jwilzewske: Buchbinder’s Waldstein: Realtime Mourning, Anticipating the Fact

Fare-thee-well, Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 26, op. 81

M usic’s promise of happiness for the adult can only be a broken promise.”
— Daniel Chua, Musical Quarterly, 2004, Vol. 87, p. 529

DSM: Buchbinder’s recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major Op. 53 are wonderful! He will perform in Kansas City on Saturday evening. Very emotive. Very meditative and introspective, desolate, aching. He hints at loss, the impact of loss or the death of a friend or loved one. Clearly, this Sonata alludes to some Other who is not here [anymore].

CMT: This is what Adorno thought, too—in his unfinished writings about Beethoven’s works. Maybe there is disagreement among Beethoven scholars about this. But your sense of the Waldstein Sonata is at least validated by Adorno and a number of others.

DSM: Adorno once said that, as a child, he had thought ‘Waldstein’ meant literally that Beethoven was writing an emotional caricature of a pensive scene involving a dark path through rocks in the woods. When he saw the score as a young kid, he imagined a person like Schumann’s Knight of the Hobbyhorse, ‘Ritter von Steckenpferd.’

I imagined a knight entering a dark, rocky wood.”
— Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 1998, p. 4

And later he confesses:

W as I not closer to the Truth in this then, than ever I was later when I could play the Waldstein by heart?”
— Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 1998, p. 4

CMT: The childlike mistake he made in identifying the music transformed a naïve experience into an enduring metaphysical one that stuck with him his whole life. The ‘child’ in us is—for Beethoven, for Adorno, for Derrida, for Buchbinder, for you and me—a perennial fount of transcendence. The gestalt of innocence is a perennial source of Truth.

DSM: Chua makes a point in his 2004 article addressing, among other things, Sonatas Nos. 26 and 32—that music must say ‘I was happy’ before it can invoke loss. Adorno had a similar remark about the arietta of Beethoven’s last sonata: “Utopia is heard as what as already been.” Derrida said more or less the same, too. To say ‘I was happy’ is to say ‘It is too late’. It is to mourn all that’s never been fulfilled, all that’s been taken away by death or disease or disability or loss—all that, now, can never be.

CMT: How should we mourn for Derrida, who spent thirty years meditating on the hazards of mourning, all the while insisting that true mourning is, paradoxically, inevitable and not really possible?

DSM: Well, try mourning defiantly, like Dylan Thomas, refusing to go gentle into that Good Night. Acknowledging the human condition doesn’t necessarily entail acquiescing, you know!

D o not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

G ood men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

W ild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

B rave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

A nd you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

CMT: Holly Prigerson and Paul Maciejewski are a husband-wife team who are studying grief and response to loss. Prigerson is faculty at Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Maciejewski is a faculty member at Yale. They’re re-examining the common clinical conception of grief: that when people mourn, they go through Kübler-Ross’s famous stages. When they began their work they say they were amazed to find that the “stages of grief” theory has been accepted by the medical establishment for 40 years, but it has not been studied or validated, and Kübler-Ross’s seminal writings on it were not based in any detailed research. Kübler-Ross’s ideas had—and have—face-validity. But they were basically only conjectures at the time they were proposed. Also surprising was Prigerson’s and Maciejewski’s discovery that the main emotional component of grieving wasn’t sadness or anger, as previously thought. Yearning, Maciejewski says, is the dominant characteristic after a loss—more prominent than sadness.

G rief is really about yearning and not about sadness.”
— Holly Prigerson, 2007

DSM: And it doesn’t begin with the moment when the loss materializes. In fact, the act of mourning, Derrida says, begins as soon as friendship begins, for “one of the two of you will inevitably see the other one die.” So the work of mourning is also a memorial act—for the other is alive in us, even after death. Characteristically, Derrida dwells on the bond between name and memory—hearers remember a person when we speak his or her name, and thus we keep our friends alive. Grapple with life’s mystery! This is what Beethoven—and Buchbinder!—are doing in the Waldstein sonata! It is what Adorno understood, even as a small child!

CMT: Regret is often coupled with grief, you know. That’s something that Janet Landman at University of Michigan has written about. She notes that we tend to view regret as an emotional indulgence. Yet, regret—over mistakes, missed opportunities, failure or misfortunes, the finiteness of human time and possibility—is a constructive response when it spurs us to pragmatic action or engagement with the world, she maintains. Landman uses the prism of novels, poems, psychological theory and anthropology to focus and refract her arguments. Landman examines four classic novels—Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations,’ Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground,’ Henry James’s ‘The Ambassadors’ and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’ These represent for Landman four distinct worldviews: romantic, tragic, comic and ironic worldviews, respectively. She shows that how we experience regret depends on our outlook and cultural values. She doesn’t illustrate her points with Beethoven or other composers, but the literary parallels to what we’re talking about are clear enough.

DSM: And the worldviews that frame instances of regret or grieving don’t have to be pure. They’re not mutually exclusive. For example, Landman examines Anne Tyler’s ‘Breathing Lessons’—a composite of romantic and ironic worldviews. And it seems to me (and maybe to Daniel Chua) that Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata may be a composite of romantic, ironic, and tragic all at once.

CMT: Landman characterizes regret as ‘a more or less painful cognitive and emotive state of feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgressions, shortcomings, or mistakes.’ ‘Cognitive-and-emotive’ is a novel conjunction seldom drawn so explicitly by other psychologists and psychiatrists as Landman elects to do. Landman views regret as a species of ‘felt-reason’ or ‘reasoned-emotion.’ In addition, Landman draws on empirical surveys, philosophy, chaos theory, anthropology, economics, psychology, and even poetry, for she sees regret as a complex, multilayered experience. Among the questions explored are: What sort of experience is regret? Who is most likely to feel it? What causes regret? What role does it play? How is it transformed? Landman’s elucidation of regret includes mathematical decision-making theoretics.

DSM: Landman seems to strongly favor or commend a composite ‘romantic-ironic’ view that acknowledges regret’s force; that recognizes the inevitability of conflict, loss, limits, and mistakes; and that accepts Life’s irreducible contradictions and ambiguities. It seems that Adorno had inclinations in this way as well. And maybe Rudolf Buchbinder? He surely plays as if it might be so . . .

T he C-sharp in Beethoven's Fare-Thee-Well motif near the end of Sonata 32, op. 111 is the most moving, consolatory, pathetically reconciling thing in the world. More so than Sonata 26, op. 81. It is like having one’s hair or cheek stroked, lovingly, understandingly, like a deep and silent farewell look. It blesses the object, the frightfully harried formulation, with overpowering humanity. It lies in parting so gently on the hearer’s heart in eternal farewell that the eyes run over.”
— Thomas Mann, ‘Doctor Faustus’

jwilzewske

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Buchbinder’s Waldstein: Realtime Mourning, Anticipating the Fact

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