Parker Ramsay

On West 121st Street, just behind Columbia’s main campus, stereo beats from of a Friday night party are floating up from the parish hall at Corpus Christi Church. While generally neither problematic or untypcial for a weekend in an Upper Manhattan, a large stereo and the screams of 150 teenagers can make a continuo rehearsal a bit more of a challenge.

In baroque ensemble music, the harpsichord, along with a couple of theorbos and a viola da gamba are, for lack of a better term, the rhythm section for a group. They establish the harmony and provide a rhythmic impetus, working from bass part upwards (not too different from an electric bass and drum set in a garage band). Harpsichords and theorbos can pack a punch to make themselves more forceful: they can add lower notes, build more notes on top in between beats and physically create more sound to increase intensity. And yet, in rehearsing Giovanni Battista’s Giona, they’ve proven to be no match for a well-equipped stereo. Within a few hours, as Jonah is inside the whale’s belly, the continuo section was being swallowed by the quinceañera downstairs.

Chi mi sveglia? Dove sono? Son in mar? E che farò?   (Who wakes me up? Where am I? Am I at sea? And what am I doing?)

Where am I, indeed? I’m on the Upper West Side.

Prague is nuts. The old city is one of a thousand spires, sure, but also a city of a thousand hen parties and stag do’s. The outlandish and garish ornamentation of the baroque churches and classical buildings is ironically matched by the alcoholic behavior of several dozen British and German grooms-to-be, staggering with their groupies from restaurant to bar, strip club to sex shop, gafawing at the resilience of their livers. It’s perhaps the trashiest, most beautiful tourist trap I’ve ever seen.

My vacation is nearly over. Sunday is Pentecost, one of the major feasts in the Church’s calendar. As such, I’m leaving early so I can head home and be present on Sunday morning. Though I only have 18 hours to be a tourist in Prague, I’ve managed to cram in the big important sites in a few hours. Like Paris or London, every location seemed to have inspired or be associated with some great work I had encountered. Walking from Wenceslas Square I remembered Milan Kundera’s reflections on 1968. As I crossed the old town center and over to the Charles Bridge, lined with the huge creepy statues, I thought of all the kitschy vampire films of the 1920s set in Central Europe. I saw the castle, which is in fact a not just a single structure, but a complex of palaces, churches and administrative buildings surrounded by a wall, much of it used for sets in Amadeus. I took a detour over to the Vyšehrad, finally seeing the inspiration for the famous harp cadenza in Smetana’s Ma Vlast. 

But as usual, I wore out after a few hours and decided just to wander until I found coffee and a place to read. I usually take books with me, and upon leaving NYC a week ago was in the mood to take something French and nihilistic about the human experience (after all, I had just finished a degree Juilliard). On the recommendation of a friend, I had picked up a copy of Flaubert’s Salammbo to take on the trip. It’s not what I signed up for in the least. Contrary to realist novels like Madame Bovary, Salammbo is an exercise in lavish ancient historical romanticism – think “sex and violence in ancient Carthage.” I made it only about 10 pages in, when the heroine appears, flanked by 12 eunuchs armed with harps. She sings a lament for Carthage, in all languages and none, conveying to the belligerent foreigners the desolation of her home, a sort of morbid Pentecostal episode. But she finishes her song and drops her harp. All falls silent. 

I admit I still haven’t touched my harp since my graduation recital a few weeks ago. It’s been almost a month, but harp-overload kind of set in towards the end of semester. I suppose I went on vacation to get away, but instead got a fresh perspective. Seeing the Vyšehrad gave a new context to my recital, having played a transcription of the Smetana’s Moldau, the culminating episode in Ma Vlast. Though supposedly about the river itself, at the end of the movement the harp’s theme returns: an apparent reminder of the greatness that lies not just with rivers, but with the cities and fortresses that line them. Smetana’s harp theme illustrating the Vyšehrad is inescapable, a constant in the work. Unlike Salammbo’s harp, it can’t be dropped or silenced. 

I’m at the train station now, waiting for my boyrfriend to join me for our last night together on vacation. I should be sad that vacation is over, but really Prague has made me want to start practicing again. The city is saturated with music, from the constant stream of concerts of Mozart to the names of the train lines in and out of the city. Richard will be arriving on the “Mozart” train from Vienna, and will be heading out on the “Brahms” train to Berlin in the morning. The train is arriving is arriving now, heralded by several bell chime arpeggios and the melody sol-do-si-sol. No, it’s not Mozart. It’s the Vyšehrad, naturally. 

After seeing six operas in a week, trying to sum up the experiences at once can be somewhat of a challange. A compositional timespan of 250 years, a myriad of production schemes, totally different opera companies and sizes – there was so much variety, and yet a few things came to mind each time. 

The apparent normalcy of opera attendance has been at the front of my mind. I’m used to heading to the Met over the 65th street bridge from Juilliard, rushing in at the last minute with a host of smartly-dressed attendees many years my senior, coming in from work. Socializing is light; the sheer size of the Met can make running to see friends somewhat of a production. Drinks are expensive, and snacks even more so (not to mention, the queues are extensive). There’s a sense of seriousness about going to the Met, unsurprisingly as it attracts some of the worlds finest singers and conductors. But it’s an atmosphere not so much of enjoyment, as constant expectancy. After heading to the Berliner Staatsoper last night, I’m convinced that opera goers are of a different species in Germany. They arrive as much as 45 minutes early to enjoy a glass of wine or a pretzel as they socialize with a host of friends or familiar faces. They dress casually. They are teenagers bringing girlfriends, parents bringing young children, middle-aged married couples, clusters of students. They are mostly educated and middle class, like a large proportion of the German population. They might gaze at the essays in the programs, but don’t necessarily discuss what they are about to see with any form of expectation or severity. They act as if this isn’t a night at the opera, but a routine. 

But in looking at all the different productions, there’s an extent to which a reinterpretation of an opera isn’t feared. I saw productions in which the staging became a dramatic biography of the composers’ lives, or some where pop references were inserted rather surreptitiously – the chorus of Vampires in Der Vampyr were dressed as pop cutlure villains (Gollum from Lord of the Rings, Snape from Harry Potter, Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.) and danced using moves from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Some would argue that these are distractions or gimmicks, but seeing as my boyfriend the opera nerd didn’t pick up on the pop culture references and thought that the production was cute, I’d say the job was well done.  

But more broadly, I suppose I was impressed with the way in which a series of operas brought a host of issues to the front – as if opera was indeed art, and not artifact. Seeing as I can’t ever remember seeing a single thought-provoking production at the Met in NYC (you caught me, I’ve got it out for the Met, but I’m not alone!) – going to Germany was a breath of fresh air. While each show addressed gender, identity and even class divisions, the most striking item for me was the topic of violence. In Terry Gilliam’s production of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust (Ok, yes, it’s technically an oratorio), Faust joins the Nazi party, but falls in love with a Jewish Marguerite. The scheme fit remarkably well on to the opera, as Faust’s supposed redemption through Mephisto’s help was at the same time Marguerite’s damnation, initially. At the end of the first half, she sings about how she wishes to be different, lighting candles and trying on a blonde mädchen’s wig – her desire to be an Aryan. The show takes you from Germany’s history, from the Franco-Prussian War, to WWI and WWII, all the way to the gates of Auschwitz where Faust attempts to retrieve Marguerite. But after his damntation, there is no apotheosis of Marguerite. She is redeemed, perhaps, but noone sees her. One only sees a pile of bodies on stages, with ashes floating down upon them. 

The discomfort at the end of Gilliam’s prodution highlighted the problem of redemption – it’s not so much that there is no redemption at the end of the opera, but that redemption comes at a price. Marguerite is spotless and memorialized, and yet we do not see her. At the same time, fascism is built upon a notion of redemptive violence; the pile of bodies represents the culmination of Nazi ideology in the destruction of European Jewry. It’s uncomfortable because Marguerite’s redemption in her death at Auschwitz is the same as that of Wehrmacht. Contrary to the ways we might want to wash our hands in thinking about the Holocaust, Gilliam’s production seemingly rejects Hannah Arendt’s or Primo Levi’s idea that there is such a thing as “meaningless violence.” Just as cause and effect aren’t separable, neither are act and intent.

In making travel arrangements and changing schedules at various points throughout the week, the patient customer service workers for Deutsche Bahn assured us that there wasn’t anything to see in Leipzig. Perhaps they’re right. It’s mainly a college town, and has a fairly East German bleak feel to the city once you get outside the city center. The art museum is modest, though notable for housing few excellent paintings by Max Klinger. The other museums and sights are small and perhaps a bit niche.  

Lucky for you (and me?), niche is my thing.  

Leipzig was home to none other than Johann Sebastian Bach for the last few decades of his life. In serving as Cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Bach made perhaps his most lasting musical impression on the world. After a series of crap jobs and even a stint in prison, Leipzig is where Bach arguably landed on his feet. There he composed over 150 Cantatas, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas for Keyboard, got himself published, and raised a family of musicians who would go off on to even larger careers (though they are perhaps less well known).  

At the Thomaskirche, one can see Bach’s grave, moved to the front of the church just in front of the altar. Across the street, one can see his house, and learn about the context of his life and the instruments he composed for. One can go downstairs and consult the resident musicologists leading way in publishing Bach’s works in usable format while remaining true to his autograph scores.  

But more than that, one sees in Leipzig the sense of renewal, though not just of Bach. The Thomaskirche once was the office of Felix Mendelssohn, the man responsible for reviving Bach’s works and reintroducing them to the public consciousness. But just as Bach was restored, so was Mendelssohn. One can see the Mendelssohn window in the church, a symbol of recognition of Mendelssohn’s rightful place in the musical canon, despite the attempts of National Socialist ideology to remove him on the basis of his Jewish heritage. The orchestra in Leipzig is Europe’s first professional “orchestra” as we know it, having survived the revolutions of of the nineteenth century and the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. The Thomaskirche’s boychoir is just over 800 years old, a continuous institution that flourished under Bach and Mendelssohn, and survived the Second World War, a communist regime and the fall of GDR.  

Yes, to an extent these sights and sounds are niche, and perhaps overblown in our understanding of the history of classical music. But the city breathes music. Because of the attempts to revive and preserve music in cycles throughout Germany’s turbulent past, the musician’s Leipzig is not just a series of relics as much as a memorial to the endurance of music.  

Today brought an unexpected surprise, in that I spent the afternoon with my oldest and best friend. Meeting up with us in Kassel, Freddie took us around the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, just outside the city. Though the grounds were beautiful from a distance, the park itself is in fact a large exploration of Romantic “reconstruction,” shall we say. Ascending up the long hill to a ruined temple of Hercules, one passes an “aqueduct” which was in fact built to look like a ruin. On warmer days, the ruin includes a water feature which pour water down a stream into the lake behind the estate. Other perverse curiosities include a faux pyramid covered in moss, a shack meant to be “Socrates’ hermitage,” and a devil’s bridge eventually leading to “Pluto’s Grotto” (an entrance to the underworld). Part of its charm was perhaps that fact that these intentional ruins were further ruined during WWII, and then restored to their former ruined state – perhaps the architectural equivalent of putting a poem of E.E. Cummings through a shredder, and trying to put it back together again for funsies.

Less inspiring was Hildesheim. Passing rows of kebab shops and buildings covered in graffiti, R and I were grateful for the decision to stop and meet up with Freddie. The opera however was a another new experience for me: Busoni’s Doktor Faustus. Contemporary with Puccini’s Turandot, the content of the opera managed to explore Faust’s crisis of faith not just dramaturgically, but musically. As Faust signs his will over to Mephistopholes, the offstage chorus works their way through a setting of the Nicene Creed, the central movement of the mass. Quotes from Bach’s Matthew Passion comment on what it means to “follow” rather than heed one’s own conscience. In the final scene, as Faust’s eternal damnation is imminent, the men in the chorus sing Vater unser in Himmelreich, a metrical setting of the Lord’s Prayer.

Tomorrow: Leipzig.

Opera no. 3 this week was Mieczysław Weinberg’s Mazel Tov, based on the play by Shalom Aleichem. While the original play was originally a snapshot of the life of a Jewish family in Odessa, the production managed to evoke both the spirit of all of Aleichem’s works and a peek into the composer’s own life. Projections of Chagall and Soviet propaganda provided the backdrop for much of the opera, a biographic commentary on Weinberg’s struggle to reconcile his identity with the artistic boundaries set by Stalinism. Indeed, at highly dramatic moments in the opera, a bloodied fiddler on the room would appear silently on stage, unclear as to whether he was a victim of a Russian pogrom, a Nazi camp or a Soviet purge. The ambiguity turned to dark irony at the end of the opera, when two children appeared on stage in Stalin and Hitler bobble heads, shaking hands and surveying the characters on stage.  

After the Weinberg, a small opera by Erich Wolfgang Korngold: The Ring of Polycrates. Though originally a love story about two sets of lovers overcoming their frustrations with each other, the production provided another venture into biographical dramaturgy. Set in Hollywood rather than Vienna, the story stopped dead three times to interpolate the opening of Korngold’s Concerto for Left Hand. Each time, a one-armed soldier sent to the fetch the ring appears on stage, as well as members of the Shalom Aleichem’s fictitious family in Odessa – all a reminder of the Europe that Korngold left behind upon his escape from Vienna and resettlement in Hollywood. 

Overall, both opera productions seemed to express what the composers were not able to throughout their careers. The Hollywood that Korngold worked in was long reticent to explicitly produce movies criticizing the Nazi regime (a problem noted in stories such as Fitzgerald’s Last Tycoon) as the largest international market for Hollywood films was in Germany. Though Weinberg’s own operas were rarely performed in his lifetime, they still conformed to official narratives and histories as dictated by the Soviet regime. His one opera concerning the Holocaust, The Passenger, tells the story of a Polish survivor of Auschwitz, but without mention of the specific targeting of Jews in Hitler’s “Final Solution” – a remarkably ideologically determined opera, considering the loss of Weinberg’s entire family at the hand of the Germans. 

Both operas raised interesting ideas about what it means to amplify the voice of the composer, questioning the relationship between the artists’ experience and their work. It’s perhaps unfortunate that the magnanimity of the Holocaust is such that its use as a metaphor in opera is unambiguous, morally straightforward, perhaps even easy. While I could see these productions being performed in NYC, I can’t think of events on US soil so unambiguous as to render such deep meaning with polemic augmentation. At the same time I have a feeling that I’m certainly wrong in that observation, as Americans are particularly bad about criticizing the past, much less the present. Perhaps the common saying that the “sense of history” is stronger on this side of the ocean isn’t so much about longevity as it is about integrity. 

Though much of the city was rather artfully rearranged by the RAF during WWII, the remaining parts old city and park were wonderfully serene. As it was a long trip from Koblenz, R and I took our time to wander the harbor and visit some of the pop-up breweries from the Netherlands and Belgium, offering cherry and raspberry beers to go with currywurst and waffles. Before heading into the opera house, we sat by the lake near the opera house and grabbed some coffee before being introduced to one of the more effective opera productions I’ve seen in a while.

In the final act of the opera, a neon red set of fallopian tubes (I think?) illuminated the stage as the opera’s heroine Scylla, meets her demise. Her boyfriend, Glaucus, was dressed as a bright blue sea monster with golden wings. Her nemesis, Circe, was dressed boobless black lace number. I mention the more absurd elements of the production, perhaps because they actually helped to tie Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucus together. Just like the division of the orchestra between the strings, winds and continuo, the color scheme on stage helped separate the characterize the figures on stage, adding a dramatic quality to the manner in which earth-nymph falls in love with fish-boy.

But the most interesting part of the production was the extent of hybridization of the costumes, the dancing and gestures of the singers. Many of the chorus members wore togas, often in distinctive colors and accompanied by Marvel super hero masks. The ballet dancers incorporated contemporary dance with baroque french traditions. The singers used both rhetorical gestures and improvised stage movement, depending on the intensity of emotions on stage.

In the same way, the orchestra mixed and matched with different aspects of historical performance. Some of the players brought along baroque bows, while others used their modern bows. The flutists played wooden with modern keys, while the brass used natural trumpets and the percussionist an animal skin timpani. In Kiel, as in many opera houses in Germany, orchestras aren’t booted out for period instruments to come and do the baroque operas. Instead, harpsichordists and conductors are brought in to conduct, and there’s an unspoken agreement to be flexible with trying historical performance techniques on modern instruments. It was nice to see an example of the gradual eradication of lines between the HP world and something opposite thereto, as if there’s a mediating space in the middle where adaptability and nuance are negotiable.

It’s 6:30am in Koblenz, and I’m on the hunt for coffee. While I’ve no pretensions of finding a single origin pourover, I did happen upon a bookstore – yes, a bookstore, at a train station, open before 7am on a Saturday. I admit my New Yorker sensibilities were slightly thrown by my ability to find nine different classical music magazines among the shop’s selection, while I sipped a coffee that resembled mulch steeped in hot radiator fluid.

After arriving in Koblenz and grabbing a quick lunch with my boyfriend, I set out on a run around the city. There’s not a great deal in Koblenz to be honest. It’s a small university town, stocked with all the standard clothing shops and grocery stores that one would expect from miniature metropolis. Restaurant dining is more or less the same, offering pizza, pasta and steaks. It’s not dissimilar from cities in England like Gloucester or Ely – medieval market towns, exhibiting a certain paradox between the visage of historic architecture and the advent of commercial materialism. In essence, there’s nothing remarkable about the city by German standards.  

Also unremarkable are three churches in the Altstadt (old city), two Catholic and one Lutheran. Each is home to an recital standard instrument, each being practiced or taught on a Friday afternoon. A small theater sits not far from the river, complete with tiered boxes and lit only by electrified chandeliers. It boasts a professional opera company and orchestra capable of grinding out either the same standard repertoire as the Metropoliton Opera or New York, or lesser known singspiele such as Marschner’s Der Vampyr (think Fidelio meets Interviews with a Vampire), and selling good seats for €15. As I said, it’s a typical small German city.  

The train is now passing through Cologne, as we’re en route to Kiel for a performance of an opera by Leclair. It’s not a normal vacation by any stretch, as we’re not museum hopping or hitting any major tourist traps. At the same time, traveling around and witnessing the cultural diet of these smaller cities has that same whiff of voyeurism one gets when heading someplace new. Of course, I could see organ recitals and operas in New York ad nauseam, but there is something encouraging about seeing this level of art in cities that aren’t populated by millions of people – places where your morning cup of coffee isn’t necessarily more important than your cultural institutions.  

 

A new piece for VAN Magazine on life, school and musicianship.

https://van-us.atavist.com/school-sucks

Enjoy!

It’s around 9pm, and I’m backstage at BAM Fischer (Brooklyn Academy of Music), frantically looking for my yarmulke, when really I’m supposed to be in place waiting for my entrance to go on stage and play some organ. We’ve all been there, right? I thought so.

I’m in the throes of my first off-Broadway show in NYC. I’m not sure if this is a rite of passage or not, but it certainly makes me feel like I’m starting to sink my teeth into being a working musician in the city. But rather than playing Stephen Schwartz on the keyboard or a harp part for an Andrew Lloyd Webber-ian musical, I’ve been contracted to play the harpsichord and the organ, on stage, in costume. In fact, I’m not playing any songs, or even accompanying any singers. On the organ, I’m playing two solos, Choral no. 3 in A minor by César Franck and Litanies by Jehan Alain, while at the harpsichord I’m playing movements from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hebe. 

Like the music, the show’s content matter is decidedly French, delving into a peculiar episode in France’s history. The main character is one Alfred Dreyfus, the object of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, from which the show takes its name. For those unfamiliar, the Dreyfus Affair was a Watergate-level conspiracy to frame a Alsatian Jewish officer in the 14th Artillery Regiment (Alfred Dreyfus) for espionage in service of Germany. In the show Alfred’s story of accusation and exile is told, are the efforts of his family, defenders and advocates, most notably, Émile Zola. The script is interwoven with music from the period, such as organ music and a chamber work by César Franck, vocal music by Ravel and Halévy, and earlier French music, evoking the nationalist trends to revive the music of Lully and Rameau. It’s an interesting concept as there is just as much time spent by musicians playing as is there is by actors speaking. None of the music is melodrama, but autonomous as a dramatic element, at once telling the story and being informed by the historical information presented on stage.  

To be honest, it’s difficult to pull together; after all, there’s naturally a certain tension between presenting this music in a manner that is not self-contained both from dramatic and historical contexts. But the dramatic elements of the music are no less tangible than those of the actors’ delivery of the script. With the music of César Franck pervading the show, one starts to get steeped in the world of the National Front, and the pedestal upon which Franck was placed by the likes of Vincent D’Indy and his nationalist circle. In playing Rameau for military drills on stage, one starts to understand why Rameau was revived in the first place and published: it was an artistic project in nation-building – a period of collection and dissemination of works to bolster the notion of a national instinct, pervasive even in music.  

But with Jehan Alain it’s slightly more complicated. Litanies is perhaps one of the most performed works in the standard organ repertoire today. Light and jumpy, the repetitive Gregorian chant theme starts fosters a trance, getting faster and louder until the organ is playing as many notes as possible with your feet and fingers. The scene in question in the Dreyfus Affair is no less intense – as the conspiracy is being revealed, the nationalist sentiment takes on a religious tone, citing France’s historic Christianity as justification for cries to remove all Jewish officers from the Army. On stage, a crucifix is placed on the organ, and I head out on stage in a cassock, collar and skull cap to play Alain’s magnum opus.

That’s all well and good, but Alain didn’t actually spend much of his liturgical career in a church. Though a baptized Roman Catholic, his main source of income was playing the organ at the Temple de la Rue-Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, home to an historically Alsatian congregation and the largest of the Grand Synagogues in Paris.  Indeed some of the only recordings we have of Alain are of him playing seven liturgical works for Purim, under the direction of Leon Algazi, one of the most prominent composers of Jewish liturgical music in the 20th century. For many in the French musical circles, Alain’s death became a symbol of the France’s capitulation to invading forces in 1940. He died on June 20, 1940, the day before the French announced their surrender. Memorialized by his own family and by other composers such as Maurice Duruflé and Henri Dutilleux, Alain became a hero.  

I’d put away the Litanies for several years, but this time round my brain had started thinking about the piece more critically in terms of how I perform it. On the one hand, I have a fear that the audience will have a narrative about what Alain’s music represents, one that could potentially be misrepresentative – there’s a certain nagging sensation in the back of my brain in favor of some brand of authenticity. On the other hand, I don’t have a problem with the use of Jean-Philippe Rameau in the military exercise scenes, though irrelevant to Rameau’s own intent and purposes, it does accurately portray the revival of works like Les Fêtes d’Hebe. It’s as if there are two Rameau’s – on one hand the French composer of opera, and on the other a product symbol of nationalist culture.

To an extent, the way I have to play Alain for the purposes of the drama on stage would otherwise be perceived as a slight perversion by my organ colleagues. Litanies is about joy and ecstasy, starting out light and gradually gaining momentum. But for the The Dreyfus Affair, it’s necessary to keep the volume up and speed up throughout the work, provoking anxiety and an almost aggressive vengeance at the work’s end. And yet with Rameau, the strings and the harpsichord have worked on feminine endings, limited use of vibrato, and techniques of historical performance that would have not been used in the 1890s at all. The members of the military on stage move with grace and charm, lacking some sheen of hyper-masculinity that one might get from a late 19th-Century army drill.

The smallest musical details in a work, including a tempo or tone quality can totally change the way in which we hear a piece of music. An extreme example might be heard in the credits for Amazon’s Man in the High Castle, in which raspy Regina Spektor-esque sings a tired rendition of Edelweiss as a sad an ironic depiction of the Nazi regime in North America. Even within the Sound of Music, the two renditions of Edelweiss carry totally different meanings – the first is one of simplicity, when Captain von Trapp realizes his affections for Maria, but the second is the Von Trapp swan song, a final performance before they flee to Switzerland.

With popular music, stage drama and musicals, there’s a large amount of flexibility of meaning that classical musicians perhaps too seldom afford themselves. The notes on the page, our “text” to which cling so dearly, is somewhat fixed. Reinterpretations are often noted, rather than taken for granted, and usually framed in terms of appeals to history, or a search within the performer’s soul. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3 “is” about heroism, and no. 5 “is” about fate. These pieces don’t have “stories” attached to them, but a certain general idea of what they are about. But there are pieces with stories and narratives attached to them, more often than not called “program music.” In a way, Alain and Rameau have been transformed in “program music” in the Dreyfus Affair, even though there are conflicting stories behind the pieces. Mind you, the notes on the page remain the same. But as with many things, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it.

A few weeks ago, I crossed West 84th Street, where Edgar Allan Poe composed The Raven. I had just finished up a project with the Munich Philharmonic String Quartet, and had run into similar problems of context and interpretation in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Over the course of a few days, we rehearsed and performed André Caplet’s Conte Fantastique, based on Poe’s intensely atmospheric Mask of the Red Death. There were no disagreements about notes on the page, or tempi or anything like that – but when it came to the “mood” of the piece, and even the story behind it, the first violinist and I had very different ideas, almost as if we had read two different authors.

The quartet had a pretty normative view of the story: Prince Prospero and his nobles meet for a party in the castle, to ride out a pandemic of the disease called the “Red Death.” Traditionally, the story has been seen as an allegory of the inevitability of death, and havoc that cholera rages. The “Red Death” supposedly sneaks up upon the victims suddenly, causing them to bleed from the mouth and die almost instantly. Poet Heinrich Heine, in describing the Parisian cholera epidemic of 1831, told of lavish parties where people would knowingly go to die. Whether they had early symptoms, a spouse with the disease, or an expectation that they would get it, the “Cholera Balls” in Paris may be one of the darkest instances of self-exposure to disease before the AIDS-parties of the 1980s.

There is no doubt that André Caplet probably had cholera in mind to be honest. After all, Poe wasn’t hugely popular in the United States, but was enormously revered in France thanks to the translations of Claude Baudelaire. Poe is often seen as having a cynical, almost nihilistic view on the inevitability of disease and death, one which resonated with the post-Napoleonic malaise about the human condition so often seen Balzac, Flaubert and even early Zola. Disease was not a product of individual sin, nor a complete accident, but the symptom of the inevitable collective failures of a democratic society. In a way, it’s quasi-fascistic, as the violence rendered upon the body by disease becomes redemptive in itself – it’s means of knowing that world continues as it always has.

The quartet took slow tempos, made expansive phrases, and turned the climax of the work into a somber tragedy as the nobles one by one fall to the “Red Death.” I got on board after a while – I won’t lie, such an interpretation of Poe’s tale and Caplet’s does work to a large degree. But what if Poe’s Mask was about something else entirely? I’ve got to say, I’ve got an entirely different picture of Poe. My first real exposure to Poe was on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. There sits Poe’s Tavern, a restaurant completely covered, floor to ceiling, in Edgar Allan Poe portraits, illustrations, and stuffed ravens. From the burger selection, you can order a “Gold Bug” (plain, with cheese), a “Starving Artist” (bunless, with blue cheese), a “Tell-Tale Heart” (Applewood Bacon, Egg) or an “Annabelle Lee” (crabcake, roumelade).

Poe was stationed at Fort Moultrie, Sullivan’s Island while serving in the US military following an unsuccessful stint at the University of Virginia. Though a southerner and aristocrat by birth, he was largely cut off from high society in Charleston, just across the Cooper River from Fort Moultrie. Indeed a less than ideal home and upbringing saw a consistent separation from the society which he was supposed to be a part in the South, and upon moving North years of defensiveness had taken a toll on his temperament. While a brilliant story teller and conjurer of images, it’s often forgotten that Poe was just as much an expert on solitude, isolation and the consequences of human interaction.

When I read Mask of the Red Death, I confess that I don’t see a dressing up Heine’s tales of cholera, but a dark allegory about isolation and fear. Like much of Poe, the Mask has quite a few little details, which point to a larger idea or story. Despite Poe’s own assertion that his work was anti-transcendental, anti-moralistic, and ultimately an exercise in description, etc. let’s all agree that sometime people are the not always the best judges of their own work, lives or personalities. More bluntly, I’m asking you to bear with me for a bit.

One really famous bit of Caplet’s Conte Fantastique is the way in which the bell chimes are portrayed. Caplet uses a very loud note towards the bottom of the harp to imitate the “clang,” but adds other notes around it to make it sound creepy and weird. In scientific terms, he uses notes unrelated to the overtone series of the note so as to give the impression that this is not just another hour-chime but your bog standard literary death knell.

In Poe’s own tale, the bell is a curious presence, as it doesn’t come from the outside, but from a grandfather clock in the ballroom.

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

Here’s the thing: how could 1,000 nobles hear this chime? Are they listening out for it? Is it a surprise? I’m a little confused, as at the start of Poe’s story, he says:

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. 

Why have any indication of time at all? Could not this clock be moved? More simply, could it not just be stopped by manually stopping the pendulum (a common practice at early 19th Century balls?). This clock is a purely manmade device with a specific purpose – why is it there?

In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t feel like another fantastical tale about cholera, tuberculosis, or any other disease. Shortly before I started rehearsals for the Caplet, I headed to the Metropolitan Opera to see La Traviata, the ultimate tale of death by consumption. But it’s one of tragedy and the unfairness of fate, not of willful ignorance by the disease’s victim. Poe’s nobles fall ill of their own self-isolation and arrogance, thinking themselves immune to the disease which wrought the peril of their kingdom.

I searching through JSTOR, this time reading about Poe and some literary interpretations of the Mask of the Red Death. Another interesting facet of the story came up: only one character has a name, and the narrator seems to be present but not active in the story. How? Why? Many scholars naturally point out the fact that Prince Prospero shares his name with the main character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Living in isolation off the coast of Italy, Shakespeare’s Prospero enslaves two servants and uses his own daughter as a pawn to keep the Milanese political apparatus out of his island kingdom.

So to recap, in Poe’s story, we’ve got:

• (1) a Prince who’s determined to maintain power 
• (2) By letting disease ravage his country 
• (3) And by fear mongering his nobles with a clock 
• (4) A mysterious figure threatening to bring everything down 
• (5) A downfall upon provocation of this dark figure 

At this point, I really started to doubt that the Mask was about disease at all, or at least not one we might think of today. It’s about something… else.  

What else was going on when Poe wrote Mask of the Red Death? Not in France, mind you, but in America? In the 1840s? In Poe’s world? I came across an article in the Edgar Allan Poe Review (http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_EAPR.html) which offered a fairly convincing argument, but one which is fairly far removed from the Parisian landscape. Penn State Professor Paul Hespel offers a more nativist interpretation of Poe’s Mask, positing that this isn’t about cholera at all, but about race.

While Poe’s name can be found on monuments and street signs in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, Hespel makes the valid point that Poe was a Southerner, and a Southern aristocrat at that. In Poe’s own time, the main distinction between the North and South was unsurprisingly the contentious issue of slavery, and the extent to which the landowners in the South clung to their supposed right to own humans as property. But with this principle came an all-encompassing fear that it could not just be lost, but that their survival was dependent upon slavery. Abolition was not simply the absence of slavery, but a herald of miscegenation, revolution, bloodshed and death.

Hespel’s arguments are a little contentious, but the obsession with blood in Mask as a literal allegory for the obsession with racial purity and pedigree. The clock, while manmade and potentially controllable, is ebony – a threat in the form of the color black. If this were a story about the Black Death, it’s arguable that the story would be less creepy. But in inventing a name for an ominous, vague disease, the “Red Death’s” association with blood and mysterious demise sends a few shivers. Blood is not just a symptom, but as Poe states, the disease’s “avatar and seal.” Hespel goes further, pointing to the fact that the bell held a specific significance in the war over abolition, Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell became the visual symbol for the abolitionist movement in the North. The first national conventions of abolitionists in Philadelphia in 1841 and 1842 had sparked riots, forcing conveners to lock themselves in Independence Hall to escape an angry mob.

Who are Poe’s nobles? Are they pesky abolitionists, comfortable and smug in their moral superiority, trying to escape the anger of slave owners? Or are they souther aristocrats, escaping the impending doom of the color line and the pillar of slavery in society? What is the disease? Is it slavery? Or is abolition? Is Prospero the harbinger of truth? Or merely vice’s protector?  

It is here that Poe may remain true to form. It’s unclear what the message of Mask might be, except that arguments about slavery ultimately were rooted in some form of moral isolation and an overwhelming fear of social demise. We have records that Poe once sold a slave and yet we know that Poe eventually abandoned the South because of the alienation he faced in Virginia and South Carolina. Though he was an aristocrat, his parents’ career as circus performers and his own career as a writer ostracized him from “genteel” Southern society, where men were expected to uphold society through commerce, land cultivation, and slave-holding.

There is no doubt that Haspel’s interpretation carries no more weight or conviction than one which sees Poe’s Mask as fantasia on the theme of cholera. Perhaps I’m more drawn to it myself, because of the importance which the color line continues to play in the South.Indeed, my first visit to Poe’s Tavern was on Wednesday night in June 2015, the same night that Dylan Roof massacred a group of African-American worshippers at Emanuel AFM Church in Charleston.

My own hometown in TN had its own strict color line too – locals in White Bluff TN bragged about the fear that African Americans had of living in the town due to rumors of a Klan presence. My local county representative was arrested for domestic violence, having assaulted his daughter upon learning she was dating a black guy. Dickson County was the site of the first major environmental justice case, after it was revealed that toxicity levels at the county landfill had remained unregulated. It was further revealed that the landfill was placed on Eno Road in 1960 next hamlet of African American families living on property granted their ancestors after the Civil War. By 2007, at least one member of every family on Eno Road had been diagnosed with cancer. I could go on, but a description of the color line in Dickson County TN is enough for at least one book, if not several.  

For me, whether it’s anything by a Southern author, whether or not it’s even “about” the South, the act of trying to ignore a racial element or maybe refusing to investigate one requires a stretch of the imagination bordering on willful ignorance. Whether it’s Poe, Faulkner, Capote, Paula Dean or an issue of Southern Living, race is present. Paul Haspel’s paper on Poe may contain a good deal of speculation as to exactly what these symbols might mean, but I think he is right to try and undo the “sanitization” that a writer like Poe has undergone. Though he may be an “American Shakespeare” or the source of inspiration for Baudelaire, Verlaine, Debussy and Ravel, I find it hard not to see Poe the Southerner, writing about life as it was. To argue that race does not or cannot fall under the heading of “realism” is contentious at best.

If I’m honest, I think this is why the content Caplet’s Conte Fanstastique matters to me so much. To treat this work as a fantasy fable doesn’t really do it for me, as I see it to be just as much Poe as I do Caplet. I don’t hear pretty phrases, beauty, points of rest. I hear avarice, obsession, nervousness, impetuosity. I don’t want a nice tone, blurry harmonies. I want articulation, clarity, sound that the listener can’t ignore.

Whether it’s Rameau, Alain or Caplet, I guess it never ceases to amaze me the extent to which instrumental music – that is, music without words – can shape a story or narrative, and be shaped by context at the same time like some sort of contextual chameleon. I’m lucky to an extent, because the stakes of the material are rather low. This is music we’re talking about, not constitutional law or environmental justice, etc. But when your life and livelihood is in music, you naturally want to try and bring out some element of truth. That truth can be an aesthetic in and of itself, it can be drawn from historical sources, or it can be made to be polemical. But teasing it all out isn’t just about the notes on the page, but the images they foster.