jwilzewske: Cryptography: Dissidence and Forbidden Music

In the midst of chaos, Messiaen wrote about the apocalypse in a completely unapocalyptic manner. And not too long after Messiaen’s quartet was completed, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Britten, and Penderecki would write pieces expressive of the horrors of the Nazis and their war, music full of screams, howls, and cries for righteous justice against the oppressor. But Messiaen has no place for such neo-pagan hysterics. In the middle of his prison camp, as a prisoner unsure if he would ever again see his family or home again, Messiaen composed a vision of Heaven where anger, violence, vengeance, and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant.”
— Michael Linton

DSM: The Indian Ambassador, Ronen Sen, speaking at the International Relations Council banquet Thursday night almost got to finish his remarks without controversy, didn’t he?

CMT: Yes. Almost. And then the final question, the one from the fellow in the back of the room who asked whether the distinguished Ambassador would please comment on India’s feelings about the U.S. position in Iraq. Two genteel hours in that pleasant banquet room and here was the giant elephant finally! It had been lurking all the while the several hundred of us ate our elegant dinners and talked about U.S.-India trade relations and business development and globalization, politely ignoring the big ugly rogue elephant. But here was the question that acknowledged its presence, acknowledged the war and the U.S.’s bellicosity!

DSM: I thought that Ambassador Sen responded in impeccable, characteristicaly diplomatic style. In fact, while several of his extended remarks glinted at actual signification, he concluded by saying, “I suppose I have said quite enough for now, without saying really anything.” His humility and gracefulness were superb. This exchange between the Ambassador and the audience was classic!

CMT: There are moments that are congenial for conclusory, pithy directness. And there are moments for being dilatory and oblique. The acrimony in U.S. politics in recent years; the degree to which open discussion is suppressed, in many, many ways; the difficulty that the person asking Ronen Sen about the war had in asking that question in a room of several hundred people; the fact that such a question had to be calculatedly held and held until it could be the very last question of the evening . . . It reminds me of the suppression that Shostakovich experienced—the obliquity of Shostakovich’s stance under the Soviet regime and during the Cold War. Or Messiaen in World War II and after. Or Stravinsky in World War I. Or other composers who have labored under tremendous political constraints but who have nonetheless managed to create art of enduring value and honesty—works that were morally decisive but not so aggressively so that the regime silenced their voices. They lived to fight another day.

DSM: Do you think Madama Butterfly is an accurate representation of the U.S. military? Or, regarding Messiaen's imprisonment by the Nazis, do you think Messiaen was commending the respect accorded Allied prisoners of war by the Nazis?

CMT: Well, yes, paradoxically maybe. Or maybe with a bit of the so-called Stockholm syndrome. You know, Antares Quartet has commissioned or premiered works by composers such as Ezra Laderman, Stefan Freund, John Mackey, Carter Pann and members of the Minimum Security Composers Collective. A number of these are highly political commentaries rendered in musical form.

DSM: Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat Trio; Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 and String Quartet No. 14 in F-sharp major, Op. 142; Britten’s War Requiem; many other things. Hans Gál, Peter Gellhorn, Berthold Goldschmid, Pavel Haas, Ernst Krenek, Karl Rankl, Franz Reizenstein, Mátyás Seiber, Leopold Spinner, Vilém Tausky, Victor Ullmann, Egon Wellesz. Suppressed composers, suppressed music!

CMT: And Messiaen’s answer to incarceration as a prisoner of war, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), uses a clarinet in place of a viola because that’s all Messiaen had available to him in the prison camp. Would we perceive this as the epitome of disenfranchisement and oppression if we did not know the circumstances under which Messiaen composed this, in Stalag 8A at Gorlitz?

DSM: Well, it’s impossible to now turn back the clock to a time before we knew those circumstances. But can tell you I first heard the Quatuor pour la fin du temps when I was 7 years old—at Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota. I’m certain I had no idea at that time, about Messiaen’s circumstances or views. And the things that this piece signified to me then are, I think, not very different from what it imparts to me now. The forsakenness of the clarinet is penetrating.

CMT: I am, as you know, not a religious person. So what is astonishing to me is Messiaen’s outpouring of love toward his captors and his display of religious devotion in the circumstances of his imprisonment. The Stockholm syndrome and the psychology of coping in untenable situations, these I understand. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others whose religious devotion was as profound as Messiaen’s chose different paths during the times of their imprisonment.

DSM: Pungent dissonances rub shoulders with pure, gorgeous, open chords. Rhythms that at first careen here and there coalesce into something that makes perfect sense. And throughout all of it, birdsong!

CMT: Frankly, I hear irony in this—not the insuperable victory of Good over Evil; not the human spirit buoyed up by divine mercy. I hear the continuation of dumb nature despite the idiocies of humankind. I hear the brutal indifference of the Universe. It is, for me, not unlike one of Werner Herzog’s films. Frankly imitative at one turn, fleshed out with complex harmonies at another, Messiaen’s careful notation of what he heard in the trees and bushes in France and in his travels permeates his music, but localizes the music in the context of human oppression. On the surface, yes, the result is a raw naturalism that infuses our senses. But there’s a subtext. Messiaen’s implicature! The backstory is the one that we would most like to know. Was this music performed for Messiaen’s German captors? Is this Herzog-esque subtext that I perceive in it something that Messiaen had to put deep, deep undercover?

DSM: I think you’re wrong here. The eight movements’ titles refer to the biblical Revelation of St. John, and Messiaen was emphatic about this. Three of them are pure solos. Messiaen’s bird calls in the clarinet solo unfold like an improvisation—an inspired meditation on the human condition. Entrances of the other instruments come out of nowhere and die away like ghosts—pretty good evidence for your subtext argument. But rapid-fire articulation in all registers here is a hallmark of direct exposition, not of oblique implication. The long, slow, singing line in the fifth movement and the gorgeous, consonant violin solo in the finale, which closes with a phrase that rises gently into the stratosphere in both the piano and the violin—these convey the pathos of the resigned martyr’s acceptance of his fate, not a covert dissident’s commentary on silenced voices and forbidden points of view. This is not the cryptographic expression of someone who is agitating to change things! Nothing like a Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. Instead, in a way that is consistent with the Michael Linto blockquote above, there is a Zen-like quality to it, I believe. Vengeance and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant. Messiaen has entered the state of not-wanting, the absence of desire. A Zen-like or Eckhart Tolle-like state.

CMT: Well, what about Shostakovich? He is the antithesis of a Zen-like response. It’s now clear that Shostakovich loathed the Soviet system, but he saw compromise as the best way to continue to work, to live and fight another day. Yes, he signed articles criticizing dissidents and Western formalism. But he apparently thought that no thinking person in the Soviet Union or elsewhere would take the ludicrous articles seriously anyway. He also took refuge in irony—for example the Finale of his Fifth Symphony? Is this not an ironic commentary on the emptiness of the reality that communism presented? His music needs to be decoded to be able to tell. If he spoke up for the oppressed, it was as one of them, and he had to be careful doing this. He obfuscated what he was doing with layers of motivic reference and irony.

DSM: In the few photographs that show Shostakovich smiling, there’s a wariness about him. It’s not merely that he didn’t enjoy being photographed. Look, there is an edgy vulnerability and guardedness in his posture, certainly, but there’s also strength—not the vehemence of a Beethoven, but a quality of dogged determination to survive. Dogged, not beatific!

CMT: Even if we’re right in these speculations, we shouldn’t see Shostakovich as egotistical or self-obsessed; there’s nothing of the Also Sprach Zarathustra about him. If he’s survived it’s as a representative of common humanity; it’s through his ability to feel the sufferings of others, one of his most noticeable and attractive traits.

DSM: It’s in the famous Quartet No. 8 where we’re most aware of Shostakovich’s empathy with others’ suffering. It was written in 1959 following his visit to Dresden where he was appalled by the destruction. What are we to read into his DSCH motif in this work? The first movement is a profound and sombre fugue based on the four notes. Not so much ‘I was there’ but more ‘I went through it and so did (or so will—) you.’

CMT: And the Quartet No. 14, performed last night by Miró Quartet, composed in 1973, in the darkness of the Vietnam War! He began it in 1971-1972. Do you remember when we protested the war, you and I—on the campus of University of Minnesota in the spring of 1972? Do you remember the fires burning on Washington Avenue, at the foot of the Mall? Do you remember when the police with the shields and the night-sticks charged us and ran us off? When we returned after midnight to the fires, still burning, and had a sandwich under the stars? Lived to fight another day?

DSM: Seems like an eternity! But lately we at least see the public protests against war beginning again. Long, long overdue. But at least it’s beginning.

jwilzewske

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Cryptography: Dissidence and Forbidden Music

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