes. The murders are public, and awfully so, but I can’t help feeling I’m violating the victim’s privacy by scanning the picture, even at a century’s remove.
But for me the real problem is that when a lynching photograph is shown to a group of academics, too often (and I think perhaps inevitably) the audience is unwillingly made complicit in the violence. At the Madison conference I attended last weekend, as the one slide was held in view, the almost wholly white audience variously attended with total seriousness to the image, while some (a vanishingly small minority to be sure, since the talk was compelling and smart) passed notes, did email, drank coffee, slipped out to run an errand or make a call – which is to say, we had become a modern day live enactment of the picnic-going spectators in the postcard. I found myself resenting my own insertion into the lynch mob even though these normal audience behaviors are not the fault of the speaker. Made to be a modern-day voyeur to the murder, in a situation where the presenter will invariably speak for a moment about the crime scene and then move on to something else, I wonder if there is any proper response in such a setting that does not compound the complicity.
Audience members who seriously and intently stare at the photo end up grouped with the majority of the actual bystanders photographed, who also stare at the swinging bodies, fixated for whatever reason. Those who let themselves be moved onto the next slide or who lapse back into their normal behaviors end up not unlike the chatting and bizarrely happy people also evident in the postcard. And if one turns away from the screen or because s/he cannot stomach the violence leaves the presentation one is simply reenacting the erasure of the victim that makes these images so noteworthy in the first place. Which is to say: there is no adequate viewing response, at least in the context and given the typical decorum of the conference lecture hall, which I think transposes any viewer into either a voyeur or a bystander, just like the people milling around in the photo who are being condemned from today’s lecture podium.
I do not think it simply reflects a too-fragile psyche to note that inducing this audience/subject position inflicts damage that is not necessarily undone by the self-reflective moment when one realizes s/he has been interpellated as one of the brutalizers. At least in my own experience, and I do not normally consider myself easy to offend, the fact of having been interpellated in such a way proves quite difficult to walk back.
And I wonder too if there are any speaking behaviors that sidestep these risks either. I’ve seen several strategies, all of which felt a little flat. One presenter I saw a couple years back simply noted that the audience “should be warned that this material is very disturbing,” but such a warning only accentuates the voyeurism when the photograph is finally presented. And at least in my case I found that the warning sounded (again, this clearly wasn’t the intention of the speaker) like language whose main consequence is simply to normalize the shock value; like the “don’t try this at home” warnings whose main benefit is to let the speaker off the hook but that for many listeners only produce an inducement to the horror, the warning can easily sound more like an unserious gesture than an engagement with the true difficulties yet to be presented in the talk. The damage was in that case compounded when the lynching Powerpoint slide was kept up on the screen long after its purpose was passed and the Q&A (mostly centered on other issues) was well underway.
At a more recent conference talk, the presenter argued that only by posting the lynching image could the audience see the formalistic properties of the photograph that linger in more subtle but dangerously racist modern photographs, such as the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford walking through an angry white crowd in Little Rock after she was briefly denied admission to the school building. I found the speaker’s point well taken until I realized that in calling attention to the lynching photograph’s formal properties (where is the eye led to focus? how is the event framed? who is centered and who is marginalized?) I was being (innocently) led to see right past the corpses. I was attending to the aesthetic dimensions of the photograph at the expense of the victims whose awful stories faded right out of mind.
Because I know that many of my colleagues in these academic audiences interpret their own viewing experiences very differently and more positively than me (my impression is that some insistently stare at the photographs for as long as they remain on screen as a way of bearing witness), perhaps the totalizing concerns I assert (that such images should never be used in an academic research talk) would be satisfied were scholars to agree not to show such images unless they are either specifically mobilized to induce sentiments of specific mourning/remembrance or audience outrage. Such an exception does not admit very many research talks back into defensibility, if my own experience is characteristic, because the normal modes of academic research presentation are not normally given over to, say, moments of silence or explicit agitation.
But these, after all, are the affective responses appropriate to lynching images, for only by responding in sorrow or in anger might one do real justice to the victims and the danger that in reshowing the image one is simply reenacting the crime. And the uses of lynching photographs that seem most effective are those designed with sorrow or outrage in mind. One northern newspaper mainly produced for African American readers agreed to print the famous lynching photograph taken in Marion, Indiana but only by adding a caption that (paraphrasing) described the standers-by as a “a party of unknown identity.” The caption is brilliant because it quotes the police report seeking to explain why no arrests had been made, connecting it to a photograph that clearly provides the evidence needed to identify many of those present. The juxtaposition (again, one hard to achieve in a traditional academic talk) can only arouse anger at the injustice.
I close by reiterating my own uncertainty on these matters and also my respect for scholars who are navigating them as best they can. But I also would caution against those who might be tempted to dismiss concerns about how lynching photographs position their viewers as nothing more than the assertion of too delicate a sensibility. More serious matters are I think also in play. Some of these are engaged in a recent book by Martin Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (Fordham UP, 2007). Harries, using the story of Lot’s wife (who in the Old Testament account was punished, turned into a pillar of salt, for looking back at God’s fire and brimstone judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah when warned not to), notes that while the sublime and terrorizing image can be engaged as a mode of witness bearing, there is also some reasonable risk that the sight of historical catastrophe risks destroying the spectator. Harries deploys the Biblical account metaphorically – it would be exceptionally rare that staring into the imagistic abyss actually savages the psyche – but as he argues, we must neither ignore or downplay the real possibility that “after some contemplation, one emerges a little destroyed.”
When humanistic scholarship is not beautiful
When Pablo Picasso first exhibited his work at the young age of eighteen, the reviews were not very promising. His friends had found him a gallery space he could use for free, but there were also no funds available to properly mount the (mostly) bohemian portraits. So the canvases were literally pinned to the walls, and in rows since there were more artworks to hang than the small gallery space allowed. The main review in the Diario de Barcelona (dated 7 February 1900) was not kind: Picasso was said to exhibit “an obsession with the most extreme form of modernisme… a lamentable derangement of the artistic sense and a mistaken concept of art.”
A decade or so later Picasso was first exhibited in the United States, and although he garnered early and strong enthusiasm in France and Germany, the American reception was also underwhelming. Personally promoted by Max Weber (the artist, not the sociologist), the photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited Picasso in New York City in March 1911 at his 291 Gallery. Although the show was later described as launching Picasso’s American career, it was something of a bust at the time – only one painting sold, and that for just eleven dollars. Gertrude Stein was an early American advocate, but when she tried to interest her friends the Cone sisters in Picasso, they said no, on the grounds that his work was repulsive cubism (actually the specific word they used was tommyrot).
Picasso provides a ready example of a broader phenomena that subverts the public reception not only of twentieth century modernist art (and music and architecture) but also taints the wider scholarship of the humanities. And I think this problem is more endemic to the so-called crisis of the humanities than its alleged inaccessibility to wider audiences, its failure to celebrate national cultures and literary traditions, or its increasingly distant relationship to the professional worlds of commerce and the professions.
The challenge is that the work product of the most brilliant scholars and artists laboring in the humanities (especially over the last half century), broadly defined, is often actually unattractive, sometimes even ugly: jarring, intentionally disorienting, inelegant, apparently self-absorbed, tedious, at times even disgusting, and understandable only within the contours of a highly specialized and technically sophisticated audience whose reach (by definition) will be small. By contrast to some other domains of human endeavor, where increasingly rigorous technical standards of evaluation have also been tightly wedded to sustaining standards of aesthetic elegance (I have in mind activities like figure skating and landscaping and perhaps even fields of study like mathematics, where the ideal achievement seems to remain the beautiful proof), work done by humanists is now widely dismissed as having abandoned its duty to actively attract audiences.
The viscerally negative reaction induced in many very bright students to some of the leading written works of humanist thinkers is better explained by this shock of first encounter than by its political agenda or by any innate inability to perceive its claims. And the simultaneous public adoration and (for the most part) scholarly disparagement of the research published by the Joseph Ellises and David McCulloughs of the world (and one might add the Thomas Kinkades and John Williams of painting and movie soundtrack fame) only highlights the often intentional arms-length relationship sustained by serious humanistic heavyweights and their potential publics.
Now of course ugliness is not necessarily undesirable. No imperative dictates that scholarship enact an aesthetic allure for its audiences, especially if it accomplishes other purposes (such as generating useful knowledge or essential insight). Nor does the observation have universal relevance: too many exceptions of elegant and even beautiful work are produced to launch this as any kind of generalized indictment and in fact it is a regular tactic of the humanities’ opponents to exaggerate the critique.
Meanwhile, a number of quite defensible factors have combined to lessen the perceived importance of beauty as a goal of, say, philosophical or literary production. One is the raging debate over the status of aesthetics itself, which was sharply problematized under the emergence of modernism and structuralism, both often seeing surface appearance as a deceptive fraud masking underlying matrices of meaning and political signification, and beauty a concept more evasive than helpful. (Of course considerable recent work has accomplished something of an aesthetic turn, as the pendulum swings back toward a view of aesthetics as empowering and not simply obliterative of difference; this is the point explored by Castiglia and Castronovo).
Jürgen Habermas argued some time ago that we are also seeing the inevitable outcomes of the specialization of knowledge accelerated by late capitalism; in contrast to an earlier Enlightenment view that the work of the scholar should culminate in findings that advanced the aspirations of Truth, Beauty, and Justice, today we inhabit a fragmented lifeworld where the philosophers fixate on truth and the lawyers fixate on their technically specialized concepts of justice (the wider complexities of Habermas’ views on aesthetics are elaborated by Duvenage). One could actually trace such forces back as far as Rome; the Latin phrase pulchritudo splendor varitatis (“beauty is the splendor of truth”) is more than twenty centuries old. Today, specialists in the humanities occasionally disavow the very idea of making their work accessible to wider literate audiences as antithetical to their projects, which they often reasonably argue obligate the use of difficult vernaculars.
Jerome McGann, the University of Virginia literary critic, has recently addressed the issue in a rather particular way. Speaking of poetry he writes,
Poetry has become a byword for incomprehensible language. It is our fault, scholars and educators, that poetry has acquired this reputation. We have hyped its depth, profundity, importance…. We have some important unlearning to do. We get into trouble, we get others into trouble, when we set either the criterion of “meaning” or the criterion of “beauty” as the measure of value for imaginative works. Like theory, criteria are ponderous things, deadly to the imagination. Yet these criteria pervade the discourse of culture, both inside and outside the academy. On the contrary, poetry and at function at more fundamental, even primitive, levels. Beauty and meaning, what the ancients called pleasure and instruction, are secondary constructions laid upon poetry by scholars who try to explain how poems work, how they arrest, astonish, reveal.
As one can see, McGann, despite his interest in the “death of beauty,” is not committed to a renunciation of poetry or criticism but rather to their reconceptualization. And it remains important to insist on the often vital role paid by enactment of the grotesque in leading a society to a broader comprehension, and even to yield, in some cases, pleasure (Matthew Kieran: “…even though an artwork may be constituted from repugnant materials, depict perverse scenes or people, we may be afforded pleasure by attending to them rather than being repelled by them”).
Still, even without judgmentalism, one might as well acknowledge that the intellectual currents that have produced increasing technical specialization in all of the humanistic endeavors have also necessarily come at the price of making them less attractive to those who encounter what will seem on first approach and to the uninitiated as impossibly obstuse and even repulsive scholarship.
All this is on my mind because of the recent controversy over the termination by Fort Hays State University of its debate coach on account of a screaming obscenity-laced argument he had after a debate round at the 2008 national tournament with the professor who directs debate at the University of Pittsburgh. The YouTube video was painful to watch and of course has now been ridiculed on nationwide television as a kind of Professors Gone Wild. The exchange was extreme and by my lights wholly uncharacteristic of the broader activity (at least with respect to its incivility, if not with respect to the passion all bring to their encounters). But the commentary, and the schisms it has reawakened (or brought to public view) within the debate community actually are far older than the introduction of identity politics, performance activism, and philosophical argument to the activity that occurred in the 1990’s.
Academic debate is a paradigm instance of the phenomenon whereby a merged humanistic practice (rooted, after all, in the ancient art of rhetoric) of intellectual substance and eloquent (even beautiful) style has for the most part given way to the elevation of intellectualism over persuasion. To the average person first encountering high level competitive policy debate, the experience is thus now most often unpleasant, and in fact, until thoroughly initiated, many are a little repulsed by the hyperfast screaming, inadvertent spitting, and red faced gasping characteristic of the activity. Fortunately, for many that first encounter also conveys some sense of the incredible thinking and research skills needed to succeed in competitive debate.
Debate is an amazingly worthwhile intellectual endeavor and even as practiced at the most competitive levels still evokes a certain compelling though occasional persuasiveness. Its participants develop astonishing aptitudes for critical thinking, the mastery of actually vast domains of public policy and philosophical literatures, and in part this is so because as an activity it has downplayed the conventional elements of recognizable persuasiveness. But as with all the broader humanities, this extracurricular activity pays a price for its accentuated emphasis on particular and idiosyncratic modes of delivery that has for the moment made it (sadly) too easy to caricature. And so even as brilliance regularly emerges, involvement (especially at the high school point of first entry) has dwindled.
I’m dismayed by the fact that beneficial co-curricular activities like intercollegiate debate are often outright opposed by faculty members who, in the name of abhorring its hyper-specialization, would never think for a second to discount their own scholarship for its arcane and limited and sometimes off-putting reach. Such a reaction is, I believe, hypocritical. But the fact of such hypocrisy should not be read as denying the importance of a discussion about whether the extent of intellectual specialization has too greatly come at the expense of the wider attractiveness of humanistic scholarship for intellectually literate audiences.
Ugly, perhaps, but true.
SOURCES: John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881-1906 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007 edition); Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 (NY: Knopf, 2007 edition); Jerome McGann, The Scholar’s Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Matthew Kieran, “Aesthetic Value: Beauty, Ugliness, and Incoherence,” Philosophy 72 (1997): 383-399; Pieter Duvenage, Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” American Literature 76.3 (September 2004): 423-435.
Bernstein’s birthday
This week Leonard Bernstein (he insisted that it be pronounced BERN-stine) would have turned ninety (he was born 25 August 1918), and the news of the anniversary reminded me of the profound influence he had on me as a young adult and maybe still. By the time I was old enough to pay attention to classical music and to even want to listen to a Young People’s music lecture by Bernstein, his famous talks were already being rerun on the local PBS station I only occasionally watched in West Lafayette where I grew up (I gather I was watching talks that had been recorded maybe decades earlier).
But for me, and looking back on it this will of course also reveal my youthful naivete, Bernstein epitomized class and urbane sophistication and learning. As I was learning to play a musical instrument in the small town midwest, Bernstein was the Big City and Broadway and jazzy swagger, all certified by his position with what I thought must be the world’s greatest orchestra (I hadn’t yet learned about Chicago under Solti or Berlin under von Karajan). But he also signified by his heart-on-his-sleeve passion for music of all sorts that erudition was not incompatible with a fierce perfectionism and a prowling curiosity. Before the slightly odd turn to mysticism and Nehru suits (along with a weird medallion he insisted on wearing) in the 1970’s had him seeming to pander a bit too much to the times (and as I first encountered his earlier works Jeremiah and Kaddish, both had also struck me as similarly overwrought), I found him charismatic anyway.
His conducting style was regularly ridiculed for its over-the-top emotionalism; it was frankly at odds with his Curtis Institute training, where his teacher, Fritz Reiner, taught a far more precise and contained approach. But I found him compelling and mainly authentic. His alternatively brooding and ecstatic movements fit the urgent underlying arc of the Mahler symphonies he loved most. And they perfectly matched the moment of German reunification in the aftermath of the Cold War when his exuberance in conducting Beethoven’s 9th in Berlin provided a more fitting response than the stifled reaction of the American president. As he aged his earlier Glamour Boy status gradually gave way to a wider respect in the world’s music capitals, and by the end the regularly offered honorific Maestro seemed sincere.
The weird mix in Bernstein of intellect and glibness is on full display in the lectures he delivered in 1973, a result of his brief appointment as Harvard’s Norton Professor of Poetry. The critics hooted – this was, after all, the same chair that had been held by Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot – but the talks (now available on DVD) hold up as a passable semiotic analysis of the musical score (and in fairness, some of those reading or hearing him loved it). And his presentational acumen remains compelling, often persuasive, even when the final conclusions he reaches are sometimes rather mundane or retrograde (he was, for example, defending High Modernism when postmodern approaches were already coming into vogue).
One of the last images we have of Bernstein was taken at the final symphonic performance Bernstein conducted before his death in October 1990. Conducting at Tanglewood (which explains his summer formal wear), Bernstein was desperately ill, and in fact there was some speculation that he would not be able to appear at all. The program had significance both for the audience and for the conductor: the orchestra played Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, which was the first piece programmed by Bernstein in his first full season as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, an appointment arising in the long aftermath of a bizarre serendipity (on November 14, 1943, Bernstein was a last-minute replacement for a sick Bruno Walter; the good first page review the next day in the New York Times made Bernstein famous).
Bernstein was so disabled by the crippling combination of lung cancer and emphysema (all an overlay to his lifelong asthma and worsened by his many years of smoking) that at one point in the piece he simply reeled back against the conductor’s rail and let the symphony move ahead of its own volition; Bernstein was gasping for air and caught in a spasm of coughing so severe he nearly passed out. But he rejoined the piece moments later and brought it to a close.
As with so many of his lifelong performances, his conducting of Beethoven’s 7th drew both admiration and criticism. His dramatic style often stretched movements out in ways that seemed to some critics to produce music played indefensibly slow. Though some suspected, no one knew for sure that this was to be his last public appearance at the conductor’s podium. Only in retrospect, when two months later his broader audience realized belatedly how seriously deteriorated was his health, did the critics come around on the Tanglewood performance: after all, Bernstein conducted the 7th so slowly because, sensing his own fast-approaching mortality, he simply didn’t want it to end.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s complex legacy
The death Sunday in Russia of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize winner, and the reaction it has apparently elicited there so far signals the inevitable response to a figure whose life’s work was to bear close witness to an age that is now long gone. Rightly revered as a man of letters, Solzhenitsyn seems more forgotten and respected by today’s Russians than loved or judged relevant to the popular semi-authoritarianism of the Putin/Medvedev government. This ambivalence reflects my own reaction to his life’s work: while I have profound admiration for his literary gifts and for his personal courage in unmasking the absurd and ugly tyrannies of the Soviet system, I disagree with his simplistic diagnosis of the west and his hostility to the Enlightenment and for the impulses of European humanism that he seemed to see as a kind of blasphemy (he believed that Bolshevism itself was a natural outgrowth of Enlightenment hubris). By contrast, I see the Enlightenment’s legacy, as complex as it is, as a potential ongoing resource for social uplift and the broader expansion of human freedom.
Part of my conflicted response undoubtedly reflects the use made of Solzhenitsyn by Russian conservatives (Pamiat and other sometimes anti-semitic conservative groups have regularly made appeals resting on Solzhenitsyn’s ethical authority), but it may also reflect the extent to which Solzhenitsyn’s religiosity (and his profound detachment from the wider themes of European humanist thought) produced an eviscerating and in my view largely incorrect diagnosis of the West, which he dismissed as animated by atheism and in need of religious revival. Solzhenitsyn’s case partly resided in his view that the Enlightenment substituted man as a false idol for God: “everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning” (qtd. in Confino, pg. 613). This, in turn, led him toward fundamentally anti-democratic directions, since as he put it in a 1980 Foreign Affairs essay, “the truth cannot be determined by voting, since the majority does not necessarily have any deeper insight into the truth.” Such views have been easy to convert into an often strident defense of the need for the return of Holy Russia, with all its attendant dangers of dictatorship or theocracy (one critic referred to Solzhenitsyn as “the Russian ayatollah”).
My first encounter with Solzhenitsyn’s thought came not by reading his Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but by hearing about the controversial lecture he delivered at the Harvard Class Day exercises in June 1978. The theme the address lays out, that Western and Russian civilizations pursue largely distinctive but dangerously parallel trajectories, prefigured both Solzhenitsyn’s increasingly evocative defense of strong Russian nationalism and what was described in today’s eulogies by many commentators as a perhaps inadvertent attack on American society – the passage from the Harvard speech where this indictment is specified is brief but as I recall it received almost all the attention from the American press at the time.
Here is what Solzhenitsyn said:
A decline of courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notice in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.
For the American right, this talk of Western weakness was red meat and they eagerly devoured it, for these were the Carter years and a period of Ronald Reagan’s national political ascendancy where the case against Carter rested on this theme of American decay and weakness from within; indeed, Solzhenitsyn is arguably most valorized by conservative think tanks and advocates of an assertive (one might say masculine) foreign policy. A short section devoted to Solzhenitsyn in one of John McCain’s books was reprinted as a eulogy in a New York newspaper today; McCain focuses on the personal courage it took for Solzhenitsyn to write and then deliver Gulag to non-Soviet publishers, but it is hard to miss his sympathies for the assertive moralism of Solzhenitsyn’s policy perspective as well.
Although Ronald Reagan seems to have been more influenced by his reading of Whittaker Chambers (he was able to recite lines from memory out of Witness), he also read Solzhenitsyn in the late 1970’s. Reagan was offended when news leaked that then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had persuaded President Ford not to meet Solzhenitsyn at the White House (Kissinger to Nixon: “Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents”). In Dinesh D’Souza’s hagiography of Reagan, D’Souza argues that Reagan “liked to cite a point that both Chambers and Solzhenitsyn made in different ways: communism is a false religion that seeks to destroy the family, private property, and genuine religious faith in order to achieve a kind of earthly paradise” (75). These are sentiments which finally made their way into Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech (Edmund Morris: “Two foreigners with direct experience of totalitarianism had touched on it before, in ways that seem to have gotten Reagan’s attention. One was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who told the AFL-CIO in 1975 that the Soviet Union was ‘the concentration of World Evil.’ The other was Alexandre de Maranches, the chief of French intelligence who flew all the way to Los Angeles in December 1980 to warn Reagan against ‘l’empire du mal’” [472]).
In a July 1978 radio address, Reagan directly relied on Solzhenitsyn at length to make a larger thematic point:
Remembering the anti-Vietnam war sentiment of the late 60s and 70s, some might find a bit of irony in the fact that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was this June’s Harvard University graduation speaker… For those who think hopefully that Angola might become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam or that Cuba’s adventuring in Africa can be stopped by being polite to Castro, he has an answer. He describes their failure to understand the Vietnam War as “the most crucial mistake. Members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of fear eastern nations in a genocide and in suffering today imposed on 30 million people.” …If the West doesn’t have the will to stand firm, Solzhenitsyn says, nothing is left then but concessions and betrayal to gain time… Then he said that while the next world war would probably not be an atomic one, still it might very well bury western civilization forever… Solzhenitsyn told the Harvard graduating class that since our bodies are all doomed to die, our task while on earth must be of a more spiritual nature. [quoted in Dugger, pg. 515]
Today the extent to which Solzhenitsyn was deployed by American conservatives to bolster the case against communism is sometimes downplayed by scholars interested in Solzhenitsyn-the-Russian-dissident; one scholar interviewed today on the Lehrer Newshour said he thought Solzhenitsyn’s comments at Harvard were more about Russia than America, and that the attention accorded his comments about the United States were overly hyped by both the right and the media. This reaction conveys some of the ongoing ambivalence in the reaction to Solzhenitsyn, which valorizes his nonfictional fiction (it is a common reaction to say that Gulag actually created a wholly new genre that blurred these categories) even while quietly expressing concern about his lapses into jingoism and arguably worse (a long-term dispute over Solzhenitsyn’s writing centers on whether, for example, despite a lack of explicit evidence, Solzhenitsyn himself trafficked in anti-Semitism).
But the reason Solzhenitsyn was so influential for the right also reflects the broader and special credibility of the witness-from-within, the whistleblower who with meticulous care documents the inside corruption and decay, and because he was so compellingly careful he was also persuasive to the people of the Soviet Union, who sometimes hid his outlawed books in empty detergent boxes since reading his indictment of the Soviet system was to risk arrest for treason.
What made Gulag so compelling was its unrelenting detail, particularly the manner by which, quoting the economic historian Steven Rosefielde, a wholesale historical revision was subsequently required of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan: “In his thoroughness, in the uncompromising way he exposes all the rationalizations and lies used to conceal and mitigate the significance of Soviet forced labor, Solzhenitsyn conveys a sense of authenticity that cannot be gainsaid even by those who find fault with his work on other grounds” (559). Solzhenitsyn’s systemic cataloguing of Soviet bookkeeping distortions, which showed how production managers hugely exaggerated industrial production, sometimes showed how laughable fictions were passed off as truth (in the second volume of Gulag, he describes how owners of a lumber plant reported 1500 cubic yards of timber had been harvested but then said it had to be destroyed because no transportation was available to move it out of the production facility; later, masses of timber were carried from annual report onto annual report until someone got the bright idea to say that it had “spoiled,” which meant all of it could be written off without subverting absurdly high national production quotas).
After Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from exile, he concentrated his energies on his gigantic life’s work, his Red Wheel project, and its magnitude yielded significant publication but at the expense of a diminishing involvement with Russian public affairs as he withdrew to get the writing done. His public speeches were infrequent near the end and his media persona often hectoring (soon after returning to Russia he was invited to address the parliament; he railed on for roughly an hour and received a muted response from those who stayed for the whole thing). But his prophetic role, which because of its strong embrace of Russian nationalism today drew the endorsement of Putin himself, lingers not only for American conservatives seeking a more muscular and moralistic foreign policy, but also for those who despise the petty tyrannies of authoritarian bureaucracies and will forever look to Solzhenitsyn as proof positive that even near-total mechanisms of state control can be countered when ethical and eloquent writers tell the truth as they see it.
SOURCES: Michael Confino, “Solzhenitsyn, the West, and the New Russian Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 26 (1991): 611-636; Sidney Monas, “Solzhenitsyn’s Life,” Russian Review 44 (1985): 397-402; Steven Rosefielde, “The First ‘Great Leap Forward’ Reconsidered: Lessons of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago,” Slavic Review 39.4 (December 1980): 559-587; Ronnie Dugger, On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983); Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999); Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Address at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,” 8 June 1978; Harvey Fireside, “Dissident Visions of the USSR: Medvedev, Sakharov, and Solzhenitsyn,” Polity 22.2 (Winter 1989): 213-229.
The continuing allure of bohemianism
Watching a staged production of La Bohème last week, performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at their new outdoor Encore Amphitheater, one could not help but be struck by the inevitable disconnect between the themes of that opera and the circumstances of the performance. Because this was not a full theatrical production, the performers wore the more customary glitter dresses and dress suits of symphonic presentation, which strikes one as a little strange as they sing about how hungry and freezing cold they are. Even given a fully willing suspension of disbelief, it still seemed a little odd to be listening to odes to bohemianism over the sounds of clinking champagne glasses from there up front at the corporate tables.
But this is high art, well presented, beautifully performed, and the outdoor theater is a great addition to our regional arts scene. Still, it got me thinking about the continuing allure of bohemianism, and its call for something of a pseudo-renunciation of material wealth in favor of a more direct engagement with the passions (I say pseudo-renunciation since as La Bohème makes very clear, the bohemian characters are just as happy to drink the champagne as the audience members).
The concept of Bohemianism first circulated in the English language in the nineteenth century (the OED notes a first occurrence in 1848), and from the start people tagged with the label were being both cursed and complimented. Bohemians were marginalized, artistic, self-indulgent, brilliant, urban, contagious, sexually liberated and, as the phrase often circulated, “voluntarily poor.” The term is a literal falsehood – the Gypsies who inspired the term in France were not from Bohemia – but the negative attributions made (that to be bohemian was to be dirty and scheming and sexually degenerate) remain deeply rooted in the western consciousness. When Henri Murger wrote Scènes de la Vie Bohème in 1845, his goal was to proclaim bohemianism, and Murger’s stories were the basis of Puccini’s opera fifty years later. The artistic afterlife of these movements continues: La Bohème is the inspiration source material for the musical Rent (if you’ve seen the film or stage show you will recall one of the central songs in the production is La Vie Bohème, which takes the traditional bohemian identity in a postmodern direction). La Bohème’s music and themes also play a significant part in the films Moonstruck and Fatal Attraction; in fact for Moonstruck, La Bohème structures the entire narrative – the Nicholas Cage character’s sensitivity is established by his passion for Puccini, and a key moment in his courtship of Loretta (the Cher character) comes when he persuades her to see the opera at Lincoln Center.
Ironically, the emergence of the bohemian as a contestable cultural figure was directly connected with an operatic performance, namely, the 1830 opening night of Victor Hugo’s Hernani. The opera brought out Hugo’s followers, and their behavior turned opening night into a huge scandal. Normally composers helped nudge their productions into success by hiring professional clappers; Hugo skipped this step and instead relied on his younger unpaid friends – the “young people, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, print makers, etc,” at he put it later – to generate enthusiasm. Mary Gluck recounts the result:
Inside the theater, they scattered in small groups in the pit and the galleries and acted as coordinated cheering squadrons for the play. They countered every hiss from the audience with louder applause, and the commotion in the audience rivaled in interest the actual drama being performed on stage. As one of the reviewers of the play commented the following day, “The spectators were on the same plane as the actors on the stage and they performed as epileptics.” …From the perspective forty years later, Gautier was to provide an even more revealing evaluation of the significance of the Battle of Hernani. The opening night, Gautier recalled, was “the greatest event of the century, since it represented the inauguration of free, youthful, and new thought on the debris of old routine.” It was the battle “of youth against decrepitude, of long hair against baldness, of enthusiasm against routine, of the future against the past.” …Gautier’s hyperbolic account accurately conveys the hidden agenda of the Battle of Hernani. The real significance of the mock-heroic battle was, it turns out, not the triumph of romanticism over classicism, which was a foregone conclusion by 1830, but the transformation of the long-standing aesthetic conflict into a more modern cultural antagonism, that of the artist versus bourgeois, bohemian versus philistine. The Battle of Hernani witnessed the emergence of radical artists as a recognizable, collective presence in public life. It represented the first enactment of the bohemian identity in modern culture. (354-355)
The conflicting impulses of bohemianism are often understood as relying on the contrary views that (a) bohemians are transhistorical marginalized artists and (b) that bohemianism is a historically specific consequence of capitalistic modernity. Although traces of both views pervade Murger and Puccini’s evocations, others have tended to come down on one side or the other of this divide. Pierre Bourdieu has argued, for instance, that bohemianism, which he celebrates for having carved out an autonomous space of artistic production, nonetheless was only made possible because of the particular marketplaces created by industrial capitalism (this point is elaborated in his 1995 Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field).
Considerable energies were expended to condemn bohemianism, and this is both a mainstream cultural response to deviance but was also charged by the late nineteenth century’s preoccupation with masculine vigor and moral (and physical) hygiene. These tendencies were perhaps most fully formed in the influential work of the Hungarian-native doctor Max Nordau, author of Degeneration (published in English, having been translated from the earlier German, in New York in 1895). Nordau’s apocalyptic survey of late-nineteenth century was not a comforting one:
A race which is regularly addicted, even without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form (such as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic) …begets degenerate descendants who, if they remain exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend to the lowest degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc. (34).
Because, artistically speaking, bohemianism (and its intellectual cousins, such as the Decadence movement to which Baudelaire and Mallarmé were connected) implied a turn to psychological explanations, with attendant interest in concepts like authenticity and subjectivity, the critique was individual as well as civilizational. Here is Hermann Bahr’s description of a 1891 James Whistler portrait of Robert de Montesquiou (cited in Berman, pg. 631):
There he is, the haggard, pale Dandy… entirely in black, very tall, very thin, very sleek, a little affected, heroic yet bizarre, nearly sublime, but comical… He appears [to his friends] as the great artist not through his works, but through his power… to hallucinate [while] fully conscious, to escape into unreality, to live a poem, that is “the art of the Decadence”; in this he is the master…
Bohemianism also implies separation and marginalization, and so it is historically connected to a physical separation from mainstream society, and one cannot name the following locales without also stirring a romantic (and sometimes sordid) sense of the bohemian: Montmartre, Chelsea, Soho, Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury, the French Quarter, Ipanema, Schwabing. These are places (at least as nostalgically romanticized) into which one can disappear, live out an alternative identity, and escape authority: what happened at the Moulin Rouge stayed at the Moulin Rouge.
La Bohème, first heard in 1896, is a reflection of Puccini’s mature style, and in strong contrast to Wagner’s epic, mythological, and titanic characters and orchestrations, the work deploys the style of opera verité – popular songs and everyday characters mingle together with occasionally thundering orchestration. This makes his work both more accessible – the easy transition from melody to melody, all interspersed by larger themes, can sometimes sneak up on a listener – but also sometimes less narratively coherent. In Act I lovers who have only met two minutes prior are suddenly declaring their undying bolt-out-of-the-blue eternal love for each other, and then without any real characterological development suddenly we learn in Act III that the relationship is star-crossed and doomed by jealousy and the physically debilitating effects of consumption and that they’ve been arguing for months. Time is curiously manipulated throughout, a fact perhaps most evident in the final act, where temporal logic is distorted: characters leave to engage in tasks (selling jewelry, even tracking down the doctors) that might normally take hours but which are compressed into minutes, while of course the dying itself it stretched out and the final last moments seem to suspend time altogether. [To some extent, of course, one might argue that these discontinuities derive from the source material and not Puccini, since Murger’s novel was a collection of unconnected short vignettes.]
As Alex Ross has put it, contrasting Puccini with the much more essentially grand style of Wagner: “If Wagner, in the Ring, made the gods into ordinary people, Puccini’s La Bohème does the opposite: it gives mythic dimensions to a rattily charming collection of bohemians” (13). These tendencies were recognized and much discussed at the time, and made Puccini the source of considerable criticism – Eduard Hanslick regretted that in Puccini the literary so fully trumped the musical, and Fausto Torrefranca felt the tropes of Puccini’s work reduced his work to nothing more than a “cynical commercialism, [with] all its pitiful impotence and its triumphant international vogue” (a 1912 passage translated by Greenwald at pg. 24).
While Puccini has a worldwide following, of course, perhaps there is something distinctive in his themes that peculiarly taps American sensibilities, for his operas stage something of a rough democracy, in the sense that any of his characters (regardless of origin) are able to mix it up across lines of class and birth. Stereotypes are circulating everywhere and form the basis of dramatic conflict, caricature and humor, but finally these stereotypes are subordinated to a sort of equal opportunity access to the best of life. The bohemian commitment to artistic production is thus a great equalizer; the ability to tap into the deeper psychic pleasures of music and poetry permits the main characters in La Bohème to evade paying the rent and the huge bar tab they have run up, although not finally fate itself. It is no coincidence, I think, that Puccini was wildly popular in America from the beginning. In 1907 he visited the United States for five weeks and his major operas (La Bohème, but also by then Tosca and Madame Butterfly) were all performed at the Met and the Manhattan Opera House to considerable acclaim and sold out popularity. Puccini was so moved by this reception that he resolved to write an opera set in the Wild West, and on returning to Italy did just that, writing The Girl of the Golden West. La Bohème remains the most performed work in the full history of the Metropolitan Opera. And recently, the New York Times columnist David Brooks has argued that the key to America’s class divisions is a best understood as a recurring bohemian sensibility – the country’s upper classes can be understood as Bobo’s (Bourgeois Bohemians) in Paradise.
Even amidst the tragedy, there might also be something distinctively American about the essential utopian optimism that pervades bohemian thought. At its core, bohemianism is exuberantly open to the possibility that, no matter how it ends up, the human condition also means one is never more than a moment away from true love or fulfillment, and that such freedoms cannot be easily denied since their source is not material but mental. Living in the shadow of rough industrialization and fast emerging materialism, the bohemian ideal lingers as a reminder that we are not finally defined by the champagne we drink or the glitter dresses we wear.
SOURCES: Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007); Patricia G. Berman, “Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette: Smoking and the Bohemian Persona,” Art Bulletin 75.4 (December 1993): 627-646; Helen Greenwald, “Recent Puccini Research,” Acta Musicologica 65, Fasc. 1 (January-June 1993): 23-50; Mary Gluck, “Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist,” Modernism/modernity 7.3 (2000): 351-378.
Amateur Humanist 