Notes From A Rough And Busy Week

I POSTED A ROUGH DRAFT of the major piece I put up yesterday,  something I'd tried to stop doing a couple of years back but felt I had to because of the urgency of the hour.   I've gone back and corrected at least some of it.  I should know better than to do that when I'm breaking some of the biggest taboos,  violating the taboo on telling the truth about Israel and Zionism and the crimes of the Israelis and Zionists and the American fascists who make common cause with them but when the Israeli government is trying to get Trump to drop big ones if not THE BIG ONE on a country perhaps setting off WWIII what that will be taken as an opportunity to lie about what I said by the "Israel right or wrong" crowd is of no importance, at all.   I know you can't keep a career in American journalism if you tell the truth about Israel and Zionism - or American fascism, for that matter -  so you don't mention those or lie about that so you can tell the truth about other things in your journalistic career,   but I don't have one of those to worry about.    So I'll speak the thought crimes others won't. 

I was surprised as well as a bit sad to read that the great pianist Alfred Brendel died yesterday, though he retired so long ago that I hadn't thought of him much in the last years.   He was 94.   Reading his obituaries online,  I hadn't ever known the extent to which he was self-taught, probably more so than any major classical musician of our time has been.  Considering he stopped taking formal lessons in his teen years,  his ability to resist devolving into the kind of willful, neurotic, self-generated habits and mannerisms that defined the career of someone most similar to that career description,  to my knowledge,  Glenn Gould, his intellectual honesty and self-discipline and modesty must have been even more extraordinary than I'd thought during his playing career.    

I remember his interview with Dick Cavett for the subtle warmth and humor he demonstrated but most of all for his response to a question about "modern music" perhaps even specifically the widespread hostility for the music of the greatest European composer of the 20th century,  Arnold Schoenberg,  Brendel said that the reason people didn't like it wasn't because it was cold and "mathematical" as they would have said but because, on the contrary, it was among the most emotionally fraught music ever composed.   As I recall he mentioned the Op. 11, Three Pieces for piano and the short monodrama Op. 17 Erwartung, which I still think was one of the more important insights into the music of Schoenberg I've ever heard.  

I've become pretty well convinced that the research into the early 19th century use of the metronome by Wim Winters and his colleagues is correct - a truly revolutionary concept which I may get into someday - so much of Brendel's recordings of Beethoven and other composers contain a number of movements that probably don't represent their intentions nearly as well as I'd once felt they were.  Though I'd have to go through any given recording of it with the score to judge that.   I can say, with some confidence, that Brendel at least tried to do that with the knowledge he had during his career far better than most do.  I would wonder what Brendel may have thought or said about that research though I suspect he would have waited to read the book Winters and his colleagues have been working on to make a definitive version of their case before he said anything about it.   I have to say that having listened to Winters and looking at the contemporaneous sources he and his colleagues cite and listening to their performances as I have access to,  I'm convinced they are right.   Which means my entire conception of that repertoire has been wrong.  I can say that hearing and playing Moazart at the tempos they advocate has greatly elevated my regard of his music, it gains in gravity what is lost when it is played too fast,  the real genius of his music evaporates faster than that of Beethoven's or Schubert's or Bach's, for that matter.  

In the same interview of Brendel by Cavett, he talked about Liszt and played - as I recall it was the piece about St. Francis preaching to the birds - in a way that enormously altered my regard of Liszt's music for the better.   I'd been kind of allergic to Liszt's music before that but he cured me of it.  Though I think Liszt is mostly ill served by performances of his music,  Brendel got me past that.