jwilzewske: Weber: New Year’s Invitation to a Pensive Dance

I t was wonderful [just as you played it], but you should speed up at the end... [because doing so would make for— ] good ‘box-office’.”
— Vladimir Horowitz, responding to Keene’s query about the rationale for his suggestion concerning Keene’s interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in E flat minor.

Charm, wit, optimism, comedy, and grace are what music for celebrating the New Year needs. And, for some, maybe this means Blue Danube and other waltzes, polkas, galopps, quadrilles and marches, csárdáses, mazurkas—Eduard Strauss, Josef Strauss, Johann Strauss I, Johann Strauss II. Not my thing.

So, for a New Year’s get-together with friends, how about Weber’s Sonata No. 2—just the Menuetto and Rondo movements of it? It’s not an easy piece to carry off successfully—there is tremendous risk that self-conscious, mannered or inappropriate nuances could wreck it. But, overall, the movements of this Sonata have a range of qualities that make them interesting as encores—or as short ‘character pieces’ for an informal gathering.

They’re sparkling and not necessarily virtuosic—and they have an impromptu, almost improvisatory sense to them. But, more than this, they are not oblivious to the reality that there are serious problems in the world.

In this respect they’re unlike Weber’s Aufforderung zum Tanz (Invitation to the Dance), which is too self-absorbed and coy. Aufforderung is about wooing. The suitor declares his passionate love for the woman, the couple exchange parting words, and then part ways. It is full of evasiveness, flirting, uncertainty, ambition. And, yes, it’s sometimes performed for New Year’s. But, by contrast, Sonata No.2 feels pensive—as though we are dancing while guardedly mindful of other, more important events.

A rt perhaps begins with the animal—with the animal at least who carves a territory.”
— Gilles Deleuze, in What is Philosophy?, p. 183

Character pieces like this require projection—decent acting ability and a good sense for the part—maybe as much so as more serious pieces. Performing a character piece with the intention of trivializing it would be inappropriate—life is too short. In immersing myself in this Sonata over the past several weeks, I revisited some well-known recordings of it. I especially admire Contance Keene’s and Mariaclara Monetti von Slawik’s. I think of Keene’s performance of this Sonata as a biographical sketch of Weber. Every ‘person’ she mentions gets a quick, sharp, devastatingly exact sketch.

And, in Keene’s hands, the Rondo is clearly ‘about’ the audience not the performer. Admittedly, mine is an aberrant notion of ‘biography’, embracing not merely the conventional conceit of a life in book form but also less formal forms that life stories now take in movies, plays, and on the Internet and in music. Is the purpose of biography to celebrate the lives of the famous and notable and to provide exemplars for the rest of us, or to reduce them to their mere humanity and to comfort us in the knowledge that the too are imperfect? Keene’s account of this Sonata is no hagiography—no worshipful biography of Weber as a saint. It’s a tale of Weber and his likely views of the society in which he lived.

May auld acquaintance be not forgot!

Carl Maria von Weber composed the No. 2 Sonata in A flat major at age 30, with a 30 year old’s aspirations. The Menuetto capriccioso is fast and enthusiastic, the Rondo is lyrical and full of aspiration. I wonder whether Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullman, Gideon Klein, or others imprisoned at Terezin ever wrote quite this way. I doubt it.

A fter the Holocaust there can be no Art... experiences [are] superficial and unworthy of expression.”
— Joseph Amato, Victims and Values, p. 183.

In a Nazi propaganda documentary film about Terezin, Haas takes a bow after the performance of his Study for Strings. The propaganda project concluded, and Haas was shipped off along with 18,000 other prisoners—to Auschwitz where he was murdered in the gas chamber on 17-OCT-1944.

Producing complex but beautiful music under duress was (and is) a defiant and meaningful thing, in context. Music is emancipatory and powerful—much in the way that Cy Twombly’s abstract paintings are powerful and historical and contextual. Music is a valuable response to these times—better than any propaganda. And character pieces are needed now because they can be a force for humanity and sensitivity, against the lies and violence of our time.

T he traditions of avante-garde art must be seen as responding to an unwanted and intolerable burden of autonomy through gestures that seek to either collapse the distinction between the institution of art and the world outside or to directly bring the political and moral concerns of social life into the center of the work of art itself... Conversely, each attempt to establish the social meaningfulness of art has been met with an equally pointed artistic critique that seeks to demonstrate that the value of aesthetic objects cannot be derived from their moral and political content.”
— J. M. Bernstein, in Kemal & Gaskell, Politics & Aesthetics in the Arts, p.53

By learning ‘balance’ in the face of everything inside and outside, we develop a healthy detachment. This detachment isn’t escapism or indifference to the problems of the world. It is a sort of zen-like meditation. That’s what this Weber Sonata enables. That is why I think it makes an especially fitting New Year’s piece, to help us transcend the banal capitalistic world and give a wider vision of an ethics and politics that is inclusive of private spiritual and humanistic themes in each of us.

Weber, Sonata No. 2, Op. 39, Menuetto, mm. 1 - 8

[50-sec clip, Keene, Weber Sonata No. 2, Op. 39, Mvt. 3, Menuetto Capricciosa Presto Assai, 1.2MB MP3]

Weber, Sonata No. 2, Op. 39, Rondo, mm. 1 - 9

[50-sec clip, Keene, Weber Sonata No. 2, Op. 39, Mvt. 4, Rondo, 1.2MB MP3]

I was flabbergasted by the fantastic color, sweep and imagination, and last but not least, by the incredible technique ... I cannot imagine anybody, including Rachmaninoff, playing the piano so beautifully.”
— Artur Rubinstein, remarking on Keene’s playing.

jwilzewske

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Weber: New Year’s Invitation to a Pensive Dance

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