November / Month of the Sonata – 14
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Category: Gustav Klimt
November 8, 2023
November / Month of the Sonata – 8
“Schubert at the Piano II“ (1899)
Gustav Klimt
______
before going any further, it’s about time
I brought up Schubert, had he survived,
he might, I think, however conservatively,
have rivalled Beethoven
he died at the age of 31, of a sexually
transmitted disease, I believe the reason
for his relative obscurity
but he is titanic
listen to one only here of his sublime piano
sonatas, his Piano Sonata No 21 in B-flat
major
though one mustn’t discount his other
transcendental masterpieces, his D956,
for instance, for string quintet, is, well,
characteristically, transcendental,
you’ll leave the planet, I promise
listen
enjoy
R ! chard
January 13, 2023
how to listen to music if you don’t know your Beethoven from your Bach
“Music“(1895)
Gustav Klimt
________
how to listen to music if you don’t know your
Beethoven from your Bach
the first thing to do, I would suggest, is to stop
and listen, spend the time with the work you’re
listening to, it’s no different than spending half
an hour with a friend
but you have to be there, listen, as you would
with a friend, no cell phones
the next thing I suggest is to compare, put your
work up against a different composer, a
different interpretation, a different version of
the piece you have on hand
I learned this as I learned to tell one artwork
from another, while I turned European art
museums into personal art history classes,
spending hours comparing one painting
with another, doing so chronologically,
century after century, imbibing thereby the
history of Western art
it’s not necessary to know who you might
even be listening to, just listen, hear,
later the names will come
here’s some Mozart, here’s some Prokofiev,
for instance, you’ll tell the difference
instinctively, forget about the composers,
just surrender to the magic
here’s a poem which says more or less
the same thing
How to Read a Poem: Beginner’s Manual
First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.
Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.
To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.
Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.
Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.
Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.
When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don’t even notice,
close this manual.
Congratulations.
You can now read poetry.
Pamela Spiro Wagner
music is also like that
R ! chard
September 13, 2018
Piano Concerto no 2 in G major, opus 44 -Tchaikovsky
“Beech Grove I“ (1902)
________
if a sonata, or any composition for one
instrument, is a meditation, a rumination,
an introspection, a concerto is its entire
opposite, it’s a declamation, a very
harangue, the performer is not only
before an audience, but before an
orchestra, before the conductor of that
orchestra, that soloist had better be,
therefore, something
Tchaikovsky’s 2nd Piano Concerto
hasn’t cut the cultural mustard, you’ve
probably never heard of it, never mind
heard it, not even in the miasma of our
collective unconscious
why
who knows, it’s magnificent
I suspect that Moscow’s distance,
St Petersburg’s, might’ve had something
to do with it, Russia would still have been
a backwater to Europe, regardless of what
Catherine the Great might’ve done for its
intellectual edification, indeed a veritable
Elizabeth the First, Queen of England,
she, in her sponsorship of the arts
something like that happened, but in
reverse, to Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele
in art, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, the
Second Viennese School in music, in
literature, Robert Musil, his “The Man
Without Qualities“ a very rival to
Proust‘s epic trip down memory lane,
“Remembrance …“, when the centre
of gravity for the arts moved from
Vienna to Paris in the late 19th
Century with the advent of
Impressionism
France had entered its Fourth
Republic by then, was to finally
entrench its democracy, and we got
Monet, Debussy, and indeed Proust
instead, not to mention all of that
city’s celebrated others
leaving creative Vienna, meanwhile,
the undisputed engine of the Zeitgeist,
the spirit of the times, for over three
quarters of an earlier century, thereby,
in the dust
New York would take over in the
1950s, similarly, for a time, Andy
Warhol and The Factory, eclipsing
any other town
in other words, location, location,
location, in tandem with historical
events
R ! chard
May 13, 2018
“Mother with Children” – Gustav Klimt
“Mother with Children“ (c.1909 – 1910)
_______
Gustav Klimt has long been one of
my very favourite painters, a large
reproduction of a detail of his
masterpiece, “Music“, hangs even
on one of my walls
how much is that Klimt in the
window, I’d asked the merchant
when I saw it from the street in
his shop’s display
later, I invited people over, to see
my Klimt, I’ve got a very large
Klimt, I’d say – this is before
anyone even knew of him, I was,
I’ll admit, a bad boy
around all that, I’ve had the good
fortune to see many of his works
during the several times I’ve been
to Vienna, where most of his
wonders reside, where they grace
that immortal city, the great hall of
the Kunsthistorisches Museum,
the Art History Museum in English,
for instance, the Beethoven Frieze
at the Vienna Secession Building
and, of course, at Belvedere, the
summer palace, where among
other paintings of his, you can
still see the iconic “The Kiss“,
their national treasure
but the painting above, part of a
private, apparently, collection, is
utterly new to me, and therefore
striking,
note how stark the background is
here, above, compared to Klimt’s
usually more ornamented
constructions, how the subject is
starkly the gentleness, the
intimation of peace, even serenity,
in the rosy cheeks of not only the
children, but of also the mother,
the slumber and surrender, midst
the imprecations of the
surrounding, and portentous,
darkness, note the paradoxical,
genetically determined even, trust
and love, in the consonant colours,
cherry blossoms blooming in all
three sleeping faces, despite the
threatening miasma of encroaching
and engulfing primordial earth
Shostakovich also said something
like that in his 15th String Quartet,
a fundamental harmony develops,
despite even strident distortions,
disturbances, in otherwise
unbearable situations, to provide
some solace, redemption
listen, I urge you, if you dare
compare the crook in the mother’s
neck, above, a nearly Baroque angle,
to the same docile, though resilient,
bent in Klimt‘s lover in “The Kiss“
for his provocative, maybe even
enlightening, perspective on
women
happy Mother’s Day, mothers, for all
your invaluable attention
R ! chard
April 22, 2018
String Quintets – Mozart / Beethoven
“A Path in Monet’s Garden at Giverny“ (1902)
________
concerned about presenting Beethoven’s
Opus 59, the next significant string quartets
of the early 19th Century, too early –
Beethoven had, incidentally, at that point no
rivals – I preferred to establish his credentials,
rather than to enter his next phase, equivalent
to the move from representational art to
Impressionism in painting, a sea change,
people would’ve balked at the very concept
of an alternative vision, and indeed they
were confused
this sea change, I should point out, challenged
the very notions of what not only art should be,
but also music, and literature, indeed very life
perspectives, philosophies
therefore the Romantic Period, when
expressions of personal epiphanies began
to crowd the new democratic environment
after the French Revolution, 1789, all of
which would lead to, eventually, our own
allegiance to, at least in the West, the
concept of human rights
music was already, in other words, talking,
and with Beethoven, indeed vociferously
still adheres to Classical conditions,
but bursts through them emotionally
written only 14 years earlier, one of six
of his
you won’t find them, perhaps, on the
surface, to be very different, wouldn’t
be able to even tell them apart in a
blind pinch
but juxtaposing, as I always urge,
sharpens one’s aesthetic pencil, ask
yourself, in this case, according to
your senses, which of the compositions
is earlier, you’ll find your senses have
already told you
everything flows from that initial
answer, when you ask yourself why
you think that
the hall we’d just entered
she demurred, of course, considering
herself not up to the challenge, despite
several visits together we’d had among
a wonder of other European art galleries
I insisted
she tossed off, okay, Renoir, an easy
answer, though it turned out to be a
Degas, or the reverse, or whatever
but upon reaching the painting, of
course, Degas, she said, knowing full
well it was him, having lacked only the
pluck and the confidence
who’s that, I asked, turning to another
master
Monet, she replied, confidently
and was, as I’d anticipated she would
be, correct, she can now tell her
we know of a lot more than we
think we do
R ! chard
March 4, 2018
String Quartet, opus 77, no 1 – Joseph Haydn
“The Red Cape (Madame Monet)“ (c.1870)
_______
for my mom
that’s a lot of Haydn, I said to my mom,
when I saw the list of my transmittals in
her hotmail, hm, I wondered, maybe it’s
too much
then I said, but it’s like when we’ve
toured, for instance, our European
art galleries, me propounding on
the paintings, as I am wont, however
incorrigibly, to do, but now, note, you
can tell the difference between your
Monets and your Klimts, however
similar their perspectives
or like your tour guide taking you
recently through Argentina,
highlighting spots, in the space of
a month only, the same amount of
time I’ve spent for the music of
Haydn
pronounced, incidentally, I specified,
like “hidin'” in English, not “maiden”,
just sayin’
I gathered that she’d ‘ve sensed by
now, if she’d been listening, which she
said she had, mornings over her
coffee, what a string quartet is, four
movements, different tempos, fast
at first, a joyful introduction,
followed by a lament, then a spirited
third movement, for countereffect,
then a big fourth movement finish
also, the internal structure of each
movement would’ve been internalized,
a theme, a counter theme, a
recapitulation of both, or either, all of
it, probably unconsciously, which is
how art fundamentally works till you
meticulously deconstruct it
the string quartet is the work of Haydn,
the house that Haydn built, from
peripheral aristocratic entertainment,
like modern day artists sporting their
wares in noisy restaurants, to the
glamour of taking on, in concert halls,
Europe, Brunelleschi did a similar,
sleight-of-hand thing with his dome
in Florence for its oracular Cathedral
remember that the string quartet lives
on as a form, where no longer does
the minuet, for instance, nor the
polonaise, nor even the waltz, not to
mention that concertos, and
symphonies have become now
significantly subservient to movies,
secondary players
watch the instrumentalists here live
out, in Haydn’s Opus 77, no 1, their
appropriately Romantic ardour,
something not at all promoted in
Haydn’s earlier Esterházy phase, to
raise their bow in triumph, as they
do at the end of most movements
is already an indication, not at all
appropriate for the earlier princely
salons, that times have changed
Haydn was a prophet, but also an
elder, with an instrument to connect
the oncoming, and turbulent, century
to the impregnable bond of his
period’s systems, the legitimacy of
the autocratic, clockwork, world,
Classicism, the Age of Reason, the
Enlightenment, for better or for
worse
we are left with its, however ever
ebullient, consequences
R ! chard
September 1, 2015
what’s happening in Poland
“The Kiss“ (1907-08)
_______
last night, most unexpectedly,
someone I know sent me this, I
wondered if it was because of
the music, the message, or the
performance, consequently I
assumed everything
Mateusz Ziółko won the Voice
of Poland contest in 2013, it’s
fun, despite the language
barrier – the adjudication being
all in Polish – to watch also,
during the evaluation, the judge
in blue fall apart, come entirely
undone, be unabashedly smitten,
from nearly the very first note of
this riveting audition, then spend
the rest of the show trying to get
herself back together again
much as I did, in fact, without
a camera
quiver too, enjoy
Richard
May 26, 2014
“Music”
“Music“ (1895)
______
not for lack of imagination, lately, but for,
rather, lack of confidence, the complaint
of any would-be poet, the complaint of
any proponent of oneself, one’s persona,
one’s own, however benign, however even
benevolent, ideas, I retreated into myself,
surrendering to forthright inspiration for
any, elusive enough, courage
inspiration, through its usual unsuspected
channels, and as ever categorically, gave
me, reliably, “Music“, Klimt‘s ineluctable
masterpiece, not even for its iconic image,
but for its transcendental comment on
art’s interpretive counterpart, music
world’s meld
a “magical mystical miracle” happens, as
Katharine Hepburn, in her utterly
enchanting movie, “Summertime“,
would have it, irrepressible as ever
I had to share
Richard
psst: note the juxtaposition of contrasting
colours, patterns, impressions, note
the Baroque presentation of Classical
imperatives, touched with Romantic
sensibilities, kicking off, not
incidentally, Modernism
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