Summer Reading & Listening
July 1, 2008
An Open Letter to Stephen Harper
From Life of Pi author Yann Martel’s
blog, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?
Book Number Thirty:
The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy
Inscription:
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Music, both beautiful and discordant,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
May 26, 2008
Dear Mr. Harper,
Tolstoy again. Sixty weeks back I sent
you The Death of Ivan Ilych, if you remember. This week it’s The Kreutzer
Sonata, published three years later, in 1889. It’s a very different
book. As much as Ilych is an artistic gem, the realism seemingly effortless,
the characters fully incarnate yet universal, the emotions finely expressed,
the lyricism simple and profound, the portrayal of life and its fleetingness
dead on, so to speak—in sum, as much as Ilych is perfect, The Kreutzer
Sonata is imperfect. For example, the setting—a long train ride in
which two passengers converse—comes off poorly because nearly the
entire novella is taken up by the endless discourse of the main character,
Pozdnyshev. Our nameless narrator just sits there, stunned into listening
and memorizing the 75-page tirade directed at him. It’s as clunky
a device as one of Plato’s dialogues—without the wisdom, for the
most part. The Kreutzer Sonata is a long rant about love, sex and marriage,
with side swipes at doctors and children, leading up to a vivid portrayal
of insane jealousy, all of it told by an unconvicted murderer. Imagine
that, a man telling you on a train, “I killed my wife. Let me tell
you about it, since we’ve got all night.” I guess I wouldn’t interrupt
him, either.
Imperfect art, then. So why the
interest? Because it’s still Tolstoy. Simple people lead simple lives.
Complex people lead complex lives. The difference between the two has
to do with one’s openness to life. Whether determined by misfortune—a
congenital deficiency, a stunting upbringing, a lack of opportunity,
a timid disposition—or determined by will— by the use and abuse
of religion or ideology, for example—there are many ways in which
life, one’s portion of it, can be regulated and made acceptably simple.
Tolstoy was unregulated. He lived in a manner unbridled and unblinkered.
He took it all in. He was supremely complex. And so there was much of
life in his long life, life good and bad, wise and unwise, happy and
unhappy. Thus the interest of his writings, because of their extraordinary
existential breadth. If the earth could gather itself up, could bring
together everything upon it, all men, women and children, every plant
and animal, every mountain and valley, every plain and ocean, and twist
itself into a fine point, and at that fine point grasp a pen, and with
that pen begin to write, it would write like Tolstoy. Tolstoy, like
Shakespeare, like Dante, like all great artists, is life itself speaking.
But whereas Ilych elicits consonance
in the reader, The Kreutzer Sonata elicits dissonance. In it, love between
men and women does not really exist but is merely a euphemism for lust.
Marriage is covenanted prostitution, a cage in which lust unhappily
fulfills itself. Men are depraved, women hate sex, children are a burden,
doctors are a fraud. The only solution is complete sexual abstinence,
and if that means the end of the human species, all the better. Because
otherwise men and women will always be unhappy with each other, and
some men may be driven to killing their wives. It’s a bleak, excessively
scouring view of the relations between the sexes, a reflection of Tolstoy’s
frustration at the social constrictions of his times, no doubt, but
nonetheless going too far, wrong-headed, objectionable. And so its effect,
the scandal upon its publication, and the reaction it has to this day.
Tolstoy does indeed go too far in The Kreutzer Sonata, but in it are
nonetheless expressed all the elements—the hypocrisy and the outrage,
the guilt and the anger—that were at the core of that greatest revolution
of the 20th century: feminism.
As an aside, this second book by
Tolstoy was a last minute choice. There’s such a world of books out
there to share with you that I thought one book per author as introduction
was enough. After that, if you were interested, you could look up for
yourself any given author’s other books.
Only I wanted a book this week
that touched on music. (I’ve forgotten to explain the title of Tolstoy’s
novella. Pozdnyshev’s wife is an amateur pianist. The couple meets
an accomplished amateur violinist by the name of Trukhashevsky, a man.
The wife and he become, in all innocence, friends because of their mutual
fondness for music. They decide to play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata,
for piano and violin, together. In the wings, her husband grows angrier.)
Why a book on music? Because serious music, at least as represented
by new and classical music, is fast disappearing from our Canadian lives.
I have belatedly learned of the latest proof of this: the CBC Radio
Orchestra is to be disbanded. Already our public radio’s fare of music
has become more paltry. There was once, Mr. Harper, a show called Two
New Hours on CBC, hosted by Larry Lake. It played Canadian new music.
It’s last slot, surely the least desirable for any show, was on Sundays
between 10 pm and midnight, too late for the early birds, too early
for the night owls. Airing at that time, no surprise that few people
managed to listen to it. When I did, though, I was grateful. New music
is a strange offering. It is, as far as I can tell, music that has broken
free. Free of rules, forms, traditions, and expectations. Frontier music.
New world music. Anarchy as music. Which might explain the screechy
violins, the pianos gone crazy, and the weird electronic stuff.
I have intense memories of listening
to Two New Hours and doing nothing but that. Because really, it’s
impossible to read while your radio is sounding like two tractors mating.
I suppose I’m more jaded when it comes to writing—jaded, jealous,
bored, whatever. But I listened to Two New Hours out of pure curiosity.
And I was surprised, moved and proud that there were creators out there
responding to our world in such fresh and serious ways. Because it was
clear to me: this was serious stuff, strange as it sounded. This was
music that, under whatever guise, was the voice of a single person trying
to communicate with me. And I listened, thrilled at the newness of it.
That is, I listened until the show was cancelled.
And now the CBC Radio Orchestra,
the last radio orchestra in North America, is to be similarly cancelled.
No more, “That was _____, played by the CBC Radio Orchestra, conducted
by Mario Bernardi,” as I heard for years. Who will play us our Bach
and Mozart now, besides our R. Murray Schaffer and Christos Hatzis?
It amazes me that at a time when
Canada is riding the commodities wave to unprecedented wealth, with
most levels of government experiencing budgetary surpluses, that we
are riding ourselves of a piddley piddling little orchestra. If this
is how we are when in fortune, how will we be when in misfortune? How
much culture exactly can we do without before we have become lifeless,
corporate drones?
I believe that both in good and bad times
we need beautiful music.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
encl: one inscribed paperback
Every two weeks, Yann Martel sends
Stephen Harper a different book to read,
along with an open letter, published on his blog at
www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca. To date, he has sent thirty-one
books.
April 16, 2007: The Death of Ivan
Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy
April 30, 2007: Animal Farm, by
George Orwell
May 14, 2007: The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
May 28, 2007: By Grand Central Station
I Sat Down and Wept,
by Elizabeth Smart
June 11, 2007: The Bhagavad Gita
June 25, 2007: Bonjour Tristesse,
by Françoise Sagan
July 9, 2007: Candide, by Voltaire
July 23, 2007: Short
and Sweet: 101 very short poems, edited by
Simon Armitage
August 6, 2007: Chronicle of a Death
Foretold, by Gabriel García Márquez
August 20, 2007: Miss Julia, by
August Strindberg
September 3, 2007: The Watsons,
by Jane Austen
September 17, 2007: Maus, by Art
Spiegelman
October 1, 2007: To Kill a Mockingbird,
by Harper Lee
October 15, 2007: Le Petit Prince,
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
October 29, 2007: Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson
November 12, 2007: Letters to a Young
Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke
November 26, 2007: The Island Means
Minago, by Milton Acorn
December 10, 2007: Metamorphosis,
by Franz Kafka
December 24, 2007: The Brothers Lionheart,
by Astrid Lindgren; Imagine A Day, by Sarah L. Thomson and Rob
Gonsalves; and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van
Allsburg
January 7, 2008: The Educated Imagination,
by Northrop Frye
January 21, 2008: The Cellist of Sarajevo,
by Steven Galloway
February 4, 2008: Meditations,
by Marcus Aurellius
February 18, 2008: Artists and Models,
by Anaïs Nin
March 3, 2008: Waiting for Godot,
by Samuel Beckett
March 17, 2008: The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi,
by Larry Tremblay
March 31, 2008: Birthday Letters,
by Ted Hughes
April 14, 2008: To the Lighthouse,
by Virginia Woolf
April 28, 2008: Read All About It!,
by Laura Bush and Jenna Bush
May 12, 2008: Drown, by Junot
Díaz
May 26, 2008: The Kreutzer Sonata,
by Leo Tolstoy
June 9, 2008: Their Eyes Were Watching
God, by Zora Neale Hurston
The Rest is Noise
Alex Ross
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
624 pages
As you’ve no doubt heard, classical
music is dead. A hundred years ago, when everyone listened to Strauss
and Mahler, composers decided to write music that alienated their devotees,
while today an increasingly fickle and lowbrow public has been abandoning
high culture for the pleasures of Stephen King novels and Britney Spears
CDs. It’s the standard narrative of music and culture in the 20th
Century. But as Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New
Yorker, proves in his new book, The Rest is Noise, the composers
had it coming.
The Rest is Noise – a
cagey rejoinder to Hamlet’s last pun – is not just a catalogue of
twentieth century composers, but a complex narrative weaving together
the intellectual, political, and social currents in Europe and North
America through the Cold War, two world wars, the Weimar Republic, Stalin’s
Russia, the Clinton years, and everything in between.
Ross argues that throughout the
century artists, believing they were infallible and that imagination
made its own laws, tried to move away from a mass audience. This mentality
made the extremes of modern art possible. But, he adds, “Only in a
prosperous, liberal, art-infatuated society could such a determinedly
antisocial class of artists survive, or find an audience.” The early
atonalists were just such a group, and their leader, Arnold Schoenberg,
was determined to be rejected by the public at large. After the wildly
successful premiere of his Gurre-Lieder, the audience, cheering
and weeping, chanted, “Schoenberg! Schoenberg!” The composer responded
by marching onstage and taking a bow – to the orchestra, turning his
back on the cheering throng.
But as Ross points out, the truth
is more nuanced. Schoenberg’s student, Alban Berg, enjoyed great success
as a composer within his own lifetime, while conductors who programmed
modern music, such as Leopold Stokowski, found their contracts were
allowed to expire without being renewed. “The failure to support the
new led inexorably to the decline of classical music as a popular pastime,”
Ross says. “A venerable art form was set to become one more passing
fad in consumer culture.”
Artists and critics who defended
the avant-garde didn’t fight this trend, either. In the postwar period,
they practiced the politics of style to a degree that marginalized anyone
who didn’t conform to their view. Theodor Adorno, a student of Berg,
whose ideas shaped much of the debate over aesthetics and culture in
the latter half of the century, set out to destroy any composer with
even a hint of popular appeal. Stravinsky, by preserving tonality in
the modern era, had a “Fascist personality,” Paul Hindemith’s
utilitarianism made him a Nazi. And of course every Stalinist intellectual
loved Aaron Copland.
It’s unlikely that classical
music will ever regain the place it had in turn-of-the-century Europe
or even postwar America, but given that their role in the culture ultimately
led them to reject it, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Ross’s
book is a welcome shot in the arm for the appreciation of modern music.
In the age of the iPod, where any music is available at any time, one
is grateful for the opportunity to have an explanation for music as
complex as this. Not only does Ross’s book give a remarkable picture
of the last hundred years of music, he has written a very rare book
– a musicological page-turner. David Podgorski
LSM Summer Listening
Many record labels are issuing back catalogue
into attractively price box sets. Take advantage of the lazy-hazy days
of summer to sit back and listen.
Bach Edition: Complete Works
Brilliant Classics BRLCD93102 (155CD
BOX SET) - $99.99
Glenn Gould: The Complete Original
Jacket Collection
Sony Classical 88697130942 (80CD BOX
SET) - $352.99
Jacqueline Du Pré: The Complete EMI
Recordings
EMI Classics 5099950416721 (17CD BOX
SET) - $71.99
KARAJAN: The Complete EMI Recordings
1946-1984, Vol. 1: Orchestral
EMI Classics 5099951203825 (88CD BOX
SET) - $183.99
KARAJAN: The Complete EMI Recordings
1946-1984, Vol. 2: Opera & Vocal
EMI Classics 5099951197322 (72CD BOX
SET) - $160.99
Les 50 plus grands operas du monde
Decca 4800094 (100CD BOX SET) - $129.99
Wagner’s
Der Ring Des Nibelungen •
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra/ James Levine, Deutsch Grammophon 4769803
(14CD BOX SET) - $29.99 |
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