Russian is such a beautiful language euphonically, as Professor John E. Malmstad pointed out in an introductory Russian course I took at Columbia University. (Professor Malmstad was co-translator of the symbolist novel Petersburg by Andrei Bely.)
I took both French and Spanish as a high school and college student. I studied both intensively.
It was fun to compare the two Romance languages, both similar in their origins and vocabulary while at the same time (as is always the case with languages) both unique; distinct. Like persons, you like and admire, each one, for the things that make them unique.
It seems to me that Spanish is closer to the original Latin than French. I took two years of Latin in high school. I found Spanish grammar easy to learn.
A notable feature of studying Spanish to me was that spelling is very regular and simple. There are hardly any exceptions. A consonant, for example is either doubled or it is not – doesn’t change for different words.
Which brings us (to quote James Joyce) by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Russian. Russian is very similar to Spanish with respect to pronunciation. Spelling is entirely regular.
And, a notable, major feature of both languages — connected or related to regularity of spelling — is that a given word and spelling dictate the pronunciation. There are no exceptions. Words in both Spanish and Russian are pronounced exactly as they are spelled.
Every language has its own sound, sonority, a unique cadence and rhythm which, once you begin to learn the language, is music to the ear. Now you can “hear” the language, which the untutored can’t.
The musicality of spoken Russian, including the simplest phrases, is undeniable.
Shorakkopoch (also spelled Shorakopok) stone; Inwood Hill Park, New York City
SHORAKKOPOCH
According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian village, Peter Minuit in 1626, purchased Manhattan Island for trinkets and beads then worth about 60 guilders.
This boulder also marks the spot where a tulip tree (Liriodendron Tulipiera) grew to a height of 165 feet and a girth of 20 feet. It was until its death in 1938 at the age of 280 years. the last living link with the Reckgawawanc Indians who lived here.
Dedicated as part of New York City’s 300th anniversary celebration by the Peter Minuit post 1247, American Legion January 1954.
This marker is in Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan, where I was walking yesterday. It’s a beautiful spot, and I can imagine what it was like for the Indians who lived there (sadly, once, no more).
The stone is easy to miss. It’s on one of the paths in the forested area of the park.
When asked to describe my activities as a research/writer, I say that I am “independent scholar.” I am not and never have been an academic or professorial type, despite having taught literature and writing as an adjunct professor briefly. I have no academic credentials, other than a B.A. degree in the humanities, that would qualify me as an English professor.
My interest in literature comes from a lifetime love of books and reading, of literature and good writing.
I love the books I read for their own sake and am interested usually (very interested) in learning about the authors themselves — their lives and times. I take a great interest in learning about the writers I read qua writers: their style; how they compare to others writers; how they fit into the literary landscape and tradition; their development. Which is to say that, besides reading books for their own sake, I am constantly reading them from a scholarly/critical point of view. But, I never lose sight of the works themselves, which for me are paramount. To put it another way, the pleasure for me of reading is elemental. Yet, at the same time, there is great intellectual pleasure (the greatest I have derived, for the most part) in reading. And, I like to be challenged by deep writers who make one think and earn my admiration.
I am thoroughly uninterested in academic criticism such as that in the latest issue of the journal American Literary History (published by Oxford University Press), the contents of which are below. What this sort of criticism has to do with the actual works, with literature, is problematic — to put it bluntly, there is no connection. This is tendentious, polemical criticism. It shows what academia is up to when it comes to the study of literature, and it seems to be getting worse.
American Alternatives: Participatory Futures of Print from New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Press
Kelley Kreitz
Crime Fiction and Black Criminality
Theodore Martin
The Book Reads You: William Melvin Kelley’s Typographic Imagination
Kinohi Nishikawa
The Novel and WikiLeaks: Transparency and the Social Life of Privacy
Scott Selisker
Liberalism and the Early American Novel
Stephen Shapiro
Attention Spans
Elizabeth Duquette
Debunking Dehumanization
Jeannine Marie DeLombard
Queer Sociality After the Antisocial Thesis
Benjamin Kahan
Archives of Ecocatastrophe; or, Vulnerable Reading Practices in the Anthropocene
Nicole M Merola
Four Theses on Economic Totality
Mitchum Huehls
Rethinking Pauline Hopkins: Plagiarism, Appropriation, and African American Cultural Production
Richard Yarborough; JoAnn Pavletich; Ira Dworkin; Lauren Dembowitz
This is by far my favorite Vivaldi concerto. He wrote over five hundred of them. In Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959), Robert Craft asked Stravinsky his opinion on a recent revival of eighteenth century Italian composers and transcribed his response: “Vivaldi is greatly overrated–a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.”
I don’t, for the most part, buy into Stravinsky’s assessment of Vivaldi. Vivaldi’s vocal and sacred music is, in a word, splendid. But, I feel that there is legitimacy to the comment when Vivaldi’s concertos are considered. An often repeated joke is that Vivaldi didn’t actually compose 500 concertos, he just wrote the same concerto 500 times.
Vivaldi’s Concerto in C Major, RV 443 was originally composed for the flautino, an instrument similar to the recorder. It is most often performed today with a soloist playing the recorder or piccolo.
The concerto is in three movements:
1. Allegro
2. Largo
3. Allegro molto
Details regarding the composition and first performance of this concerto are unknown.
More than two thirds of Vivaldi’s five hundred-plus concertos are for solo instrument: violin (in more than 230 concertos), bassoon, cello, oboe, and mandolin. Only three of Vivaldi’s concertos were written for the “flautino” — “little flute” or high-pitched recorder — which is the equivalent of today’s piccolo.
The solo role is more virtuosic and demanding than Vivaldi’s normal woodwind writing (the solo enters with an unbroken string of eighty-four eighth notes, and that’s just the beginning). Vivaldi must have had a superlative player in mind. The pattern is classic Vivaldi: the two outer movements are dazzling display pieces (the last seemingly endless run of triplets in the finale is particularly breathtaking—especially for the performer); the central Largo is an eloquent, highly expressive monologue [italics added].
— Phillip Huscher, program note, Chicago Symphony Orchestra
The performance which I have posted here (from an old, now unavailable LP of mine) — on FLUTE — features as soloist French flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000).
A beautiful performance on piccolo featuring as soloist Lucille Bénédicte Zeitoun is on YouTube at
On the YouTube link, Ms. Zeitoun also performs as a spellbinding encore one of Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances .
Shortly after his return to Russia from the first international tour Tchaikovsky set to work on his Fifth Symphony, in E minor. It was written in about two months, during the summer of 1888. For some time the composer had been brooding over the possibility that his inspiration had dried up and that it was time for him to quit. He worked hard on his symphony to prove to himself that his own fears were groundless. The first performance of the work left him more despondent than ever. When he conducted it in St. Petersburg later that year, and in Prague, it fell flat. ‘It is a failure,’ he wrote to his confidante. ‘There is something repellent in it, some over-exaggerated idea of colour, some insincerity or fabrication which the public instinctively recognizes.’ He went on to say that his Fourth Symphony was a far better work.
It is interesting to note after many years how much of the composer’s estimate of the Fifth Symphony fell wide of the mark and how much was damningly true. The work certainly was not a failure. It became one of the most popular symphonies ever written, one of the established showpieces of every orchestra’s repertoire, and a bulwark of Tchaikovsky’s hold on the affections of the music public. It has been played until every shred of novelty is worn away, the seams show, and the dramatic surprises are gone. Every critic knows how right the composer was when he spoke of over-exaggeration, insincerity, fabrication—even the ‘something repellent’. Nevertheless the Fifth Symphony is beloved wherever orchestras foregather the world over.
The work is another laboratory specimen of the composer’s mature style–which means a mixture of his virtues and faults in unexplainable juxtaposition. It has lyric richness almost to excess; it has brilliance, variety of mood, tremendous passion. It has also the composer’s characteristic melancholia, his mood of desperate sadness. There is an orchestration of clarity, colour, and resounding power; and finally, like pieces of glass set in a diadem, there are some classic examples of bad taste.
The symphony makes a good beginning, as Tchaikovsky so often does in his first movements. This one may be a patchwork of themes instead of a logical piece of sonata construction, but has melodic interest, well sustained. The motto theme with which the work begins is radically different from the Fatum of the Fourth Symphony, being not a brassy fanfare but a soft, gloomily intoned melody for the clarinet. It runs through the entire symphony in various guises, becoming in the last movement the main declamation point of the entire work. Its use is so strongly stressed as to suggest some concrete idea behind the composer’s inspiration. Tchaikovsky never admitted the existence of such a programme, as he did in the case of the Fourth Symphony, but many commentators have supplied their own. It seems doubtful if one really existed. This phase of Tchaikovsky’s music is apt to be confusing. He was obviously impressed with the tone-poem, programme-symphony idea, which permeated the music of the romantic era. It ruled so much of his thinking that even his most abstract works often sound as if they had a programmatic basis. His melodies, helped by his dramatic type of construction, often seem to be telling some story; it is one of their strongest characteristics. But most of the time the composer was simply imitating the tone-poem style, not actually carrying it out.
The second movement of the Fifth Symphony presents another celebrated Tchaikovsky melody. It is given at first to the solo horn and is later entwined with an obbligato by the oboe. The movement is remindful of a Chopin nocturne, extended and intensified with all the swelling passions and colours of the great orchestra. It misses being one of the supreme nocturnes, for its chief blemish is two convulsive interruptions by the motto theme that are noisy and tasteless. Chopin made use of such breaks in the mood of his later nocturnes, but he did it with a distinction of craftsmanship and idea which was denied Tchaikovsky.
The third movement is marked Waltz, and for this the composer has been doubly damned. The purists have said that a waltz has no place whatever in a symphony, and anyway this is not a real waltz at all. They may be right on both counts, but not many listeners would sacrifice this particular movement. It is unpretentious, melodious, and charming; and it serves to relieve the emotional tension of the surrounding movements.
It is hard to forgive Tchaikovsky for the last movement of the Fifth Symphony [italics added]. His purpose was to end his symphony with a resounding, triumphal finale; his method in part was to take the gloomy motto theme, turn it from minor to major, and proclaim it to the skies. It so happens that this is one of the hardest tests to which a composer may subject a theme–to have it sung fortissimo by the brass. Better themes than Tchaikovsky’s have failed under this ordeal. Here the result is lamentable. The tune takes on neither dignity nor beauty only the banal trumpery of an operatic march by Meyerbeer [italics added].
“[The second movement’s] chief blemish is two convulsive interruptions by the motto theme that are noisy and tasteless. Chopin made use of such breaks in the mood of his later nocturnes, but he did it with a distinction of craftsmanship and idea which was denied Tchaikovsky.”
It is hard to forgive Richard Anthony Leonard for such atrocious criticism.
The taste of the public, it has often been said, has always been, and will always be, abysmally low. But, a literary critic should be careful when savaging such universally beloved and esteemed works as Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Les Misérables, or Great Expectations; or a pompous music critic the works of one of the greatest composers.
On November 8 2018, I attended a performance at Carnegie Hall by the West-East Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor Op. 64. The symphony is comprised of four movements: Andante–Allegro con anima, Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza, Valse: Allegro moderato, Finale: Andante maestroso–Allegro vivace.
I believe Tchaikovsky’s Fifth was the first symphony I got to know in its entirety. It was the first symphony I ever purchased, on an LP when I was a teenager.
The above quote is from a popular book by the British music historian and critic Richard Anthony Leonard that is now out of print. It was used in a course, Introduction to Music, which I took at Brandeis University in my sophomore year.
I was dismayed and almost felt wronged when I read Leonard’s comments on the Fifth, in my college survey text (Leonard’s book). I thought for a moment: Could I be wrong about Tchaikovsky? Could it be that I was snowed, fooled by Tchaikovsky’s “schlocky” music? No, I thought, I don’t, can’t agree.
On October 27 at Carnegie Hall, I saw a performance of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, opus 70. It was a work hitherto unknown to me.
The program notes contained the following comment:
Dvořák’s Seventh is generally ranked as the greatest of the composer’s nine symphonies. This assessment is voiced in spite of the work not being as ingratiating as the Eighth Symphony or as dramatic as the ever-popular Ninth, “From the New World.” Sir Donald Francis Tovey set the Seventh alongside the C-Major Symphony of Schubert and the four symphonies of Brahms as “among the greatest and purest examples of this art form since Beethoven.”
I am not prepared to say this about Dvořák’s Seventh. But, the comment got me to thinking: what are the greatest symphonies of all time?
Well, Tovey identifies most of them: Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms.
What about Mozart?
My personal ranking:
All nine Beethoven symphonies. You can’t really choose among them.
Mozart’s last three symphonies and his Symphony No. 36 (“Linz”). The “Linz’ and Mozart’s’ Symphony No. 40 are personal favorites of mine.
Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C-Major. Incidentally, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony is haunting, but it odes not, in my opinion, rank with the others listed above by me and is not the equal of Schubert’s Ninth.
Brahms’s first and fourth symphonies. These are his two greatest, I feel. The First is a personal favorite of mine, but the Fourth is equally great.
Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony.
Shostakovich’s fifth symphony. I am convinced that it ranks with the others, and is the only modern symphony about which I am prepared to say this.
In all of the above works, what I find is brilliance of conception, structure, and musical architecture and unwavering emotional power. So that each work feels like an organic whole and never flags.
Well, almost never. The third movement — Valse: Allegro moderato — of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is comprised of a beautiful waltz worthy of Tchaikovsky, and yet I find my interest and sense of inevitability in the music flagging a bit at that point.
On October 25, 2018, I attended a performance at Carnegie Hall by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and soloists and choir of Haydn’s “Nelson Mass” and Mozart’s Requiem.
The “Nelson Mass.” Stupendous. To hear it live is a revelation. Here is the “Kyrie” (the opening section).
I was struck by something when listening to the “Lacrimosa” section of Mozart’s Requiem. The doleful stress of the strings, which beautifully convey tears: the concept of weeping.
It remined me of something: Vivaldi’s magnificent Stabat Mater. The strings in the “Eja mater” section.
I looked up some musical terms used for performance directions. The strings are playing agitato: agitated or restless. Agitato is a direction to play in an agitated manner.
Was Mozart somehow influenced by Vivaldi? No. Just a coincidence.
Did he know Vivaldi or his music? Doesn’t seem that likely.
Mozart did know Bach personally and admired his music. Bach, as is well known, was an admirer of Vivaldi.
I suffered a near loss of vision. It was terrifying, but treatment seems to have restored my sight to its former state, or near to it.
I temporarily lost the ability to read. To celebrate my recovery, I have begun reading Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets, a work I have been intending to read.
I think reading gives me the greatest pleasure of all. Here is Johnson on the metaphysical poets:
Their attempts were always analytick; they broke every image into fragments and could no more represent by their slender conceits and laboured particularities, the prospects of nature or the scenes of life than he, who dissects a sun-beam with a prism, can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon.” — “Cowley”
Like a biologist or physician examining a tissue under a microscope, I can detect great writing (and tell good from mediocre or bad); can recognize, appreciate, and delight in power and subtlety of exposition, when happily seen, from a sentence or two.
Reading gives me the greatest pleasure imaginable. The above sentence shows why Samuel Johnson is so admired and why he has few rivals as a writer of expository prose.
