Summary
Pianist and writer whose The Romantic Generation, the substantially expanded Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard in 1980-81, is the subject of the fortieth essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: his analytic gift for walking and playing through pieces, above all Chopin and Schumann, is set against his garrulous cultural exposition and his scheme’s closed edges (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.450-457).
Details
- He writes not as a musicologist but as an extremely literate pianist — the book is accompanied by a CD of illustrative extracts played by him — and his underlying concentration is J. S. Bach’s polyphonic genius at work in Romantic music: not Mendelssohn but Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and before them Beethoven and Mozart, “discovered” Bach (PDF p.450).
- On Chopin: “there is a paradox at the heart of Chopin’s style, in its unlikely combination of a rich chromatic web of polyphony, based on a profound experience of J. S. Bach, with a sense of melody and a way of sustaining the melodic line derived directly from Italian opera” (quoted PDF p.451); Chopin “was the greatest master of counterpoint since Mozart” and embodies “the most conservative and most radical composer of his generation” (quoted PDF p.454).
- On the Romantics’ sound: “it is an essentially Romantic paradox that the primacy of sound in Romantic music should be accompanied, and even announced, by a sonority that is not only unrealizable but unimaginable” (quoted PDF p.451); “the song cycle is the most original form created in the first half of the 19th century” (quoted PDF p.453).
- Said’s limits: the cultural background is paraphrased without direct inference and disconnected from social, economic and political realities; the Schumann scheme leaves the chamber music out almost entirely; the Berlioz chapter is encapsulated in “it is not Berlioz’s oddity but his normality, his ordinariness that makes him great” (quoted PDF p.455); Mendelssohn is called “the inventor of religious Kitsch” in music (quoted PDF p.455); and declarations such as “a purely musical experience is as powerful a sensation as anything outside music” (quoted PDF p.456) substitute for a theory of the relation between a composer’s life and work.
- Earlier in the same book he is named among the pianists influenced by Glenn Gould’s Bach playing who became known for performing the Goldberg Variations (PDF p.220-221).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Glenn Gould, Contrapuntalism