…Schopenhauer
is going personal in his praise for Rossini, in the following passage of Die
Welt Als Wille Und Vorstellung:
“If music is too closely united to
the words, and tries to form itself according to the events, it is striving to
speak a language which is not its own. No one (!) has kept so free from this mistake as Rossini; therefore, his
music speaks its own language so distinctly and purely that it requires
no words, and produces its full effect when rendered by instruments alone.” (#52).
Saying
“no one” in the above passage may have been too much of an exaggeration
on Schopenhauer’s part, rather than an expert judgment, which of course may be
forgiven him, as he was himself not an expert musician, but an enthusiastic
amateur hooked on Rossini; and as otherwise beside the point…
A
much more intriguing point would be to have guessed his potential opinion of
the Finnish composer Ian Sibelius as the epitome of what Schopenhauer sees as a
complete objectification of the will in music. Born five years after the 1860
death of Schopenhauer, Sibelius (1865-1952) physically belonged to the twentieth
century, but as a creator of music he belongs, with Sergei Rachmaninoff, to
those “good old days, musically speaking,” which I have
nostalgically commented upon in an earlier eponymous entry, and thus, to say
that his place is in the nineteenth century, which is a pretty accurate
assessment, is not a brand of backwardness, but rather a bright stamp of
wholehearted approval.
Sibelius
did not write operas, or choral pieces, such as would have allowed a parallel
with Schopenhauer’s Rossini. But what he had done was to express his spiritual
and emotional affinity with the feelings and the emotions of ancient literary
classics such as the Finnish epic poem Kalevala, in his own language of
music. This is exactly where Schopenhauer’s words about Rossini can be applied
to Sibelius. He does not require the ‘words’ of Kalevala to “produce its full
effect… rendered by instruments alone.” Incidentally, this was precisely
what was said about him during his 1914 memorable visit to the United States,
where an honorary doctorate was bestowed on him by the University of Yale.
Professor Wilbur Cross, later Governor of Connecticut, said this of Sibelius
during the Yale presentation ceremony:
“What Wagner did with Teutonic
legend, Dr. Sibelius has done in his own impressive way with the legends of
Finland, as embodied in her national epic. He has translated the Kalevala into
the universal language of music, remarkable for its breadth, large simplicity,
and the infusion of a deeply poetic personality.”
I
wonder what Schopenhauer would have said of Sibelius’s music, had he lived long
enough to hear it?
As
for this genius’s towering achievement, in my ears, it is the great
Violin Concerto in d-moll, somehow representing the flight through life and
universal consciousness of the human spirit itself… a Phänomenologie des Geistes,
of sorts, where you do not really need Hegel’s incomprehensible words to feel
the same impact. I shall never forget it in the astonishing David Oistrakh performance
(1959, with Eugene Ormandy conducting Philadelphia Orchestra), especially, with
Oistrakh’s out-of-this-worldly third movement’s eerie harmonic sequence. How do
these objectificate pure will, I wonder?..
Perhaps,
on hearing this unforgettable Violin Concerto, Schopenhauer, in his “little quiet room inside hell,” all his
stated disdain for the monotheistic “Jewish
religions” notwithstanding, may have started reciting the Nunc dimittis on
the spot?…
No comments:
Post a Comment