Talk about your itty-bitty profession: we classical music commentators make up a huddled little clutch indeed. Every city of any size or pretensions to gentility contains a few of us, but compare our paltry numbers with—oh, I don’t know—dentists. Imagine Philadelphia with only three or four dentists. I get an anticipatory toothache just thinking about it.
Our ranks may be minuscule, but on the whole we’re a fine, upstanding, and thoroughly responsible bunch. We dig into our research, double-check our facts, fuss over our prose and burn gallons of midnight oil preparing our pre-concert lectures. We aren’t super(wo)men by any means; we all make mistakes. The fellow who wrote a program note on Ernest Bloch and committed the boner of referring to Bloch’s composition teacher as Jacques Dalcroze instead of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. The hapless chap who, assigned to write a program note on an Ives symphony, looked up “Ives” in Grove’s and proceeded to write his note on 17th century English composer Simon Ives, never realizing that he had the wrong guy. The program annotator who got his various branches of San Francisco’s philanthropic Stern family mixed up and referred to “Rosalie” Stern in a program note which he should have written “Rosa”—as he was crisply reminded by a member of the family.
And yes, that last guy was me. As I said, we all goof up from time to time. Factual errors can creep in despite our best efforts and the solicitous overview of our editors. Such boo-boos that remain hardly make for gut-wrenching tragedy—well, that Simon Ives thing was probably a career-ender—but other pitfalls and pratfalls await, and we must all be ever vigilant lest we tumble into the gaping chasms of sorrow that lie everywhere about.
Sidenote/tangent/marginally-pertinent story: one of my older relatives, a second uncle thrice removed or something equally impenetrable, was stationed on a navy cruiser during WWII. He liked to tell us how bored sailors would amuse themselves by arranging a lasso flat on the deck with a bait in the middle of the loop; big stupid sea birds called “boobies” would be attracted to the bait, would land in the lasso, and then the sailors would rope them by the legs, presumably providing all save the poor bird with gales of merriment. He claimed this to be the origin of the term “booby trap.” However, Uncle Thrice-Removed-Or-Whatever had a tendency to extemporize, extrapolate, and extenuate—i.e., he told whoppers. I think my particular favorite was his he-man tale of having scared off a posse of gang-bangers who were out to mug him. He claimed to have taken a karate pose while yelping HEEEEE—YYYYYYYYAAAAAAAA! at them. He would demonstrate to all-and-sundry at our family gatherings, followed by bursts of barely-suppressed hardy-har-hars from said all-and-sundry.
In all fairness to Uncle Thrice-Removed-Or-Whatever, I should hasten to add that he would only put on his little show when he was a good three sheets to the wind. Or does that only twist the knife?
Anyway. Music commentators share a common mission, which is to bring our listeners more closely to the music. Almost anything is fair game along the way; we’re all on the lookout for juicy tidbits about this or that composer, as long as they aren’t overly scandalous or cannot be repeated in polite company. (You simply do not tell blue jokes from the stage of Davies Symphony Hall before an SFS concert.) We look for resonances that might help our audiences make that all-important connection: aha! so that’s a key difference between Debussy and Ravel; aha! so now I understand what makes Op. 111 tick; aha! so Vivaldi isn’t just wallpaper after all. As long as we’re being honest, refraining from just making it all up—claiming, say, that J.C. Bach was actually the illegitimate love-child of Anna Magdalena Bach and the Leipzig burgomeister—it’s all good.
But there is a line that should not be crossed. And to me, making unjustifiable connections to play the emotional-involvement card is a transgression, pure and simple. I came across a set of liner notes recently that I consider to have slipped over into transgression in places. The notes were on various Bach cantatas, and the author of the notes was attempting to humanize the pieces by connecting them with various events in Bach’s life. So far so good, but the problem came when the author started hypothesizing about Bach’s mental states and then drew conclusions from those hypotheses, such as connecting a particularly lugubrious movement to the death, in infancy, of one of Bach’s many children. But a moment’s reflection brings up the many cheerful movements in the same cantata or other works written around the same time: was Bach happy about the loss? The historical record offers not the slightest connection between the movement and the event in Bach’s life; the author just forged the link out of thin air. The article included those all-important words “may have” and “perhaps”, carefully sidestepping the charge of presenting moonshine as fact, but that’s really not acceptable as far as I’m concerned. After all, you can use “may have” and “perhaps” to fuzz the edges of just about anything, however wildly absurd:
The following ‘Allegretto’ movement, filled as it is with whimsical burblings in the flutes and busy activity in the first violin, may possibly reflect Bach’s delight in having actually seen, with his own eyes, the merry little Dweeborkalop People who inhabit the craters of the moon.
I could go on, but you get my general drift: you can connect anything to anything, but that doesn’t mean the connection really exists. If I had to point to one faux-connection that is encountered more than any other, it has to be Beethoven’s deafness. The temptation is damn near irresistible, after all. You’ve got the Heiligenstadt Testament at your disposal, that confession-cum-suicide-note from October 1802, just perfectly timed to feed into a discussion of the Eroica‘s funeral march movement, the dark tension of the third piano concerto, or the churn and unrest of the “Waldstein” piano sonata. There isn’t a sforzando anywhere in Beethoven’s post-1800 output that you can’t claim as a jolt of fury from a Beethoven raging against the unfairness of fate. But the Heiligenstadt Testament also comes from the time of the bright and chipper second symphony, the snappy G Major “Spring” sonata for piano solo, and the downright funny E-flat major Trio Op. 38 for clarinet, ‘cello, and piano. What do those say about Beethoven’s mental state regarding his encroaching deafness? Well, nothing, in fact. But neither does the Eroica. Not really.
Naturally, documented and verifiable connections between composer mindstates and their compositions most indubitably do exist. Berlioz’s obsession with actress Harriet Smithson definitely fueled the Symphonie fantastique. He told us so.
Other common candidates for commentarial abuse: Robert Schumann’s long courtship of Clara Wieck as well as his 1854 mental breakdown, Schubert’s final illness (whatever, precisely, it was), both Bach and Handel’s vision problems, Chopin’s relationship to his native Poland, Shostakovich’s relationship to the Soviet regime. Pieces particularly prone to being illuminated by moonshine: Mozart’s final three symphonies, Haydn’s minor-key and turbulent symphonies of the early 1760s, Handel’s Messiah.
Sometimes a particularly sassy friend and I will be walking around San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, and we’ll see a now-elderly fellow still dolled up like an assembly-line Castro Clone of the 1970s: tight jeans, Pendleton shirt, buzzed hair, mustache, color-coded handkerchief in one hip pocket and a heavy ring of keys dangling from his cowboy belt. My friend has sometimes murmured If you ever see me looking like that, just shoot me.
I don’t think I have ever committed any of the connect-the-dots-that-aren’t-really-there transgressions that I’ve discussed above. But if I ever do, just shoot me.