Ewig, ewig; The Berliner Philharmoniker Binds two works on the Secular Eternal

In a much anticipated pairing the Berliner Philharmoniker, led by music director Simon Rattle, juxtaposed the final scene of The Cunning Little Vixen by Leoš Janáček with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Both works explored ideas of the eternal in terms related to the cyclical in nature. Both used common images from daily life as a portal toward awakening--toward seeking solace in the idea that even though the particular dies that there is still youth expressed through rebirth. It is the idea that Nietzsche called "eternal return."

The correspondence between the two works was more than metaphysical, it was also strangely practical. It turns out that the scene, centered on Bass-Baritone Gerald Finley, also required two small roles--the innkeeper's wife, and the schoolteacher that could be performed by the mezzo and tenor from Das Lied. This not only gave us an extra opportunity to hear Mezzo-Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, and tenor Stuart Skelton, but it also seemed to connect them directly from the opera into Das Lied.

A new insight was layered into Das Lied in this performance: It was as if the mezzo role in Das Lied was still the innkeeper's wife, and the tenor was still the schoolteacher.



Rattle began the excerpt from The Cunning Little Vixen just after the gunshot that kills the Vixen (beginning with the adagio on page 159 of the piano vocal score). This opened the concert with music of transition; it was like a 90 second upbeat to the final two-scene division that Janáček marked in the score.


The scene at the inn was described by Milan Kundera in an essay from his book "Encounters." Kundera observed that the scene "seems insignificant but [it] always grips my heart. The woodsman and the schoolteacher are alone at the inn. The [...] The innkeeper’s wife is very busy and doesn’t feel like talking. The teacher himself is taciturn: the woman he loves is to be married today. So the conversation is very sparse: where is the innkeeper? off to town; and how is the priest getting on? who knows; and the woodsman’s dog, why isn’t he here? he doesn’t like to walk any longer, his paws hurt, he is old; “like us,” the woodsman adds. I know no other opera scene so utterly banal in its dialogue; or any scene of sadness more poignant, more real."

"Janáček has managed to say what only an opera can say," continued Kundera, "the unbearable nostalgia of insignificant talk at an inn cannot be expressed any other way than by an opera: the music becomes the fourth dimension of a situation which without it would remain anodyne, unnoticed, mute."

Finley voiced this scene and the meditation that followed with simple expression and with resonant
grace.

After intermission von Otter and Skelton returned for Das Lied von der Erde. Skelton sang with deeply voiced baritonal colors, but he was able to sing effortless high As and projected like a heldentenor over the orchestra. He brought a wide variety of characteristic expressions to the role--fear during the passage where he first sees the ape among the tombstones, wit during the reflected images of friends chatting seen on the surface of the "little pool," intoxicated conversation with a bird in springtime.

Von Otter brought dignified solemnity to the texts on loneliness and charm to Von der Schönheit, a work about the dangers of youthful obsession.

In a short blog entry last week, I wrote about Kundera's sense that Janáček sought the opposite of "Wagnerian emotion­alism." This performance showed Janáček and Mahler to be brothers.

Rachmaninoff, Marilyn Monroe and Milan Kundera; A Fantasia

In the 1955 film called "The Seven Year Itch," the character Richard Sherman (played by Tom Ewell imagines that he is able to seduce "The Girl," who is played by Marilyn Monroe. The plan for the seduction: classical music.

Sherman rejects a disc by Debussy and passes over Ravel before finding Stravinsky. But upon reflection; "Stravinsky'll only scare her."

It is the second piano concerto by Rachmaninoff that if perfect. As the bell-chords that open the work move into the opening theme Marilyn Monroe comes into focus...it is a fantasy sequence.

She wears a tiger-skin dress and is smoking a cigarette. Sherman reclines at the piano in a smoking jacket that looks like it came from the closet of Hugh Heffner. The conversation is deliberately campy and fabulous:

"Rachmaninoff... It isn't fair... Every time I hear it, I go to pieces... It shakes me, it quakes me. It makes me feel goose-pimply all over. I don't know where I am or who I am or what I'm doing. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't ever stop!"

This scene is a lovely parody of what Milan Kundera calls "Homo Sentimentalis" in his novel "Immortality:"

"Homo Sentimentalis cannot be defined as a man with feelings (for we all have feelings), but as a man who has raised feelings to a category of value. As soon as feelings are seen as a value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on out values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings."

"As soon as we want to feel...feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling."

"Europe: great music and homo sentimentalis. Twins nurtured side by side in the same cradle. Music taught the European not only a richness of feeling, but also the worship of his feelings and his feeling self."

It takes Marilyn Monroe to play homo sentimentalis to the perfect laugh.

An "Encounter" with Milan Kundera's new book of Essays

Milan Kundera writes frequently about classical music. Detailed references to specific works are woven throughout his writing. In "Immortality," the character Paul is speaking to a character who has written the novel "Life is Elsewhere." Paul is talking to a semi-fictional Kundera about Mahler's seventh symphony:

"Everything is worked through, thought through, felt through, nothing has been left to chance," explains Paul to Kundera in the novel, "but that enormous perfection overwhelms us, it surpasses the capacity of our memory, our ability to concentrate, so that even the most fanatically attentive listener will grasp no more than one-hundredth of the symphony, and certainly it will be this one-hundredth that Mahler cared about the least."

"I don't deny those symphonies their perfection," continued Paul, "I only deny the importance of that perfection. [...] we exaggerated their significance. [...] Europe reduced Europe to fifty works of genius that it never understood."

Even in dismantling Paul, Kundera is both insightful and funny.

His new book, "Encounter," seems in dialog with his writing of the past, and is often in dialog with the past itself.

In "The Total Rejection of Heritage, or Iannis Xenakis." Kundera is in dialog with an essay that he wrote in 1980. He interrupts his earlier text with comments written in 2008. "I found consolation in Xenakis's music," wrote Kundera in 1980, "I learned to love it during the darkest time of my life, and that of my homeland." In 2008 he comments; "His music reconciled me to the inevitability of endings."

The music of Leoš Janáček has been "indelibly written" into his "aesthetic genes." Janáček "lived his whole life in Brno," wrote Kundera, "like my father who, as a young pianist, was a member of the enchanted (and isolated) circle of the composer's connoisseurs and defenders. [...] from my earliest childhood, I would hear his music played daily on the piano by my father or by his students; at my father's funeral in 1971, during that sombre period of the Russian occupation, I forbade any orations; only at the crematorium, four musician friends played Janáček's Second String Quartet."



There is also a lovely essay on "The Cunning little Vixen," which Kundera calls "The Most Nostalgic Opera" in the essay's title.

"The final passage of the opera begins with a scene that seems insignificant but that always grips my heart," writes Kundera. "I know of no other opera scene so utterly banal in its dialogue; or any scene of sadness more poignant, more real."

"Janáček has managed to say what only an opera can say: the unbearable nostalgia of insignificant talk at an inn cannot be expressed any other way than by an opera: the music becomes the fourth dimension of a situation which without it would remain anodyne, unnoticed, mute."

There is an essay called "forgetting Schoenberg," which is a plea to hear the "fearsome grandeur" of "A Survivor from Warsaw." There are references to Milhaud, the late piano fugues of Beethoven as a "dream of total heritage," and anecdotes about Adorno, Stravinsky, Saint-Saëns.

Any encounter with Kundera promises lightness, farewell waltzes, laughter and forgetting; his work is familiar but it remains fresh.

"Encounter" is welcome.