On Monday, April 11th (tomorrow as of publishing this), I perform my first of three doctoral recitals, containing three large-scale pieces by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Eve Beglarian (b. 1958) and Maurice Ravel (1857-1937). I’ve written program notes for this concert, which I reproduce here (eagle-eyed readers will recognize the first paragraph from my previous essay on The Book of Hanging Gardens).
Composed between 1908 and 1909, Arnold Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (The Book of Hanging Gardens), Op.15, marks the beginning of the composer’s atonal period, pushing an already febrile expressionist musical language to the point of no return to set a portion of the German symbolist Stefan George’s collection of thirty-one poems by the same name. Emotionally overripe and full of danger and wonder, the texts trace the childhood, youth and ascendency, then subsequent ruination and abdication, of a poet-king. The fifteen pieces that make up Schoenberg’s Buch are an interlude of sexual awakening in the middle of George’s cycle, which the poet wrote in 1894 for Ida Coblenz, the woman he described as “[his] world” and the object of his unrequited love. Schoenberg himself wrote his treatment of the material as his marriage was falling apart. His wife Mathilde had just left him for the painter Richard Gerstl, until a close friend of the couple. Unsurprisingly, the journey into George and Schoenberg’s Garden [of Eden] does not end well – nor did it for Gerstl, who died by suicide in 1908 at the age of twenty-five, partially driven to kill himself as a result of the affair. This Garden is a nexus of these men’s unrequited, or unsuccessful, passion.
Richard Gerstl, The Family of Schoenberg (1908), Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna
Richard Gerstl, self-portrait shortly before his death(1908), Leopold Museum, Vienna
Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), Thérèse Dreaming (1938), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In the program note that accompanies She Gets to Decide (2018), Eve Beglarian states that the piece “began as a meditation on the Balthus painting Thérèse Dreaming. While the painting seems unquestionably pervy to me, I am also struck by the power and self-sufficiency Thérèse radiates.” From this departure point, Beglarian has woven together a collage of texts and allusions that explore sexual objectification, abuse and, ultimately, agency. The first section combines the Metropolitan Museum audioguide to the Balthus, the Poulenc Flute Sonata and passages from an article about allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior against the flute teacher Bradley Garner.
In the second section, a duet begins between the singer and a haunting vocode voice, setting pieces of early 20th-century hebephile poetry by Alphonse Momas. Initially frozen in fear, the singer gains in confidence and sexual maturity as the piece progresses, and her part becomes more independent of the track, wider in range and more lyrical. The accompaniment becomes broader and full of low vibrations that seep into the body of the performer and audience; the synthetic voice gradually fades away, and the live singer takes the stage fully. The ambiguous text, which can at first be understood as the thoughts and desires of [her] abuser as well as her own attempts to get away, becomes increasingly her own monologue of sexual pleasure. “Stop… everything is being crushed inside me” takes on a different meaning with each consequent or simultaneous perspective.
The third, and last, section, transitions from the pre-recorded track to a live, semi-imporvised accompaniment on violin (here played by a violist) in a setting of Judge Rosemarie Aquilina’s words to a survivor who testified against Larry Nasser, the United States gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing hundreds of young women in his care: “Leave your pain here and go out and do your magnificent things.” Spanning over two octaves, the simple melody is intimate, solemn and direct while operatic and triumphant. She Gets to Decide addresses a rampant and destructive subject, but it isn’t a prurient tragedy. It’s a reclamation, complicated as most reclamations are.
To quote Beglarian’s program note once more: “Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a letter to Balthus’ mother, Baladine Klossowska, who was Rilke’s lover at the time: ‘a barely arching bridge connects the terrible to the tender.’ Sometimes the way out is through.”
In early 1913, Maurice Ravel was living and working in Clarens, Switzerland with Igor Stravinksy, who told the French composer about a piece he had just heard: Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912). This second-hand discovery obviously caught Ravel’s imagination, and he composed his Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé a few months later for an extended Pierrot ensemble – [soprano] voice, two flutes (doubling piccolo), two clarinets (doubling bass clarinet), string quartet and piano. (Stravinsky, meanwhile, wrote his own Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise for such an instrumentation the same year.)
The poems by Mallarmé chosen by Ravel are particularly rich – and complex – examples of French symbolism, and the composer took special pains to translate them into music: “I transposed the literary procedures of Mallarmé, whom I personally consider France’s greatest poet. I wished to transpose Mallarmé’s poetry into music, especially that preciosity so full of meaning and so characteristic of him.” The resulting songs are veritable boîtes à bijoux of colorful and often obtuse imagery, rendered delicately into some of the most layered and difficult pieces of Ravel’s vocal output.
All three pieces are pensive, quiet and enigmatic. Time seems to stand still in all the songs, whose texts paint love, devotion and melancholy through a microscopic attention to objects. “Soupir” draws on a tradition of nature imagery to describe and decorate a declaration of love, but this is a limpid scene devoid of the more common and exuberant spring images of birds and bright flowers. We are treated instead to an “autumn blanketed with freckles,” “the tender azure of pale and pure October” and “the tawny agony of leaves” on still water. Ravel matches this reserve, never allowing his most lyrical moments to swell too broadly. The string arpeggios and long vocal lines that make up the first part of the song are probably the cycle’s most overtly lyrical music, but when the singer sings her highest note of the piece, a long F-sharp on “fidèle,” the culmination of a slow ascent in her line in this section accompanied by a significant harmony change from the piano, the moment is one of contained magic, pianissimo and internal. “Placet futile,” the most precious of the songs, is a “futile petition” – in the religious sense of the word – to the object of the speaker’s desire, whom he addresses as “Princesse.” The repeated use of divine imagery, especially Classical, characteristic of symbolist style, serves to place the beloved on a pedestal. The preciosity (and objecthood) of the Princesse are emphasized by linking her with the Sèvres cup at her lips, which becomes the departure point for the poem’s colorful, pastoral images – the kind that would typically be painted on this porcelain. Despite the text’s amorous declarations and enjoinders, Ravel again favors a reserved atmosphere full of tender dialogues between the different instruments and the voice. Finally, after the teacup of “Placet,” “Surgi…” shifts its focus to a glass vase in what is the set’s most peculiar and hermetic poem, as well as musical setting. Displaying the greatest departure of instrumentation and tone color, and the most experimental music, the song serves as an account of the affective, minute observation that accompanies the poetic process. It’s a text about transforming the material world into words and sound – the images here are suggestive of associations rather than readable as direct metaphors. Ravel, then, takes on the challenge of faithfully transforming its poetics into music.
Sèvres porcelain – referenced in “Placet futile” – detail (1795), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Although separated by more than a century, Eve Beglarian’s piece obviously shares an aesthetic début du siècle world with Arnold Schoenberg and Maurice Ravel, linked by visual art and texts. Moreover, all three pieces deal with the objects – and most importantly the objectification – of desire. For all of her central, even oppressive, presence in Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, George’s lover is also noticeably absent. She is certainly not a person: instead, she’s an obsession, a judge*, a savior, a ghost… a whole damn(ed) Garden of Eden but never really a woman. Like so many pieces “about” a lover, this is, of course, actually a song cycle about the poet.
The objectification is far less sycophantic in Mallarmé’s poetry: his rendering of objects is tender, loving, malleable. While literal objects – the teacup, the vase, the autumn leaves – are dissected as representations of a loved one or the act of loving in general, they also take on a certain anthropomorphic subjecthood of their own. There’s a sense that to love someone is always to render them yours and therefore to strip away, at least from your perspective, part of their agency. Meanwhile, to map memories and associations on an inanimate thing is also to give it a soul.
This malleability of borders isn’t inherently sinister. In the Ravel settings of Mallarmé, I argue that it’s magical, but it’s true that I’ve called these pieces “jewelry boxes” in this very program note, which implies that they are filled with things, precious though these things may be. Beglarian’s piece explores an extreme of this desire to objectify the things we love, or at least want, and a corrective. What happens when desire, objectification and agency are a dialogue? What happens when an “object” gets to assert her own perspective?
*Note: There’s a fantastic and telling symmetry in George’s plea “Erwähle mich zu denen die dir dienen” (“Elect me to be among those that serve you”), in the third song of Das Buch and Mallarmé’s “Nommez-nous berger de vos sourires” (“Appoint us/name us shepherd of your smiles”) in “Placet futile.”