Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

For Radu Lupu

The arch-magus of the piano died yesterday in Lausanne, at the age of seventy-six. For me, Lupu was the supreme living practitioner of his instrument, a musician and artist of the highest order. I wrote about him many times, always struggling to grasp the elemental mystery of his sound and style. None of the verbiage seems adequate in retrospect, but I tried my utmost. From a New York Times year-end piece in 1994:

Radu Lupu is a strange, wizardly presence at the piano, and his recital in January had the atmosphere of a seance. He indulged, as always, in eccentricities, but his lustrous tone and easeful grasp of the longer musical line mesmerized a Carnegie Hall audience. The final movement of Schumann's Fantasy in C turned into never-ending waves of lyric warmth, and the encore of Brahms's Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2) was too beautiful for words. Ghosts of the Romantics hovered behind him.

From a Times review of a Carnegie recital in 1996:

It is difficult to describe exactly what happens when Radu Lupu's fingers meet the piano. There are no flamboyant gestures, dazzling technical feats, startling interpretive notions. No grand personality hurls the music at the listener. What happens first is that the piano gives out a narcotically beautiful tone; solitary lines or open intervals take on a luminous sheen. Subtle dynamic shadings, lucid inner voices, well-turned rhythms and songful phrasings follow — beyond that, nothing, or something uncannily like the music itself.

From a round-up of favorite Brahms recordings in 1996:

For many years, Radu Lupu has been in the habit of ending his piano recitals with selections from Brahms's final piano pieces, the Intermezzos (Op. 117) and the ''Klavierstucke'' (Opp. 118 and 119). Those moments are usually among the most memorable of any season. Each of these works makes a world from a handful of notes; Mr. Lupu plays them slowly, simply and with hypnotically lovely tone. His 1970's recordings, collected on a London CD, come as close to musical perfection as you could ask.

From a 2005 New Yorker column:

In 1970, he made a recording of Brahms’s Intermezzos Opus 117 that is in my personal pantheon of the most beautiful piano records ever made. At a Carnegie recital in 1996, Lupu offered as his last encore the slow movement of Schubert’s “Little” A-Major Sonata, and it wasn’t so much a performance as a glimpse of a perfect world. No pianist gets a lovelier tone out of the instrument. How he does it is a bit of a mystery: the piano is, after all, an impersonal machine of levers and hammers. But an A above middle C sounds different under Lupu’s finger. It glows from within.

I never met Lupu, but I heard some delightful stories about him. He was magnificently indifferent to the anxious routines of the classical business, refusing interviews. He made relatively few recordings, and none of them captured the mesmerism of his live appearances. Here's a passage from my 2008 piece about Mitsuko Uchida at Marlboro:

Her warmest words were for the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu, whom she calls “the most talented guy I have ever met.” She describes how she once tried to get Lupu to visit Marlboro. “I got very excited, describing how people do nothing but play music all day long. But he said no. His explanation was very funny. ‘Mitsuko,’ he said, ‘I don’t like music as much as you.’ ”

I last heard Lupu in 2012, in Paris. After the Brahms D-minor concerto, he offered, as an encore, Op. 117 No. 1, a piece that lies as close to me as any. For many years, I had been waiting in vain for a chance to hear Lupu play it; on that night, it felt like a private gift, even though he had no idea I was there and probably had no idea who I was. Such is the relationship between great artists and all of us out here in the dark.

At the grave of Lubitsch

The master of sophisticated uproar rests in verdant peace. In another part of Forest Lawn lies my near-namesake Ross Alexander, a bright-eyed actor who came to a very sad end.

Previously: Korngold, Salieri, Bruckner, Liszt, Georg Trakl, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, Thomas Mann, Bach, Nietzsche, Monteverdi, Koussevitzky, Michael Furey, Luranah Aldridge, Ligeti, Frescobaldi, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Baudelaire and Beckett, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Stravinsky and Nono, Zemlinsky, Schnittke, Fibich, Xavier Scharwenka, Elliott Carter, Enescu, Rachmaninov, Mahler and many others, Russ.

LA Master Chorale

Pyramid of Sound. The New Yorker, April 18, 2022.

Prokofiev and Shostakovich vs. Putin

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker webite.

Don Carlos at the Met

Behind the Throne. The New Yorker, March 21, 2022.

Tyshawn Sorey in the Rothko Chapel

Singing Shadows. The New Yorker, March 14, 2022.

Final thoughts on Valery Gergiev

A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

Silvestrov, Prayer for Ukraine

It wouldn't be Valentine's Day without Alban Berg Valentine

COUNTESS: It must have been a very gifted artist who painted that portrait.

SCHIGOLCH: And later he slit his throat.

                — Lulu

Previously: An Alban Berg Valentine, Another Alban Berg Valentine, Yet Another Alban Berg Valentine, Return of Alban Berg Valentine, Nothing says forever like an Alban Berg Valentine, Alban Berg Valentine (10th anniversary edition), Alban Berg Valentine (2017 edition), Will you be my Alban Berg Valentine?, Eternity, by Alban Berg Valentine, My Bloody Alban Berg Valentine, Saint Alban Berg Valentine's Day Massacre.

Spotify remains awful

A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

Thought of the day

"If I don't accept a bad critique, then I can't accept a good one, either." — Fritz Lang

Hough's Nocturnes

Moonlight. The New Yorker, Jan. 31, 2022.

Translating Mann

Several people who've read my Mann essay in this week's The New Yorker have asked me how this somewhat intimidating author might best be approached. I have no hesitation in recommending John E. Woods's idiomatic translations for Knopf, which replaced the woebegone old versions by Helen Lowe-Porter: Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doctor Faustus. The first two are perhaps easier to digest, relatively speaking, than the last two, although Joseph is a vastly more entertaining work than many might expect. It does take a few hundred pages to get warmed up, but Mann's mastery of storytelling creates a remarkable degree of suspense around tales that most of us have known since childhood. There is also a strong untertow of mischief. Faustus is the most difficult of these novels, because of the density of the musical allusions, but it is also, I believe, Mann's greatest, deepest work. (My books The Rest Is Noise and Wagnerism are both written directly in the shadow of Faustus.) There are also several good translations of the stories: I recommend those by David Luke and Jefferson Chase. The classic early stories — "Little Herr Friedemann," "Tonio Kröger," "Tristan" — are perhaps the best point of departure. "Death in Venice" is unavoidable, although it is probably the most elusive Mann tale of all.

Alas, Woods did not go on to translate Mann's shorter novels: Royal Highness, Lotte in Weimar (first published in English as The Beloved Returns), Der Erwählte (published as The Holy Sinner). New versions are sorely needed. I'd read Royal Highness long ago in translation and thought little of it. Reading it more recently in German, I realized how sly it is, particularly in its portrait of the millionaire's daughter Imma Spoleman — Mann's tribute to his wife, Katia Pringsheim. (Prince Klaus Heinrich's hapless first attempts to strike up conversation with the arch Imma are a delight: "Do you like it better there than in New York?" "Just as well. It is about the same. It is everywhere about the same.") Lotte is particularly challenging because of the wild profusion of Goethe allusions. The monologue in the seventh chapter may be Mann's supreme feat of collage-writing. As much as Ulysses, this is a novel that needs to be read with a guide, such as Heinrich Detering provides for the Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe. We will probably never get such a thing in English, but an accurate modern translation would do wonders for this profound comedy of a book. 

As for the prose writings, these are largely inaccessible, unless one searches out the old Lowe-Porter translations in used bookstores. Many of Mann's most interesting essays — "Bilse and I," "Occult Experiences," "On Marriage," his unpublished cri de coeur against McCarthyism — have never been translated. The return to print of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is a mixed blessing given the absence of the other work. Aside from the issues I've raised about Mark Lilla's introduction, there are also problems of translation. Walter D. Morris's 1983 rendering of Reflections is a valiant attempt at an impossible task, and it holds up reasonably well, although there are errors that could have been corrected: misplaced quotation marks (on p. 376, the sentence beginning "All the nations" is not from the Lensch essay); typos (on p. 326, "the principle of even freedom" should be "the principle of every freedom"); and awkwardnesses (it would be better to say that the "shores reecho with the sounds of a hunting horn," not a "French horn").

Appended to Reflections are two essays, "Thoughts in Wartime" from 1914 and "On the German Republic" from 1922. The latter was initially presented in bowdlerized form by Lowe-Porter, with the author's connivance; American audiences were deemed unready for Mann's peculiar strategy of celebrating democracy by way of Whitmanesque homoeroticism. Lawrence Rainey's version is complete but not especially accurate. On p. 515, we read that Gerhart Hauptmann "conducted himself as a man of letters"; this should be, "He did not conduct himself as a man of letters" — a vestige of the rhetoric of Reflections. A little later, we read, "Young men, please not that tone!" Mann in fact writes: "Jungmannschaft — nicht diese Töne!" — something like "Young teammates — not these tones!" What Rainey missed here was an allusion to the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ("O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!"). Throughout the essay, Mann is fantasizing that he is addressing a crowd of boisterous young men whom he intends to win over to the cause of democracy with his seductive talk of comradeship. That he thinks a Beethoven reference will help his case is part of the charming absurdity of the exercise.

The translation of "Thoughts in Wartime" is credited to Lilla and Cosima Mattner. It shows a troubling tendency to simplify Mann's prose and drop phrases. Here is the opening in German:

Im Gebrauch der Schlagworte "Kultur" und "Zivilisation" herrscht, namentlich in der Tagespresse — und zwar der des In- und Auslandes — große Ungenauigkeit und Willkür. Oft scheint man sie einfach als gleichbedeutend zu verwechseln, oft sieht es auch aus, als ob man das erstere für eine Steigerung des anderen halte, oder auch umgekehrt — es bleibt ungewiss, welcher Zustand nun eigentlich für den höheren und edleren gilt. Für meine Person habe ich mir die Begriffe folgendermassen zurechtgelegt.

A faithful translation might read like this:

Great imprecision and arbitrariness prevail in the use of the catchwords “culture” and “civilization," especially in the daily press, both at home and abroad. Sometimes they seem simply to be mixed up as if they were synonymous; sometimes it appears that the first is considered a heightening of the second, or vice versa — it remains uncertain which state actually counts as the higher and nobler one. For my part, I have set forth the terms as follows.

Lilla and Mattner make several trims and dispense with the idea of "Steigerung":

So often in today’s press the words “culture” and “civilization” are used inaccurately and arbitrarily. Sometimes they are treated as equivalent, sometimes as being on a continuum. And it is never clear which of the two—culture or civilization—is superior to the other. Here is how I understand the terms.

The translation goes on in this vein, setting aside fussy complications in an apparent attempt to make the writing blunter, breezier, more think-piece-like. In the process, it ceases to sound like Thomas Mann. Convoluted openings are part of his prose strategy; he often uses them as a foil for sharper, crisper utterances later on. In this case, the preliminary throat-clearing feels symptomatic of the author's psychological condition as he embarks on a plunge into politics that will do him considerable damage, as he is perhaps aware. Morris is much more faithful to that voice, in a way that makes Reflections a chore to read, but in a necessary way.

The best of the Mann biographies in English is Hermann Kurzke's Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, although it perhaps goes too far in interpreting Mann's fiction as a reflection of his life. It also presumes a quite high level of acquaintance with the work itself. Anthony Heilbut's 1996 biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature is an excellent study of Mann through a sexual lens, even if it is a bit overzealous in seeking out a physical side to that sexuality, as I discussed in a 1996 essay for The New Yorker. Two absorbing recent studies are Tobias Boes's Thomas Mann's War and Stanley Corngold's The Mind in Exile. For those who read German, the field is of course far wider. Klaus Harpprecht's 1995 biography runs well over two thousand pages; the Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe has lately issued the later stories and Der Erwählte; and Fischer has released an excellent new edition of the Heinrich-Thomas Mann letters, containing many shorter notes that had previously gone unpublished.

At the grave of Korngold

The music on the grave is, of course ... 

Previously: Salieri, Bruckner, Liszt, Georg Trakl, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, Thomas Mann, Bach, Nietzsche, Monteverdi, Koussevitzky, Michael Furey, Luranah Aldridge, Ligeti, Frescobaldi, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Baudelaire and Beckett, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Stravinsky and Nono, Zemlinsky, Schnittke, Fibich, Xavier Scharwenka, Elliott Carter, Enescu, Rachmaninov, Mahler and many others, Russ.

Mann vs. Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich's memo about Thomas Mann, July 1933.

In my Thomas Mann essay in this week's New Yorker, I mention a critical and dramatic moment in the author's life, one whose full dimensions became clear only long after his death. On Feb. 11, 1933, twelve days after Hitler became Reichskanzler, Mann left Germany to deliver a series of lectures on Wagner in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris. He and his wife, Katia, then went on vacation in Switzerland. Mann returned to his native land only in 1949, and did not live there again. Because the departure had been entirely unplanned, a great quantity of papers remained at Mann's house in Munich, including volumes of his diaries, in which his same-sex desires were very evident. Mann soon began to worry that the diaries would fall into the hands of the Nazis, who could have made a propaganda bonanza out of them — or, possibly, have tried to blackmail Mann into returning to Germany and endorsing the regime.

The events that ensued inspired the most effective sequence in Colm Tóibín's recent novel The Magician. Golo Mann, one of the author's sons, undertook the risky task of packing up the diaries and other important documents. Under strict orders to keep the journals secret, Golo took the precaution of locking the door while he crammed them into a suitcase alongside other papers, including the typescript of Joseph and His Brothers. Golo was preparing to ship the Koffer, weighing thirty-eight kilograms, when he encountered the family chauffeur, Heins, who offered to take care of it. Golo handed it over — a questionable decision, since Heins had admitted his Nazi sympathies. As weeks went by and the suitcase failed to appear in Switzerland, the family came to suspect that Heins had brought it to the police. In fact, as later researches established, the shipment made it as far as the border in Lindau, where a police official named Neeb detained it. Opening the suitcase, Neeb found a set of contracts that showed Mann's considerable earnings as an author. He got in touch with the Bavarian political police, offering to send the material for inspection. His report aroused great curiosity, as the document below attests. "Eilt sehr!" is written on the top — extremely urgent. The contracts were sent to Munich, information was copied down, the contracts were sent back, and Neeb allowed the suitcase to proceed over the border. 

Neeb wrote in his memo: "A look through the suitcase revealed that it contained only manuscripts of Thomas Mann's novels and short stories. It gives the impression that Thomas Mann does not intend to return to Germany in the near future.” Either the official failed to notice the diaries, or, as Hermann Kurzke speculates in his remarkable biography Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk, possibly he decided that private matters were better left private. The memo has the manner of a punctilious bureaucrat, one would presumably have made a thorough inspection. In any case, the suitcase arrived intact, and Mann had the impression that it had not been disturbed. He never learned what a stroke of luck been granted to him; the Neeb memo was published in 1987, in Jürgen Kolbe's book Heller Zauber: Thomas Mann in München 1894–1933.

Neeb addressed his memo to "O. Sektr. Müller," in Abteilung VI of the Munich Polizeidirektion. This was Heinrich Müller, who would rise to become chief of the Gestapo and would play a crucial role in the planning of the Holocaust. His superior was the fiendish Reinhard Heydrich, who ran Abteilung VI, the political division of the Bavarian police. There is no question that if the entire suitcase had been sent to Munich its contents would have been of extraordinary interest to Heydrich and his boss Heinrich Himmler. The Nazis were very exercised about Thomas Mann, who was widely seen as an apostate from the right-wing cause on account of his embrace of the Weimar Republic in 1922. In July 1933, Heydrich went to the trouble of writing up a two-page memo detailing Mann's ideological crimes, leading to an ominous conclusion: "This anti-German, Marxist, pro-Jewish attitude, one hostile to the national movement, gave reason to issue a protective custody order against Thomas Mann, which, however, could not be carried out on account of his absence." Of that document Mann had no inkling. But he was right to suspect, as he said on various occasions, that if he had remained in Germany he would have wound up in Dachau, or dead. Even when he was in Switzerland, there was a not unjustified fear that he could be kidnapped or assassinated. (For more, see Paul Egon Hübinger, "Thomas Mann und Reinhard Heydrich in den Akten des Reichsstatthalters v. Epp," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 28:1 [1980], pp. 111–43.)

A fruitless thought experiment: what would have happened if the Nazis had published incriminating excerpts from the diaries, including those detailing his 1927 infatuation with the eighteen-year-old Klaus Heuser, which could have been interpreted as indicating a physical affair? (As I write in my New Yorker piece, Heuser's own later testimony suggests that nothing of the sort happened.) Perhaps Mann would have been driven to despair, even suicide. Or — I admit this is extremely unlikely — perhaps he would have written an essay saying, yes, I have been attracted to men, though I have never acted on those impulses — so what? He had come close to making such an admission already. It is implicit in the bizarre 1925 essay "On Marriage," which spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the impossibility of gay desire, as if this were an ordinary factor in any man's decision to marry. A 1920 letter to the gay poet and educator Carl Maria Weber is also moderately forthcoming. Behind the mask of bourgeois reserve, there was a deep streak of defiant pride in Mann, and I don't think his response to a Nazi exposé would have been quiet either way.

Profuse thanks, as ever, to Hans Rudolf Vaget.

Thomas Mann, again

Behind the Mask. The New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2022.

Previously: Mann in love, Mann and music, Fictional composers, Mann's house in LA, Mann's house again, An Adrian Leverkühn companion, Exodus.

Photo: Mann receiving an honorary degree at the University of Dubuque, 1940. From the Thomas-Mann-Archiv, Zürich. 

For Terry Teachout

I was deeply saddened to hear of the death, at the age of sixty-five, of the critic, biographer, and playwright Terry Teachout. Terry was, as Ethan Iverson comments, an uncommonly generous soul who seemed incapable of holding a grudge and steadfastly resisted the general deterioration of digital-era discourse. His inexhaustible attention to theater across the country was a model for me; no New York-based critic was less New York-centric. He had a great deal to do with the fact that I started this blog back in 2004. I saw him seldom in person, but he was a constant presence in my life nonetheless, through his writing and through social media. A couple of weeks ago, I posted something enthusiastic about Frank Martin, and Terry posted something enthusiastic in return. It's the kind of exchange that makes one think one isn't alone in the world. I offer Martin's great Mass for double choir in Terry's honor.

Shoshone, California

The Queen of the Desert. The New Yorker online, Jan. 4, 2022.

Tecopa vole

A (long) Jorge E. López moment

The ensemble for Dome Peak, premiered in 1993, includes no fewer than eight Wagner tubas.