Talking of Which, 15.02.24
Talking of Which, 15.02.24
Passion, Joy and Doc’s Advice
My monthly selection of scrips and scraps, personal observations, quotes and songs continues. First few entries for all, the rest for paying guests…
Mother Tongue
My Bulgarian peasant neighbours point-blank refused to believe I did not understand them and chatted away to me without the slightest reticence. At first I tried to explain, then I kept up my end of the conversation in English before finally settling on the most sensible approach. I'd been listening a lot recently to babies babbering, you see, and to the neighbours’ turkeys gobbling and to the fire hissing and logs popping and the embers crinkling and the joosh of snow sliding off my roof and it decided me to give up word-language entirely. First of all I started speaking pure gibberish to the locals, with all my meaning in tone, which they appeared to both understand and enjoy. I had some problems in the chemist, but on the whole it made for a pleasanter life, for I learnt to speak the strange language of bees and to chat with catkins, and hold perfectly intelligible conversations with my central heating pump.
Lack of Passion is Death
Are you without passion? I’ll show you how you can tell. Do you have difficulty making decisions or do you often make stupid decisions? If the former, your passion is numbed, if the latter, your passion is faked.
Numbed, lack of passion cannot decide because it doesn’t have the power to escape the facts. It thinks and thinks and worries and worries and thinks, but thought and worry is all there is, so the numbed mind is paralysed. Eventually, if enough pain prods, it will act, but usually it just resigns itself to its sad life.
Fake, wilful passion on the other hand, is impatient with facts, bored with reason and unable to accept a difficult situation, so out of frustration, desperation or reckless pride, it makes emotional decisions which always end in tears.
True passion is very still, contained, accepting of the situation. It looks at the facts, reasons with them perhaps, and then lets it all lie until, at the right time, BOOM. It acts.1
Talking of which…
Ode to Oh, Not Too Bad, Can’t Complain
I’ve seen Beethoven’s 9th performed live three times now, and although they’ve all been alright (the best one conducted by the posh but into-it Christopher Warren-Green), none of them have expressed real joy and, scanning the faces of the orchestra and choir it’s not difficult to see why. None of pit are acquainted with joy. Or not enough; occasionally you’ll see a lead violinist or a background oboist really into it, or one or two faces among the choir radiant with life-glory. But on the whole, they look like what they are, career people at work.
I wonder how Richter and Furtwängler wrestled open the cages round their orchestra’s hearts. Perhaps they didn’t need to work too hard, perhaps they were dealing with finer psyches, but then perhaps the right conductor can even work with that most dreary, spiritless and monstrously deformed sector of society, ‘people who like classical music’.
It seems to me though, and this is how I would approach conducting the 9th today, that to get the right kind of feeling from your musicians, you’d have to first take them deep into a forest, set light to all their money and property, sacrifice their friends and families, tie them up, give them a deadly poison, bury them in a mass grave and then, as the sun comes up, reveal that the executions were all bogus, the poison just a tranquillizer and that really they are alive, alive, alive, alive, alive, alive!