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Romeo and Juliet in Russian music

The philosophy of this blog is that it will be a good time when humanity no longer has to deal centrally with economics or politics and can concentrate on life and culture -  understood in the widest sense and including art.

Unfortunately, however, we have not yet arrived at that point. Too many people in the world are still too poor, and too many things still too threatening, to have such a luxury.

The pleasure and learning experience of listening to music has therefore been disrupted in the last few weeks by the need to follow world financial markets - hence the delay in posts on this blog. There has been no financial crisis on this scale since 1929 and events which occur only once or twice in a lifetime need study. This has meant time following London Interbank Offer Rates, movements in US Treasury Bond yields, relative rates of investment in the US and China and similar matters.

I find such issues deeply intellectually interesting, in addition to important, but it has left little time to listen to music properly. I normally listen even while working, but in this case the importance of concentrating on what is taking place elsewhere made it impossible to take in even in outline either music or performance.

Hence the pleasure of a natural break this weekend while the US Congress and president Bush are spending their time negotiating the Paulson bank bail out package - which makes it possible to listen to some serious music and performances with the attention they deserve (not as background I hasten to add).

As one of the several purposes of this blog is to promote outstanding performances which have not received the attention they deserve, this post puts in a big plug for a Melodiya CD of Kynill Kondrashin conducting Tchaikovsky - available on Amazon. 

The longest item is a fine performance of Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony - although Mravinsky still has an edge as regards Russian interpretations. But what makes the CD truly outstanding is the finest performance of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet overture I have heard. In order to understand its character it may be worth making a small digression through Russian music's encounter with the world's most famous love story.

One of the most delightful ironies of English culture is that its greatest writer, and also its greatest contributer to world culture, has nothing in common with the 'stiff upper lip', 'lie back, close your eyes and think of England,' ethos which characterised Victorian Britain, and which pervades aspects of England to this day.

Romeo and Juliet is a perfect illustration of just how alien Shakespeare is to such English 'understatement'. Of all its strokes of genius perhaps structurally its most outstanding, as has been pointed out, is its compression of time. The lovers go from first meeting to suicide in a maximum of six days. There is nothing in the sources dictating such time compression, which was therefore deliberately introduced by Shakespeare. It is decisive in giving the play its characteristic of extremes - the time compression embodies its supercharged and driven character in a shattering emotional outburst. From an 'objective' psychological viewpoint both Romeo and Juliet were deeply disturbed and unbalanced. But love being one of the most out of control of all emotions this shattering character undoubtedly helps give Romeo and Juliet its dominant position as the love story in world literature.

Perhaps for this reason also Russian musical culture understands Romeo and Juliet very well. I frequently describe Russia to West Europeans, who do not know it, as somehow 'Spain in a cold climate' - intense passion amid violent, because overwhelming, nature. Romeo and Juliet, with its deliberately extreme and out of balance passion, which encompasses not only love but the violence of the family feud, resonates with that perfectly. Freud held that sex and violence were the two most powerful human drives and certainly the grip exercised on the world's cultural imagination by Romeo and Juliet does nothing to refute that view.

Prokofiev caught both elements in his own Romeo and Juliet - not only in the great love music but in the 'Knights Dance' becoming the classic music accompaniment to lectures on war. If you wish to see one of the greatest performances of anything get the Bolshoi DVD of Lavrovsky and Bessmertnova performing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (finer, in my opinion, even than the film made with Galina Ulanova in 1954 - although that is itself superb, while the excerpts of Maya Plisetskaya performing Juliet, which are available most readily on Maya Plisetskaya: Diva of Dance, are even more remarkable but only small fragments).

Kondrashin brings out both aspects of the story/music quite superbly in this interpretation of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. Although Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev are, of course, very different in style - more than seventy years separate their musical reactions to Shakespeare's play - both understand both the love and the violence.

The CD's booklet interestingly quotes a letter of Tchaikovsky in which he writes 'after long reflections I come to a conclusion, that the old but always new story of "Romeo and Juliet" matches my temperament best of all.'

In Kondrashin;s performance the love music is beautifully fluid, melting and sensual - technically achieved by a really subtle flexibility in tempo around his central pulse, which gives a human and subjective character to the music, and by nuanced and exquisite phrasing. The music of the feud/duel achieves its impact of extreme violence by its extremely rapid tempo combined with heavy rhythmic stress - wonderful virtuosity by the Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra making this combination possible.

This is a superlative interpretation not only of a musical masterpiece but of its relations to one of the most influential plays in world culture. Given that Melodiya CDs are only spasmodically available, readers of this blog who are interested should snap it up now. 

Paul Henry Smith's comment

Paul Henry Smith, who can be contacted at his site here, raises several of the most important issues of philosophy in his post on Shostakovich, Pletnev and Bernstein. As these affect music, art, and many other questions, and are fundamental to issues dealt with in this blog, the following post deals with some of them. Paul Henry Smith is clearly able explain his own views so this 'comment on his comment' is only mine.
The first issue involved is what is in technical philosophical terminology 'ontological monism' - put non- technically it means that there is only one realm of reality and not more than one. To understand the  implications of this consider some non-monist philosophies.
A classic example is Descartes - who held there were two different realities, 'mind and matter' or 'spirit and matter'. This is a dualist philosophy - i.e. one with two fundamental realities.
To take another example, Kant distinguished between 'phenomena', the world as it is perceived, and 'noumena', the world as it actually is (the 'thing in itself).
Non-monist philosophies lead to well known and impossible philosophical contradictions.
Descartes and his followers, for example, could not answer the question of how these two realms were supposed to interact, or the causal relation between them - arriving at the bizarre conclusion this interaction between matter and spirit took place through the pineal gland! Kant claimed that there could be no knowledge of 'the thing in itself' but simultaneously contradicted himself by claiming to have a crucial piece of knowledge about it - namely that it existed!
Monist philosophies were put forward by the ancient Greeks and in Asian philosophies. However in post-renaissance Europe Spinoza was the philosopher who first decisively put forward a monist conception of the world.
Naturally most people do not study, adhere to or even know about philosophical systems. But nevertheless philosophical viewpoints are built into parts of language or particular views put forward.
One concept, which both the original post on Shostakovich and Paul Henry Smith refer to, is that  there is some 'spirit' of a work separate from what actually exists in the score, or in the play, or the painting. Another example is the frequent suggestion by Frederic Jameson, for example, that what has to be looked for is the 'essence' of a work of art - which is apparently separate from what actually exists in sight, or in sound etc. A further typical example may be found in a book such as Surface and Depth by Richard Shusterman. These frequently implicitly conceive that there is some 'spirit', or 'essence' or 'depth' which is separate from what actually exists.
Such a view is wrong. There is no such separate realm separate from what actually exists - whether as sound or visually or any other form. This does not mean that terms such as 'essence' cannot be used but they do not refer to anything which has a real existence separate from the actually existing.
Any philosophy course immediately makes the point that (pace Plato) there is no 'essence of whale' or 'concept of whale' existing separately from actual whales. There is equally no 'spirit' of Beethoven's Eroica symphony.
A second issue Paul Henry Smith deals with is that the observer, or in this case the listener, of course imposes their own order on that reality. He deals with the example of how we hear the interval of 'a fifth' in music. But we could equally take many other examples - that is there is no 'naive' perception of reality. An order is always imposed on reality by the observer/listener.
These issues have many implications a number of which are considered in this blog.

Paul Henry Smith - on 'Shostakovich, Pletnev, Bernstein - a comment'

The following comment has been received from Paul Henry Smith - whose site is Paul Henry Smith. It was sent as a comment to the post 'Shostakovich, Pletnev, Bernstein - a comment'.  However because of its interest it is also posted here separately.

Paul Henry Smith wrote:

"there exists nothing over and above what is composed and performed."

To elaborate ...

All music exists in the mind of the listener. There is no other "actually" existing reality. (One could even claim this about sound, but that's not important for this discussion.)

This is not the same as the old saw about the tree falling in the forest with no one to see it. Music is different.

Consider this ...

Think about an ascending melodic fifth (or any interval). After the first sound is played, it's gone. Right? It "actually" doesn't exist any more.

The second sound comes along in all its "actual" existence (for that moment) yet somehow we hear a fifth. If the first note no longer exists, where, then, does the fifth come from? How could something, the fifth, exist when half of it doesn't exist (in this strict "actual" sense you allude to)?

The fifth is in the mind of the listener.

All musical structure exists in this same way. A line, a harmony, a motif. Without a listening mind to perceive and organize sensory data, the only things that can be said to exist are air pressure waves. And we know that those are not sufficient to "be" music.

So, you are right that there is no already-existing Shostakovich symphony (in any ideal or actual sense). It must be produced in sound to exist. However, you are also right that the composer has given us some instructions (has told us what he wanted, as you put it). Those instructions actually exist, too. That's what the score is, nothing more, nothing less.

We assume the composer's vision of what's possible by putting these sounds together in the way he indicated is worth trying to produce. If we go through the steps and follow directions, we MIGHT get to have the kind of experience Shostakovich imagined or had.

Thus the only reasons ever to make changes to the instructions are:

1. The performer doesn't understand the score and can't make it work as written. Maybe we'll slow down the ending, then.

2. The performer understands better than the composer what's needed to make the experience coalesce as music.

3. The instructions themselves are incomplete insofar as they do not specify every aspect of musical utterance for every element indicated in the score. That is, for example, every note has its pitch and rhythm indicated, but not every element has its own dynamic marking. This incompleteness is a failing of musical notation, perhaps.

4. The performer is not engaged in the activity of trying to get to the composer's vision. He's instead trying to showcase period instruments or some new way of playing, fit the music to a film, impress the audience with the power and stamina of the brass section, and so on, ad infinitum.

5. Like no. 2, there is some that doesn't quite work and the performer decides to change it. Using horns in the recap of the Beethoven's Fifth instead of bassoons, for example. Beethoven didn't write that, but the logic of the music almost demands it. (However, I think that, of course, bassoons would also work ... would lead to what Beethoven envisioned). Some music is more malleable in this way. Instrumentation can be changed, and the possibility of getting to the composer's vision is not destroyed. Think of Bach's art of the fugue. No instruments are indicated in the score at all. A saxophone quartet or an organ can play that piece and remain true to the composer's intentions.

The point is simple. Music exists in the mind of the listener. Sounds put together in a way that follows the instructions of a composer (perhaps a genius) can lead to music that might be a great experience.

The idea of an "actually existing" piece of music outside of this doesn't make sense and can't really be defended or even explained.

If you want to go further down this philosophical road, you would do well to read what Roman Ingarden had to say about the subject.

"Utwór muzyczny i sprawa jego tożsamości" (The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity), Wydawnictwo, Warszawa, 1966.

Or, in translation:

"The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity", transl. Adam Czerniawski; Jean Harrell ed., Berkeley: University of Califomia Press; and London: Macmillan, 1986.

"L’opera musicale e il problema della sua identità", Flaccovio, Palermo 1989.

"Qu’est – ce qu’ne oeuvre musicale?", transl. D. Smoje, Paris: C. Bourgois 1989.

Or more generally ...

"The Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, the Picture, the Architectural Work, the Film", transl. R. Meyer and J.T. Goldthwait, Athens: Ohio UP 1989.