Fortune plango vulnera...

I've decided to start a series of posts discussing music in my collection based on an arbitrary-number generator. (If random-number generation is truly possible, the fact that I don't have exactly 1000 CD's blunts the randomness.) It's either quite ironic or quite fitting that the first disc selected via this method is number 571 -- Carmina Burana, a piece that I have very little desire to write about.

The Hickox/LSO recording (in a previous release on Fidelio) was among my first classical CD's, purchased at the Berkshire Record Outlet in my early teens. I loved it for some common, if immature reasons. It was loud and dissonant. The texts were funny, and treated sex and drunkenness. But mainly, it was loud and dissonant. (Boy did the final three movements pack a wallop -- you go from the insane Soprano range of "Dulcissime" to the loud brass/chorus of "Blanziflor et Helena" to the recapitulation of "O Fortuna.")

As I grew older, though, I started having second thoughts. As I studied music theory and became infatuated with Beethoven and Bach, form and counterpoint became more and more important to me. You can spend a lot of time buried in the score and fail to find much in the way of either. The form is predominantly strophic songs. The most common texture is unison or parallel blocks of intervals or chords. There's plenty of novel orchestration, but relatively little else of interest.

In time, I grew to view it as a piece in which nothing happens, for all its noise. (In the interest of fairness, I should note that I never tired of the "Olim lacus colueram" movement, concerning the swan roasting on the spit. I'd rate this among the funniest moments in musical history. That means that I enjoy under four of the piece's sixty or so minutes.) To me, it was another top-40 hit with little of value or harm. Then I discovered something troubling.

In many ways, the simple textures are meant to suggest a return to the ideals of Medieval music. However, in 1930's Germany, such an idea can actually be quite troubling. If Carmina Burana is to represent a more pure, earlier ideal of Germanic music, then it can be seen as a musical representation of Aryan ideals. It's a music that is without influence from inferior kinds of music, freed from the Italian foundation of German Baroque music. It's one thing to flag Wagner's music as representing proto-Nazi ideals; this was written the year of Germany occupied the Rhineland. This implication, that Carmina Burana is essentially Nazi propaganda, certainly can temper one's enjoyment. (It doesn't disqualify it outright; however, it should be in the canon of "problem works" of art that represent a view that is now seen as unacceptable due to bigotry. Just as productions of The Merchant of Venice invariably involve discussion of anti-Semitism or screenings of Triumph des Willens acknowledge the techniques Reifenstahl used to make the Nuremberg Rally so impressive, I feel that performances of Carmina Burana should highlight this less palatable aspect.)

A couple of weeks ago, in this space, I offered a reassessment of one of those other much-maligned top-4o hits: Pachelbel's canon. Can I offer any sort of positive reassessment Carmina Burana?

First a digression: the medieval poems that Orff selected are brilliant. The rhetorical delights of In taberna quando sumus, for example doesn't really translate to English, but is clear enough in the Latin.

But the subject at hand is really the music. The natural question arises: how can I enjoy Glass's Two Pages or Reich's Piano Phase, yet argue that nothing happens in Carmina Burana? While I could argue that a lot more happens in those austerely minimalist pieces (albeit very slowly) than in Carmina, I won't. The point stands, though, that we can't compare Orff's music to Bach's and Beethoven's, as he was consciously trying to use a neo-medieval style. As much as I'm trying, however, I can't defend this piece of music (which greatly pales in comparison to contemporary pieces like Schoenberg's 4th string quartet or Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta).

Next up: #452, Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony, conducted by Furtwangler on Naxos Historical

Defending Pachelbel[?]

The "Pachelbel Rant" is making the rounds on YouTube.

It's a pretty easy position within the classical music world to dump on the canon in D. (The matching gigue somehow gets off scot-free.) It's perhaps the poster-piece for everything that's wrong with classical music programming on radio -- always headlining collections of "relaxing" classical music, as if one of the great art forms was actually meant as a lobotomy rather than intellectual stimulation. But is that Pachelbel's fault?

So, then, what about the music? It's both a basso-ostinato and a three-part canon. While this may be considered a strength, I actually think it hurts the piece a little. My recollection is that it is neither all that strong as a canon or as an ostinato. When I think of great baroque ostinato pieces, what comes to mind are Bach's c-minor passacaglia and d-minor chaconne. Each creates the illusion of ternary form and finds ways to integrate each phrase into the next. Pachelbel doesn't; he has an endless series of indepedent four-bar phrases. (I once heard a "rearrangement" by Prof. Robert Greenberg, which changed the order of the phrases, and it was just as seemless as the original.) If you're interested in form rather than straight episodic writing, this is a huge strike against it.

How is it as a canon? It's fairly straight-forward. It does the job fairly elegantly, but doesn't really pose a big challenge. After you've heard Bach's "A Musical Offering," I think it's hard to get excited about the Pachelbel.

So, my conclusion is that this canon has two problems, neither of which is strictly Pachelbel's fault: it is over-exposed, and it wasn't written by Bach. It's possible to imagine a world where the same piece of music might be considered an early-music gem, but it's not the lot it drew.

Schubert hurts his own cause

Schubert wrote too much music for his own good.

As I work, I'm cycling through all my music from the 19th century in chronological order. I hit the year 1822 this week, and with it Schubert's b minor symphony D 759. I've just been listening to Beethoven's late piano sonatas and Die Freischütz. The Diabelli Variations and Dichterliebe are in deck.

As I listened, I couldn't help myself. I started laughing. Measures 36-44 are the culprit. The first theme ends with a forceful cadence -- a syncopated, tutti dominant 7th chord returning to the b-minor sforzando chord. But the third hangs on -- the d is sustained by the horns and bassoons. The d quickly turns into a cadence in G(?), and like that, we're on into the melodic theme (nevermind that it's in the wrong key). That's a grand total of four measures of transition between themes, three of which are a unison pedal d.

That's a pretty typical Schubert move in his instrumental music. (With a few direct substitutions, we could be talking about the "Great" C-major symphony, for example.) It's astounding when you compare it to what Beethoven was writing at the same time in the same place.

If Schubert had only written his 700 lieder, his reputation would be secure. Individual songs like Erlkönig and Gretchen am Spinnrade are in the discussion of the greatest songs ever written, Winterreise and Schwannengesang are masterpieces, and there are so many great songs in between. There's no doubt of his mastery as a composer of short forms; however, he treated long forms the same. Just take one idea, through two or four measures of modulation in there, do another idea, and call it a symphony or a quartet.

Perhaps Schubert's spot in history is this -- no other one composer ever wrote so much great music and so much terrible music.