The trip home yesterday was nothing out of the ordinary but it seemed worse. I was bit more sensitized than usual, my nostrils twitching at the stench of urine baking on the sidewalk, my eyes averted from the phalanx of comatose winos, druggies, and crazies lining the sidewalks, my ears recoiling from the stressed blare of Van Ness drivers as they made a beeline for the freeway onramp a few blocks down. Street level San Francisco is no place to leave your heart. It's like picking your way through a festering trash dump staffed by escapees from the county nuthouse.
So in a way San Francisco lives up to its reputation as one of America's pitifully few showcase cities. It demonstrates in vividly unmistakable terms that the nation is circling the drain, sucked down into its own self-made vortex of ignorance, superstition, and economic malaise. Not a pretty picture.
Happily for me, I can go home. I can shut my front door and leave crumbling America behind, at least for a while. My house is a happy relic of an earlier age. It's sloppy and comfortable, a sprawling nest for a single man who is casual about frippery but passionate about his passions. Lots of books. CDs and LPs scattered and stacked and stored everywhere. Two rooms sport fancy stereo equipment. There are four or five—I forget how many at the moment—computers and their assorted periphernalia. The whole is cluttered but reasonably clean. I'm scrupulous about the kitchen, good about dusting, OK about vacuuming, lousy about the laundry.
For some folks, homecoming might mean mixing up a cocktail or pouring a glass of wine. Others might head for a shower. Still others might make a swan dive for the living-room couch and the remote. For me, the ritual takes place in my home office with its knockout headphone rig and a sound library that currently weighs in at 1.8 terabytes of lossless digital audio. Sennheiser HD 800s perched comfortably on my head, Audio Research DAC7 and Luxman P-1u headphone amp on and running, I make my choice for my welcome-home listening.
Invariably I select something from the great masters of the Western tradition. Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Mendelssohn, Bach, Handel, Schumann. I'll go about as far as Debussy, Sibelius, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff. But that's about it. If my listening is to include something contemporary or edgy, it will be at a different time of the day. Never at homecoming. Never first thing in the morning. Never right before bedtime, either. Those are the times when I require music that renews, reaffirms, reassures. I need an anchor.
How much of that need for anchoring and reassurance reflects the well-documented tendency for aging musicians to gravitate more and more to those essential classics? It's a very rare senior-citizen musician who retains much of the missionary zeal that may have characterized youthful years. Think back to Arthur Rubinstein, champion of contemporary composers galore—friend and interpreter of Debussy, Ravel, de Falla, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Villa-Lobos. He played those works throughout his long career. Clueless youngsters would diss the older Rubinstein for his conservative programming, unaware that he had introduced many of those now standard-repertory items. Toscanini's recorded legacy gets a lot of heat for the same uninformed reasons. The facts speak otherwise: Toscanini didn't start recording until he was well past fifty, when he shepherded the touring La Scala Orchestra through some acoustic shellac discs in the early 1920s. The bulk of his vast discography comes from his last two decades when he helmed the NBC Symphony. He was in his mid-eighties when he gave us a studio version of La Bohème with Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce. Oh, how dull, how same-ol' same-ol', cry the ignorant. What they forget—or more likely just don't know—is that Toscanini conducted the world premiere of La Bohème, just as he premiered The Girl of the Golden West and Turandot, not to mention Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci. When Toscanini recorded Verdi's Otello in 1947 for NBC, he was reaching back to his youth when he played the 'cello at the premiere, under Verdi's supervision. Toscanini conducted La Mer at NBC, capping a lifetime's experience with a work he had helped to establish in the repertory. Ditto Richard Strauss' tone poems. Ditto Wagner's late operas—it was Toscanini who brought them to Italy, and that took a lot of courage in those days. As late as 1938 the septuagenarian gave the premiere of Samuel Barber's ever-popular Adagio for Strings, and during WWII he introduced the Shostakovich Seventh to American audiences. (In all fairness I should point out that his initial enthusiasm for the work quickly cooled.) True, Toscanini had nothing but scorn for the Second Viennese School and showed absolutely no interest in the hot young things who started popping up in the later 1940s. Then again, he appears to have been mostly right about that. Heck, even Pierre Monteux, he of the impeccable contemporary cred with Le Sacre du Printemps, Petrushka, and Daphnis et Chloë in his C.V.—not to mention buckets of lesser fare—became mostly conservative in his old age, focusing on his beloved Wagner, Beethoven, Berlioz, Dvorak, and Elgar.
Or the obvious preference of concert audiences for traditional fare over the hottest and newest? A major symphony orchestra serves a wide variety of constituencies, and its mission certainly includes advocating and performing fresh stuff. But an orchestra is also a community resource and bears a responsibility to those who need those tested and trusted masterworks for their continued peace of mind and sustenance. While the average symphony program has been creeping ever more into the 20th century—lots of Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, and the like—people still want to hear plenty of Mozart and Beethoven and Schumann and Schubert and Brahms and all that.
It's easy to dismiss such tastes as stodgy. But are they really? I'm a fairly enterprising musician and yet I reach for the Schubert when I need balm. Rather than specializing, I have become a sloppy generalist happy to roam over many centuries of musical heritage. But I come home to those core pieces. Perhaps it's nothing more complicated than seeking security amidst a failing culture. The pre-Anschluss Viennese heard the Mahler 9th for one last time just before the darkness enfolded them. It wasn't a very old work—only about thirty years old in 1938—but it represented what many no doubt viewed as a golden age, when there was still a Hapsburg empire and a feeling of order in their world.
It is said that a healthy society takes a generally dismissive attitude towards its past. Tinctoris cheerfully maligned music from before his early Renaissance days. Lutheran Germany retained a sliver of older church music but otherwise preferred to create anew every week, thus providing steady employment for armies of industrious municipal kapellmeisters and their minions. The eager audiences of Joseph II's Vienna snapped up new fare from Cimarosa, Piccini, Hasse, Mozart, Salieri, and more. Romantics heard music resolutely through their own auditory lens and had little if any patience for twitty authenticity. The composers they chose to elevate on pedestals were mostly 19th century—Beethoven in particular—or those 18th century worthies who could be massaged into a Romantic mindset, such as the Mozart of Don Giovanni or a Gothically-cast Bach. Only after the first World War did the Western world start rummaging through its own attic instead of shopping for new stuff. As long as a culture is healthy, the cutting edge is really the only edge. When decay sets in, however, it's the past that counts.
Enough talking. It's a shimmering summer day in San Francisco, August 2012. I want to focus on Mozart's B-flat Major Divertimento K 287. It's 235 years old. Good.