the last of Menlo

Music@Menlo's final day began with what they called a marathon Young Performers concert: eight ensembles of 10-to-18 year olds, lasting somewhat over two hours without intermission, as a result of which the last three ensembles were greeted by streams of people leaving the hall. As each ensemble plays only one or two movements of a work, it was ingenious to line up two or three of them in a row to partition off Mendelssohn's Op. 66 piano trio and Shostakovich's piano quintet and play the works in their entirety.

Though the music-making was fairly good (though again not up to the standards of the first concert), my appreciation was quite fouled by the young performers' little introductory talks, which revealed how much biographical tripe on the composers they had been hand-fed. It didn't happen in the public master classes, which when not focused on technical issues were about connecting to the music's direct emotional nature without cheap psychoanalysis. It must have come in the coaching sessions, in foolish attempts to bring the music "alive". Either it lives for you or it doesn't; this isn't going to help.

It's tiresome and annoying to hear some teenager prating about how Brahms's music was melancholy because he was in love with Clara Schumann. We don't actually know that he was in love with Clara Schumann at all; it's just a plausible surmise, which shouldn't be erected into a solid known biographical fact;¹ and if he was, we know absolutely nothing about how he felt about its non-fulfillment. And even if he spent his life in melancholic regret, it trivializes great art to reduce it to a simple reflection of its creator's personal soap opera. Plenty of men have been in unrequited love with their mentors' wives without writing great melancholy music; plenty of other composers wrote melancholy music without being in love with Clara Schumann; plenty of Brahms's music isn't melancholy at all. When Beethoven was, by his own testimony, in near-suicidal despair over his growing deafness, he wrote some of his most cheerful music. So? "An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous." Thus spake J.R.R. Tolkien.

There was more. All the Shostakovich was filtered through a simplified version of Solomon Volkov's view of the composer. Not only does this erase Volkov's corrosive fibbing, the whole point of the Volkov portrait of Shostakovich - to the extent it is based on reality - is that it's ambiguous and hidden. To treat it as plain and forthright falsifies the picture; it's just wrong.

And do the two themes of Mendelssohn's finale reflect an inner conflict between his Jewish heritage and his Christian upbringing? Really? For one, he never indicated that he was conflicted over it; this is just an assumption by someone who "knows" how he "must have" felt. For the other, to say that the first theme is influenced by klezmer music skates over huge unanswered questions of how much an assimilated upper-class genteel German Jew would have identified with Ashkenazic peasants from another country, whether the Russian Jewish folk music that Mendelssohn heard² would have been like what we call klezmer today, and even whether the theme sounds like klezmer at all: it doesn't to me.

I suppose if it helps you to internalize the music by making up stories about it, go ahead. Just be aware that you're making it up, and don't put it in your pre-concert talks. Just as if Tim Burton and Johnny Depp wanted to construct a narrative about Willy Wonka being in rebellion against his dentist father as a private way for Depp to enrich his performance, OK, but they should have left it out of the movie.

1. Still less the one basic nugget about Brahms to be pulled out on all occasions whether - even if true - it's relevant or not, as practiced by the brainless announcers of certain radio stations, I name no call letters.

2. Do we know that he heard Russian Jewish folk music at all? Yes, that we do know.

ETA: Here's a rock-music critic named Greil Marcus saying pretty much the same thing: art can't be reduced to biography.

c'est la mort

It was a pleasant, sunny day, rather warmer than most we've had recently.

I spent most of it at a funeral.

Attending the funerals, and even more the post-funeral receptions, of your parents' friends can be a variable process. A lot depends on how well you knew their children, your own contemporaries, in the days when you were all juveniles. The more you had in common with them back then, the easier it'll be to interact with them now.

I'm finding the same thing on being e-mailed out of the blue last week by a high-school acquaintance I hadn't had contact with since then. We weren't close in those days, but we had enough context in common that we're chatting interestingly now. She's doing very well for herself both personally and professionally, which was a great relief to me to hear.