Two Kinds of Love

Aksel Schiotz / Gerald Moore perform Die Schoene Muellerin

You can read the lyrics here: http://members.macconnect.com/users/j/jimbob/classical/Schubert_D795.html#texts

You may have to be between the ages of 16 and 18 to appreciate these songs properly. Back in high school they had the same place in my life as did R&B love songs in the lives of my classmates: balm for broken hearts. Nowadays most "classical" singers are too sophisticated for this music; you can hear the bow tie. Aksel Schiotz's recording from the 1930s is the only one that brings to mind the fresh, flushed cheeks and haplessness of the teenage miller.

Perhaps only rosy-faced teenage boys can move us with lines like these:

"I’d like to raise me a young starling
until he could speak the words loud and clear
until he could speak with the sound of my mouth
with the full, hot press of my heart…”

Perhaps only pimply-faced teenage boys are excused for this kind of love, love that is simply drunken absorption in the babbling brook, in the green alders, in the clattering mill-wheels around the house, the glint of sunlight from the windows, and the fountains of youth pouring from one’s body.

As for the “lovely mill-girl” of the title, she may or may as well not exist. This kind of love ends logically in suicide, in the miller boy drowning himself, merging with the landscape he loves so much. But really he is too young to believe in death, and so he only falls asleep and wakes up in November, older and more embittered, to wander the dead landscape of Schubert's other song cycle, Winterreise.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Joerg Demus perform An Die Ferne Geliebte

You can Read the Lyrics here: http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?LanguageId=7&SongCycleId=128

Beethoven’s lover in To the Distant Beloved is homelier, square-jawed like Beethoven himself, with none of the rosy pubescent charm of the miller boy. The melodies are plainer, and in the way Beethoven has with melodies, are nuts and bolts rather than Schuber's wild bouquets. But as nuts and bolts, they constantly remind us of the impulse behind the whole, which here might be summed up in Adorno’s epigram, “He only loves, who has the strength to hold onto love.” The six songs each flow into the next without a break, woven together by the piano, which is in many ways more expressive here than the voice (Beethoven was a pianist, not a singer) and embodies this unwavering, underlying impulse. The most moving moment comes when the refrain of the first song reappears at the very end, and we see, as in many of Beethoven’s works, that it could not be otherwise, that everything we have experienced so far only leads back to the beginning, to what we always knew in a process of trial and affirmation. And so space and time is overcome, and enduring absence and uncertainty, love is transformed from the sunlight of an afternoon into the binding force of life itself. It is a more adult love than that of Die Schoene Muellerin. The experience of love is ennobling in itself, regardless of how things turned out.

Music From Outside

Mozart: Serenade in B flat, K. 361 ("Gran Partita")

My mom had an uncle whom she was close to, a chemistry professor who loved collecting books and records in his spare time, and who sparked her own lifelong interest in visual arts. He had a huge number of Classical music CDs. At one point, my mother recalls, the collection overflowed the shelves into a stack on the floor of his study that almost reached to the ceiling. One day, the Red Guards ransacked his house and smashed his entire collection. No, he had done most of it himself an hour or so before, in anticipation of what was coming. They finished off the absolutely precious recordings he couldn't bear to destroy himself. There they lay on the wooden floor: shards of grooved plastic that were once vintage recordings of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms.

Forty years later, this scene repeated in the living room of my parents' house in Fremont, California. With a hammer, my father, a former Red Guard, smashed the collection of Classical CD's one by one that I had carefully amassed from the local Tower Records. “I'm going to wean you of this drug once and for all!” My father said as he swung his still muscular arms, honed from manual labor. They were propaganda arms, the arms of the perfect workers and soldiers in those posters he painted in the 60's. I stood by with a cold fire in my heart, the unrepentant counterrevolutionary. As I watched bits of shiny plastic scatter over the carpet, I knew the music would be wedded to my heart forever, and to my hatred of everything productive and modern.

This music was as incompatible with Capitalism as it had been with Communism. I remember the first time I heard it. I was about 12, my father and I were driving to his workplace. I switched on the car radio and some Mozart came on. “Turn that off, will you?” My father said, “That music doesn't belong in the modern world.” How true that was, I thought as soon as I looked out the window. We were in Silicon Valley, a landscape of death, a horror of people working in windowless offices and giant warehouses, surrounded by glowing screens and snaking wires. Mozart was an insult to this world, because he reminded us that some part of us was still human, that some part of us still longed to play, to laugh and cry at the beauty of the world, that we were not completely enslaved.

All modern art and music seemed like propaganda to me: Either Communist propaganda to produce more tractors, or Capitalist propaganda to buy more Viagra. The true message of every song on the radio is “Work, work, work! Buy, buy, buy!” The lyrics don't matter, the message is in the monotonous, unchanging beat, which is the same beat as freeways, factories, fighter jets. It makes us into robots who desperately produce and then desperately consume – and that is the whole story of life. It is in this context that I proudly listen to music written, played and enjoyed by dead white men.