Rhapsodic
When I was studying with Leonard Stein, who was Schoenberg’s student/assistant …
(by the way he had this old house up in the Hollywood Hills to which I would drive every week and he was pretty old and feisty and “had this neighbor, who was quite attractive I must say — I think she’s an actress or model or something her name is Linda … Evangelista I think? Have you heard of her? Anyway I want to show you this letter Boulez wrote me about Le marteau … “)
…. when he really didn’t dig a piece he would call it “rhapsodic.” He said it with a sneer. And I’m thinking about him this week because it’s all Chopin, Wagner, and Liszt at the KW Symphony.
I personally have no problem with rhapsodic music, because I don’t think structure is everything. I do know a lot about structure, in fact that’s the way I was taught to understand music, but these days I’m thinking about how the music “gets you there.” Structure is all well and good, but music happens in real time, and though the audience might perceive the structure of a piece in some way, they’re much more concerned with the moment to moment. The fun of performing a piece like Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod or Liszt’s Les Préludes is getting there. And by “there” of course I mean a musical CLIMAX. We all know where this piece is going to end up, but the options one has as a performer to get there are infinite! Hmm, that last sentence reminds me of something else (SEX). That’s what’s fun about rhapsodic music — there are fewer structural roadblocks for the performer to do his or her thing. The only problem with rhapsodic music is that without a clear musical form, the listener has to have at least some idea of what’s coming next — so Wagner and Liszt use lots of sequences and you have to deal with those. But I don’t mind, I’ve always had a soft spot for them.
Last week I heard the Berlin Philharmonic play Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 in the big orchestra version, which is a piece I studied with Leonard and know really well. There’s a piece that wears its structure on its sleeve, but it goes by so fast and is so complex (for instance, there are several superimposed structures happening in that piece) that I can’t imagine the audience is following this, though I’m sure they’re aware that the music has structure and is complex in that way. Schoenberg was of course a Structure Queen as was Brahms ,which is why Sir Simon put them on the same program. (You have to read Schoneberg’s essay Brahms the Progressive). In both composers, there’s this tremendous tension between structure and Romantic Sentiment. A kind of self-repression or self-negation going on I think. The structure seems to be the walls holding the wildness back. This is what makes Brahms so difficult to perform well, I think. But when it’s great, when all the structure and emotion are in line it’s beautiful and always a little sad because it’s about real life where rhapsodic music is about our inner fantasies.
And yes, Wagner and Liszt do have structure too, in their own way, but as compositions they are by no means obsessed with it. It’s fun to be in rhapsody / fantasy world this week. Orchestra concerts could use more music like this and less “structure concerts.” Opera, you know where it’s at, you’ve got plenty of both!