This is another David Markson-inspired "lyric essay" that is a post-script to another recent post ("Mad Scenes") inspired by my wife's acclaimed debut as THE prima donna of operatic madness ( the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor)...It is dedicated to Amy, and "Cousin Boss," Tracy.
Hans Werner Henze's 5th String Quartet is dedicated to the memory of Benjamin Britten. Influenced by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Henze calls his score an example of "musica impura." It "is unable to deal in abstract formulas...[it] allows the imperfections of life, of the body, of relationships, illness, even physical suffering to break into and even determine its structure."
The fourth of the six movements is based on the "mad people's madrigal" from his earlier opera, We Come to the River.
Another of Henze's crazy movements is the third character study from his Shakespeare suite for solo guitar, "Mad Lady McBeth."
The Scottish King and King Lear are both mad Shakespeareans. But Richard III? Prospero? Caliban? Crazy or eccentric? Mad or just bitter?
Discuss.
Robert Louis Stevenson, not particularly renowned for madness, wrote a poem sizzling with its passionate side, "After Reading Antony and Cleopatra." I am stopped in my tracks when I read lines like:
The sea's roar fills us aching full
Of objectless desire—
The sea's roar, and the white moon-shine,
And the reddening of the fire.
He closes with this gauntlet-throwing quatrain:
Who talks to me of reason now?
It would be more delight
To have died in Cleopatra's arms
Than be alive to-night.
Whether hyperbole or insanity, Stevenson survived reading Shakespeare, living to write about it. Such red-blooded poetry is a riveting reminder of art's ability to quicken the pulse and make us feel more alive.
Philip Langridge's riveting, red-blooded performance of Peter Grimes' mad scene just began playing on my ipod.
(It appears on my new "mad scenes" playlist following Bernstein's frenetic scherzo Profanation from his Jeremiah Symphony. It precedes Bernstein's own mad scene for the Celebrant in Mass.)
Bernstein conducted the premiere of Grimes. Langridge's breakthrough role was Tom Rakewell, who goes mad after being cursed by the mephistophelian Nick Shadow at the end of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress.
Alan Bennett's play named The Madness of King George III was changed to The Madness of King George when the film appeared, for the sake of titular simplicity where Hollywood audiences were concerned ("But I didn't see the first two...").
Mad poets previously mentioned: Clare & Smart. Must not omit Hölderlin & Cowper.
The former beloved of composers from Brahms to Britten to Hindemith to Henze.
Finally reading Bellow's crazy brilliant Herzog.
Which opens with "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me."
Beckett's protagonists are all a bit touched.
Was Gesualdo mad or just angry to kill his wife and her lover? Regardless, he lived the remainder of his years depressed.
Donizetti and Duparc spent their last years in asyla.
Asyla=plural of asylum; title of Thomas Adés' four movement orchestral fantasy, op. 17.
(It follows Barber's Medea's Dance of Vengeance and the deranged Tarantella from Corigliano's Symphony No. 1 on the aforementioned playlist).
We are currently listening to the Tarantella from Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien.
The Tarantella being a mad ritual of sorcery or a frenzied dance of death.
Tarantula. Tarantism. Tarantella.
Schumann was also crazy (as were Eusebius and Florestan: just ask him).
Henze (b. 1926) claims to have met Selim & Suleika, characters from Goethe's West-Eastern Divan (1816).
They "appear" in his mad song cycle Six Songs from the Arabian (with poetry by the composer, auf Deutsch).
I met Henze in 2001. He did not appear mad. We had a thoughtful conversation about music and society. He signed my copy of the score to his 5th Symphony, written for Bernstein and the New York Phil.
Mad 5th's: Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich & Henze. (Promethean 5th's--literally: Liszt & Scriabin)
Bruckner, Prokofiev & Vaughan Williams took the less-traveled road of noble understatement in theirs.
Was Prokofiev crazy in the head? He chose to return to the USSR long before he suffered a brain-injuring fall in the mid-1940's. After which he wrote (in response to WWII, his misunderstood 6th Symphony, et al) "We are now rejoicing in our magnificent victory, but thousands of us have wounds that cannot be healed...We must not forget this."
Against forgetting. Only connect. Shostakovich carried that torch. His scherzi are all mad tarantastic [sic] dances, deliciously satirical and sardonic.
"I am by nature a conflagration..."
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