Stendhal's Mozart

Last week, while playing as an extra for Oregon Symphony's program "Mozart and Shakespeare," I couldn't help but wander into Powell's. The hotel where I stayed, the Mark Spencer, is just a stone's throw from the beloved book store. I was on a mission to find the works of Stendhal, having just been introduced to his "Life of Rossini." This is not only a fascinating but controversial biography of Rossini, but an honest appraisal of the mutilation of Mozart's music as performed by Italian orchestras of that period. Those Italians! To play Mozart meant to play strictly in time, a principle which the lazier musicians referred to as barbaric, for each instrument would have to enter and finish exactly where Mozart had said that it should.

At Powell's, you never know what you might discover. I walked by a placard on the first level which said: I read dead people. How true, I thought. I went upstairs to the Music and Arts section to browse. There I discovered a hardcover book about violinists, opened the pages, and delighted in finding an unsealed envelope with the obituaries of both Mischa Elman and Louis Persinger from The New York Times and The Oregonian, circa 1960's. I bought the book, of course.

Stendhal  (Marie-Henri Beyle)

Downstairs in the Blue Room, I found two magnificent hard cover and illustrated Stendhal novels, "The Red and the Black" and "The Charterhouse of Parma." It would be a cinch for me to spend all the earnings I made from subbing in the symphony in that book store. I remember one time trying to hide a rare edition of "Revolt of the Angels" by Anatole France. I thought Ilkka would be angry at me for spending money on more and more books. They are, after all, falling off my night stand and cluttering each room in the house. But when he saw the beautiful work, with pages not yet cut, Ilkka took out a knife and carefully separated each thick page. "This is how books used to be made in my youth." Indeed, I have learned more about art, music and philosophy from the great French writers, Stendhal, France, and Proust than from any classes or private lessons in conservatory.

While perusing the shelf stocked with Stendhal's works, I stumbled across another title that beckoned, and whispered to me: "Memoirs of an Egotist". I laughed for a moment because I, too, have been writing a memoir. Am I an egotist? I picked it up and read the back cover:
The only things I have passionately loved in life are:
            Cimarosa,
            Mozart
            and Shakespeare.
In Milan, in 1820, I wanted to put these words on my gravestone. Every day I would think of this inscription, firmly believing that I would have no peace of mind except in the grave. I wanted a marble slab in the shape of a playing card.

Well, of course, I had to purchase this on the spot, and take it back to the hotel with me. It was as if Stendhal himself was reminding me how fortunate I was to have been hearing Mozart's "Prague" Symphony that week and playing Elgar's "Falstaff".  Edward Elgar was an ardent Shakespearean, and Oregon Symphony's Music Director Carlos Kalmar had recruited actors to link Elgar's composition to the Shakespeare's text that had inspired the music.

Wine was being served at the hotel. I sat down with a glass and listened to my egotist friend:
At the age of ten, my father, who had all the prejudices of religion and aristocracy, vehemently prevented me from studying music. At sixteen, I learnt successively to play the violin, to sing, and to play the clarinet. Only in this way did I manage to produce sounds which gave me pleasure. My music teacher, a kind, good-looking German by the name of Hermann, made me play tender cantilenas. Who knows? Perhaps he knew Mozart? This was in 1797, Mozart had just died.

Later, at the concert, I sneaked upstairs to the balcony of Arlene Schnitzer to hear Mozart's "Prague" Symphony as performed by Oregon Symphony under the direction of Maestro Kalmar. The hall was filled to capacity. Stendhal accompanied me in heart and soul. This was Mozart at its loveliest; each note filled with warmth, sensitivity and precision. The orchestra, demonstrating enviable refinement and good taste, was a pleasure to behold.

Proust and Transfiguration

Jeremy Eichler, classical music critic for The Boston Globe, shares his deep appreciation for Marcel Proust in The Proust Project: "When I go to concerts, I often bring a colleague or a friend, but my most frequent companion, the one who always arrives just as the lights have dimmed and the silence fallen, is Marcel Proust. Indeed, ever since I first read Proust, his musical sensibilities have joined me in the concert hall, for in addition to being the poet of love, of longing, of memory, and of loss, Proust is the poet of listening."

I, too, feel as if Marcel Proust is by my side whenever I listen to music, especially during my sessions with young people. While teaching the Saint-Saëns "Havanaise" to our gifted concertmaster from Garfield High School, I reached into the book-shelf  and found a recording of the legendary French violinist, Jacques Thibaud, performing the same work. During many of my teaching sessions, I encourage students to listen to the masters from the past, to glean from them, to endeavor to copy the subtlest nuances for purposes of refinement. A performance of Brahms "Hungarian Dance" rendered by Joseph Joachim proves a more valuable tool for learning than any of my words or gesticulations. I'll admit there are times when it's best when I remain silent for a short period during the lesson, and allow the disembodied voices of Fritz Kreisler and Pablo de Sarasate from the CD player to fill the studio, and speak for me.

Proust's invented composer, Vinteuil, is regarded as having been inspired by Camille Saint-Saëns, whose artistry Proust revered. Of his pianistic ability, and his performance of a Mozart Concerto at the Paris Conservatoire, Proust noted: "In Saint-Saëns' playing there are no pianissimos where you feel you'll faint if they go on any longer, and which are cut off just in the nick of time by a forte, no broken chords sending instantaneous shivers down your back, none of those fortissimos which leave you bruised from head to foot, as if you had been surf-bathing, none of those pianist's writhings and tossed back locks of hair, which infect the purity of music with the sensuality of the dance..."

The young, dashing fictional violinist, Charles Morel, who sweeps through the Parisian, aristocratic society performing in the most sought-after soirees, causing the ladies to swoon in their own salons, is portrayed as an up and coming rival to violinists Enescu, Capet and Thibaud. Hearing Thibaud's purity of sound on the recording of "Havanaise", the nobility of phrasing, mouth-watering portamenti, and almost imperceptible vibrato, I feel myself going back a hundred years, as if stepping right into the pages of  "Remembrance of Things Past". Thibaud "French to the tip of his bow" was born the same year as Proust, 1880.

As I revisit Proust's depiction of the violinist Morel, his artistry, and the elixir of seduction that was Vinteuil's music, with notes and phrases painted in sublime and dazzling colors, I begin to hear Thibaud and Saint-Saëns in a different and more personal way, as if my old ears have been replaced with newer, more attuned ones. Marcel Proust has composed "Remembrance of Things Past" in various keys of solemnity and joy, a symphony of colors, with words that sing, dance and are loved, reminding the reader that Art is Eternal.

In Search Of Lost Time

Marcel Proust's Open Sesame and the magic lantern seem to have taken effect. While stepping into "In Search Of Lost Time" I discovered a sort of kindred spirit and guide in the voice of Proust. I picked up my first volume "Swann In Love" over this summer when I was struck by a longing to play Wagner's "Ring Cycle". Although I had sent a personal letter to the general director reminding him of my past contributions to the first violin section in previous cycles, practically begging for mercy from retaliatory behavior by the local snobs, I found myself one of many rejected artists, denied and dispossessed. I tried to be sympathetic to the general director, since he had, years ago in our house, claimed not to have understood what a concertmaster's role is, although himself a former music critic. His orders had come from above; from the dark gods, and he didn't have the spine of bendable zirconium like say, Peter Gelb.

I ordered a Proust 6-pack after perusing Alain de Botton's "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and decided, right then and there, to succumb to the thousands of  pages. Envisioning "In Search of Lost Time" as a sort of replacement for playing excruciatingly long, sinuous Wagnerian phrases—what notes are to music, words are to prose—I was not mistaken. Every Gospel-like page that I turn, transports me to salons from my past where local braggarts compared stock market successes and flaunted Bar and Bat Mitvah parties. As a music librarian once asked: What do you give the thirteen-year-old child who already has the moon?

As you can see, I get a bit worked up over what must seem like tit-for-tat. It's the Jewish New Year. I'll begin with a fresh tradition. Proust owned a theatre-phone on which he used to listen to live performances. Metropolitan Opera at the Movies will become my new tradition, which hopefully guarantees a snob-free zone featuring first-rate productions, by truly world class singers and orchestra musicians, like oboist Nathan Hughes. No hearing aids or opera glasses needed. Popcorn?