He even makes his own pollen on site - fresh every morning! - according to a top-secret family recipe. I gather it's something like a sourdough-starter; the batch they've got going now was started some 113 years ago by the grand-pere.
Quite extraordinary!
*****
Last night I was up until the ghastly hours painstakingly editing the final draft of my upcoming (towering) tome on The Symphony. Less a history of the genre than a philosophical conversation with the symphony, if you will. It seemed the correct approach to that most public and discursive of musical forms.
What is it about a composer's symphonies that we inevitably view them as a cycle? No other musical output is subjected to the same psycho-biographical analysis. Your Tom Quill can slop any number of sonatas out of his inkwell; we rate them for charm and effect, sure enough, but it never occurs to us to divine the scribbler's life story in their crabbed notes. But let him set his mind to work on what was (once) that most mundane of tasks, creating a symphony, and the game is afoot!
Yet the hardest thing of all is to write one's First Symphony. And the hardest part of that is starting it. Once you've got a few notes down (how herculean that towering achievement itself is, how rarely the audience knows!) the rest comes about of its own accord, which is to say, according to the ever-shifting rules of the game.
The difficulty in beginning one's first symphony is precisely due to the previously-noted fact that one's symphony-cycle is the grand vehicle which will carry the weight of its author's life story. The nature of one symphony directly impinges upon and forms the nature of the next in the series.
For example: if one's first symphony takes on a titanic, triumphant air (finally, I've got the damn thing done!), by rule the second symphony must be lyrical, quite personal in tone. It follows then that one's third symphony must wear an austere mantle, formed of cold counterpoint, so that one's fourth symphony may sing in simple spring airs. Then one's fifth symphony must perforce strike a tragic (O lacrimae rerum!) chord (it helps if there's been a war or some local skirmish recently) so that one's sixth symphony in balance may express some deeply civic joy, if not outright pomp.
And so on.
Of course it follows that if your First Symphony is rather a tender love letter to an illicit mistress (or mister) filled with secret, merry allusions and the sounds of shifting chemises, then your second symphony must answer that in no uncertain terms of Love Undone; drafty garrets; Dostoevskian cynicism; the dying embers of life's flame. Only to be alleviated by a neo-classical Third. And so on.
In short, the careful listener will always find a certain affinity (albeit on ever-higher vibratory planes) between a composer's various odd-numbered symphonies, and a certain (other) correspondence betwixt his (her) even-numbered ones.
Last night I was up until the ghastly hours painstakingly editing the final draft of my upcoming (towering) tome on The Symphony. Less a history of the genre than a philosophical conversation with the symphony, if you will. It seemed the correct approach to that most public and discursive of musical forms.
What is it about a composer's symphonies that we inevitably view them as a cycle? No other musical output is subjected to the same psycho-biographical analysis. Your Tom Quill can slop any number of sonatas out of his inkwell; we rate them for charm and effect, sure enough, but it never occurs to us to divine the scribbler's life story in their crabbed notes. But let him set his mind to work on what was (once) that most mundane of tasks, creating a symphony, and the game is afoot!
Yet the hardest thing of all is to write one's First Symphony. And the hardest part of that is starting it. Once you've got a few notes down (how herculean that towering achievement itself is, how rarely the audience knows!) the rest comes about of its own accord, which is to say, according to the ever-shifting rules of the game.
The difficulty in beginning one's first symphony is precisely due to the previously-noted fact that one's symphony-cycle is the grand vehicle which will carry the weight of its author's life story. The nature of one symphony directly impinges upon and forms the nature of the next in the series.
For example: if one's first symphony takes on a titanic, triumphant air (finally, I've got the damn thing done!), by rule the second symphony must be lyrical, quite personal in tone. It follows then that one's third symphony must wear an austere mantle, formed of cold counterpoint, so that one's fourth symphony may sing in simple spring airs. Then one's fifth symphony must perforce strike a tragic (O lacrimae rerum!) chord (it helps if there's been a war or some local skirmish recently) so that one's sixth symphony in balance may express some deeply civic joy, if not outright pomp.
And so on.
Of course it follows that if your First Symphony is rather a tender love letter to an illicit mistress (or mister) filled with secret, merry allusions and the sounds of shifting chemises, then your second symphony must answer that in no uncertain terms of Love Undone; drafty garrets; Dostoevskian cynicism; the dying embers of life's flame. Only to be alleviated by a neo-classical Third. And so on.
In short, the careful listener will always find a certain affinity (albeit on ever-higher vibratory planes) between a composer's various odd-numbered symphonies, and a certain (other) correspondence betwixt his (her) even-numbered ones.
*****
I suppose we have that Grand Sire of the Ball, Mssr. Haydn, to blame for all this symphony mess, even if his enviable inflorescence is rarely read biographically. The task would be herculean, of course.
While the master's prolific output is well-attested, what is not generally known is that Haydn in fact has continued to compose the things, even after his death. The most recent tabulations estimate that there are now somewhere in the realm of 27 trillion Haydn symphonies, bearing nearly every conceivable nickname (affectionately applied by various admirers): The "Doorknob" Symphony, the "Lobster Thermidor" Symphony, the "Glass of Water" Symphony, and so on.
It has likewise been estimated that the sheer weight of Haydn's symphonies thus constitute the single largest body in the known universe - were they to be collected in one spot, of course.
*****
I was discussing the final draft of my soon-to-be-published discourse on (with) the symphony with a colleague at the office, when the charwoman, laboring within earshot in the background, ceased her scouring perambulations, leaned upon the mop and fixed me a hard stare.
"And I suppose your book has precious little to mention about the symphonies of Honegger?" she pronounced in her heavily-accented "English."
I confessed that there was in fact precious little mention of the set, beyond a brief account of Karajan's celebrated battle with a few of 'em.
"They never mention Honegger..." she snorted, and returned to her moppery.
I had quite forgotten that in the Old Country, she had been a countess (or perhaps a baroness, I forget) whose family was known for entertaining various artists at their craggy chalets overlooking various moraines, back in the more felicitous decades of the previous century. Doubtless le Honegger was one of the more distinguished guests. Perhaps he dandled the young countess on his knee and laughed as she recounted one of the merry folk songs of her native land.
The smell of pipe-smoke never fails to bring him back to memory!
"And I suppose your book has precious little to mention about the symphonies of Honegger?" she pronounced in her heavily-accented "English."
I confessed that there was in fact precious little mention of the set, beyond a brief account of Karajan's celebrated battle with a few of 'em.
"They never mention Honegger..." she snorted, and returned to her moppery.
I had quite forgotten that in the Old Country, she had been a countess (or perhaps a baroness, I forget) whose family was known for entertaining various artists at their craggy chalets overlooking various moraines, back in the more felicitous decades of the previous century. Doubtless le Honegger was one of the more distinguished guests. Perhaps he dandled the young countess on his knee and laughed as she recounted one of the merry folk songs of her native land.
The smell of pipe-smoke never fails to bring him back to memory!
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