Loving Gertrude – Sin or Moral Duty?

André Gide: La Symphonie pastorale (English title: The Pastoral Symphony) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ISBN 978-207-035687-4 How I loathed this book at school! How I loved this book when I read it a second time some 30 years later! The simplicity of the story. The beauty of the language. The multi-layered message it contains. What bore me to death when I was young (too young for this book!), amazes me now. I was surprised myself by the pleasure I took in reading this novel, published for the first time in 1919. The bonus material added in this specific French edition for the benefit of students was very interesting too as it sets the novel in a historic and biographical context.

Here’s the plot: A married Protestant priest takes care of a blind orphan, Gertrude. He draws her soul out of its seclusion and offers the girl a way to discover the word if not through her eyes, but through her other senses and her intellect. A key moment is the evening when Gertrude hears in the company of the priest Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major “Pastorale” (Op. 68). She seems to grasp for the first time the beauty of the world by listening to this piece of music. The priest takes care to hide anything evil from Gertrude as he wants to preserve her innocence. He feels a deep commitment to protect the girl, a commitment borne out of his faith. However he fails to realize that he falls in love with the girl at some point.

To do the right thing…

I will not spoil your pleasure by going into the details of the troubles the priest runs into. What’s more important here is the question the priest is confronted with: What is my exact motivation to do something? To do what seemed to be the right thing? How do I not fool myself about my feelings, my motives, my actions? How much can you bent the word of the Gospel to align it with your behaviour and how high is the price you are willing to pay while trying to justify your behaviour.

Gide (1869 – 1951) succeeds in packing wisdom and beauty in a very short novel, written in an admirable style – a philosophical miniature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947 “for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight”. The novel “La Symphonie pastorale” is a first class example of Gide’s talent. Even if the author set the story in the late 19th century, the moral questions reflected in the novel are relevant today. Seeing through one’s own intention – that’s about the biggest challenge for a human being considering his natural inclination to live in denial – be it in the context of politics or the position one takes in the #metoo discussion.

And since Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 plays such an important part in this novel, enjoy a moment of exceptional musical beauty:

A book and a symphony – two extremes remembered

Where Recep Tayyip Erdogan Comes From

turks today

Andrew Mango: The Turks Today. ISBN 978-0-7195-6595-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Reading Andrew Mango’s biography of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, was already a great intellectual pleasure, and the follow-up “The Turks Today” was just as fascinating. The first half of the book deal with history as you would expect it. A chronicle of important political developments from 1938, the year Atatürk died, up to the year 2003 when Turkey seemed ready to align itself on the policies of the European Union and to join it finally, after having waited for this moment for decades.

The second half of the book deals with a range of subjects not strictly political, but closely related to politics: the question of identity, of culture, education and Muslim faith, the leaps and setbacks Turkey witnessed in economic affairs, the differences between city and rural life and the desperate wish to be recognized as European country with a European tradition and a European future.

Even more than the biography of Atatürk this book helped me understand what conflicts dominate Turkish politics and the attitude towards the European Union. The book was published in 2003 and of course it does not cover more recent events like the failed military putsch, the demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul, the repression by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. It however explains where Erdogan comes from – politically speaking – and how he managed to turn Turkey into a state that seems to discards more and more of Atatürks liberal and open-minded legacy.

A synthesis of cultural ideas drawn from Turkey’s tradition and the avant-garde of French classical music can be found in Ahmed Adnan Saygun’s String Quartet No. 1 (Op. 27):

French avant-garde meets Sufi Mystics

Listening to My Romantic Hero Schubert

wersin schubert

Michael Wersin: Schubert hören – Eine Anleitung. ISBN 978-3-15-010872-7 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Long ago Schubert has become my personal tragic hero of German Romanticism and recent visit to Vienna compelled me in some way or other to create a link with one of my top five favourite composers. On the plane I listened to a few lovely works from Schubert and Vienna I stumbled over one of those books I had been looking out for some time: a listening guide to Schubert.

The music teacher and singer Michael Wersin has written such a book and he draws from Schubert’s many works – chamber music, symphonies, songs and church music – to identify the most important hallmarks of Schubert’s musical language and to isolate elements in his biography and the life in Vienna that may explain some of the peculiarities of his music. The influence of his teacher Salieri, his Viennese ancestor Mozart and his paragon Beethoven, the oppressive regime of Emperor Franz II. are some of the elements explored in this context. A highly interesting book, best read in connection with the music examples that Wersin singles out.

A little, melancholic piece that I would single out in this context is Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 19 in C minor, D. 958:

Haunted by the question of fate

Portrait of an Unknown Composer and Pianist

Cora Irsen: Die charmante Unbekannte – Marie Jaëll. ISBN 978-3-7374-0241-5. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Those of you who follow my music blog are aware of the fact that I am currently promoting female composers to do justice to their undeniable talent and to reflect a more accurate picture of music history. The dominance of male composers from the 17th century until today may reflect men’s dominance in society, but intellectual integrity commands me to present the other facet of the creative process in music.

The German pianist Cora Irsen (born in 1974) has championed the cause of the French pianist and composer Marie Jaëll. She has recorded all of Jaëll’s piano works and through arduous research work compiled a small, but highly instructive biography. Let me just sketch a few highlight’s of Jaëll’s life: She was born in eastern France (Alsace), a region traditionally bilingual (French/German). She was a child prodigy and performed as a young girl works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Robert Schumann. Later she became acquainted with Franz Liszt and Camille de Saint-Saëns, two composers that encouraged her to become a professional composer.

As long as Marie was married to Albert Jaëll, a virtuosic pianist and a friend of both Liszt and Saint-Saëns, she would however stick to her pianist career; husband and wife would often perform together. The French-Prussian war in 1870/71, the loss of Alsace to Germany and the humiliation of France put Marie Jaëll at the centre of a personal dilemma: Can you love German music when German troops occupy your home country? She would stay away from Germany from some time, but another dilemma occupied her mind: Performing with her husband kept her from composing.

After the death of her husband, Marie Jaëll was free to embark on a new life and I will stop here, otherwise you will have no reason to read the book or to follow my posts about Marie Jaëll on my music blog. What is remarkable about Jaëll is her passion, the courage she mustered to pursue her dream in a society that frowned upon the strange relationship between Marie and Albert, an intellectual and an emotional one, and who must have frowned even more upon the liberty Marie claimed for herself to associate with other male composers and the intimate friendship she developed with some like Liszt, who not only was a composer and star pianist, but also an ordained priest.

Cora Irsen has rendered musicologists and music students a great service in digging through Marie Jaëll’s correspondence and diaries to investigate the life of an exceptional woman. A woman celebrated at her time, but quickly forgotten after her death. One of Jaëll’s masterworks is a piano cycle inspired from Dante Alighieri’s “Divina Commedia”:

Piano music from paradise, written by a woman

A Nuanced View of Mozart’s Personality

Cliff Eisen (ed.): Mozart – A Life in Letters. ISBN 978-0-141-44146-7 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Reading Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s correspondence with his father Leopold, his sister Nannerl, his wife Constanze and his friends and patrons – that seemed to me to be the key to better understand Mozart’s personality. His double-sided face – gentle, loving, helpful on the one hand, arrogant, vulgar and deceitful on the other hand – was a recurrent theme in my posts on my music blog and it kept irritating me.

The letters selected by Cliff Eisen fulfilled my expectation in so far as they nuanced certain aspects of the composer’s character that the biographies I had read up to that point had empasized e.g. his at times strained relationship with his father and his tendancy to speak with much despise of some of his benefactors. The tension between the young and old Mozart triggered by some of Wolfgang’s decisions in professional matters reminds me of many other father-son conflicts such as the dispute between Franz Schubert and his father or the one between my dad and myself! Such conflicts are part of man’s personal development, and in Mozart’s case, his success in Vienna quickly reconciled the father with his maverick son.

Mozart’s inability to keep his expences under control and and thus to reduce his dependance on borrowing money from friends who quite often were not reimbursed also appears in a new light. In his letters Mozart regularly complains that the nobility – people who liked to have him around as a mark of their cultural taste – mostly expected him to perform for free without giving a thought to how the composer would feed his family and cover the expenses he had to make to be able to compose and perform. If Mozart’s morality in financial issues may appear questionable today, it must be said in his defence that his noble “friends” did not exactly set a good example.

Mozart’s letters are a lovely piece of prose, reflecting well life at the end of the 18th century in general and Mozart’s world more specifically, from mundane issues like how to get a good housemaid or find decent transport for long-distance trips to political issues and the questions of musical taste, court appointments and his apprecuation of fellow composers.

While reading Mozart’s letters I discovered a wonderful early composition, the oratorio “La Betulia Liberata”, inspired by the Book of Judith:

A Mozart oratorio about women empowerment