SOUND OF MUSIC

Let us continue to keep our focus on the musical dimension. It is time now to expand this discussion from “religious music” to music as-such, and from that, to the current shaky status of classical music in Western society.

It was very appropriate to begin this section’s study of the Jewish phenomenon on the world stage with the Sound of Music. “If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land,” asserts the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius. And Martin Luther agrees, although his equation of a musician with good temperament is rather untrustworthy: “I always loved music. Who has skill in this art is of a good temperament, and fitted for all things. We must teach music at schools.” Coming from the opposite sides of the world’s cultural spectrum, East and West, this is a pretty solid testimonial to the character of our subject, to use some Evangelical jargon, for a little innocent amusement at their expense.

But first, here is a philosophically-defining excerpt on the substance of music from §52 of the Third Book of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt wie Wille und Vorstellung:---

“Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas; but the copy of the Will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows (in the strict Platonic sense), but it speaks of the thing itself.”

One does not have to agree with Schopenhauer’s elevation of the great art of music to such metaphysical heights, to recognize a special relationship which definitely exists between classical music and the overall culture of our Western Civilization.

In an 1810 letter to Bettina von Arnim, Beethoven writes: “Music is a higher revelation than philosophy,” presaging Schopenhauer’s philosophical revelation by almost a decade. Much later, Oscar Wilde, in one of his more serious moods, says this:

“Music is the art in which form and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be separated from the method of its expression, the art which most completely realizes the artistic ideal and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.” (The English Renaissance of Art, 1882.)

Generally speaking, music can be compared to a torch in the hand of our civilization. The fire of classical masterpieces gives us light. The fire from modern pop culture aggravates the risk of a conflagration, which may eventually engulf it and reduce it to cultural ashes.

In this specific case, I see a highly positive Jewish role in maintaining the highest aesthetical standards of Western culture, both in their choices for borrowing its tunes, and in their exquisite, classy performance of great musical masterpieces, at a time when our “gentile” Western Civilization is rapidly deteriorating into the democratic post-industrialist gutter of expensive bread and cheap circuses. (On the other hand, the utter degradation of modern Western culture may be credibly associated with the negative influences of specific mostly Jewish promoters of cheap and vulgar entertainment for the masses. What we can see here already is a sharp contrast between the positive and negative extremes of the Jewish influence on modern Western culture!)

The disproportional, and even strictly numerical, preponderance of Jewish musicians performing classical masterpieces to gentile audiences, thus promoting the elitism of taste and therefore preservation of culture, incurs a debt of gratitude owed by the Western Civilization to the Jews for taking such good care of it.

It is also important in this connection to keep in mind one salient historical fact, known mostly to educated music lovers and historians of music. Those of us who take for granted the universally recognized position occupied by Johann Sebastian Bach as the “Father of Western Music” will be well served to learn that this was not the way Bach had been seen for some eighty years after his death. In fact, he was badly underrated and largely neglected. It was the 1829 performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion that brought the well-deserved fame to his genius, and the man behind this inspired effort was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.

Proud of his historical accomplishment, Mendelssohn would later keep pointing out that “it was a Jew who restored this great Christian work” (he could have added, and this towering colossus of world culture, i. e. Bach) to the people. The story of a Jew resurrecting a genius of Christian civilization to posterity should be a fitting closing chord for this well-merited tribute.

Whether I should call the following the coda, or my reluctance to allot a new entry to what is essentially an extension of the present one, is a good excuse for adding this postscript, here is more about Mendelssohn’s aesthetic sense characteristic of the excellence of the Jewish propensity in general to appreciate aesthetical values.

In November 1821 the twelve-year-old composer-prodigy, Mendelssohn was invited to spend some time at the home of the seventy-two-year-old Goethe. At their first meeting, Goethe asked the boy to play for him, expecting to hear some of the precocious boy’s own compositions. “Shall it be the most beautiful music in the world?” the boy asked, and started playing… Mozart.

Needless to say, a wonderful friendship developed thereafter between Mendelssohn and Goethe that lasted until the old man’s death.

Here is the Jewish musical genius in its most revealing moment, and, in my opinion, at its best.