“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
— Plato
“Where words fail, music speaks.”
Now that we’re all poised to fast, pray, give alms, and repent in ashes for the next seven weeks, a little solace is called for.
We might turn to music. We all have our preferences, but classical music — having in many cases held up through the centuries — tends to touch us at our depths, restore interior order, and impart a mysterious sense of hope.
Also, a lot of it is free, which is especially nice as the winter doldrums descend and tax time draws near.
Take Medici TV, for example, a huge perk of your LA Public Library card. (Go to “E-Media,” then “Movies, TV, and Videos”).
Here you’ll find a dizzying array of jazz, ballet, operas, concerts, master classes, and documentaries. I’m a huge fan of French filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon, who has profiled, among many others, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, pianist Glenn Gould, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Monastic in their devotion and focus, these artists approach music in much the same spirit as the saints approach prayer.
Poke around and you’ll make your own finds. I happened one afternoon upon “Enrico Caruso: The Eternal Voice,” a 2021 documentary in which I learned that the celebrated Italian tenor (1873-1921) was targeted by New York City’s notorious Black Hand extortionists, was star-crossed in love, and basically sang himself into an early death. “They love my throat,” he lamented, “not me as person,” thereby corroborating that no amount of adulation can fulfill our hunger for love.
“Knowledge Is the Beginning,” a 2005 documentary available on YouTube, tells the story of the Arab-Israeli orchestra founded by the Argentine-Israeli classical pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.
Barenboim is a born leader and to witness him and orchestra co-founder Edward Saïd bringing together scores of young people, many of whom would not have had a chance to perform otherwise, is deeply moving.
The film traces the orchestra’s six-year history beginning in 1999, when young musicians from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, and Spain began working together. After overcoming major organizational and political roadblocks, Barenboim did the almost unthinkable by leading a 2005 live concert in Ramallah that justly received worldwide attention.
In a clip that has special resonance in light of today’s conflicts, Karim, a Palestinian from Jordan, reflects on his time with the orchestra, starting when he was only 10 years old.
“I was pretty naïve. Israelis to me were something that’s not human even. This is how I perceived it as a young boy … the only side we saw in Jordan is that of killing, of massacring even, of extreme brutality. That’s the only thing I saw of Israelis and for me to actually meet people that have the same interests as me and lead relatively similar lives changed my view of what a human being is.”
“In that sense,” Barenboim observes with massive understatement, “music is a bit subversive.”
“Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie” (2004), another award-winning documentary available on YouTube, takes as its subject Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie (b. 1965), who began to lose her hearing at the age of 8 and became profoundly deaf.
She learned to listen and hear with other parts of her body beyond her ears and is altogether a beautiful, vibrant, compelling figure.
“Silence is probably one of the loudest sounds and heaviest sounds that you’re ever likely to experience,” she notes. “My mission is to teach the world to listen.”
If you need your faith in humankind restored yet further, check out the 1970 recording, “Glenn Gould: Beethoven, Six Variations for Piano in F major op. 34.”
The piece was written when Beethoven was 32 and undergoing one of the most painful emotional crises of his career. Unable to ignore his growing deafness and fearing he would die, the “Six Variations” nonetheless betray little of the composer’s increasing despair. Gould suffered his own depression and neuroses — yet both he and Beethoven stayed their respective vocational courses till the end. This is what we’re capable of, we humans, at our best, and highest.
Speaking of Beethoven, one last fascinating YouTube video is music historian Robert Greenberg’s lecture: “The First Angry Man.”
Beethoven didn’t just go outside the box, maintains Greenberg — he obliterated the box. He created an entirely new paradigm for Western music, mirroring his own often chaotic life and times in “music that stuns us with its power and passion, delights us with its lyricism, awes us with its magnificence, but most importantly, inspires us in the manner in which it depicts Beethoven’s humanity.”
This from a man whose childhood was dominated by abuse and loss, whose life was marked by chronic illness and psychological neuroses, and who went deaf over the course of his young and middle adulthood. He was irascible, unattractive, and unhygienic.
And to the end, he continued to compose music that universalized his struggles and his victories.
It was late in his life that Beethoven uttered his famous artistic creed: “Art demands that we never stand still.”
As Greenberg points out, that’s good advice for us all.
