On Course - Spring 2013

Gil Talbot

O n c o u rse

Music 485/History-Social Science 485

Madmen

by Sally V. Holm

history are parsed and conjoined by A film of the Metropolitan Opera’s instructors who share passions for latest version of Parsifal is playing both, a country of origin, and 21 years in a Graves classroom occupied by & of friendship as part of the Andover 15 attentive students. Their two faculty. Marcelle Doheny, instructor teachers have already briefed them in history and social science and well on the ancient Germanic story classically trained oboeist, has taught with its Wagnerian elements that world and European history for all of appealed to—and very likely heavily “ ut of Tune O ” o S those 21 years. Walter came in 1977 influenced—a young Adolf Hitler. as a French and German teacher, and They are deep into the motifs—the then went off for a master’s degree in music before returning suffering of Amfortas, the seductress Kundry, edging to the music department, where, aside from his teaching and toward the compassion and redemption that finally gives conducting, he served as chair of the department from 1995 way to resolution at the end. to 2001 and has been director of performance since 2007.

“Did you hear that?” Chris Walter asks, eyes wide. “And there it is again!” A few students nod. “Dee-dee-dum. What The idea for the course was hatched over lunch five years ago, born of a mutual desire to increase the comingling is that? What’s the connection between Parsifal and PA? of history, politics, and music studies. But how to narrow It’s a trick question,” he teases. Quizzical looks abound. the focus? They settled on classical music in the 20th “It’s called the Parsifal Chime! Hear it in the bass? Dacentury (Doheny believes this timeframe is insufficiently da-da-dum. It’s the Bell Tower chimes!” The moment is studied, and Walter senses that few students have had much punctuated by laughter. exposure to classical music of this period) just as New Yorker Walter attempts to connect students on a personal level writer Alex Ross published his book, The Rest Is Noise: to the deep meanings and motivations behind Wagner’s Listening to the Twentieth Century. “It crystallized it all for famous opera. And to set it in the context of the times, the us,” Doheny says. They would look at Strauss, Wagner, and 1930s as Hitler was amassing power, he has a substantive Hitler, Shostakovich and Stalin, Copeland and McCarthy partner. In this inventive collaboration called Out of Tune: for starters. Toward the end they would look at the Music and the State in the Twentieth Century, music and deprivations imposed by the Cultural Revolution in China.

Maestros:

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The key element would be questions. How did the politics of the time influence a composer? How reflective of the culture is the music of its time? How do we discern sarcasm in a composer’s work? How do you create irony in music?

What forbidden emotions or realities are imbedded in a work? Questions that have no definitive answers, but that ask students to ponder deeper meanings and come to their own informed interpretations of art. Doheny and Walter agreed that only seniors and uppers would be able to enroll.

“It’s all too sophisticated, too ambiguous for 9th- and 10thgraders,” Doheny says. “They have to be mature enough to tolerate uncertainty.”

Uncertainty dominates the classroom throughout the discussion of Shostakovich and the angst that held Soviet Russia in its grip in Stalin’s time. Doheny sets the stage: an atmosphere of fear, rampant paranoia in the arts brought on by Stalin’s ruthless purges of anyone who deviated from the party line, the promotion of a “classless society” marked by a mirage of happy workers bringing industrialization to the economy, the crushing of Formalism and the rise of Soviet Realism.

Enter Dmitri Shostakovich. Walter describes him: a prodigy and product of the intellectual elite who tended toward dissonance and abstraction in his music until a disastrous review in Pravda of his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District marked him as a target for Stalin’s wrath. Change or die.

Shostakovich was certainly no fool. His 5th Symphony, written in 1937, had to be seen as a monument to

Soviet Realism. It resurrects his career. Walter plays a video of a rendition by the San Francisco Symphony, interjecting throughout: “This symphony expressed all that Shostakovich had endured, yet Stalin accepted it.

How was that possible? Was the composer being sarcastic?

What imbedded emotions can you hear?” He points out a brief thematic reference from Bizet’s Carmen—a prime example of a “code” in the music. He draws their attention to the strings’ subtle echo of the choral music of the Russian Orthodox religion. An elegy to Stalin’s victims, among whom were Shostakovich’s relatives and friends?

Is the composer taking a huge risk? Remember, Doheny chimes in, “communism is an atheist creed. Religion was completely forbidden in that era.” At the time, students are told, the audience cried.

The students are assigned to listen to a movement of the 5th Symphony in its entirety before the next class. But Walter, in his enthusiasm, cannot help himself. He skips to the end of the second movement, explaining about the “dead ends” Shostakovich has crafted into the music that reflect the composer’s hopelessness and frustration. “But then, listen to how he finishes,” he implores them. The harp’s “ghostly notes” lead into the strings’ “last benediction,” full of religious overtones, winding down to what sounds suspiciously “like a haunting amen.” And so it does.

The class is silent. No one stirs for a moment, lost in thought about what becomes of music in a time so out of tune.

Andover | Spring 2013

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