Festival in Residence: Windsor
Thursday, June 19; 7:00PM
Ty Bouque
—
I want to return to Vitruvius, whose treatise De architectura began this journey nearly two weeks ago. In the opening week we looked at two of the three arenas of design identified by the Roman architect; tonight we tarry with the third.
Reading scenography as Vitruvius understood it is, like orthography before it, clouded by the word’s contemporary understanding. In conventional parlance, we take “scenography” to mean the decorative backdrops and set pieces in a theater. For Vitruvius, it meant something more elemental and abstract: scenography in architectural design, he says, “exhibits the front and a receding side properly shadowed, the lines being drawn to their proper vanishing points.” Scenography is perspective (which gives its modern theatrical understanding a bit more sense; the details of perspective and space that make a setting feel real). Vitruvius is at the same time proposing a new draughtsman’s concept here, what he calls the “vanishing point.” Think of a pair of train tracks at the center of a photo, running away from the viewer: that impossible, distant speck into which all lines seem to disappear is the vanishing point. All tracks in proper perspective; all roads lead to Rome.
Architectural scenography gives us something of the theme for tonight, a theme which is also the project of musicology writ large. I want to listen for invisible points whose central gravity generates perspective, for shadows and details the ear barely notes, but without whom the whole thing would fall strangely flat. Musicology is the project by which the invisible mathematics of perspective are brought to audibility, with the hope of changing how we hear; each of the pieces tonight encodes a vanishing point, a missing center which draws all these sculpted lines into something like recognizable form.
Without the text in the Schubert—an aching poem from Friedrich Rückert, whose title translates loosely to “You are repose”—it is difficult to hear why so simple a melody should carry such devastating rapture. Without the text, one cannot hear, for instance, the vanishing point of the poet’s Berlin professorship in Eastern languages and literature. Rückert, a formidable polyglot (scholars estimate his language retention numbered in the 30s) specialized in myth and song from East Asia and the Middle East, where the particular
literary overlay of eroticism with the sacred left an indelible mark on his own German output. The central stanzas of the violin’s unspoken text for example—
Full of joy and grief
I consecrate to you
my eyes and my heart
as a dwelling place.
Come in to me
and softly close
the gate
behind you.
—play with the thin line between religious prayer and love song. The erotic physical interiority tilts the scale towards the latter, but the pungency of holy submission here bears the traces of Rückert’s long studies in Eastern religion to which Schubert is musically responding. Likewise, without the text, one cannot know that the fading high notes at the top of that breathtaking scale would belong to the word erhellt, to brighten, after which comes that laden silence: a light that fades this mundane world into darkness.
Behind Martinů’s Three Madrigals is a pair of living bodies, siblings actually. Lillian and Joseph Fuchs, two of the great American string players and pedagogues of their generation, played the Mozart duo (also for violin and viola) in the Berkshires with an admiring Martinů in the audience. Only a few days later, the composer took a spill in the Massachusetts forest, giving himself some serious injuries in the process. Newly confined to limited mobility—and with the memory of that performance freshly in mind—he abandoned the symphony form (he had just finished five of them) and started out on a year’s worth of chamber music; this duo was his first.
For all that the Three Madrigals betray Martinů’s idiosyncratic sensibilities—Czech folk melodies and a vested interest in sonic colors—the piece hinges on sibling dynamics. Prodigies thought they may have been, Joseph and Lillian were once Joe and Lily to each other, and no matter how much of a professional life you share, the childhood bonds (battles?) never fade. It is a music, then, that steps on a brother’s toes, a music that tugs a sister’s hair. The way, in the midst of an almost Mozartian outburst in the third movement, that the viola comes careening up to derail the game; or how, shrouded in the mystery of trills and tremolos in the second, the two instruments without fail chose to move in the
opposite direction, culminating in that long glissando agains a scale, combative and contrarian just for the sake of a rise. It’s easy to think the playful nature of this music was a gift from the composer, when in reality it was siblinghood that gave such energy to him.
And, at last, the Beethoven. The absent center around which this music congeals is nothing more or less than audition itself. The Piano Sonata No. 28, Opus 101 is timestamped as the beginning of what we now call “Late Beethoven,” the final years after deafness set in and the music began its bend towards mature Romanticism. There are all the usual hallmarks—hallucinogenic harmonic warp, form dehiscing from the inside, a monstrous canon at the limits of the sustainable—but these themselves are not products of deafness so much as Beethoven’s advanced compositional capacities. No, it is the language of the score and the register most impacted by his hearing. The score is littered with an astonishing array of expressive markings (in German, a radical departure from the traditional Italian), phrases like “with innermost sensitivity” and “gradually with more string.” Beethoven was, by this juncture, restricted to communicating with his friends via notebook; the descriptors are things he wishes he could say aloud. And the 28th sonata sits shockingly low in the piano’s range, the product of two factors: Beethoven had just received a new piano with a novel low E and was using it like a toy, but the low range was also vibration enough that the deaf man could properly feel it, even with his hearing vanished. We, too, might want to feel this music as vibration first.