His music is complicated, not like Beethoven’s deeply complex but ultimately resolvable music but complicated with the unresolvable tensions of our modern age: a longing for harmony and order without religious faith, without a confidence in reason or a belief in unrelenting progress that sustained Western civilization before the debacle of 1914.īrahms was a contemporary of Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead.” Nietzsche also declared philosophy dead, at least philosophy as it had been practised before him. Brahms is no throw-back to the heyday of long-hair Romanticism. You see that world in a novel like Perez-Galdos’s Fortunata and Jacinta, in the irreverence of Samuel Butler as well as in the “primitivism” of Le Sacre du Printemps. His music is certainly melodic, but it’s troubled by the same sensibility I recognize as the modern world’s, the one I live in, which seems to have begun sometime in the late 19th century. I no longer think of him as old-fashioned. I applauded him for having the guts to be old-fashioned. I also admired him for sticking to what I saw as his traditional tack despite the gales of Wagner blowing in the opposite direction. But then I would hear a rendition of the slow movement from one of his concertos and be drawn back into his orbit. As time passed, I listened less and less to Brahms and more and more to later composers like Poulenc, Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev. I loved his symphonies and concertos but never ventured much beyond them, certainly not into his solo piano music. I mean before I ever attempted to play anything he wrote. But all I do at the keyboard is maintain a familiarity with the waltz in A minor and the first part of a polonaise I learned by heart when that composer still absorbed most of my attention.īrahms and I have had an on-again off-again relationship over the years. I continue to play the bit I did learn of him, and I still listen to Yulianna Avdeeva’s Chopin with great pleasure. After a while, though, his moods began to cloy: too much adolescent angst, too much of the same tale of death and unrequited love. I intended to learn all his music I could. A few years back I did care a great deal about almost anything by Chopin I could manhandle. To put things simply, I just don’t care about that sonatina enough. It doesn’t resonate in a way that makes it infinitely repeatable. Why? Because, I think, it doesn’t speak to me as other music does. I’ve invested too much time and effort to set it aside entirely, but I’m not motivated enough to put in the time required to make it my own. There’s a Beethoven sonatina I’ve been hammering away at forever. I’ve labored over a simple menuet by Krebs or Pachelbel and breezed through a technically more difficult waltz of Chopin. Whatever that something is, it has nothing to do with an individual composition’s difficulty. When it comes to music, I feel I can afford to be choosy, fickle, even undisciplined.īut I’m becoming convinced there’s something besides self-indulgence that determines whether I stay with a new piece or put it aside after a couple weeks.
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I’ve completed more than a dozen novels plus scores of short stories and all manner of non-fiction. There are good reasons for not finishing a novel. If I begin a novel I generally finish it. I play for my own pleasure, not to make a living or because music is my profession. In all but a handful of cases I’ve put them aside.
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I’ve taken up dozens of compositions with the full intention of doing justice to each before moving on to anything else.
What is it about some music that holds our attention and continues to move us, while other music charms us for a while but then loses its allure? I’m speaking not just of heard music but of music we play ourselves, or try to.