Listening to Rachmaninoff

My first experience of a live performance of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto occurred in Los Angeles when I was fifteen. Van Cliburn was the soloist with the L.A. Philharmonic. His playing of the noble, plaintive initial theme still rings in my mind, so assured and expressive in its shape, and needless to say, his command of the work’s surging virtuosity was compelling to my adolescent ears. This was a year after Cliburn won the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, as he had a few years earlier won the Levintritt Competition in New York. His recording of the Rachmaninoff became a favorite of mine, to be partly supplanted first by Horowitz’s performance in the 70s and Argerich’s in the 80s. Here's a link to the Van Cliburn cd: https://www.amazon.com/Sergei-Rachmaninoff-Piano-Concerto-No-3/dp/B00AGU1S8M/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1547609140&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=rachmaninoff+piano+concerto+3+van+cliburn
- one to the Horowitz: Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 3; and one to the Argerich performance: Rachmaninoff: Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 / Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23.

At eighteen I took a couple of piano lessons from the great pianist Egon Petri, who lived then a few miles south of U.C. Berkeley, where I attended college. His recording of the late Beethoven piano sonatas had been a great favorite of mine (here is a link to the cd Beethoven Sonatas: Egon Petri in Recital; see my earlier post on other great performances of those sonatas). In awe I visited his apartment and absorbed all I could. He already was suffering from his last illness, and he connected me to one of his best pupils, Julian White – a brilliant pianist and generous teacher like Petri, offering particularly keen insights into the structure of phrases, passages, and movements. I took lessons from White for three years.

At one of our lessons, he told me about his experiences as a student at Julliard and his friendship with Van Cliburn. When Cliburn was training” for the Levintritt competition, Julian told me to my amazement, their mutual teacher Rosina Lhevinne asked White to be a sort of all-day coach. I was nineteen when I heard this story, and I made an assumption about White’s help, which I now realize was false. I imagined that White had served to prompt musical passion and engagement in the great young pianist, as if he were a sort of blank tablet. Listening again to Cliburn’s recordings from the fifties through the seventies, I realize that can’t have been true, for what Van Cliburn possesses at his core is passion, even to the point of violence. What White probably provided was an auditor to help in pacing practice and a sense of occasion for the discipline involved – and perhaps also what he provided for me: insights into structure, shaping and controlling the beauty of phrases, the passion of passages.

I’m prompted to think about all this because I’ve searched for a recorded performance of Rachmaninoff’s second piano sonata which echoes the extraordinary poignancy of Alexander Ghindin’s Master Class performance of the slow second theme of the first movement, a few weeks ago. Only Cliburn’s recording comes close (a link to that performance on cd: Great Pianists 19).

some plans

Over this past week, I've planned to write about Hemingway and Babel, about Walter Benjamin and Derrida, and about some performances I admire of classical music. I'll try in these next weeks to offer comments on each (though they'll be curtailed due to added commitments which have arisen).

I'm hoping to comment on the issue of how Hemingway and Babel differently portray ways of surviving in a hostile universe - and, with regard to the former, I'm struck by the bearing of two quotations on his work. One is Lawrence's remark the Hemingway fearlessly reveals what it feels like to lose all hope. The other remark is more obliquely relevant; it's W. C. Williams' idea in introducing the little magazine he edited in the early 1920s: "Contact" is a man without abstract analysis, parody, abstract ethics - with nothing but immediate contact with his world.

And I'm interested in how the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made use of Walter Benjamin's thinking about repairing the broken world, attending to what disappears into its cracks and fissures, and defining the role of hope in human life. The link I'll try to explore is between Derrida's Spectres of Marx and Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations.

Finally, I intend to comment on some of the musical performances which I've found most moving and illuminating - there are performances of Beethoven I'm tempted again to cite, but I'll let a single example about Schuber suffice for now: Sviatoslav Richter's performance of Schubert's last piano sonata (D. 960 in B-flat), playing the first movement at an unusually slow tempo which allows him to convey with great force the beauty in every phrase. [Here's a link to the cd: Schubert: Piano Sonatas D.958, D.960 ~ Richter .]

Conclusion of "Under Western Eyes" and Silence (plus a note on Alexander Ghindin)

On Friday (August 5^th), I was in the audience of a master class offered by the great Russian pianist Alexander Ghindin to three participants in the Cleveland International Piano Competition. Mr. Ghindin, a member of the competition jury, is a brilliant teacher as well as pianist, offering a wealth of insight and advice without diminishing the student. The second pianist had performed the Rachmaninoff Piano Sonata, op. 36 (original version) during the semi-finals of the competition, and when he played the first bar for Ghindin, the Russian immediately offered extraordinary suggestions to reconceive and release the power of the opening. The most poignant moment in this session occurred when the slow theme sounded out less than two minutes into the sonata. Again, Mr. Ghindin offered a suggestion, and when he illustrated how the passage should be phrased, he played with such sorrow and tenderness that tears came to my eyes. Then he spoke of a Russian notion of pathos – of the isolation of suffering, of sadness, compassion, and yearning for happiness all mixed together. But it was his playing of the single line of music which spoke most eloquently of these things, incredibly tender and piercing. [Here is a link to one of Ghindin's cds: Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1 & 4 (Original Versions).]

There is a powerful expression of such empathic sorrow in Conrad's creation of the Russian women characters in Under Western Eyes. These characters struggle for meaning in a world where meaning is silenced; in such a realm, the capacity to empathize and to perceive another without blinders is endangered, for in this world compassion is manipulatively selective or erased from consciousness. Apart from Razumov, most of the Russian men enact totalitarian roles, even the travestied revolutionary Peter Ivanovich, an unholy combination of Kropotkin and Bakunin. Russian women, however, join Razumov in choosing to cast off their erased and betrayed status and to emerge, even if into silence and suffering, "to burn rather than rot" (177), to struggle for meaning within its silencing in a totalized society. [Here, again, is the Amazon link: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics).]

These women characters - Sophia Antonovna, Tekla, Mrs. Haldin, and above all the daughter Natalia - ironically and unstably shift between opposed roles, and their ambiguity constitutes a crucial structural tension in the novel. Western romance conventions shadow Razumov’s realization of “the possibility of being loved” by Natalia, but his discovery prompts the nightmare realization of what Sophia calls the “ignominy” of existence in the East (266).  There is a Dostoyevskian role of women, which is searchingly intense, revelatory, yet nurturing – Peter Ivanovich voices the standard cliché: "Admirable Russian women!" (86) – and in this novel it collides with the image of women as traditional heroines from Western fiction, gifted in attuning the community to the "heart's" needs. The instability of these characters - correctively shifting between Eastern and Western images and conventions - reinforces the sense of modern emergency in characterization and narrative convention. The portrait of these women characters enacts a sense of crisis in the silenced and erased status of the "human," a crisis in sustaining the capacity for empathic comprehension in the modern world. 

Perhaps the best way to describe the critical and structural instability achieved by Conrad is to broach the notion of "playing dead" - as a means of exploring the deadnesses of modern existence. The self-hobbling, interiorized, Dostoyevskian confession is a form of such playing dead, simultaneously desired by the totalitarian state yet not perfectly fulfilling its wishes, for Dostoyevskian confession subverts the totalitarian version of confessional rhetoric, making it the instrument for an unpredictable disorder and fullness of possibility, for polyphony to use Bakhtin's resonant term. In the case of Razumov's journal, its apparent "deadness" (with its implicit acquiescence in the act of confession) masks a subversive, invigorating flux of possibility, above all the possibility of contact.

For the victims of such a world of numbing simulation and lies, it is no accident that these characters should exhibit "a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity," as the Professor observes (6). This Russian ethos of contact – this use of language and form – offers a model for many future efforts in modern fiction to draw a voice from the silence of the controlled, "totalized," insulated world its characters inhabit. Thus Natalie Sarraute writes: "[A] continual, almost maniacal need for contact ... attracts all such characters like dizziness and incites them on occasions to try, by any means whatsoever, to clear a path to the 'other,' to penetrate him as deeply as possible and make him lose his disturbing, unbearable opaqueness" (33). 

Razumov's desperate act of "contact" is his confession to the very persons he has betrayed. In this way he subverts and silences the totalized expectations of his speech; after he is deafened for his troubles, he exists in a world of exterior silence, "playing" or appearing dead in terms of the fabrications and prefabrications of the totalized society. Yet as a result he is himself contacted, cared for, and listened to by Sophia, Tekla, and others, and he becomes a source of meaningful speech for the alienated inhabitants outside and silenced by the totalized field. Razumov and his fragile circle of survivors face the haunted, illusory specter - the deadness - of their society, and their role is not only to tell the dangerous, potentially immolating truths, to grieve in advance for all the betrayals their society suffers and enacts; their role is also to testify to the possibility of just and compassionate relations.

In "Autocracy and War," Conrad writes that - in the face of societal delusion and oppression - it is only by using "our sympathetic imagination" that we may glimpse the possibility of any "triumph of concord and justice" (84) [see this link to Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters]. In the end, Razumov and his listeners inhabit the land of the silenced where they struggle to imagine and communicate fragmentary, forecasting images of what community, freedom, truth, and justice might be. These characters thus embody a sort of waiting described by later writers - from Walter Benjamin (264) and Adorno (247) to Derrida (168) - a waiting which places their suffering and grief in the perspective of possibility: that the future may yet exist, obliterated though it now is, decipherable perhaps in the paradoxical cracks and crevices of a narrative which allows the significance of Razumov's silence to manifest itself. 

The idea of "playing dead" - and all it may signify - applies even to the British professor. Concerned always with detachment in manner and sentimental propriety in plot, his narration is "dead" to the motives and issues of the scenes he observes, issues we discover from Razumov's juxtaposed journal. As one reads the professor's narration, its deadness - its clichés, its imperceptions, its incapacity to comprehend or express the lives it attempts to render - becomes a structural paradox, for it is only in the West - inside Geneva and this Professor's denying, sentimentalizing narration - that the utterances of the novel exist at all. The novel thus becomes a model of how to balance East and West with and against one another, in order to allow for the mutual survival of human beings on both sides of the Slavic/Western or any imperial, racial, or national divide. The denials and deadnesses of the West become equally, then, a rhetoric of "playing dead," a paradoxical cover for the struggle to use speech to utter meaning. For Conrad, only in ironic tension and perspective can either language - Slavic or Western - be retrieved from its deadnesses; only so can silence produce meaning. (Rather different approaches to the significance of “silence” in Conrad can be found in studies by Carabine, Fogel, and GoGwilt.)

Conrad's art is based in a language which plays on the edge of silence. This is the core paradox of his modernism: his art would use language as if it utters meaning in order simultaneously to expose language's failure to convey meaning and sustain the vanishing possibility that meaning can be conveyed. Hence, silence becomes the sign of truth, of escape from the being and world of lies: the deaf Razumov at novel's end is visited by the characters whose endurance is nurtured by hearing him utter some form of truth from within his silence. Once again, the narrative emerges from silence and honors its origins. Conrad offers here an image of tragically belated romanticism; when Razumov writes in his journal on Rousseau's Island in Lake Geneva, he asks the same questions which Rousseau's Solitary Traveler posed there a century and a half before (206). Can we use silence and irony, the suspension and negation or "forgetting" of the self's roles, to create meaning?

In the answer offered by modernism's language for the arts, silence becomes speech, fragmentation suggests an absent wholeness, absence implies presence, dissonance is all the harmony there is, and descent into the heart of darkness can yield visionary illumination. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad employs modernist strategies akin to those in Heart of Darkness, where the totalitarian abomination is racist imperialism rather than autocracy. In each text, Conrad indicts the symbiosis of colonizer and colonized, master and servant, the former transformed - with god-like presumption and absolutism - into an instrument of barbaric domination, the latter struggling with desperate absoluteness to overcome dehumanized subjection. In the dialectical vision of each text, the reader is located at the focal point of modernist paradox, where endless interrogation dominates and exposes every facet of the human, where the "human" is driven into silence and negation and the literary text forced into fragmentation and perspectivism. 

In Conrad's novel of 1911, the reader experiences a far-reaching deconstruction of conceptions of the Slavic and of Russia; we are made to explore a paradoxical field where all "truths" are revealed to be compounded with illusion, all speech compounded with silence. Conradian perspectivism exposes the implacable insecurity of basing the struggle for meaning in any national, ethnic, or societal images; meaning is achieved only, if at all, in the shared recognition that it emerges from silence, from its own erasure. Compassion is an imaginative act in this regard, for it operates against all societal prompts to the contrary: "sympathetic imagination" - as Conrad calls it - locates the human and imagines meaning within the silenced and erased "other" who faces one across the divides which society erects. To act "as if" meaning exists, with a continual awareness of its emergence from erased images and silenced voices, is what can be achieved in a world where all manifestations of individual and community are shown to be either instruments or victims of interrogative domination. For Conrad, any conception of individual or community which now arises or endures can emerge only from the resulting silence. As if silence were a form of speech.