Writings

Life On Hold--Clara Wieck Schumann

Author: Sandra Miller
Published on: August 30, 2001

History, they say, has a way of repeating itself. Perhaps that explains why many women of today could identify so well with Clara Schumann. Clara's story, though often overshadowed by that of her husband, is equally interesting, and equally unfortunate. Like many women who lived after her time, Clara Schumann put her personal career aspirations of performing and composing on hold to raise a family.

Clara Schumann was born Clara Wieck, daughter of pianist Friedrich Wieck, and soprano Marianne Tromlitz Wieck. She was raised as a musical prodigy; her first public performance was at age nine. She was well educated musically, in both performance and composition studies. Clara was trained in piano, violin, voice, counterpoint, score reading, and instrumentation. She performed widely, and with great skill.

By the coincidence of a mutual friendship, Friedrich Wieck was the pianist Robert Schumann studied with after he graduated law school. Clara was a great pianist in her own right, steadily achieving fame as a concert pianist during her courtship with Robert. Her father was vigorously opposed to the relationship, and refused to consent to a marriage. Clara was unable to marry without his consent until she was twenty-one, so she and Robert filed suit against Friedrich. They won the suit, and married the day before her twenty-first birthday in 1840. After their marriage, Clara put her musical career aside, and went to work helping her husband with his. Clara was an unofficial public relations manager for Robert, working between him and the outside world. Robert Schumann was a composer, music critic, and journalist, so this was quite a job! She also had eight children in this marriage, and certainly had her hands very full.

Clara was distressed to see her piano skills in such disuse; when Robert was composing she could not practice for fear of disturbing him. She enjoyed the admiration of audiences and missed it very much, enough that in 1842 she began touring again, as extensively as she could. Since women in that time could not travel alone, Robert was forced to accompany her at first. Unable to handle the stress of travelling, though, he eventually decided to remain at home and Clara toured accompanied by a friend. She was unfailingly hailed as a great talent wherever she performed.

Robert's mental health slowly deteriorated over the course of his life; finally after a failed suicide attempt in 1854 Clara had to commit him to a mental institution. He remained in the institution until his death, and although Clara was not permitted to visit him there, fellow composer Johannes Brahms was. While Robert was institutionalized, Brahms helped Clara as much as he could with the household and children, and corresponded with her by letter when he was away. This support helped her greatly through this very difficult time.

Clara was also a composer in her own right, though not nearly as prolific as her husband. With a family, she couldn't pursue her ambitions of concert performance so easily, but Robert encouraged her to compose, and they even collaborated on some works. She wrote 25 solo piano pieces, plus cadenzas for piano concertos by Beethoven and Mozart, as well as a piano concerto of her own. Altogether, Clara Schumann wrote approximately 56 pieces, an especially impressive number considering the absence of any other well known female composers in that period. All of her compositions were written before Robert's death. After his death she moved to Berlin, where she performed and taught. She edited and interpreted her husband's compositions and writings. During her life she traveled on an impressive 38 concert tours outside of Germany.

Clara Schumann was a fascinating woman. For more information about her, I would recommend http://www.claraschumann.net

Classical Riot--The Rite of Spring

Author: Sandra Miller
Published on: November 1, 2001

Outside of the doors of Music History class, it now seems to be common knowledge that Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is one of the finest compositions of the twentieth century; so fine, in fact, that there is a general impression that it couldn’t possibly have been a twentieth century composition. Why, this piece is even included in Disney’s Fantasia--it’s a fine old standard. Surely a romantic era composition?

In a word, no. Igor Stravinsky was heavily influenced by romantic composers; he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. But The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) premiered in 1913, and its style of composition sets it firmly outside the romantic bounds.

With the interpretation presented in Fantasia, it has been widely forgotten that The Rite of Spring was originally a ballet. Ballets traditionally tell stories, but The Rite of Spring contains only the sketchiest trace of one. As Stravinsky relates in his autobiography:

"One day, when I was finishing the last page of The Firebird in St Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of other things. I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring. Such was the theme of the Sacre du Printemps."

This is the entire story of the ballet; various pagan rituals including divination, "marriage by capture", and "adoration of the earth". The grand finale is the ritual sacrifice where the chosen young maid dances herself to death, as Stravinsky describes.

The Rite of Spring premiered the evening of May 28, 1913. It was not welcomed as the fine composition we regard it to be today; instead there was a riot, now notorious in music history classes everywhere. BBC Online describes the music as "simply barbaric, incomprehensible" to listeners and critics of the time. The piece opens with a bassoon note far out of the traditional range of the instrument, almost unrecognizable as a bassoon. According to Philip Glass, writing for Time magazine, "renowned composer Camille Saint-Saens conspicuously walked out, complaining loudly of the misuse of the instrument." At a performance of the Firebird, Richard Strauss told Stravinsky, "You make a mistake beginning your piece pianissimo [softly]; the public will not listen. You should astonish them by a sudden crash at the very start. After that they will follow you and you can do whatever you like." Evidently Stravinsky took this advice to heart!

The choreography, by Vaslav Nijinsky, was difficult and unusual; one of the dancers related, "With every leap we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us." The music clearly heralded the beginning of twentieth century style: the well-established rules of harmony, form, and tonality are disregarded. The rhythms are primitive and irregular, with lots of repetition. An orchestra member that night described The Rite of Spring in terms of "complicated rhythms, atrocious dissonances and strange sounds".

Apparently the audience agreed. There were hisses and catcalls, loud protests and fights. In my first music history class, our instructor told us of Stravinsky climbing out a backstage window to avoid the angry crowd. If that did indeed happen, Stravinsky did not relate it in his own version of the story. Here is how Stravinsky related the incident in his autobiography:

"...the Sacre du Printemps was given on May 28 at the evening performance. The complexity of my score had demanded a great number of rehearsals, which Monteux had conducted with his usual skill and attention. As for the actual performance, I am not in a position to judge, as I left the auditorium [to stand in the wings] at the first bars of the prelude, which had at once evoked derisive laughter. I was disgusted. These demonstrations, at first isolated, soon became general, provoking counter-demonstrations and very quickly developing into a terrific uproar. During the whole performance I was at Nijinsky's side in the wings. He was standing on a chair, screaming "sixteen, seventeen, eighteen"--they had their own method of counting to keep time. Naturally, the poor dancers could hear nothing by reason of the row in the auditorium and the sound of their own dance steps. I had to hold Nijinsky by his clothes, for he was furious, and ready to dash on stage at any moment and create a scandal. Diaghileff kept ordering the electricians to turn the lights on or off, hoping in that way to put a stop to the noise. That is all I can remember about that first performance. Oddly enough, at the dress rehearsal, to which we had, as usual, invited a number of actors, painters, musicians, writers, and the most cultured representatives of society, everything had gone off peacefully, and I was very far from expecting such an outburst."

The Rite of Spring is a fascinating piece of music. For more information on The Rite of Spring or Igor Stravinsky, I would suggest:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/profiles/stra...
http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists...
http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/mil...

Stravinsky’s autobiography is available through Amazon.com at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0...

Touching the Past--Beethoven's Hair

Author: Sandra Miller
Published on: December 1, 2001

This isn't your usual Music History article. Every now and then in the course of the reading I do about music history, I come across something really fascinating, really different, something that hasn't been done before. Beethoven's Hair was one of those books. Part scientific study, part biography, part epic travel across more than a century, Beethoven's Hair was the first non-fiction book I really felt I couldn't put down.

Apart from manuscripts and letters, we don't really have much to physically connect us to great composers of the past. Of course there are those who have made their fortunes selling bogus Beethoven artifacts, but it came as a surprise to me to find that a genuine, tangible artifact survives in the form of a framed lock of Beethoven's hair. How this lock of hair survived from Beethoven's death in 1827 in Vienna to resurface in the present day in Denmark is a fascinating story that the style of this book ensures you will not tire of reading. It is more like a sweeping epic novel than a history lesson.

The book explores Beethoven's life in surprising detail, as well as the lives of the people whose hands guarded this lock of hair through the decades. There is some fascinating Romantic era history here, presented in a new light. Ultimately the hair wound up for auction in the Sotheby's December 1994 books and music auction, to be purchased by two American Beethoven enthusiasts. From there the really interesting science kicks in, as we follow the hair through numerous tests and procedures designed to shed more light on the lifestyle of Ludwig van Beethoven, and possible the nature of the mysterious illness that caused his deafness.

--WARNING--SPOILERS AHEAD

If you intend to read this book, don't read any farther! Read Beethoven's Hair, then come back and finish the article and tell us what you thought of the book. We'll still be here!

Now, on with the spoilers!

The most significant finding of the tests, to my mind, was the conclusion that the levels of lead found in Beethoven's hair were forty-two times the level of lead found in the average person's hair sample. Forty-two! The author presents a description of the symptoms of this kind of massive lead poisoning, and when compared to the descriptions found in Beethoven's own letters and journals, it makes a very convincing case. Lead poisoning seems to be the one hypothesis put forth so far that would explain Beethoven's numerous and seemingly unrelated health complaints. He had an impressive list, including buzzing and ringing in his ears, progressive hearing loss leading to total deafness, diarrhea, fever, abdominal cramping, severe headaches, rheumatism, jaundice, constipation, eye pain, nosebleeds, vomiting, pneumonia, and finally liver failure. The list of symptoms for severe lead poisoning coincides very well with this.

If we accept lead poisoning as a fact, and most likely the cause of Beethoven's problems, the next obvious question is, how in the world did he acquire and maintain such massive levels of lead in his system anyway?

Explaining how the high levels of lead were maintained over possibly thirty years is fairly straightforward. As Russell Martin, the author of Beethoven's Hair, describes, "lead is quickly deposited in bone, where it readily resides for many years, and from which source it subsequently is released back into the body." So while it is possible that Beethoven at one point ingested an enormous amount of lead and suffered residual effects for the rest of his life, I'm not sure that is a convincing explanation. What quantity of lead would it take to show evidence of forty-two times the normal level, thirty years later? And how would a man accidentally ingest that enormous quantity of lead? It is more plausible to imagine a slower and more continuous ingestion of lead from some source of which Beethoven was unaware.

This is one place where I find the book's explanations to be lacking. Beethoven's Hair suggests leaden dishes, "plumbed" (leaded) wine, and even lead-soldered pipes in Vienna's water system. Without knowing whether many other residents of Vienna at the time suffered the same effects, it is hard to dismiss any one of these, but it does make one more inclined to look for other explanations as well.

Gail S Altman has an interesting hypothesis in her book, Fatal Links. In this book she examines the deaths of Beethoven, Napoleon, and the Duke of Reichstadt (who happened to be Napoleon's son). All three, she says, were suspicious deaths mistakenly labeled as natural diseases at the time. All three men exhibited extremely similar symptoms, yet were labeled with three very different causes. Beethoven: cirrhosis, Napoleon: cancer, Reichstadt: tuberculosis. Considering this book was written before the results of the test on Beethoven's hair were made public, it is uncanny just how accurate her predictions seem. I haven't read this book yet, only the synopsis and an interview Ms Altman did on the subject. It seems a great follow-up for Beethoven's Hair, though, as it seems she attempts to answer the one questions Russell Martin leaves unanswered: why?

This is really a fascinating subject. You can find Beethoven's Hair at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0...

A really well done companion site for the book can be found at http://www.randomhouse.com/features/beet...

You can also visit the Ira F Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies (which houses the hair) at http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/beethovenThey even have a picture of the hair on their website!

Fatal Links is available at http://www.polaris.net/~anubis/fatal.htm.

If you're up for an adventure, try listening to this computer-finished overture based on unpublished Beethoven sketches and fragments of the Ghost Trio: http://www.unheardbeethoven.org/search/s...

Twentieth Century Music: The Twelve-Tone System

Author: Sandra Miller

Published on: December 30, 2001

When discussing twentieth-century music, the term "twelve-tone" always comes up. It seems an alarming technical term, with the result that many people don't know anything about it but the name. In truth, it is a very simple concept. And yet it represents a great step away from the music of the centuries before.

To understand what is so different about the twelve-tone system, you have to understand a little bit about how music is traditionally structured. A traditional piece of music is composed in one of the twelve keys; either major or minor. The key determines what pitch the piece will center around; a piece composed in C major will center around the pitch C, and in general the phrases in the piece will gravitate toward the pitch C. The structure of the musical phrases, the harmony lines, and the chord structure are all influenced by the key, and chords will be chosen based on their relation to the C major chord.

If you didn't understand all of that, don't worry, because the twelve-tone system tosses it all out. The twelve tone system was the result of an endeavor by Arnold Schoenberg to ensure that no one tone could be more important than any other. There is no "dominant" pitch, as there is in traditionally composed music (in our C major piece discussed before, the dominant pitch is C, and other pitches will be dominant to lesser and lesser degrees depending on their relation to C.)

The fundamental rule of twelve-tone composition is that no one pitch can be repeated before each of the other eleven have been heard. In a nutshell, that is the twelve-tone system. The rest is the details; the rules describing how you must ensure the fundamental rule is observed.

The first thing you must determine is the order in which you will present the twelve tones. The twelve tones of the chromatic scale are (starting with C for the sake of convenience): C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B. You can present these tones in any order you choose, so long as each tone is included and is heard only once. This is called a "tone row". The tone row is the basic unit of twelve-tone music. You can see how tedious it would be to listen to a composition based on the same precise ordering of tones, over and over ad nauseum. This is why the twelve-tone system has built-in methods to allow you to vary the tone row. The original presentation of the tone row is called the prime form. These variations all start from the prime form of the tone row.

TRANSPOSITION: You are permitted to adjust the entire row up or down by any number of notes, as long as every note in the series is adjusted by the same number of notes. As a result, your whole tone row will move up or down as a unit, but the overall "sound" of the row remains the same.

RETROGRADE: The retrograde form of the tone row, as you might imagine from the name, is simply the prime row backwards. Start with the last note and proceed through, ending on the first note.

INVERSION: Inversion is a little more complex. Inversion is probably the most confusing of the variation techniques, and it requires an understanding of intervals. Intervals are basically the distances between notes. If you arrange the twelve tones of the chromatic scale in an ascending line, as we did above, you can count the number of notes (half-steps) between two tones to determine the interval. For instance, from the tone F to the tone A is four notes (half-steps). This interval is called a major third. To invert a row, you take the interval between each two notes are reverse it. For instance, if the prime form of your tone row began with a major third going up (from A to C#, for instance), you would alter the row so that it started with a major third going down (in this case from A to F).

RETROGRADE INVERSION: As you might guess from the name, this technique combines retrograde and inversion rows. First you invert the row, then you flip it backwards. Voila! Retrograde inversion.

There you have it; the twelve-tone system in a nutshell. Of course the twelve-tone system was only the beginning, and Schoenberg's invention was refined and expanded upon later in the twentieth century; today the twelve-tone system is often regarded as only a small part of serialism. But the twelve-tone system started it all, and took a giant step into atonalism, breaking the boundaries of traditional key-based music.

Twelve-tone composition is extremely interesting. For more information, I would recommend:

The Library at Thinkquest has a really great walkthrough of the twelve-tone system, with sound samples and graphics and even a Flash demonstration. You can find them at http://library.thinkquest.org/27110/nofr...

This site has an excellent, though somewhat technical, explanation of the twelve-tone system, and touches on improvements made by later composers. http://www.geocities.com/al6an6erg/seria...