Text for the 3rd movement, with translation

La bas, au bord du chemin, ou le Prince and le pauvre se croisser,
A l'horizon ou l'esprit touche le monde,
La bas, ou la Beaute se bris comme une vague,
Et les pecheurs du perles sentent l'evanouissement des souvenirs insupportables,
La bas, ou toute est movement et grace,
La musique cesse d'etre nous
Car, triumphant, envoiles, nous sommes d'elles.

There, along the path where the Prince and the Pauper meet,
At the horizon where mind touches world,
There, where Beauty crumbles like a wave,
And the pearl-fishers feel the unbearable memories melt,
There, where all is movement and grace
Does music cease to be of us
For we, triumphant, winged, are of it.

Do you believe in miracles?    In Santa Claus?  In the existence of natural forces, beneficent to mankind, that conspire, at times, to grant us the fulfillment of our dreams or, even better, felicities we never imagined?

I had concluded some years ago (in the wake of certain disappointments, both
personal and professional, that have left their mark not merely on my psyche but on an impoverished scholarly community) that this cosmos is a cold and uncaring place in which to live and die.  But thanks to the sympathies of a bicycling delivery man, Mr. Lum (who, noting my despondency, introduced me to Chinese philosophy) everything has become more complicated since, if it’s true that suffering and apparent misfortune can actually be instructional and eventually a boon, then I’m no longer sure what to wish for.

And so it was in a state of uncertainty  that I descended the stairs last week on  Christmas morning and approached the neatly wrapped gifts lying underneath the Gesellschaft tree.  You can imagine my surprise at discovering there, instead of the usual socks, ties and pencils, a three movement string quartet in manuscript entitled  Le Colibri, alongside a black notebook containing, as it turns out, a group of letters from the quartet’s composer to an unnamed woman, at once the object of his affection and the source of his misery.

Neither music nor text bears any signature, and so, in our efforts to ascertain the author, we must rely on the internal evidence of his harmonies and counterpoints, his adverbs and adjectives.

To begin with, the title of the quartet is the name of an early song by Ernest
Chausson, a composer beloved of our chief editor, Peter Ceniti  The poetry
celebrates the diminutive but intrepid “king of the forest,” and ultimately resolves into an elaborate metaphor.  Musically the original possesses a charming lightness, employing equivocal five–beat measures. The main melody of this song is interpolated into  the first movement of the quartet on the flute whose brief, unexpected appearance heightens the sense of quotation.  This “Hummingbird theme” reappears in the second movement, embellished and developed in various canonic forms, prompting the composer to explicate, in his second letter, his conflation of abstract contrapuntal methods with programmatic intentions.

The issue of authorship is complicated by the fact  that, in the second movement there exists, in addition to the “Hummingbird theme,” a contrasting melody, also subject to canonic strictures: this tune is readily identified as the opening melody of The Blue Flower, of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a vignette which has achieved quasi- legendary status in certain annals of the music community. From this alternation and blending of Gallic and Teutonic traits one receives the impression, not so much of the hand of Chausson, nor of Ofterdingen, but of a higher, synthesizing mind.  

Yet the composer’s words, far from corroborating our thesis, serve to undermine and cast doubt, as, for example, when the artist invokes the charming image of a cardinal enchanted by its reflection in a glassy lake on a winter morning.  As aficionados of our Gesellschaft will know, this is a veiled reference to the legend surrounding the death of Juan C. Arriaga (1806-1826) recounted in Sonata for Mrs. Cardinal (see  Pulications:  Music Out of Time).  According to the story, that young composer fell in love with a little bird and renounced his human existence, being transformed into a bright red cardinal (the reader will allow that from cardinal to hummingbird is a small step) and lived out his earthly days in melodious felicity.

The main difficulty in ascribing the quartet to the pen of Arriaga (besides the
discrepancy in style between this work and his extant compositions) lies in the fact that the Chausson melody was conceived some years after Arriaga’s death (or transfiguration).

But since we’re speaking of mirrors I might as well remind the reader that one’s reflection is not precisely oneself, but in a sense one’s opposite, a dark anti-self, staring back with implacable defiance, seeming to pronounce a verdict:  we can never know ourselves, much less another, nor ever say precisely what we mean.  

When we turn our attention the third movement, all our former theories appear
misguided, and are replaced by a new set of ideas, provoked by fresh curiosities.  (Indeed, the style of this finale resembles that of the first two movements so remotely that one is led to wonder whether it is not the work of another hand!)  Here the flute retires and is replaced (could Schoenberg have known this work?) by a vocalist.  The text is in French, though the anonymous poem is thought by some originally to have been in Provencal (or Old Occitan).  

But we have read these words before!  Again the (patient) reader is referred to   Publications: Music Out of Time where he will find an article entitled The Ober-fim Variations that describes a lengthy, one movement quintet for piano and strings entitled Where Beauty Begins to Crumble, composed under most remarkable circumstances by one Nikolay Nikolayevitch Lodyzhensky.  As the text explains, the work is thought to be based on a dream–inspired poem – that just happens to be identical to the text of our present quartet’s final movement.  And yet, none of the quartet’s three movements bears strong stylistic similarities  (except in the coda of the finale) to the music of Lodyzhensky that our efforts have rescued from oblivion.  (I refer not only to the Piano Quintet but to the Tangerine Concerto as well.)  

As for the parcel of letters, I have included here only those with direct bearing on the compositional process in the Colibri Quartet,  discarding thereby much information of keen interest, particularly on the gustatory habits of our mystery musician who refers to himself (with humor? with pride? with irony?) as Foodking .  No sign of any response from the Unknown Woman has surfaced: perhaps her letters have been lost.  Or perhaps she didn’t care to answer.  Or maybe the composer, in his reticence, or from a sense of propriety, refrained from ever sending his letters to her.   Or was there no one to send them to? – Was she a figment of his imagination?  

My guess, considering that reality is usually more complex than our conjectures about it, is that most of these surmises contain an element of truth:  that he opted to withhold the letters knowing beforehand of her indifference, that the mysterious beauty, “short and sturdy, pumpkin–headed, with generous eyes,” to whom the author addresses these missives, is, quite simply, his wife, whom he loves the old- fashioned way, as the sky loves the sea, without thought, without choice, and without a chance of her ever understanding – his wife, but here, in these letters,  in the sonorous image of a little green bird, idealized, immortalized, while their tragic love,  in this bright music, opens into a vast, scented forest and is gilded, by beauty’s boon, in eternal hope.




Dear Cardinal,

Outside my window the snow is falling, but it is springtime in my heart.  I had
despaired ever again of writing music – you know me, and how I can’t (or won’t, it’s the same thing) push something out that’s not dying to be born.  How many half- hearted projects, fueled by forced enthusiasm, I have abandoned in the past few months!

But how did things change? you ask.  It sounds silly: one morning (always the best time) I dragged myself to the piano and played, with one hand, the first thing that came into my mind, a pair of fifths, rocking back and forth.  A well-spring opened: the fifths became background and a melody grew out of them and took shape.   Continuation, refinement and variation have been pouring forth ever since.  And in spite of the profusion of ideas, everything fits meaningfully together, the connections as natural and apparent to the ear as they were effortless and uncontrived in making.  

I am now at the happy stage of transforming hasty sketches into a finished score.  It’s a string quartet though, of course, I can’t leave it that simple.  A “guest flute” appears in the first and second movements, and a singer in the finale.  

Where did this all come from, after so long, and so suddenly?  Is it truly beautiful, or do I hear it in the sonorous glow of a life redeemed?


Lady,

More than thirty years ago I first heard that little song (in a student recital from my happy undergraduate days  when every fresh musical experience was a revelation), and I can still feel the quiet thrill steal over me as I struggled with the French, my eyes shifting back and forth from the stage to the text, as all the while that soft and supple music pulsed through the hall.

I must have stored this experience in that part of the memory reserved for archetypal encounters – inspiring, almost sacred, unrepeatable.  Or maybe I was just too busy – in any case many years would pass before I’d think again of this chanson.  Then one day, seeking to expand the repertoire for a class, I stumbled on a fragmentary recollection, as a traveler might trip, with good fortune, upon  some splendid ruin.  By then I had forgotten both title and composer, retaining an impression, vague but powerful, but with a little searching,  Chausson’s Colibri,  came to alight in that intricate network of meaningful phenomena which is my life and work.  

But was that magical web, that delicate pattern, implicit beforehand, and  have I merely coaxed it into view, or has it been constructed over these many years through thoughts and deeds?  Discovered or invented?  (Or am I myself part of some larger pattern, in which case perhaps the difference dissolves?)


Unknown Woman,

In the history of the world there has never yet been a truly beautiful canon…until tomorrow.

Last night, just before turning out the light, I penned these words – not from egotism (Bach is great, I am not) but with innocent happiness, contemplating the image of a wintry morning  with the white forest flecked by a red cardinal, frozen in the contemplation of his image reflected in an icy pond.  (When we think  we see another, it’s ourselves we see, and when we think we see ourselves, it is another.)

Musically, a mirror is created when one sounds a theme against it own inversion, as I have done in the second movement of my quartet.  But neither in musical mirrors nor in visual ones is  the reflection identical to the original: in a sense it is the opposite.   This leads our bird to the misconception that he sees another (that would be you) whose differences attract his attention and whom he thus longs to know (as long to know you, beautiful stranger, even as I despair of knowing myself – or can learning of you lead to self–knowledge?)

In any case it is the wish to express in music this pursuit, this desire, that
distinguishes the present, programmatic canon from  those conventional contrapuntal abstractions it otherwise resembles.  For it seems to me, darling,  one of music’s miracles that two melodies, once entwined, yield something in their harmony unanticipated in their prior isolation: let’s call it love, thanks to which you and I, together, are neither anymore you nor I, but – what?  Can you tell me what we are?


Dear ...

Yesterday we performed the quartet, after long and arduous rehearsal, and today I am all mixed up.

I always feel this way in such circumstances: too many notes held in elegant
equipoise too long have involuntarily been surrendered to the chaos of my
unconscious, where they are currently bouncing around discordantly.

The performance?  Typical: good enough to tantalize with a hint of the ideal
rendering, thus disappointing, despite some fine playing.  I’ll probably come to
cherish the remembrance of the occasion, working with the musicians, more than the experience of the final product.  I admit without embarrassment that it was gratifying to be able to focus on this music in the company of such comprehending and enthusiastic players, though the contrast with my normally solitary creative existence was so strong and sudden as no doubt to contribute to my present, disoriented state.  

Above all, though, I am gripped today (as usual) with a peculiar dissatisfaction – an abrupt loss of interest in all this music, which is balanced by an urge to make something new and different, though not completely so: something with less thematic working and harmonic detail, something with splashes of color and delicately dove- tailed washes of sound…

And so it is, my oblivious one, that a healthy discontent with the past, mingled with perpetual hope in the future, creates the industrious present, in which true happiness in this life is found.



My dear,

How lovely are the letters lovers write!  The greater the distance that separates them, the longer the passage of time between them, the more lovely they become.

I could almost wish for obstacles to be set between us, like those old Wiek
interposed between his daughter Clara and her beloved Schumann.  How noble was their longing, how precious their least hope, how triumphant the ultimate consummation of their wishes.

Whereas we, with nothing to hinder us, flee from a bitter home, and dream of
throwing ourselves in front of speeding trains, to be free of this painful bond.

To be free?  Yes, free to live, despite the cynical times, a hero’s life, studying  
nature, fashioning beautiful things,  nourishing, teaching, loving, prodigiously pouring out our lives.

But this one thing I cannot do:  exist with the dull compromise of narrow-minded conformity.  I DO NOT CARE  about owning a car.  I DO NOT CARE about wealth and prestige.  (Everyone says this but I mean it.)  I want to be generous, sensitive, wise, funny, patient, fecund, strong, indefatigueable, fearless, clean of spite or malice.  

And if one person in the universe understands this and sees in me a prince (flawed and bumbling to be sure, but meant for goodness), and if that person is you, it becomes true, and the world is swathed in an aureole of light.  But if you thwart my efforts, then, like some tribal magician whose power depends on the naïve credulity of his clan, I become impotent, desperate, and seek only to die.  

…But even to die, and darkly, as did Schumann, with all the happiness of youth
dissolved in madness and  grief, is a fate lovers can bear – a plenitude of sorrow, as grand as their former joy, and a summons beyond this world and its art and present love to some mysterious otherness where,

…when their coming is due all blessed souls will return,
Where the eagles are, the planets, the Father’s own heralds,
Where the Muses are still, heroes and lovers began,
There we shall meet again, or here, on a dew-covered island,
Where what is ours for once, blooms that a garden conjoins,
All our poems are true and springs remain beautiful longer
And another, a new year of our souls can begin.   
(Hoelderlin)