What is realism? That is the central question running throughout the first section of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, aptly titled - wait for it - “Realism.” I don’t know any other writer who is more intelligently mischievous than Coetzee, and he plays it very sly in this section. The premise is simple: Elizabeth Costello, a famous literary writer, arrives in a Pennsylvania college town to accept an award with her son. The narrative pivots around the apparently useless function of realism in contemporary literature -

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things.

And in fiction, according to this narrator, characters embody contending ideas but in doing so, prohibits the ideas from floating free. Coetzee also does his tongue-in-cheek best to expose the artifice of his fictional construct; he pushes along the action with dispassionate directives that seem more like cookie-cutter screenplay directions than anything, i.e.: “We skip the rest of the hotel scene, move to the foyer.” Mapquest directions can seem less bland than this.

Yet, this is a deliberate game. The reader realizes that Coetzee’s narration is anything but dispassionate, as it’s a remarkable act of psychological ventriloquism, a free indirect speech which closely tracks the interiority of Elizabeth’s son. All the while Coetzee points out the artifice of realist fiction, pointing out that realism tethers ideas and imaginations down to things, the evidences that Coetzee underhandedly presents through his writing prove the exact opposite - that the things that we are bound by, even and especially our bodies, actually open up our imagination, our emotional lives. For example, Elizabeth’s son sleeps with a woman who interviewed his mother earlier in the day. Coetzee chooses to narrate the son’s experience retrospectively. “We skip ahead in the text rather than in the performance,” he says -

When he thinks back over those hours, one moment returns with a sudden force, the moment when her knee slips under his arm and folds into the armpit. Curious that the memory of an entire scene should be dominated by one moment, not obviously significant, yet so vivid that he can still almost feel the ghostly thigh against his skin. Does the mind by nature prefer sensations to ideas, the tangible to the abstract? Or is the folding of the woman’s knee just a mnemonic, from which will unfold the rest of the night?

What a passage. That haunting last question posed with a Proustian inflection: Or is the folding of the woman’s knee just a mnemonic, from which will unfold the rest of the night? From the smallest containment - a glimpse of a fold from a woman’s knee - a dream space opens up, a narcotic space divinely expansive with metaphysical proportions.

Which brings us to the attached music file, sorry about the circuitous route. Sam Beam, in a brief introduction to the live account of this song in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, says that it took him more than 10 years to write this brief song. It begins this way -

Mary Anne, do you remember
the tree by the river
when we were seventeen?

Dark canyon wall, the call and the answer
and the mare in the pasture
pitch black and baring its teeth.

Not difficult to imagine how a single mnemonic, be it a folding of her knee or a tree by the river, can resurrect an entire world you’d believed had long perished with time, heartbreak and all, and every swift glance at each small thing suddenly reveals a hidden code, all specifying the same secret, that I haven’t forgotten, I have not forgotten, could never have forgotten.

(All images are by the amazing Bill Henson; a grateful hat tip to my friend gould for forwarding yet another great find for me)

Attached file is the cello transcription of the F-A-E Intermezzo from Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 3; I’d previously posted my thoughts on the original version for the violin. Steven Isserlis, who is as spirited a defender of late Schumann as anyone out there, transcribed it himself and plays it. Dénes Várjon, who accompanied Carolin Widmann’s violin in my previous post, accompanies Isserlis here, as well. A nice touch. Now I can’t imagine those supple, inaugural triplets played by anyone else.

I still prefer the original violin version, but through Isserlis’ Stradivarius, the musical line gains a lonelier lexicon. Schumann in his deepest melancholy makes me think of Roland Barthes, and tonight is no exception. As the notes sound their mourning alphabets through Isserlis’ cello, F-A-E, my thoughts turn to Barthes’ brief reflection on palm trees, alphabets and Heine: Frei aber einsam. From Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (tr. Richard Howard) -

According to the Greeks, trees are alphabets. Of all the tree letters, the palm is the loveliest. And of writing, profuse and distinct as the burst of its fronds, it possesses the major effect: falling back.

A hemlock tree stands lonely. 

Far north on a barren height.

He drowses; ice and snowflakes 

wrap him in sheets of white

He dreams about a palm tree

That far in an eastern land

Languishes lonely and silent

Upon the parching sand.

                                 Heine

First of all: a killer post on late Schumann by msodradek, my kindred spirit. She’s a total mystery and an inspiration to me, please go read her take on Märchenerzählungen.

Attached music file is the slow Intermezzo movement from Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 3, beautifully recorded by ECM. The violinist is Carolin Widmann sensitively accompanied by Dénes Várjon on the piano. I’d written about this movement before on a different website I used to keep, now defunct, so I thought I might as well re-post some of the posts here.

Schumann cobbled together No. 3 by taking two movements from another work to which he had contributed previously – the F-A-E Sonata. The F-A-E Sonata was a collective effort. The first movement was composed by Albert Dietrich, Schumann’s pupil who was to become Brahms’s lifelong friend. Schumann wrote the second movement (the attached mp3 file, Intermezzo) and the finale. And Brahms wrote the third movement, Scherzo. Why F-A-E? They decided to prominently feature the notes, F, A, and E as the sonata’s musical code, for Joachim’s self-proclaimed motto was Frei aber einsam - Free but lonely. Yes, I believe that if Joachim was alive, he’d perhaps be a devotee of the Twilight franchise of movies and books.

The F-A-E Sonata was composed just four months before Schumann threw himself into the Rhine. The deterioration of Schumann’s mental state was rapid and alarming. After he was rescued by the fishermen from his suicide attempt, he was committed to the asylum in Endenich in March of 1854, where he would live out the rest of his life for two and a half years, until his death.  

People still speculate as to what exactly Schumann’s mental ailment might have been. There is no doubt, however, that he was certifiably mad. He heard voices from Bach and Schubert, who dictated musical themes to him. Still other voices told him that he is sailing in the arctic seas and commanded him to make maps and lists of towns and rivers. From March of 1855, he began losing his ability to speak coherently, often merely gurgling; his doctor wrote in his diary that Schumann sounded as though he were speaking with his mouth half-full, and what he uttered were mostly a series of inchoate, animalistic vowels.

In 1856, he entered into a self-starvation mode, and became skeletal in figure. He became further obsessed with picking names out of maps and atlases. Here is Brahms’ account after visiting Schumann in April of 1856 -

We sat down, it became increasingly painful for me, his eyes were moist, he spoke continuously, but I understood nothing… Often he just blabbered, sort of bababa-dadada. While questioning him at length, I understood the names, Marie, Julie, Berlin, Vienna, England, not much more.

He died in July of 1856.

Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 3 is regarded as a slight work, and in fact, Clara Schumann had refused to publish it originally (the piece was only published in 1956). As thisNY Times article explains, for a long time, many of the critics claimed that Schumann’s late music suffered from “exhaustion” because they perceived mental and behavioral patterns exhibited by Schumann, noted by his doctor, Franz Richarz, as a mental exhaustion (Richarz’s diary noting Schumann’s symptoms is sad, but fascinating to read.) As the 20th century forensic diagnoses of Schumann’s symptoms revealed his condition as being more schizophrenic in nature, the notion that Schumann’s late music is characterized by “exhaustion” has become untenable. Pretty silly, actually. But the damage has been done, no doubt.

The attached music file, the Intermezzo movement from the Violin Sonata No. 3, reminds me of a supremely beautiful and melancholic late Schumann duet, “In der Nacht,” which I wrote about previously. The same kind of emotional compression evident in “In der Nacht” also paces the attached 3-minute long F-A-E Intermezzo from the No. 3 Violin Sonata. Carolin Widmann’s serenely luminous violin tone is an ideal instrument for this movement, just as Jan de Gaetani’s silvery, anti-hysterical voice had been for “In der Nacht” – both the F-A-E Intermezzo and “In der Nacht” fairly shimmer with subdued longing and poetry by their accounts.

The attached Intermezzo begins in F-major. The quietly lush, harmonically morphing triplets of the piano accompaniment play off the three notes, F-A-E. When the violin enters, the three notes sound in a guileless, forthright plainsong, exactly as they are in sequence. And the rest of the Intermezzo just plays off the pattern, but despite the almost overtly simplistic arrangement, the piece feels prismatically rich. The same effect holds true in “In der Nacht” as well. Both the F-A-E Intermezzo and “In der Nacht” seem to me the musical equivalents of zen koans: I keep turning them over in my mind, over and over, and there is no rational answer or outcome. Just the mystery and the achingly brief beauty of them turning in place, shifting.

(All images by Vilhelm Hammershøi)

I’ve plainly expressed my admiration for Andras Schiff’s recording of Bach’s last six Partitas (ECM) in my Night RPM blog, especially his lissome, breathing interpretation of the Allemande from the C-minor Partita, BWV 826. I don’t believe I’ve revisited any other recording this past year as frequently as I have with Schiff’s Bach disc.

Attached is an audio file of the Sinfonia from the same C-minor Partita, played this time by Piotr Anderszewski. It is an astounding account, in my view. After getting through the seven bars of initial chordal Adagio section, listen to how Anderszewski tracks the Andante with the left hand. If the passage can be called contrapuntal at all, it is only in the barest sense of counterpoint. The right hand just sings over the spare, minimal bass note accompaniment, nothing very fugal here.

But the way Anderszewski manages the left hand figures - a kind of an eloquent and quietly propulsive stutter - it brings such an inner light to the music. He enlivens the dialogue between the right hand and the left with so much intelligence and motion… and brings an imaginative life to something that could have been easily overlooked -

Non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est.

An epigraph from Hölderlin’s Hyperion, which translates as: “Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine.” I can’t think of a better way to describe what Anderszewski is doing with this music, making so much flourish, with so little.

Even more impressive is the fact that this performance is captured live, at Anderszewski’s Carnegie Hall debut, no less. In that big hall, the audience must have experienced a sensation akin to staring at a flickering flame of a single candle, rapt, in a dark and boundless room.

By Casper