Beethoven

The Transformation of Pain Helps us see Value in Suffering

/ ginnyburges / Leave a comment
“Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.” ~ Bob Dylan

Pain – either physical or emotional, is something most of us seek to avoid. Yet our pain is just as valuable as our joy.

Such perceived undesirable feelings are at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from joy and ecstasy, but are essentially all part of the same energetic material. Pain is one of those things that we strive to remove and resolve once we’re feeling it, yet it has immense value to our lives if we can use it constructively. As a form of feedback it is invaluable.

It can lead us to an expanded awareness and an equanimity that would not otherwise have been possible, but for our moments of pain.

Pain that has been transcended can be compared to the physical pain of childbirth: it hurts like hell at the time, you have no idea how long the labour will last, how long you can bear the intensity, but when it’s finally over you have a priceless gift – a new life. After a few months it’s not possible to recall the acute pain of childbirth, it is consigned to a murky memory; all you know is that it was worth it, because you brought a human being into the world.

What recondite depths have inspired composers, writers, poets, artists, social entrepreneurs and people from all walks of life, wanting to make the world a better place for others?

Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo
In 1939 Frida and Diego divorced. She was devastated and her emotions were reflected in this painting. She drew two identical Fridas, but with different personalities. One is the “Mexican Frida;” the one Diego Rivera fell in love with. The other is “European Frida” – the new and independent artist that’s recognized worldwide, but also, the woman her husband abandoned.
Their hearts are exposed over their clothing, and there is a thin vein passing through them both, uniting them. Victorian Frida holds surgical scissors that cut the vein in her lap, and the blood spills on her white dress. Frida was experiencing real sorrow, the kind of sorrow that made her feel she could bleed from the pain. Both women are holding hands as if the artist accepted she was the only person who understood her, loved her, and could help her to move on. ~ Matador Network

Such motivations do not normally emanate from pain free lives. When we have experienced profound pain we genuinely develop more compassion and empathy, and are probably more willing to help alleviate suffering if we come across someone going through a similar situation.

Pain is a powerful motivator: it can spur us into action, prompt us to change course, widen our perception, and in many cases, make us more accepting and less judgmental and align us to a meaningful purpose.

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.” ~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

For me, intense pain formed the bedrock of my determination to follow my dreams and made me a stronger, more resilient person. I learned to listen to the inner longing that wasn’t based in my head.

Through pain I liken myself to a carbon atom that has been pressured, pulverised and heated inside the earth’s mantle; a violent process that forms a striking crystalline structure which is dense yet clear, still rough around the edges, yet with further cutting and refining will one day gleam with the best of them.

I have taken the gems (no pun intended!) of my own suffering, and used them in a coalescence of knowledge, experience and imagination in the form of my novel, The Virtuoso. 

There was a time in my life when I considered making an early exit from existence, but fortunately I decided against that idea. My love for my family spurred me to turn my life around. One day at a time.

It has been said that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Most people don’t want to consciously end their life, they want to end their pain. Sadly, not every one can get past their pain.

The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis

Tarquin and Lucretia by Titian c. 1571

The other day I was reading an email from Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley, telling a very personal story about how a painful experience became the catalyst for the values he lives by.

In Vishen’s words:

Your values became the healing you want to give to the world because of past pain.

My first core value was sparked from a horrible incident in 2003.

Just imagine, for a minute, being forced to leave the country you love because you were put on a watchlist based on a bullsh*t idea that, because of your place of birth, you were somehow a potentially dangerous immigrant.

But that was the situation I was placed in 2003 while living in America. I don’t blame anyone…it was the years following September 11th. And this was part of global politics. But boy was it painful…

I had lived in America for a decade and it was a place I had called home. My wife from Estonia and I lived in New York. We were newly married and I’d been living in the United States for 9 straight years. This was our home and I wanted my son born as an American.

But then – one day in 2003 arriving at JFK airport I was taken into a special room and told that I could no longer travel as freely. I had been added to an early version of the same Muslim-watchlist that Trump has been recently pushing for.

See, because I happened to be an immigrant from a Muslim-dominant country (Malaysia), I, alongside 80,000 other men, weren’t afforded the same freedom of movement as everyone else. I could no longer board flights or get off a plane without enduring 2 to 3 hrs in interviews in tiny rooms at the limited airports I was allowed to fly from.

Worse, I was expected to report to the government every 28 days. Interrogated for hours, get my picture taken, and have my credit card purchases scrutinized. Sometimes after waiting in line for up to 4 hours. And I had to repeat this. Every. Four. Weeks.

The funny thing was that I was not even a Muslim. Nor should that even matter.

Waiting 4 hours in the cold New York weather every 28 days just to be subjected to a really degrading process was something I could only tolerate for so long.

That was it.

And I had enough.

I was deeply saddened that I had to leave America this way, but I felt I didn’t really have a choice but to relocate Mindvalley to Malaysia.

In the end, in 2008 the then-new President Obama ruled the whole dumb process unconstitutional and this Bush-era regulation was tossed into the garbage bin.

I was finally free to travel.

But this pain served me. It set me up for the value of UNITY.

Unity is the idea that we align not with our country, our flag, our religion, or our ethnicity first — but that we align first and foremost with humanity as a whole.

My kids are half-Indian and half-white. You know what that means? It means they look middle-eastern. I don’t want MY children ever ending up on some stupid “watchlist” because fact-challenge old men with racist tendencies think something like a Muslim-ban is somehow a good idea.

So, I made it my mission to bring humanity together.

And the result was the value of Unity in everything we do at Mindvalley.

For example, our events typically welcome people from 40 different countries. Our team of 300 people now come from 49 countries.

And we make effort to represent the under-represented. Mindvalley University for example had 55% women speakers. Our courses feature people of all ethnicities and sexual orientations.

And we actively stand up for pro-Unity politics.

Unity was a value that made me who I am.

I was once on the popular talk show “Impact Theory” and the host Tom Bilyeu asked me.

“Are you an entrepreneur or a philosopher?”

I replied that I think the label ‘entrepreneur’ is pointless. Anyone can be an entrepreneur.

“What defines a person”, I said, “is not the label – but what they stand for.”

I could lost my business. I guess that happens to many people. But it won’t make me lose my identity.

But if I lost my stand. And my stand is Unity. I would not be Vishen Lakhiani. Everything I do, including Mindvalley, is designed to bring unity to the human race.

That’s how deeply entrenched unity is in my DNA.

And you can see how PAIN – can lead to the strongest values.

The healing, transforming power of music

Nowhere is the transformative quality of pain more evident, accessible and immediate than in the experience of listening to, performing and writing music. Like all the creative arts, music can be a miraculous medium for ameliorating pain – leaving a legacy of great benefit to many people, no matter if they are alive at the same time in history.

The Violinist by Joseph Rodefer DeCamp

All types of music fulfill this role for people. Some prefer rock, pop, country, jazz, tango, rap, heavy metal, dance anthems, not forgetting the more established and earlier types such as romantic, classical and baroque.  I find my mood and activity selects the music, but the kind that reaches the parts others cannot is – surprise, surprise – classical music.

I have included a few examples of pieces that continue to resonate with audiences centuries later, due to the emotion that was fundamental to their creation. It seems many of the most loved and enduring musical works were hammered out on the anvil of pain…

As you can imagine, keeping this list short is quite impossible for me, so forgive my alacrity if we’re not on the same musical page.

The andante con moto of Schubert’s chamber masterpiece ‘Death and the Maiden’ speaks to me deeply of pain. When I hear it, any unresolved pain I feel comes through and tells me it’s there…

It connects me to the composer, to myself and to humanity.  It has even inspired the title of a trilogy of psychological thrillers, quietly brewing in my psyche.

Schubert composed the String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, D. 810 in 1824, after he had been seriously ill and realised that he was dying. It is Schubert’s testament to death. The quartet takes its name from the lied ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, a setting of a poem of the same name by Matthias Claudius which Schubert wrote in 1817.

Only one who suffered such as Schubert could have written it. Much of Schubert’s music reflects the deep chasm of human emotion. It some of the most heart-felt music I think I will ever hear.

“My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.”
~ Franz Schubert

An incredibly moving performance of Schubert’s Piano Fantasie in F minor, D. 940 for four hands, by Dutch brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen:

The bittersweet quality of the melody and their sensitive, nuanced interpretation makes me well up.

The touch of a master makes the Impromptu No. 3 Op. 90 sound like it’s coming straight from Schubert’s heart…

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” ~ Rumi
Variations on this sentiment:
“There is a crack in everything God has made.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Antelope Canyon – by Madhu Shesharam on Unsplash

“The crack is where the light gets in.” ~ Leonard Cohen
“Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.” ~ Groucho Marx

Beethoven similarly expressed profound depths through his music, in way too many pieces to share here. Works that could only have come about because of his physical and emotional wretchedness. He was the epitome of the tortured genius!

The Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 (Apassionata), was written at a time of great political and personal turmoil, and it seems that Beethoven has bared his soul within the notes. The famous triadic motif from his fifth symphony can be heard in the opening movement, indeed, it pervades much of his musical output.

You can hear the violent rage, anguish, torment, passion and determination expressed either consciously or unconsciously by Beethoven, as if he is unashamedly showing us his inner core, which was clearly on a stormy setting at the time.

He was reeling from a broken heart, just when his brother Karl announced his marriage to Johanna, a woman Beethoven despised. He could not bring himself to dismount from his moral high horse and be happy for them.

Oh my, it was quite the maelstrom… I think Richter played it like the mercurial maestro would have:

Prior to publication of the Apassionata, Beethoven erupted with fury in a disagreement with a great patron of the arts, his aristocratic benefactor, Prince Lichnowsky. The altercation supposedly took place one stormy night at the prince’s country estate near Graz.

Lichnowsky asked Beethoven if he would perform for him and some of Napoleon’s officers he was playing host to. Beethoven refused in his combustible, irascible manner, and strode off into the rainy night with his Appassionata score under his arm; but not before telling Lichnowsky that there were many princes, but only one Beethoven!

The blotches caused by the contact of rain and ink from that fated evening are still visible on the original autograph manuscript.

Even though Beethoven never quite forgave Lichnowsky for his transgression, he still wrote to his estranged patron sometime later to complain of his “thoroughly lacerated heart.”

The pain of parting is so beautifully transferred to the ivories by Alfred Brendel in this recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major, Op. 81a, ‘Les Adieux’:

In his brilliant analysis of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Charles Hazlewood highlights that the piano and orchestra are in a conversation; a dialogue that becomes increasingly tense through the first and second movements.

He enthuses that Beethoven created a new era for the role of the piano by not starting the concerto with a grand orchestral opening, as was the custom, but instead with a tentative phrase on the piano, which seeks to dictate terms to the orchestra.

Discord permeates each phrase of the conversation as the tension becomes more pronounced in the andante con moto. When the piano finally breaks out it seems that the gulf between the piano and the orchestra is unbridgeable, until the third movement brings about resolution and reconciliation. The piano mollifies the orchestra and they unite musically.

I could not leave out the incomparable second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major minor, Op.  73 (Emperor), which seems to encompass the entire history of mankind at the molecular level within its sublime, poignant melody.

The whispered opening makes me hold my breath for eight unbearably beautiful minutes, floating in suspended animation, soaking up the apotheosis of all that is…

James Rhodes blends notes and emotion perfectly in the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109:

Backed by Stanford University’s Ensemble in Residence, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Robert Kapilow, (composer and radio commentator), explores the notion of illness as a potent source of creativity, (e.g. appreciation for existence) through Beethoven’s ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’, which Beethoven wrote in thanksgiving after recovering from a life-threatening illness.

Tchaikovksy could also pack in the pathos, as expressed in his Serenade Melancolique Op. 26, via Itzhak Perlman on his violin:

The sobriquet ‘Suffocation’ is a fitting description for Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E minor, Op. 28:

I think the addition of the cello brings out a lyrical, lugubrious quality to the melody:

The original lyrics to ‘So Deep is the Night’ by André Viaud and Jean Marietti were set to Chopin’s Etude No. 3 in E Major, Op. 10 ‘Tristesse’, perfect on its own:

In the medium of opera and vocal works suffering finds an outlet through the voice. I find  Camille Saint-Saëns’s ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’ from Samson et Dalila one of the most moving arias ever written. Maria Callas was no stranger to emotional pain, and you can hear it as she pours out her heart:

Callas is also unmatched as Norma in Bellini’s eponymous opera singing the aria Casta Diva:

Puccini and Pavarotti are a match made in heaven…

I love the strong sentiment in this interpretation by Marita Solberg of Edvard Grieg’s ‘Solveig’s song’ from his Peer Gynt Suite:

Bach’s eternal, prayerful and beseeching ‘Erbarme dich mein Gott‘ (Have mercy Lord, My God) from his epic St. Matthew Passion:

Get the tissues ready for Handel’s signature aria ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from his Opera Rinaldo.

Let me weep

over my cruel fate,

and sigh for freedom.

Let my sorrow break the chains

of my suffering, out of pity.

Dimitry Shostakovich takes us to the abyss as he performs the andante from his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major, Op. 102 in this vintage recording:

Albinoni finds a sorrowful voice for the oboe in the adagio of his concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 9:

I couldn’t leave out maestro Mozart, who proved he was equally at home with a deep and meaningful as well as a galloping allegro.

Vladimir Horowitz always takes me to another dimension with this recording of the adagio of Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488. The heartache is palpable…

In my humble opinion this is no ‘feeble adagio’ as Brahms had labelled the slow movement of his Violin Concerto in D Major. The oboe, bassoon, brass and violin share the profound melody.

To me it is poetic and purifies the soul.

Franz Liszt wasn’t always a showman, as he proves in his nostalgic and tender Consolation No. 3:

Love hurts and pleasures at the same time when Wagner gets involved! The immortal Tristan und Isolde, Prelude & Liebestod:

The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is a symphony in three movements, composed by Henryk Górecki in Katowice, Poland, between October and December 1976.

In the second movement a solo soprano sings the Polish message written on the wall of a Gestapo cell during World War II, from the perspective of a child separated from a parent. The dominant themes of each of the three movements of the symphony are motherhood and separation through war.

The symphony is constructed around simple harmonies, set in a neo-modal style which makes use of the medieval musical modes. The nine-minute second movement is for soprano, her words are supported by the orchestra and the movement culminates when the strings hold a chord without diminuendo for nearly one and a half minutes.

The final words of the movement are the first two lines of the Polish Ave Maria, sung twice on a repeated pitch by the soprano.

Maternal Affection by Adolphe Jourdan c. 1860

Górecki dedicated the work to his wife, Jadwiga Rurańska. He never sought to explain the symphony as a response to a political or historical event. Instead, he maintained that the work is an evocation of the ties between mother and child.

You can certainly feel the fathomless pain of parental separation, as well as the music’s roots in the Holocaust, and indeed every war:

Honestly, I could go on forever, but I think you get the idea!

In his book, The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein makes a point about the futility of trying to extract the meaning of music, contending that it stands in a special lonely region, unlit…

The composer and musical artist bring their own ‘wounds’ and life experience to their work. In the process there is catharsis, release, healing, beauty and meaning. For them, and for us.

For violinist Ji-Hae Park, music was part of the pain and the resolution:

One could go as far as to say that a completely happy life provides no substance for a creative individual.

Hirzel, Switzerland by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

I have had my fair share of pain, but also incredible joy, and it makes you appreciate the good times. I’m reminded every day to extract every drop of life from each precious, present moment…

Letting go

Letting go of pain takes patience and practice. At least for me.

When I finally decided I was sick of the perverse way my ego was getting off on my pain, I decided to let it go. I could stand in the fire and not be burnt by it. But that took time and awareness.

In hindsight we can understand how our painful experiences have made us who we are, and how they may have served us, but rarely is this possible when we are in the thick of it.

When we step out of the victim archetype we regain our power.

I find this profound teaching by Dr. David R Hawkins (in terms of the paradigm of Content and Context) really helpful in managing and transcending pain. The best course of action is to focus on the totality of the experience, (context) and not the specifics, (content).  He was a wise and wonderful real-life Yoda!

#BeTheBowl

I recently had a candid chat with a good friend of mine, who happens to be a spiritual coach, and I was relaying what a horrendous first six months of the year I’d had, and how I’d struggled to maintain my usual positive outlook and get back on track with my plans. I put on a humorous slant, relieved that I’d got through it. She listened and smiled, and gave me the most amazing advice.

She said, “Ginny, be the bowl!”

I must have looked a bit dim and confused, because she went on to explain that in Japan, they have a custom of not throwing out damaged or broken things. So a precious vase that may have been knocked over and smashed is glued back together using a special gold lacquer.

Rather than cover up the imperfection of the object or throw it away, they appreciate and celebrate it.

I really love that ethos. The practice is known as Kintsugi.

I thought #BeTheBowl would make a great hashtag  to embrace life in all its manifestations.

We all go through rough patches, but rather than bury the hurt, or wallow in it, we can always bring it into the light to mend it with our personal application of liquid gold.

Our life experience comes moment by moment through our thoughts, emotions, words and deeds, and to expect that it will always be perfect is setting us up for unnecessary suffering. We have to just roll with the punches, knowing that they are coming, but not necessarily how hard, how many, where or when…

It seems a much more reasonable proposition to love and accept each other despite our random gold seams.

#BeTheBowl is my new mantra whenever I’m feeling low or the proverbial hits the fan.

#BeTheBowl helps me see myself and humanity as a work in progress.

Khalil Gibran’s poem On Pain, from his timeless book, The Prophet,  is a great reminder that pain is the divine taking us to a different dimension of life. It’s futile to oppose and resist the inevitable.

The only reason we suffer with our pain is that we don’t want to accept its existence and don’t recognize its value. We think that pain is not fair, that we didn’t deserve to experience it, that perhaps we are being punished for something we have or haven’t done.

My biggest question to God during the depths of my despair was always, ‘why me?’ In truth, pain chooses us when it sees that we are ready for transformation.

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” ~ C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

I can’t think of anyone who transformed his pain into such beauty and an enduring legacy more than Beethoven…except Jesus!

As I tell the W.I. ladies whenever I do a fiction talk, there is no greater fodder for your fiction than that of your life, or the lives of loved ones.

Grampians National Park, Australia by Manuel Meurisse on Unsplash

The soul has to be breached to be opened, and wounds do the breaching. The deeper the wound, the richer your story will be, the greater the journey, and the more satisfying the transformation.

This is just as true for real life as it is for fiction.

“Only the wounded physician heals.” ~ Carl Jung

Remarkable Women: The Life and Times of Alice Herz-Sommer (Part 1)

/ ginnyburges / Leave a comment
“Every day is a miracle. No matter how bad my circumstances, I have the freedom to choose my attitude to life, even to find joy. Evil is not new. It is up to us how we deal with both good and bad. No one can take this power away from us.”
~ Alice Herz-Sommer

After reading a moving and inspiring book about the life of Alice Herz-Sommer (A Century of Wisdom by Caroline Stoessinger), I’ve come to the conclusion that the word remarkable doesn’t exactly do her justice.

Alice Herz-Sommer was a phenomenon.

So many facets of her life were outstanding, her musical ability, her attitude and resilience, and her extraordinary longevity. Alice Herz-Sommer is known as the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor. She was born on 23rd November 1903 in Prague, which was then part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire. Alice both experienced and witnessed the highs lows of the twentieth century before she passed away on 23rd February 2014 at the impressive age of 110.

What’s even more astounding is that Alice was practicing her piano for at least three hours a day when she was 107! Alice’s musical discipline proves that playing an instrument can keep the mind sharp and fertile right up to the end. There was no sign of atrophy in her grey matter, which included her amazing memory. She must have had a huge hippocampus!

Alice was probably as close to a flesh and blood angel as you can get.

Reading about her life has frequently moved me to tears, and made me reflect and re-evaluate my own attitudes. You can’t help but be drawn in by her warm, radiant smile and the twinkle in her eyes, or fail to be inspired by Alice’s pearls of wisdom when you watch her interviews.

Even though Alice’s mother and husband were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, and she and her son endured the horrors of internment at Theresienstadt (Terezin), for two years, she did not have an ounce of hatred in her.

She never succumbed to self-pity, bitterness or hating; she simply focused on what was beautiful in her life. For Alice that was mainly two things: her love for her son, Rafi, and her passion for the piano and classical music. One of Alice’s sayings was, “My world is music. Music is a dream. It takes you to paradise.”

She was young at heart because of her ‘joie de vivre’, and perhaps her deliberate immersion in beauty played a part in her longevity.

Her childhood friend, Franz Kafka, seems to have summed it up perfectly:  “Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

Several aspects of Alice’s personality stand out for me: her unquenchable and eternal optimism, her work ethic, her curious mind and love of learning, her early exposure to culture and music which inspired her career path, her gift for teaching as well as performing, and her sweet, sanguine nature. Alice seems to have been friendly to all who came into contact with her. These formidable attributes combined were greater than the sum of their parts, the basis and core of her incredible life.

Alice’s life is an example to all for experiencing a richer, happier existence in the face of the seemingly random vicissitudes that we all face at times. It is surely a gift to humanity.

Malcolm Clarke and Nick Reed’s short documentary film about Alice, The Lady in Number Six won an Oscar in 2014. Filmed shortly before her passing, it is a poignant portrait of a beautiful spirit:

Childhood in Czechoslovakia

Alice grew up in the heart of Bohemia during its cultural zenith. Alice had a twin sister, Marianne (Mitzi), an older sister Irma and two brothers, Georg and Paul.

‘Alice’ in Czech means ‘of the noble kind’, a most fitting name for a truly wonderful lady.

Her Moravian mother, Sofie, was raised in a cultured environment. Her parents ensured that she was highly educated and she became a fine pianist who loved music. She instilled her own cultural education as best she could in her children. Sofie’s parents were friends with Gustav Mahler’s parents, so they played together as children. As an adult, Sofie moved in circles of the great artists, musicians, composers, writers, scientists and thinkers of the day; such as Gustav Mahler, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig.

In her wonderful book, Caroline mentions seeing an old photograph of a bearded man in Alice’s London flat, presumed to have been taken by her mother. Alice explained that it was Sigmund Freud.

Also born in Moravia, Freud had met Sofie through mutual family friends in Vienna. Alice recounted the story of a visit to a relative in Vienna with her mother in the late 1920s, who happened to live near Freud’s office on Berggasse. They would often run into him on their walks and Freud would always stop and engage with them in a brief conversation.

As a child Alice knew and spent time with Franz Kafka, whose best friend married her older sister Irma. She shared her treasured memories of him with the writer and pianist Caroline Stoessinger. Kafka would take Alice and her twin sister Mitzi on walks in the countryside outside Prague and regale them with stories. In Alice’s recollections of Kafka to Caroline she would remember him as an ‘eternal child’.

Kafka would often say to Alice, “Writing is a kind of prayer,” and although he did not know anything about music, he understood Alice’s respect for music. Alice mirrored his his sentiment in her view that listening to music, playing concerts, and practicing is a kind of prayer.

Through his friendship with Kafka, the journalist, biographer and music critic Max Brod also became a firm friend of the Herz family.

“Children must study music. It helps with everything in life. This beauty is always in my mind.” ~ Alice Herz-Sommer

Sofie had taken Alice to Vienna with her in November 1907 to attend Mahler’s farewell concert of his Second Symphony, just before her 4th birthday. No doubt this partly inspired Alice to take up the piano. They chatted with Mahler after the performance and stood among the crowd to wave his train off alongside composer Arnold Schoenberg the following morning.

The Israel Philharmonic, the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the baton of Zubin Mehta perform Mahler’s 2nd Symphony ‘Auferstehung’ (Ressurection):

The theme of this symphony appears to be in harmony with Alice’s views on death, which were greatly influenced by Spinoza’s writings that death and life are part of the same infinity of God. Alice believed that the soul lives on without the body, as do I. She listened to Mahler’s epic work again and again, finding solace in the song ‘Urlicht’ (primal light), at the begininning of the 4th movement. The opening words of the song appear to have served as her spiritual theme song: I come from God and I will return to God.

Alice’s father, Freidrich Herz ran a local engineering factory, and was known to be kind and generous in spirit, something he clearly passed on to his daughter.

At some point in her childhood, Sofie had made it clear to Alice that Freidrich hadn’t been her first choice of husband, for she had previously been in love with another man, but had ultimately acquiesced to her parent’s choice of suitor. They made it work, but perhaps there had been some lingering resentment on her mother’s side at having to give up the love of her life. Alice remembered how her mother loved to play the piano, commenting, “It was one of her diversions from melancholy.”

A grand piano took pride of place in their living room, a precious heirloom passed down from Alice’s grandmother.

The Herz’s hosted many musical soirees and concerts in their welcoming salon. Alice and Paul would play Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’ together, Alice on piano and Paul on the violin, as well as sonatas and concertos.

I imagine they slept well if they played it anything like this:

“Music was always all around me. I mean live music, people playing or singing, not recordings. That came years later.” ~ Alice Herz-Sommer (A century of Wisdom by Caroline Stoessinger).

It is heart-warming to hear Alice reminisce about those early chamber sessions with her brother and how they stayed with her over the years. We should never underestimate the power of music in the home for our children.

Life as a piano virtuoso

Alice’s sister Irma, an accomplished pianist herself, began to teach Alice the piano in 1910.  In her lessons she imbued in her younger sibling her love of practicing. Their twelve year age gap worked well, as there was no jealousy or rivalry between them.

Alice was dedicated to improving and followed her sister’s instructions and guidance in the early years. As she progressed and showed talent and commitment, Irma took her to play for her former music teacher, the Czech musicologist and pianist Václav Štěpán, widely considered Prague’s finest pedagogue.

Alice performed an early Beethoven sonata at the audition, and Štěpán had been so impressed with her passion that he agreed to see her once a month (even though he did not normally teach younger children), while Irma continued her weekly lessons. A few years later Alice took lessons in earnest with Václav Štěpán, whom she revered as her mentor and friend.

During her time studying the piano at the Prague Conservatory as a young woman, Alice came under the tutelage of Franz Liszt’s former pupil, Conrad Ansorge. Whilst the brilliance of his playing wasn’t in question, it seemed Alice didn’t rate him as a teacher.

A vintage recording of Conrad Ansorge playing Mozart in 1928, only two years before his death:

She was surrounded by brilliant musicians who had been only one generation away from the immortal talents of Brahms, Liszt and Chopin.

Alexander Zemlinsky, (the founder of the German Prague Conservatory) befriended Alice. Himself once a favoured student of Brahms, he had been bequeathed the composer’s grand piano. She also learned from the pianists Wilhelm Backhaus and Moris Rosenthal, both students of Chopin’s pupil Karol Mikuli.

After Alice graduated from the conservatory Václav Štěpán arranged for her first debut as a soloist with the Czech Philharmonic, coaching her performance of Chopin’s E minor piano concerto. He also invited Max Brod to the concert, who was spellbound by her technique and tone. He duly wrote a glowing review, and Alice was launched in her promising career as a concert pianist.

“Stage fright comes mainly from caring more about what others think than about the music itself. The only possible fear that I might have had was of my own inner critic. But once I began to play, even that anxiety disappeared.” ~Alice Herz-Sommer (A Century of Wisdom by Caroline Stoessinger)

Alice took masterclasses with Eduard Steurmann and Artur Schnabel, but rather than inspiring her they impressed upon Alice the need to trust her own judgement, and in the process she learned to teach others.

It speaks volumes about Alice’s character that she believed her life as a committed artist in search of excellence came before her performance career. To successfully experience the latter, the former is fundamental.

Alice was a frequent soloist with the Czech Philharmonic and she also undertook commercial recordings prior to the Second World War.

Here she is, playing Chopin’s Waltz in C sharp minor, Op. 64, No. 2 by memory with arthritic hands, just before her 108th birthday!

Alice’s musical inspiration

I share Alice’s admiration and reverence for the genius of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. When asked in a private moment in her apartment by Golda Meir, (who she developed a close friendship with in Israel after the war) about her religion, Alice responded:

“I am Jewish, but Beethoven is my religion.”

Her inspiration came from playing the works of the great baroque, classical and romantic composers, which included her compatriots Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák, who had achieved international fame and recognition.

“When I play Bach, I am in the sky.” ~ Alice Herz-Sommer

Her early duets with her brother Paul and her evening performances also inspired a deep appreciation for the works of Schumann, Chopin and Strauss.

Alice talking about how music takes us to another world:

Their family entertainment was mainly in the form of the Hauskonzerte (house concerts). It wasn’t just the Herz’s who indulged in this form of enjoyment; many families who had everyday professions were skilled amateur musicians and held house concerts.

Hauskonzerte by Giacomo Mantegazza

The word amateur is derived from the Latin word amator – lover – and during the Bohemian zeitgeist, music was, for many, their grandest love affair. I don’t think I’ll say I’m only an amateur anymore, because it somehow belittles the fact that music is an amatory activity.

I can’t think of a better pastime for improving memory, keeping your brain, body and spirit healthy, as well as bringing joy…

In her beautiful book, Caroline explained that Alice often talked about Beethoven, saying, “As I grow older, I appreciate Beethoven’s depth more and more.”

Alice would extol how Beethoven created new music dictated by fearless talent, breaking the bonds of established rules when necessary; becoming the first musician to call himself an artist, and about how he searched for meaning in life, keeping a journal and notebook of musical sketches and philosophical quotations.

Alice loved that Beethoven was free from conventional prejudice, standing up to royalty and nobility when he disagreed with them. She told Caroline, “Beethoven would not have been afraid to stand up to Hitler.”

Her love of Beethoven would provide Alice with moral and spiritual courage throughout her imprisonment in Theresienstadt.

“In the camp, I sometimes felt that I was protesting against the inhumanity of the Nazis when I played Beethoven. I could feel the audience breathing, feeling with me as they clung to their memories of a better time.”

Caroline marvelled at seeing Alice throw her head back in hearty laughter when she found a new solution to a difficult passage that she had already been practicing for at least one hundred years!

Alice’s work ethic is unmatched, because apart from her being the oldest Holocaust survivor, she was also the world’s oldest concert pianist.

“I am an artist. Some days I admire myself. Not bad, I think. But the longer I work, the more I learn that I am only a beginner. No matter how well I known a work of Beethoven, for example, I can always go deeper, and then deeper still. One of the rewards of being a musician is that it is possible to practice the same piece of music and discover new meaning without boredom for at least a hundred years. I study the language of music with the same fervour that scholars re-examine the holy scriptures. The artist’s job is never done. It is the same with life. We can only strive towards rightness. As with music, I search for meaning. I practice life.”
~ Alice Herz-Sommer (A Century of Wisdom, by Caroline Stoessinger).

She was most certainly on the same page as Nietzsche in his view that, “Without music life would be a mistake.” Alice had many interests to sustain her throughout her long and rich life; she loved poetry, art, philosophy and architecture, but she agreed with Schopenhauer that music is the highest of all the arts.

This lovely chat with Tony Robbins highlights Alice’s philosophy on life:

Marriage and Motherhood

Alice met Leopold Sommer in the wake of a personal tragedy. Her close friend Daisy had died aged twenty from an infection that could have been cured if she had had access to antibiotics. Alice was devastated, it was one of the few times she stopped playing the piano.

Shortly after Daisy’s funeral Alice’s friend Trude mentioned that her good friend in Hamburg, Leopold Sommer, had written her a comforting letter. She showed Leopold’s thoughtful words to Alice who then resumed her practice regimen. Leopold was himself a fine amateur violinist, also raised in Prague, but he had decided to carve out his professional path in the business world. Alice met Leopold at a Hauskonzerte hosted by their mutual friend Trude.

Their relationship quickly blossomed, and Leopold made many trips from Hamburg (where he was working), to visit her in Prague, and was there for Alice when her father died suddenly from a heart attack. As their relationship deepened Leopold began to seek employment in Prague. They decided to get married during a romantic walk around Prague Castle one evening, with the city lights glimmering beneath them.

Alice and Leopold were married in 1931. Alice’s career as a concert pianist was burgeoning, and for a time life was good. At their wedding breakfast I love that they both performed Beethoven’s Spring Sonata together as a fitting symbol of their union.

“I grew up in friendship. I fell in love with my future husband’s mind and his knowledge. In marriage, friendship is more important than romantic love.” ~ Alice Herz-Sommer

Alice and Leopold lived in an apartment in the same neighbourhood as her mother and sister Irma, and Alice was gifted a Forster grand piano by Leopold’s parents. Alice practiced on her new piano and began giving lessons to young students.

Their son came into the world on June 21st 1937. They named him Štěpán after her beloved piano mentor, but he later changed his name to the Hebrew Raphael, and was always affectionately referred to as ‘Rafi’ by his mother.

Rafi was only six years old when the Sommer family were sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt. He was one of the few children to survive; most likely because of his mother’s musical skill and determination to protect him.

Sadly, in 1944 Leopold was moved to Auschwitz and later Dachau, where he perished just six weeks before the camp was liberated. His last act before being wrenched away from his wife and son was to save their lives.

Alice spoke of how Leopold told her not to volunteer for anything that the Nazi’s offered; no matter how appealing it might sound.

Soon after Leopold and many of the other men had been deported, the wives and children were given the opportunity to be with their husbands. Alice declined as per Leopold’s instructions. None of the mothers and children who took the offer and boarded the special trains ever returned.

Rafi had been taught to play the piano by his mother, but around age 11 he decided that the cello was his first musical love. He studied in earnest at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem and was fortunate to meet and play for the legendary cellist Paul Tortelier during a Kibbutz. Tortelier became a teacher, friend and mentor to Rafi, who, like his mother, was an outstanding musician and conductor.

Rafi’s sudden death at the age of 65, after performing a concert of Beethoven chamber works with his Salomon Trio in Jerusalem was a devastating blow for Alice. At almost 98 years of age, her closest friends worried that it might be the catalyst for her own passing, but their love and support and her connection to music sustained Alice through the immense sorrow.

Alice’s stoic approach to life and her concern for Rafi’s widow and her two grandsons also kept her going. You could forgive her for indulging in self-pity at such a time, but she told Caroline, “After all, I am not the only mother who has lost her son. Maybe I draw from the strength of Clara Schumann, who one hundred years before me lost two of her children, Felix and Julia. Music kept her going until she closed her eyes for the last time.”

In part two, I will cover Alice’s harrowing time in Theresienstadt, her immediate post war recovery in Prague, her new life in Israel, her formidable contributions as a teacher and mentor to her students, and her final years in London.

I feel it’s right to end part one with a video of her beloved son Raphael Sommer, playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata Op. 5 No. 2 with unbelievable emotional intensity and beauty:

“A sense of humour keeps us balanced in all circumstances, even death.” ~ Alice Herz-Sommer

 

Tchaikovsky and Oistrakh Pluck at Sturdy Heart Strings

/ ginnyburges / Leave a comment
“Undoubtedly I should have gone mad but for music. Music is indeed the most beautiful of all Heaven’s gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. Alone it calms, enlightens, and stills our souls. It is not the straw to which the drowning man clings; but a true friend, refuge, and comforter, for whose sake life is worth living.”  ~ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The Russian’s are in the house! Thankfully not malicious, vengeful spies, instead respected individuals of the intelligent, cultural and artistic kind – and they are playing heart-felt music. Classical music is an auditory nerve agent of a spiritual nature; it seeps into your cells and elicits various emotional reactions, ideas, memories, feelings and visual imagery.

Tchaikovksy’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 35 is one of the great romantic violin concertos ever written, and a staple of the concert violinist’s repertoire. It was the only violin concerto the Romantic era composer wrote, and I don’t think he could have followed it up with a better one somehow. It has many wonderful, subjective attributes which weren’t fully appreciated after it was first published and performed.

It is, in my humble opinion, melodic, lyrical, soulful, virtuosic and so very Russian in its expressive depths… Did I mention it’s also fiendishly difficult to play?

Where to start…

There are many tricky trills, finger-bending and eye-watering double-stopping, glissandi, frequent leaps and thrilling passages to for a soloist to negotiate. The opening movement is lengthy and physically demanding, with many notes in the stratosphere of what is possible for the violin.

It’s hard to maintain intonation and energy throughout these gruelling sections. A full body/brain workout for sure. It’s way over my playing ability for the most part, and even causes consternation for the professionals.

Tachikovsky originally dedicated the concerto to revered Russian virtuoso and teacher Leopold Auer, who rather embarrassingly declined to play its debut performance.

Relations between composer and artist cooled, and Tchaikovsky ruefully wrote in one of his letters that the episode ‘had the effect of casting this unfortunate child of my imagination into the limbo of the hopelessly forgotten’.

The front page of my own score for violin & piano with violin part edited by David Oistrakh

Thankfully it wasn’t forgotten, and rather paradoxically, it is Auer’s revised edition of the concerto that is most widely performed today.  Heifetz and Kreisler also made their own tweaks and some repeats were cut out. Leopold Auer gave his ‘official’ viewpoint in a 1912 interview, on what the press today might have dubbed ‘Dedication-Gate’:

“I had championed the symphonic works of the young composer (who was at that time not universally recognized), I could not feel the same enthusiasm for the Violin Concerto, with the exception of the first movement; still less could I place it on the same level as his purely orchestral compositions. I am still of the same opinion. My delay in bringing the concerto before the public was partly due to this doubt in my mind as to its intrinsic worth, and partly that I would have found it necessary, for purely technical reasons, to make some slight alterations in the passages of the solo part. This delicate and difficult task I subsequently undertook, and re-edited the violin solo part, and it is this edition which has been played by me, and also by my pupils, up to the present day.
It is incorrect to state that I had declared the concerto in its original form unplayable. What I did say was that some of the passages were not suited to the character of the instrument, and that, however perfectly rendered, they would not sound as well as the composer had imagined. From this purely aesthetic point of view only I found some of it impracticable, and for this reason I re-edited the solo part.”

There have been many wonderful performances over the years, but I especially love this 1954 recording of the late Russian virtuoso, David Oistrakh with Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Franz Konwitchny:

It seems to me that Oistrakh connected with the music on a soul level. In this sublime recording of his own version he conveys its musical essence through a beautiful and plaintive purity of tone, a restrained yet intense vibrato, and mind-blowing virtuosity without sacrificing accuracy. It is astounding!

He gives a performance full of pathos, passion and precision but does not slide into schmaltzy self-indulgence, or become sentimental to the point of being sickly.

Oistrakh takes us to dizzying heights in the first movement (Allegro Moderato) with stunning syncopated semi-quavers interspersed with soft, pianissimo passages of eloquent singing on his Stradivarius, only to forcefully proclaim his intermittent chords in conversation with the orchestra before the final ascending, chord-laden runs that build in volume and speed until they climax with the entry of the lush main theme from the orchestra.

Professor James Stern provides nuggets on the first movement for violin students at Juilliard:

The violin’s soaring passages of rhythmic complexity and melody in increasingly higher realms make my heart dance.

This movement seems entirely evocative of Spring: there is some leftover wintry grit and determination giving way to vivid, vibrant and powerful new shoots of life and energy.

It is like an epic ballet score (of which Tchaikovsky was a master), without any dancing. Come to think of it, maybe someone should choreograph a dance routine to the first movement?

Itzhak Perlman, one of my living idols on the violin, gives his take on the Tchaikovsky violin concerto:

I love to play the second movement (Andante), titled Canzonetta in the key of G minor, which expresses a mournful, song like interlude, a kind of reflective musing on suffering; perhaps a lamentation of Tchaikovsky’s soul.

Oistrakh’s dynamics are exquisitely soft and gentle, and the music is marked con sordino (use of a mute), to subdue the effect further.

I also enjoyed Arabella Steinbacher’s ‘uncut’ interpretation and performance of Oistrakh’s edition, which is played at a slightly slower tempo than Oistrakh himself.  I am in awe at how she makes such mastery look effortless. Here’s what she says about the Canzonetta:

“Then, when Tchaikovsky writes con anima, it’s like the sunshine comes through the clouds. It’s on the E string and this positive energy comes through.”

The third movement (Allegro vivacissimo), back to the D Major key, is a vivid tapestry of Slavic and Russian folk tunes woven together in a very bold, brisk and dynamic finale.

A masterpiece!

Tchaikvosky’s personal circumstances behind the Violin Concerto

Despite being written in the key of D Major, the concerto has an unmistakable melancholy feel. Tchaikovsky composed the work in spring 1878, after a period of personal strife and unhappiness. His disastrous six week marriage to Antonina Miliukova had failed and he was seeking solace from his misery with a tour of Switzerland, France and Italy.

It is widely thought that the inspiration for the work sprang from his infatuation for a violinist he had tutored in composition and music theory at the Moscow Conservatory, Josef Kotek.

It was Kotek who came to his rescue in Clarens, Switzerland, carrying many scores in his suitcase. Among them was Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, a concertante work for violin and orchestra which influenced Tchaikovsky greatly on his concerto. I can ‘hear’ similarities between Lalo’s finale and Tchaikovsky’s opening movement.

On the banks of lake Geneva they worked together on the solo sections and the sketching was completed in just eleven days, with the complete scoring finished in two weeks. He must have written it in some kind of creative frenzy.

Somewhat surprisingly, given his close collaboration with the composer, Kotek also refused to perform the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. Another early setback for the work.

However, Josef Kotek redeemed himself by instigating a life changing friendship for Tchaikovsky, as he enthusiastically edified his former tutor to his employer, Nadheza von Meck, a wealthy arts patron. Tchaikovsky began composing for her ‘in house’ string ensemble, (which Josef Kotek played in), resulting in a rewarding, if bizarre, fourteen year working relationship vital to Tchaikovsky’s composing career.

A later work by Tchaikovsky, the Valse-Scherzo for Violin and Orchestra was dedicated to Kotek.

Allegro Films have made a superb documentary about this period of his life:

Tchaikovsky rededicated his violin concerto to Adolph Brodsky, who premiered it in Vienna on 4th December 1881. The music critic Eduard Hanslick notoriously described it as “stinking music” — an insult which cut Tchaikovsky to the core.

A moving account of Tchaikovsky’s gratitude to Adolph Brodsky:

“In referring to this outstanding artist, I cannot help availing myself of this opportunity to express publicly the fervent gratitude which to my dying day I shall always feel for him because of the following incident. In 1877 I wrote a Violin Concerto and dedicated it to Mr L. Auer. I do not know whether Mr Auer felt himself flattered by my dedication, but the point is that, in spite of his genuine friendliness towards me, he never wanted to surmount the difficulties of this concerto and in fact pronounced it to be impossible to play—a verdict which, coming from such an authority as this Saint Petersburg-based virtuoso, plunged this unhappy child of my imagination into an abyss of what seemed to be irrevocable oblivion.
One day, some five years after my concerto had been written and published, when I was living in Rome, I went into a café and happened to pick up an issue of the Neue Freie Presse in whose feuilleton section there was an article by the famous critic Hanslick  about a recent concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Society which, amongst other things, had also featured that hapless violin creation of mine which L. S. Auer had condemned to non-existence a few years earlier. Herr Hanslick reproached the soloist (who was none other than A. D. Brodsky) for having made such a bad choice and lambasted my poor concerto, liberally strewing the pearls of his caustic humour and firing the most poisoned arrows of his irony.
“We know,” he wrote, “that in contemporary literature there have started to appear works whose authors love to reproduce in detail the most repulsive physiological phenomena, including foul smells. One might describe literature of that kind as stinking. Well, Herr Tschaikowsky has shown us that there can also be stinking music (stinkende Musik)”
Having read the above comment by this famous and highly influential critic, I could vividly picture to myself how much energy and effort it must have cost Mr Brodsky to get my “stinking concerto” performed by the Vienna Philharmonic, and how aggrieved and unpleasantly struck he must have been by this attitude of a critic towards a work by a fellow-countryman and friend. I of course hastened to convey my most heartfelt gratitude to Mr Brodsky, and from his reply I found out how many trials and tribulations he had had to get through in order to achieve his goal—and his goal was precisely to rescue my concerto from the abyss of oblivion. Mr Brodsky subsequently played the “stinking” concerto everywhere, and was everywhere attacked by critics similar to Hanslick in their approach and their exclusivity of tone, but still the deed was done—my concerto had been saved, and now it is quite frequently played in Western Europe, especially since another excellent violinist, the young Haliř, has come to the aid of Mr Brodsky (further down I shall have a lot to say about this young violinist).
It should now be understandable why I was so pleased to meet A. D. Brodsky in Leipzig, where I had never been before and otherwise had no friends amongst the locals, and to know that, throughout all the emotional agitation and even fears that were lying ahead of me on this tour, I could count on the moral support of his warm and firm friendship of many years’ standing.”

Musical influences on Tchaikovsky

An excerpt from his Autobiography in 1889 highlights how hearing Don Giovanni had affected him:

“Would play through my beloved Don Giovanni over and over again, or rehearse some shallow salon piece. From time to time, though, I would set about studying a Beethoven symphony. How strange! This music would cause me to feel sad each time and made me an unhappy person for weeks. From then on I was filled with a burning desire to write a symphony — a desire which would erupt afresh each time that I came into contact with Beethoven’s music. However, I would then feel all too keenly my ignorance, my complete inability to deal with the technique of composition, and this feeling brought me close to despair…”

From Wikipedia:
This declaration suggests that it was Beethoven’s symphonies in fact which kindled in the young Tchaikovsky the zeal to write music himself, rather than just escaping from everyday reality into the magical realm of Mozart’s opera. Moreover, the feeling of “sadness” which overcame him whenever he heard Beethoven’s music is one that would remain with him all his life, and, if around 1860 it was perhaps mainly due to his despair at the thought that he would never be able to write anything similar since he knew nothing of compositional technique, in later years it was certainly the “tragic struggle with Fate and striving after unattainable ideals” expressed in many of Beethoven’s works that struck a chord with Tchaikovsky. This affinity he felt with Beethoven and the element of ‘struggle’ in the latter’s life and music is perhaps most interestingly revealed in the additions he made to a compilation of biographical material on Beethoven which he started writing in 1873 but did not complete — ‘Beethoven and His Time’. These extra observations of his own suggest that Tchaikovsky clearly empathized with some important moments in Beethoven’s life: the early loss of his mother, the German composer’s struggle against adverse circumstances and against the failings of his own character. Thus, far from being merely a remote, awe-inspiring Old Testament God to him, Tchaikovsky recognized in Beethoven a kindred spirit, namely an artist who was deeply aware of the tragedy of human existence, and who sensed that the only true happiness he could find in life was in music. The comparison in his diary between Mozart and Beethoven, at first sight so ‘unfavourable’ for the latter, might therefore be interpreted, firstly, as a way of expressing how Mozart’s music acted like a balsam on his troubled soul as opposed to Beethoven’s, which reflected back his own suffering, and, secondly, as an implicit confession of how daunting it was to have to write music in the wake of Beethoven — a feeling that was shared by almost all the other great composers of the nineteenth century!

An insightful BBC documentary (sadly without subtitles for the Russian bits) on the life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893):

After an emotionally fraught birth and challenging early years, this musical ‘enfant terrible’ evolved through much struggle, and grew to walk and talk and eventually sing on the world stage, thanks to the magnificent potential Tchaikovsky suffused within its poignant notes, as well as the dedicated soloists throughout the decades who  underwent countless hours of bruised fingers, chafed necks, aching arms and mind-altering concentration, pouring out their heart and soul in bringing it to life.

In a comment about Beethoven’s masses Tchaikovsky observed that they were not strictly religious works but, similar to his symphonies, as ‘poetically intensive effusions of sentiment’, permeated by the same ‘spirit of despair and struggle’.

I definitely get the feeling that Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major could be described thus, originating from the ‘ideal realm’ that Beethoven inspired in him, both from the perspective of performing and listening.

Any creative individual whose work may not have received glowing reviews or achieved early success can take heart from this story – all it takes is a determined and influential champion to make history.

The Great Virtuoso Violinists/Composers of the 19th Century: Joachim

/ ginnyburges / 3 Comments
“How often did the master Joachim himself perform the work, how often did he teach it to countless pupils, and yet nowadays what is passed off as the Brahms Concerto no longer bears any relation to that [work].” ~ Heinrich Schenker

The name Joseph Joachim has been familiar to me for a very long time. I was aware that he was a celebrated and hugely virtuosic soloist, for I saw his name on many violin scores of other composers over the years as I progressed with my violin studies.

Joseph Joachim by John Singer Sargent c. 1904

He had either arranged the piece for the violin and piano part, or written a cadenza. His musical pedigree shone from the pages of multifarious scores, but other than that I didn’t know anything else about him.

So here endeth much of my ignorance, as I attempt to shine the light of appreciation on Joseph Joachim’s life and achievements.

Whilst Joachim was much more famous for his playing career than his composing (as many of my revered candidates in this violin/composer series have been), this Austro-Hungarian maestro was an early trailblazer of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, and in a large measure responsible for its current popularity.

I love him for that alone!

His name is firmly established in the pantheon of violin greats; an exceptional talent on his instrument, and like many gifted musicians before him, he branched out into composing, conducting and teaching, where possibly his greatest legacy and influence still thrives.

Joseph Joachim: (28 June 1831 – 15 August 1907)

Joseph Joachim was born the seventh of eight children to Julius (a wool merchant) and Fanny Joachim on 28th June 1831, in Köpcsény, Hungary (present-day Kittsee, Austria). As an infant he survived the European cholera pandemic, which claimed almost 400 lives in the Pressburg region.

When Joseph was two years old the Joachim family moved to Pest, then the capital of Hungary’s thriving wool industry.  His older sister had stimulated an early interest of music in him from her study of guitar and singing, and a toy violin given to Joseph by Julius seems to have been the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the violin.

Family of influence

Joachim’s cousin on his maternal side was Fanny (nee Figdor) Wittgenstein, who served as a surrogate mother to Joachim throughout much of his youth, mother of the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein, grandmother of the pianist Paul Wittgenstein and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Joseph’s sister Johanna married Lajos György Arányi, a prominent physician and university professor in Pest who, in 1844, founded one of the world’s first institutes of pathology.  Their granddaughters (Jospeh’s grand neices) were  the distinguished violinists Adila (Arányi) Fachiri (1886-1962) and Jelly d’Arányi (1893-1966). Both had studied under Joachim’s protégé, the eminent Jenö Hubay.

Jelly d’Arányi is the protagonist of Jessica Duchen’s novel, Ghost Variations, a fictional tale around the true story of Robert Schumann’s long lost violin concerto, composed for her great uncle Joseph. This book is next on my reading list!

Joseph’s brother Henry followed in the same trade as their father, and settled in England, where he married Ellen Margaret Smart, from a prominent British musical family. Their son Harold Joachim (nephew of Joseph) was educated at Harrow College and Balliol College Oxford. A  respected philosopher and scholar of Aristotle and Spinoza, his most well-known book was The Nature of Truth, (1906).

As an Oxford University professor he taught the American poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote: ‘to his criticism of my papers I owe an appreciation of the fact that good writing is impossible without clear and distinct ideas’ (letter in The Times, August 4, 1938).

He was also said to be a talented amateur violinist and married to one of Joseph’s daughters.

Harold’s sister Gertrude, (Joseph’s niece) married Francis Albert Rollo Russell, the son of British Prime Minister John Russell, and uncle of the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Early Career 

Joseph received his first violin lessons from Gustav Ellinger, a competent violinist but not the best teacher for the young prodigy, so Joachim’s parents’ placed young Joseph under the tutelage of Stanisław Serwaczyński, the concertmaster and conductor of the opera in Pest, who gave him a thorough grounding in the modern French School, by Viotti’s successors: Rode, Baillot and Kreutzer.

An early debut in Pest brought Joachim to the attention of an important benefactor: Count Franz von Brunsvik, a liberal aristocrat and a pillar of Pest’s musical community, and also the affection of his sister Therese.

Beethoven had dedicated his Appassionata Sonata, Op. 57 to von Brunsvik, who was among the earliest performers of Beethoven’s string quartets. Beethoven was also fond of Franz’s sister, Therese, to whom he dedicated his Op. 78 sonata, and their sister Josephine von Brunsvik, who I believe to have been Beethoven’s mysterious “Immortal Beloved.”

Vienna

The next stage of his musical development was to be in Vienna, where Joseph’s wealthy grandfather Isaac lived, as did his uncles, Nathan and Wilhelm Figdor.

Joachim had a shaky start with teacher George Hellmesberger senior, who doubted Joachim’s future as a virtuoso due to what he considered weak and stiff bowing. At this point Joachim’s parents (who had been in Vienna for his concert), decided that they would return with him to Pest and seek a new profession for their son.

Luckily for Joachim, the celebrated violinist Heinrich Wilhem Ernst was also in Vienna giving a series of highly publicised concerts, and when Joachim’s parents sought his advice he referred them to his own teacher: Joseph Böhm.

Portrait of Joseph Bohm

Böhm proved to be the best mentor to further develop Joseph’s talent. He was well respected as the father of the Viennese School of violin playing.

Robert W Eshbach writes:
Joseph Böhm played in many historically significant concerts, including a performance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony under the composer’s direction. He became an early advocate for Schubert’s chamber music, and, on 26 March 1828, he gave the premiere of Schubert’s opus 100 trio.  Together with Holz, Weiss and Linke of the original Schuppanzigh Quartet, he performed Beethoven’s string quartets under the composer’s supervision. For Joachim, this direct personal and musical connection to Beethoven held a great and abiding significance.
Joachim’s training under Böhm was a true apprenticeship. In accepting him as a student, Böhm and his wife agreed to take him into their home just outside of Vienna’s first district, two blocks from the Schwarzspanierhaus where Beethoven had lived and died. For the next three years, for all but the Summer months, they would raise him in loco parentis, and train him in the practical skills of a professional violinist. Though not a violinist, Frau Böhm played a critical role in the Joseph’s musical upbringing, attending his lessons, and taking personal charge of his practicing.

I find it fascinating how the connections emanating from Beethoven’s life through his compositions, fellow musicians, friends, acolytes and protégé’s seemed to go full-circle in the life of Joseph Joachim!

Shortly before his own recital on 30th April 1843, Joseph had the benefit of seeing the Belgian violinist Henri Vieuxtemps perform in Vienna’s Imperial and Royal Redoutensaal, no doubt an inspiring event.

At his own recital to a burgeoning audience in the same venue, of the Adagio religioso and Finale marziale movements of Vieuxtemps’s fourth concerto in D minor, he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Joachim left Vienna in the summer of 1843 to further his studies in Leipzig, where he was to audition for the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Böhm relented, as his preference had been for his protégé to go to Paris instead.

In August that year Joachim appeared in a Leipzig Gewandhaus concert, with Pauline Viardot-García and Clara Schumann, playing an Adagio and Rondo by Charles-Auguste de Bériot.

London debut and critical acclaim 

Under the guidance and mentorship of composer Felix Mendelssohn, the thirteen year old Joseph wowed an enthusiastic audience in the Hanover Square Rooms on 27th May 1844, with his performance of the hitherto rather unfairly maligned Beethoven Violin Concerto.

Hanover Square Rooms – A Concert in 1843

Vieuxtemps’s Beethoven performance had taken place in Vienna in 1834, but in London there had been no well received recitals of Beethoven’s only violin concerto.

After what must have been a poor performance in London in April 1832 by Edward Eliason, came this scathing review in Hamonicon:

“Beethoven has put forth no strength in his violin concerto. It is a fiddling affair, and might have been written by any third or fourth rate composer. We cannot say that the performance of this concealed any of its weakness, or rendered it at all more palatable.”

Many great violinists, including Ludwig Spohr, had rejected the work outright. “That was all very fine,” Spohr later said to Joachim by way of congratulations after a performance in Hanover, “but now I’d like to hear you play a real violin piece.”

Ouch! Perhaps it is poetic justice that Spohr’s own violin concertos, which only were popular during his lifetime, never reached the current pinnacle of Beethoven’s much loved and enduring work.

Joseph Joachim’s Cadenza for the Beethoven Violin Concerto

I wonder if Joachim realised all that was riding on his debut. Had he not played Beethoven’s ‘fiddling affair’ in such an outstanding manner, his career may have faltered and Beethoven’s only violin concerto may have forever remained in the shadows. That’s quite a lot of pressure to sit, even on the mature shoulders, of a young teenager.

Joseph Joachim in London in 1844

Mendelssohn had put his own reputation on the line, having been invited over as the guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1843 and promptly suggesting the wunderkind Joseph Joachim to the society; who had a long-standing ban on child performers.

Eventually, after a few high level auditions, it was agreed that Joachim would play the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

A fabulous vintage recording of Beethoven’s VC played at a jaunty tempo, (Joachim Cadenzas) by fellow Hungarian, Joseph Szigeti, with the British Symphony Orchestra and Bruno Walter:

Joseph was paid the sum total of 5 guineas (with a guinea being equivalent to one pound, one shilling). Quite a disparity with today’s performers, (inflation not withstanding), but it was to be the opportunity of a lifetime.

Felix Mendelssohn in his elation wrote:
“… The cheers of the audience accompanied every single part of the concerto throughout. When it was over and I took him down the stairs, I had to remind him that he should once more acknowledge the audience, and even then the thundering noise continued until long after he had again descended the steps, and was out of the hall. A better success the most celebrated and famous artist could neither hope for nor achieve.”
The reviewer for the Morning Post enthused:
“Joachim, the boy violinist, astounded every amateur. The concerto in D, op. 61… has been generally regarded by violin-players as not a proper and effective development of the powers of their instrument… But there arrives a boy of fourteen [sic] from Vienna, who, after astonishing everybody by his quartett-playing, is invited to perform at the Philharmonic, the standard law against the exhibition of precocities at these concerts being suspended on his account. As for his execution of this concerto, it is beyond all praise, and defies all description. This highly-gifted lad stands for half-an-hour without any music, and plays from memory without missing a note or making a single mistake in taking up the subject after the Tutti. He now and then bestows a furtive glance at the conductor, but the boy is steady, firm, and wonderfully true throughout.
In the slow movement in C — that elegant expanse of melody which glides so charmingly into the sportive rondo — the intensity of his expression and the breadth of his tone proved that it was not merely mechanical display, but that it was an emanation from the heart — that the mind and soul of the poet and musician were there, and it is just in these attributes that Joachim is distinguished from all former youthful prodigies… Joachim’s performance was altogether unprecedented, and elicited from amateurs and professors equal admiration.
Mendelssohn’s unequivocal expression of delight and Loder’s look of amazement, combined with the hearty cheering of the band as well as auditory, all testified to the effect young Joachim had produced.”

On June 4th 1844, as news of his successful debut had spread, Joseph was asked to play for none other than Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort at a state concert in Windsor, attended by Emperor Nicholas of Russia, Frederick Augustus II, King of Saxony, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel.

He performed Ernst’s Othello Fantasy, and de Bériot’s Andantino and Rondo Russe, (the second and third movements of his violin concerto No. 2 in B minor), accompanied by the Queen’s private band, and received a golden watch and chain from the Queen for his efforts.

 The Liszt years, Hanover and touring

Mendelssohn’s sudden death in 1847 deeply affected Joachim, who was teaching at the Conservatorium in Leipzig and playing on the first desk of the Gewandhaus Orchestra with Ferdinand David.

In 1848 the renowned pianist and composer Franz Liszt invited Joachim to Weimar (once home to Goethe and Schiller) to join his circle of avant-garde musicians, encouraging him to compose. Joachim served Liszt as his concertmaster and seemed to embrace the new “psychological music” as he put it.

It was during his time in Weimar that he wrote his Violin Concerto in G minor, Op. 3, dedicated to his new mentor.

By 1852 Joachim had a change of heart and eschewed the direction of Liszt’s and particularly Wagner’s music of the ‘New German School’ and moved to Hanover. In 1857 he wrote to Liszt: “I am completely out of sympathy with your music; it contradicts everything which from early youth I have taken as mental nourishment from the spirit of our great masters.”

Under the generous patronage of King George V of Hanover Joachim was well paid and given the freedom to compose and undertake concert tours of Europe.

Performance repertoire and dedications

Joachim not only revived Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, but also championed Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin BWV 1001 – 1006 and the much loved ‘Chaconne’ from the Partita No. 2, BWV 1004. Bach is staple canon for any modern violinist both pro and amateur.

How marvellous that Joachim’s good taste still prevails upon modern repertoire…

“The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven’s. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart’s jewel, is Mendelssohn’s.” ~ Joseph Joachim

He studied the Mendelssohn violin concerto with the composer, and famously provided inspiration and composition feedback to Johannes Brahms, who wrote his Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 for Joachim.

A marvellous documentary with violinist Gil Shaham about Brahm’s violin concerto and Joachim’s role in its creation and performance:

Brahms’s Scherzo for Joachim, the third movement of the F-A-E Sonata, a passionate rendition from Vengerov and Papian:

He also performed his own version of Tartini’s Devil’s Trill and Robert Schumann’s dedication, Fantasy in C Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 131, previously unknown to me.

A wonderful 1953 recording of the piece arranged by Joachim for violin and piano, with a rhapsodic performance by Russian virtuoso Leonid Kogan and pianist Andrei Mytnik :

Joachim and Clara Schumann undertook a recital tour in late 1857, performing in Dresden, Leipzig and Munich.  They were also well received in London’s St. James’s Hall. Joachim performed yearly in London from 1867 to 1904.

Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann in Concert by Adolph von Menzel c. 1854

“Then there was a violin solo by young Joachim, then as now the greatest violinist of his time; and a solo on the piano-forte by Madame Schumann, his only peeress! and these came as a wholesome check to the levity of those for whom all music is but an agreeable pastime, a mere emotional delight, in which the intellect has no part; and also as a well-deserved humiliation to all virtuosi who play so charmingly that they make their listeners forget the master who invented the music in the lesser master who interprets it! “~ Excerpt from Trilby, 1894, by George du Maurier

Friendship with Johannes Brahms and the Schumann’s

Through his friendship with Robert and Clara Schumann Joachim was able to introduce them to the twenty year old Johannes Brahms. They would all form a close and lifelong friendship, but not without their disagreements.

Johannes Brahms, German composer with Joseph Joachim.

After many years of friendship and close collaboration, Brahms sided with Joachim’s wife at the time of their divorce. Joseph had accused Amalie of having an affair, but Brahms apparently had thought more highly of her chastity!

Their rift lasted a year, and was mended, at least partially, when Brahms composed his Double Violin Concerto for Violin and Cello.

The King of Cadenzas

Joachim wrote the cadenza as the dedicatee for Brahms’s violin concerto. Joachim’s cadenzas:

  • Beethoven, Concerto in D major, Op. 61
  • Brahms, Concerto in D major, Op. 77
  • Kreutzer, Concerto No. 19 in D minor
  • Mozart, Aria from Il re pastore, K. 208, Concerto No. 3 in G major, K. 216, Concerto No. 4 in D major, K. 218, and Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219
  • Rode, Concerto No. 10 in B minor, and Concerto No. 11 in D major
  • Spohr, Concerto in A minor, Op. 47 (Gesangsszene)
  • Tartini, Sonata in G minor (Devil’s Trill)
  • Viotti, Concerto No. 22 in A minor

Recordings of his cadenzas of Brahms and Mozart:

Hilary Hahn playing Joachim’s cadenza for the Brahms VC:

Mozart Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major K.218 – 1st Movement – Allegro with Henryk Szeryng, New Philharmonia Orchestra w/Sir Alexander Gibson (Joachim Cadenza at 7.05):

The Joachim String Quartet 

Aside from his illustrious career as one of the most influential solo violinists of his era, Joachim also performed chamber works with his eponymous string quartet.

They gave recitals of Beethoven’s late quartets – high in difficulty and low in popularity, at least until revival by Joachim and his quartet members: Robert Hausmann (cello), Joseph Joachim (1st violin), Emanuel Wirth (viola) and Karel Halíř (2nd violin).

The Joachim Quartet performing in the Sing Akademie zu Berlin in 1903 – engraving based on a painting by Felix Possart

The Joachim Quartet was formed in Berlin in 1869 and quickly garnered a reputation as the finest quartet in Europe at the time. Joachim played in the quartet until his death in 1907.

Joachim’s former teacher, Joseph Böhm had been part of the quartet that had given the world premiere performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 12 in E-Flat Major, Op. 127, now in mainstream chamber repertoire:

The legendary music critic and theorist, Heinrich Schenker on his quartet in 1894:
“In the course of recent years, since Hellmesberger senior, the great quartet connoisseur and player, we found only one single quartet that could do complete justice to the demands of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann—that quartet was the Joachim Quartet from Berlin.”

Joseph Joachim’s vintage recordings

Please bear in mind that these recordings date back over a hundred and ten years and therefore sound scratchy and hissy by today’s standards, but they are just about clear enough to give you an idea of Joachim’s style.

It’s also worth noting that he was 72 years old at the time of these recordings, playing with swollen fingers and gout, so not in his prime!

Joachim’s Violin Concertos

Violin Concerto in One Movement in G minor, Op. 3 for Franz Liszt:

The so called ‘Hungarian’ violin concerto was composed in the summer of 1857, considered one of the great romantic violin concertos, written in the style of Hungarian folk music, which to Joachim, was inseparable to gypsy music.

Rarely performed, it has been described as “the Holy Grail of Romantic violin concertos” by music critic David Hurwitz.

The concerto premiered on 24th March 1860 in Hanover and was published in Leipzig by Breitkopf and Härtel in 1861.

“The critic Eduard Hanslick recorded Joachim as having been for some ten years the greatest living violinist. His review of the Concerto in the Hungarian Style was more guarded, describing it as too expansive, complicated and striking in its virtuosity to be evaluated at a first hearing.” ~ Keith Anderson

The performance I’m going to share is by Rachel Barton Pine, a musician I admire very much. She recorded the work on the Naxos label in 2003 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to high acclaim.

She was noted as saying that because the concerto is so challenging and lengthy (45 minutes+) practising and performing it was akin to “training to run a marathon”.

Excerpt from Grampohone Magazine:
In 1861, 17 years before Brahms produced his masterpiece in the genre, Joseph Joachim as a young virtuoso wrote his D minor Violin Concerto, In the Hungarian Style. He would later help to perfect the solo part of his friend’s work, but in his own concerto the solo part is if anything even more formidable, one reason – suggested in the New Grove Dictionary – that it has fallen out of the repertory.

Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, with Takako Nishizaki, Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Meir Minsky:

Other Compositions

Hamlet Overture, Op. 4 with Meir Minsky and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra:

Overture in C major, performed by Maastricht Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Roland Bader:

The Overture in C major by Josef Joachim, was composed in 1896 for the imperial birthday of the Kaiser of Germany. It was first performed on 3 February 1896 in Berlin’s Royal Academy of Arts.

The delightful Hebrew Melodies, Op. 9 (after Impressions of Byron’s Songs) for viola and piano (1854–1855), with Hartmut Rohde and Masumi Arai:

Schubert’s Piano Sonata ‘Grand Duo in C Major, D 812’ arranged for orchestra by Joachim as Symphony in C:

Teaching Legacy

Probably Joachim’s most illustrious pupil was Leopold Auer, who himself went on teach some of the greatest violinists of the 20th century:  Mischa Elman, Konstanty Gorski, Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Toscha Seidel, Efrem Zimbalist, Georges Boulanger, Benno Rabinof, Kathleen Parlow, Julia Klumpke, Thelma Given, and Oscar Shumsky.

“Joachim was an inspiration to me, and opened before my eyes horizons of that greater art of which until then I had lived in ignorance. With him I worked not only with my hands, but with my head as well, studying the scores of the masters, and endeavouring to penetrate the very heart of their works…. I [also] played a great deal of chamber music with my fellow students.” ~ Leopold Auer

Other prominent virtuoso violinists who were tutored by Joseph Joachim included Jenő Hubay, Bronislaw Huberman, Karl Klingler (violinist of the Klingler Quartet and Joachim’s successor at the Berlin Hochschule), Klingler was the teacher of Shinichi Suzuki.

Franz von Vecsey, who studied with Hubay, then Joachim, became the dedicatee of the Sibelius violin concerto.

Andreas Moser (another of Joachim’s pupils), went on to become his assistant, helping to recover the original scores of J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, collaborating with Joachim on numerous editions. Moser wrote the first biography of Joachim in 1901.

Joachim’s Stradivarius Violins

From Wikipedia:
In March 1877, Joachim received an honorary Doctorate of Music from Cambridge University. For the occasion he presented his Overture in honor of Kleist, Op. 13. Near the 50th anniversary of Joachim’s debut recital, he was honored by “friends and admirers in England” on 16 April 1889 who presented him with “an exceptionally fine” violin made in 1715 by Antonio Stradivari, called “Il Cremonese”.

The provenance of the ‘Cremonese, Harold, Joachim’ is given in full detail on the intstrument’s listing in Tarisio. Currently housed at the museum in Cremona, here is a 2013 recital of Bach by Antonio de Lorenzi, and it sounds georgeous!

Joachim also played on the ‘Messiah’ 1716 Stradivarius which I have seen on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, on the list of the 12 most expensive violins in history.

He is no longer just a name on a score to me now – rather a fully fledged violin hero…

The Secret of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

/ ginnyburges / 6 Comments

If you’ve read some of my previous musical blogs you’ll know that I’m a bit of a Beethoven fan. Well, let’s not beat about the bush – it’s more like hero worship!

Beethoven featured quite a bit in my debut novel, The Virtuoso.  I listened to his fifth symphony many, many times whilst writing it. I also did some research, but with a musical icon of such genius there is always more to learn and I’m delighted to continue my education into his life and music.

beethoven-original-score-of-fifth

Recently the BBC produced an outstanding documentary: The Secret of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It was narrated by Ian Hislop, journalist, political satirist and editor of Private Eye, in collaboration with eminent conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantiq.

Before I watched it I thought I already knew everything there was to know about this piece of music. The most famous opening four notes in musical history: da- da –da – dah. A motif of three triplet quavers in G followed by a dotted minim in E flat, followed by triplet quavers in F and an extended four beat note in D, repeated throughout the first movement and variations thereof in the other movements.

It premiered on 22nd December 1808 at the Theater an der Wien and much to Beethoven’s chagrin it wasn’t an immediate success. I know how he feels! But audiences in Vienna weren’t ready for his powerful, uncompromising brand of music.

Detail of the 1804-05 portrait of Beethoven by JW Maher, painted at the time Beethoven was writing his fifth symphony.

Detail of the 1804-05 portrait of Beethoven by JW Maher, painted at the time Beethoven was writing his fifth symphony.

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 was composed between 1804 and 1808 when Beethoven was in his late thirties at his lodgings in the Pasqualati House, which also features in The Virtuoso.

He had already written his heart rending Heiligenstadt Testament a couple of years earlier and was still composing despite his tragic descent into deafness. Experts believe he was already 60% deaf by the age of 31 and completely deaf by age 46 in 1816.

The common theme agreed by scholars was that of ‘fate knocking at the door’, of Beethoven expressing his inner turmoil at his deafness and faltering love affairs. Beethoven could not escape his physical destiny, but by sheer force of will he was determined to fulfill his artistic destiny. Ludwig lived in turbulent times and possessed a turbulent temperament!

beethoven-published-cover-to-fifth

I used this context for part 1 of my novel as my protagonist Isabelle Bryant, a world famous violin virtuoso has to deal with the loss of her fingers and ensuing devastation. One publisher kindly reviewed it as ‘a modern day Beethoven story’.

But Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s assertions that this symphony is about so much more really resonate with me. It makes perfect sense that one of the most revolutionary pieces of music of the 19th century (indeed of all-time), is at its heart about a revolution – the most shocking and radical of them all: the French Revolution.

The French Revolution had taken place between 1789 and 1799 when the young Beethoven had been aligned to the ideas of liberté, égalité and fraternité. Freedom and the enlightenment ideals were themes that he drew from more obviously in his epic ninth Symphony for example, but perhaps, due to circumstances, more covertly in his fifth.

“Behold all ye friends of freedom… behold the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes and warms and illuminates Europe. I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; …the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.” ~ Richard Price sermon c. 1789

I had not been aware that Beethoven had seriously considered moving to Paris, but as fate would have it he remained in Vienna.

At this point in his career Beethoven was not beholden to the imperial court as earlier composers like Mozart and Haydn had been. He did, however rely on the patronage and support of his wealthy, aristocratic benefactors; the upper class nobility from the privileged echelons of society that ‘the people’ had rallied against in the French Revolution for living in the lap of luxury whilst the poor suffered and starved.

This must have caused some inner conflict for Beethoven. He was dependent on an aristocratic system to produce his life’s work, yet he fervently believed in a meritocracy.

The repercussions of the French Revolution and the execution of the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette reverberated throughout Europe. The subsequent invasion by French Troops of Austria and Vienna, Beethoven’s home and place of work, must have been tough to reconcile.

Although I’m sure Beethoven was sickened like many writers, artists and scholars by the two year reign of Terror and blood bath that Robespierre unleashed, he was still loyal to the principles behind the revolution, if not the manner in which those principles came to fruition. Human nature being what it is, power crazed individuals got out of hand.

Under such delicate political circumstances Beethoven could not afford to be outspoken about revolutionary ideals while living under the noses of the House of Habsburg, who were at war with France. His position would have been tenuous.

Beethoven knew the only way to express his views and convictions was through his music.

And here it is in full, a wonderful new recording by John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantiq:

The effect is softer and more textured compared to a modern orchestra because they are playing on period instruments, and as John points out the sound is more pure and authentic. This is how Beethoven intended it to be heard.  These older instruments are being played to the very edge of their capabilities. You would expect nothing less from Ludwig though. It is also performed at a quicker tempo to many other performances at 108 beats per minute, as directed specifically by Beethoven (who loved his metronome).

When I listened to this recording knowing the fervour, idealism, the political upheaval and personal strife of Beethoven it made perfect sense. I listened with new ears and it just blew me away…

Influences

At the beginning of his musical career Beethoven had been tutored at the court palace chapel in Bonn by composer and court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe, who imparted his musical knowledge and love of Bach as well as his radical political views to the impressionable teenage Ludwig. Beethoven studied keyboard, viola and organ.

‘Nous jurons tour, le fer en main’

Beethoven was almost certainly influenced by the Italian born composer Luigi Cherubini, who was living in France and his patriotic Hymne du Pantheon.  The German musicologist Arnold Schmitz (who had influenced conductor John Eliot Gardiner), argued that the opening lyrics of this rousing hymn: Nous jurons tour, le fer en main (we all swear, sword in hand), De mourir pour la Republique (to die for the Republic), et pours les droits du genre humain (and for the rights of man) are the inspiration for the unforgettable opening bars of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.

Drawing of the Pantheon in Paris

Drawing of the Pantheon in Paris

Article in Gramophone magazine by John Eliot Gardiner on this subject.

The belief that no human being had a divine right to rule over another human being was sweeping through Europe and the arts and literature were flourishing.

The desire for a better, more just society can also be heard in the second movement of Beethoven’s fifth with its expansive and gentle melody.  Its beauty and harmony perfectly fit this ethos of a united humanity – except Beethoven does not quite unite us musically by the end of this movement, subduing the chords before they can attain closure.

John Eliot Gardiner sums up the second movement as a kind of prayer by Beethoven for the elevation and evolution of mankind.

Beethoven’s fifth symphony is his way of saying: ‘I believe in the rights of man, I believe in the brotherhood of all men and I believe in political freedom.’

While studying at university in Bonn, Beethoven had been to see Friedrich Schiller’s play, The Robbers, which fuelled his rebellious attitude towards the upper class and economic inequality. Beethoven realised that art (in whatever form) could have a real impact on an audience and on the world.

The popularity of Beethoven’s music for over 200 years proves this universal power of the arts. Great swathes of humanity still live under repression and terrifying violence. It’s still relevant.

Another musical influence is from one of Beethoven’s earlier, more overtly political works, the lieder Der Freie Mann; a poem by Gottleib Konrad Pfeffel set to music in the key of C Major. If you listen carefully you can hear similarities between this music and the opening bars of the 4th movement of his fifth symphony (also in C Major), with its theme of freedom achieved.

Yet more evidence to his state of mind around that time and the revolutionary origins of the fifth symphony. There are also elements of the rising triadic idea from Der Freie Mann used in the second movement of the fifth.

One of Beethoven’s musical sketch books known as Landsberg 6 contains his preliminary ideas for many of his works between 1802 and 1804, including his fifth symphony. The outline of the opening of the first movement is in there, as well as basic ideas for the beginning of the third movement, the Scherzo. The musical motifs are notated as slower but similar to the opening movement, and as John Eliot says, ‘It really does feel like humanity is on the march.’

So without further ado, here is the brilliant documentary which covers more detail than I have time and space for. It’s well worth watching:

I’ll leave you with the words of Monsieur Rouget de Lisle’s Hymne Dithrambique: Chantons la liberte, – la liberte, couronnons sa statue, Comme un nouveau Titan, Le crime est foudroye…

Lisle’s hymne Dithrambique was used by Beethoven as inspiration for the theme of ‘liberty’ in the fourth and final movement of his fifth symphony; Beethoven’s musical culmination of a political and personal utopia.

I’m going to have to listen to it again, it kind of makes you feel invincible!

#SundayBlogShare 🎼🎻🎹🎸🎷🎧 Music: An Unsurpassed Social Gift

/ ginnyburges / Leave a comment

“All art aspires towards the condition of music.” ~ Walter Pater

Playing a musical instrument is the best workout I know for my brain, as well as for invigorating my whole body. Meditation follows a close second alongside some other pleasurable activities…

The Music Lesson by Manet c. 1868

The Music Lesson by Manet c. 1868

During a practice session I feel totally alive; my mind seems to be at its most creative, and yet clear of life’s ‘junk’. I can be myself when I’m playing my violin; happily ensconced in a ‘flow state’ with no judgment or expectation other than to enjoy my activity.

I may not be on stage in a world-class concert hall, (only in my imagination), in reality I’m in my lounge and completely engaged in a joyful fusion of physical and mental exercise.

The thought of not being able to play inspired the premise for my novel, The Virtuoso.

Music score to accompany The Virtuoso by Tim Johnson

Music score to accompany The Virtuoso by Tim Johnson

While I’m playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Vivaldi my brain is doing the ultimate multi-tasking, coordinating on an epic scale:

It’s enabling me to read the notes, to perform challenging passages of semi-quaver notes, to react quickly with tricky  incidental notes, trills and possible key changes during the piece, let alone changing position on the fingerboard, deciding what digit goes where, what bowing technique is required, the dynamics of the music and, of course intonation and my unique interpretation based on how the music makes me feel as I play it.

Jeanne Saint Cheron - violinist

Violinist by Jeanne Saint Cheron

Imagine coordinating that many processes in a split second. Brain plasticity is an incredible process. It must be an orchestra of simultaneous sparks, a symphony of synapses in there, lighting up all over the place!

Science has backed me up on that one. How playing an instrument benefits your brain – Anita Collins:

Afterwards I find myself in a special space, my mind is empty yet energised and I just write. Ideas flow. It doesn’t last forever, but I try to make the most of it! Those alpha brain waves are the good guys, they usher in our most creative moments when we’re in a state of relaxed concentration.

The Music Lesson by Caspar Netscher

The Music Lesson by Caspar Netscher

Music really is instrumental in improving brain function and cognitive ability.

You may relate to my joy if you play an instrument. I don’t mean to be unnecessarily sombre, but if music disappeared overnight, for whatever reason, what would become of our species? I don’t think I could live in a world devoid of such a rich, cultural heritage…

A fascinating talk from the late neurologist Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain:

This short video shows Dr. Sacks’s brain activity as he listens to music by Bach, his favourite composer compared with that of Beethoven:

A great excerpt from a talk about the history of music by Dr. Daniel Levitin, who argues against Steven Pinker, asserting that music preceded language:

I wanted to share with you my own verses; poetry which most certainly does not compare to the likes of Keats or Shelley, but which is nonetheless genuinely reflective of my love for music; both playing and listening.

Music Makes Me Feel…

First came the hypnotic rhythm of Beethoven,

Moonlight tones passing through my mother’s womb;

Loving piano gently infiltrates fleshy oven,

Beautiful harmony surrounds the warm, watery tomb

My whole being is receptive, active, listening,

Later in life, it will make my spirit sing.

Woman at the Piano by Pierre Auguste Renoir

Woman at the Piano by Pierre Auguste Renoir

Orchestras fill our home, my education starts,

Lessons begin on the violin; fun but hard,

Before long I am hooked, for joy it imparts,

Bowing, scraping, hand stretching on fingerboard,

The right note eludes me, again and again,

Eventually, fingers know their place more than pain.

Berthe Morisot - The artist's daughterplaying the violin

Berthe Morisot – The artist’s daughter playing the violin

Pulsing air waves elicit ecstasy, and poignant lingering,

Oscillations match to memories from the deep,

Such moving melody, well-spring of suffering,

Black notes on treble or bass clef; ready to leap

From musicians instruments, creating composer’s passions

Hypnotism says Ludwig van, to force same emotions.

The Kreutzer Sonata by Xavier Prinet

The Kreutzer Sonata by Xavier Prinet

Major or minor key, varying dynamics and tempo

Music mirrors every sacred moment of life,

Soft, soothing adagio or a galloping allegro,

Good vibrations comfort me when in strife;

Open your heart to its flowing, healing tune,

And fill your soul with rapture, thrilling croon.

Music - Ancient Greek vase - music lesson

Ancient, divine sounds, evolving over millennia,

Effect is more visceral than art, sculpture, literature.

No mode of communication stirs like an aria;

Universal language communes with our nature,

Eclectic music of mankind, such profound apotheosis,

Ultimate expression of humanity: Quo Vadis?

The Music Lesson by Jan Vermeer

The Music Lesson by Jan Vermeer

Apart from the sound of my mother’s voice, this timeless and peaceful composition by Beethoven that my mum used to play was probably one of the first things I ever heard:

Sound when stretched is music.

Movement when stretched is dance.

Mind when stretched is meditation.

Life when stretched is celebration. ~ Sri Sri Ravishankar

Vienna – The City of Music

/ ginnyburges / 6 Comments

004Vienna is the world’s foremost classical music city, indeed of the arts in general, and is one of my favourite places. For music and culture it can’t be beaten. During its musical zenith it was home to great composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms and the father and son waltz kings, Johann Strauss I and II.

It’s no surprise therefore, that Vienna is the setting for part of my novel, The Virtuoso.

In addition to its musical pedigree Vienna was the birth place, and or base, of artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as some of the world’s most respected and ground breaking writers, thinkers and psychologists such as Franz Grillparzer, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Viktor E. Frankl, and more recently, Hans Asperger, Konrad Lorenz, Ludwig von Mises, and Peter Drucker. It was the seat of the mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire and home of the Habsburg dynasty for many centuries. Vienna became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001.

093I have been to Vienna in both winter and spring. My first visit was in 2005, which also incorporated a trip to Salzburg and Innsbruck. On my second trip in April 2011, I was focussed on consolidating my research for the venues to be featured in my novel, plus my mum and I had tickets to go and see Joshua Bell perform at the Wiener Konzerthaus! He played beautifully, alongside Jeremy Denk on the piano, and I was thrilled to have met him afterwards and he signed my newly purchased CD.

This superb BBC documentary gives a wonderful overview of the ‘City of Dreams’ and its history:

Vienna has it all: the beautiful Danube river, palaces and parks, museums, galleries, concert halls, churches, coffee houses, baroque architecture, modernism, a rich history, warm and friendly inhabitants, and not forgetting apple strudel to die for. It’s an easy place to fall in love in and with, and that’s exactly what my heroine does!

In chapter nineteen Isabelle Bryant travels to Vienna to do some research on her hero Ludwig van Beethoven, so that she can write about his life and music for an article in High Notes magazine.  During her stay she has a fortuitous second meeting with enigmatic publisher Daniel Carter, (who has already awakened intensely amorous feelings in her at their first meeting), and they begin a passionate love affair amidst the wintry splendour of the city.

I hope this small section of the chapter gives you a flavour of the musical legacy and delights of Vienna:

The day started out brightly. From her small balcony Isabelle peered over the numerous rooftops, her eyes sweeping over the narrow pavements lined with historical houses, each with their own unique story she pondered. Snow lay undisturbed on the pavement below her in Kirchbergasse, still fresh from the heavy fall the night before. She filled her lungs with the wintry air and then made her way to the lounge for breakfast.

Suitably filled with rolls and orange juice she pulled her handbag across her shoulder and waited for Hans in the hotel lobby. It was dead on 9am. A tall dark figure stood erect and patient by the front door. She smiled at him. He smiled back at her, and in a few strides he was by her side greeting her with an outstretched hand.

‘Good morning Frau Bryant, my name is Hans Moser. I am your guide for the day. I understand you wish to visit some of Beethoven’s Houses?’ His slow and clipped accent immediately warmed her heart. She looked up at his strong features. His wide set jaw, olive skin and dark moustache gave him a strangely Latin appearance, and his large brown eyes were framed by substantial eyebrows. Isabelle guessed he must have been about forty.

‘Good to meet you Mr. Moser. That’s right. I’m researching the composer for an article I’m writing.’

He signalled towards a smart black Mercedes waiting at the entrance and pulled open the rear door for her. ‘Is this is your first visit to Wien?’

‘Not exactly,’ she mumbled, clambering into the seat.

‘I used to be a concert violinist, Mr Moser. I’ve been to Vienna once before, I was on tour playing with the Vienna Philharmonic, and most of my time was spent at the Wiener Musikverein. It was just for a couple of nights and unfortunately I didn’t get to see anything of the city. I spent large chunks of my time rehearsing and preparing. I- I had an accident recently, so I can’t play anymore.’

Hans’ eyes caught hers through the rear view mirror. He had already noticed the dressings on her left hand, and bowed his head.

‘I am sorry for your loss. I wish I had been able to see you play. I am a great lover of classical music and especially of Beethoven. I will do my best to make an enjoyable day for you. Also, please call me Hans.’

‘Thank you Hans, I really appreciate your help. I probably could have made it round the city on buses, trams and by foot, but I’m on quite a tight schedule and I don’t really have time to get lost.’ She raised her left arm. ‘My injury isn’t too good in the cold weather either.’

‘It’s a pleasure for me to assist you in such an important task,’ Hans replied.

Isabelle showed him her scribbles of some of the venues she wanted to see and he looked thoughtful.

‘I will take you to the Beethoven Platz first,’ he said, ‘followed by the famous Theater an der Wein, before stopping at the Memorial Rooms in the Pasqualati House, and perhaps the site of the Schwarzspanierhaus, where he died. Beethoven moved house over eighty times during his time in Wien, so there aren’t many houses that we know of left standing. Also in the city is the Palais Lobkowitz which houses the Eroica Saal and the Palais Pallavicini which is opposite the Spanish Riding School of the Hofburg Palace.’

‘That’s great. If there’s enough time afterwards I’d also like to visit the House of the Heiligenstadt Testament, and the Church of Holy Trinity where Beethoven’s funeral was held.’

Hans gave an accommodating nod. ‘I am at your service, we can go wherever you would like.’

They drove in silence as dark clouds gathered in the sky above. Hans pulled the car into a lay by and proudly pointed towards an imposing statue of Beethoven sternly surveying his eponymous Platz.

Isabelle got out and wandered up to the statue. He looked regal and rightly honoured in pride of place in his own little square. Groups of young students came and went as Isabelle took in the scene. To her left was a gothic building containing a performance hall and rooms, and on the opposite side of the square the view was dwarfed by the towering Intercontinental Hotel, and next to that was an ice rink and some construction cranes. The wind whipped around her like a mini tornado but she felt exhilarated.

She took a few pictures and climbed back into the warm interior of the waiting car, brushing her hair away from her face, and Hans sped off further into the city.

Their next stop was the Theater an der Wien, a relatively innocuous looking building amongst the classical finery of the city. Its early nineteenth century yellow façade appeared a little shabby, but the theatre had seen thousands of Viennese concert goers through its green doors during its history. She studied the guidebook to see that it had been built in 1801, and the statues above the doorway were in fact depicting Papageno, from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Reading further she saw that it had also premiered Beethoven’s Fidelio in 1805.

‘It’s hard to believe Hans, but his violin concerto, which was my favourite, premiered in this very theatre on the twenty third of December 1806, after a rushed completion and next to no rehearsal. The Viennese didn’t take to it, and it wasn’t performed for about another four decades. These days it’s in every soloist’s repertoire as one of the great violin concerti, and has even been transcribed for the piano.’

‘It seems even the best of us sometimes have to wait for success,’ concurred Hans.

Isabelle studied her book. ‘Luckily his grand Symphony number five in C minor fared a lot better in December of 1808. His pastoral Symphony and the fourth piano concerto were also premiered in this unremarkable looking building. What I find amazing is that it’s still in use for concerts in the twenty first century.’

‘The concert hall interior is magnificent.’

‘Can we go in Hans?’

Hans disappeared into a small door around the back of the theatre. Isabelle could hear lots of banging and drilling going on inside. He emerged a few moments later shaking his head.

‘I’m so sorry, but unfortunately they are doing renovations ready for Mozart’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday celebrations in the New Year, and so it is closed to the public.’

Isabelle’s shoulders dropped as she sighed. ‘What a shame.’

Hans led her back to the car and she obediently followed him as he opened the door for her. This kind, tall, strong Austrian man had a grace of movement that was masculine and yet gentle.

The snow began falling again as the engine roared back to life, and they drove towards the Palais Lobkowitz.

‘Hans, I understand Prince Lobkowitz was a great patron of the arts one of Beethoven’s strongest supporters?’

‘He was indeed, Isabelle, along with Prince Karl Lichnowsky, Count von Fries and Archduke Rudolph. If you like, I have an interesting anecdote to tell you, about when Beethoven was making a reputation for himself in Viennese society as virtuoso pianist.’

‘Oh Hans, yes please, do tell, I need insider information for my article. I’d love to know what happened.’ Isabelle leaned forward slightly, stretching her seatbelt.

‘You may know it already, but Prince Lobkowitz organised an improvisation contest between Beethoven and a Prussian pianist popular in Vienna in 1800 called Daniel Steibelt.’

‘I’ve never heard of him, Hans. How cool, a salon duel on the ivories. Please go on.’ Isabelle strained her neck a little closer to Hans.

‘In fact they met twice, firstly at the von Fries residence, the Palais Pallavicini. Steibelt was already an established virtuoso on a tour of European capitals and wanted to make his mark in Vienna. He was known for his, how do you say, tremolandos. The first time they met I’m afraid Steibelt apparently impressed the aristocracy more than Beethoven with his fancy performance of his own Piano Quintet. By all accounts he was condescending in attitude towards Beethoven, who refused to play again on that occasion.’

‘Knowing what an irascible temperament Beethoven had I’m sure his blood must have been boiling after that,’ Isabelle said.

‘Most certainly, Isabelle. A rematch was planned a week later at the Palais Lobkowitz.’

‘Oh! The anticipation! What happened Hans?’

I’m pleased to tell you that Beethoven got his revenge on Steibelt at their second meeting. The aristocracy must have been on the edge of their seats under such an atmosphere of hostility. It is said that Beethoven parodied his precious tremolandos and indeed Steibelt’s entire composition. He imitated Steibelt’s Quintet for the ordinary piece it was, and exposed it in a humiliating fashion. He then began to improvise on it with such brilliance that the audience could barely believe what they were witnessing.’

‘Bravo Beethoven!’

‘Steibelt stormed out of the salon while Beethoven was still playing, indeed, mocking him.’

‘Game set and match Ludwig,’ replied Isabelle.

‘Beethoven was known for having small but very intense and bright eyes. They must have surely been blazing that night,’ Hans concluded.

‘Wow. It would have been incredible to have seen him in full flow, going hell for leather against an opulent backdrop with all his unrefined clothes and mannerisms, trumping some posh, over inflated big wig,’ Isabelle said.

‘Yes. He so comprehensively showed up Steibelt that he left Vienna with his pride in tatters and went straight back to Berlin, refusing to ever play in Vienna again if Beethoven were present.’ Hans pulled the car to halt. ‘And here we are, in front of the very building where it all happened.’

You will have to read the novel to become immersed in the rest of Vienna and the raunchier scenes! These chapters of The Virtuoso are a love letter to Beethoven and Vienna.

I wonder if other writers also worry that they haven’t got enough information on a real place to do it justice? In my case I had to work from old memories and photographs, but my emotions at the time made a big impression on me.

Heiligenstadt Testament

I found this piece of music written to evoke Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament by Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin:

I have included a small gallery of photos mostly taken on my 2011 trip.  Just click on a picture to enlarge.

Vienna truly is the ‘City of Dreams’ as well as the ‘City of Music’.