Marc Estrin
ZELENKA
My brother once called me up and said he had discovered “the single greatest piece of music ever written.” This from a man who can sing the entire St. Matthew Passion, from beginning to end, and identify every Mozart piano sonata. So it was with great excitement I asked what it was: Jan Dismus Zelenka’s Lamentations of Jeremiah. I had barely heard of Zelenka, but this is the kind of recommendation that send me questing. I ordered a recording. While the piece hasn’t lamented its way into my Pantheon, it is one hell of a work. And it illustrated the kind of a thing a music-maniac might go ape-shit over. Hence, Alan’s essay.
APPENDIX (B). HIS UNDERSTANDING OF MUSIC
Alan Krieger
Music 201, Writing about Music
Dr. Schwartz.
Fall, 1981
THE NOBLE TRUTH OF MUSIC: JAN DISMAS ZELENKA AND THE THE MUSIC OF PAIN AND SUFFERING
Someone once wrote that “all music is asking and thanking.” But what if the gift never comes? What if solace, resolution, never heals the discord, and a chain of impossible dissonances seduce, disappoint and strangle the despairing listener?
Pain in tonal music is generally expressed by notes crunching in on one another, creating the effect of “dissonance”, which Walter Piston describes as having a “restless” character, needing to “resolve” into a “stable” and “complete” consonance. The most common occurrence of dissonance occurs in suspensions, in which a note’s “natural” resolution has been delayed while the harmony under it changes, creating a momentary strain. But what if the natural, enduring condition of life is restlessness and strain?
Leonard Bernstein resorts to physics to make nicey-nice of the world. In his Harvard lectures, he discusses why he thinks minor keys are sad:
Whatever darkness or sadness, or passion you feel when you hear music in the minor mode is perfectly explainable in purely phonological terms....One of the earliest overtones of any fundamental is the major third -- a strong, consonant overtone which is clearly heard as part of its fundamental....Now the
minor third is a very late and remote overtone way up here in the series -- overtone number 18. So that when it is employed to create music in the minor mode, it is at variance with the major third which is implicitly present in the fundamental. This creates what is called in acoustics “interference”, meaning that we are, so to speak, hearing both the major and the minor thirds at once. This interference of the two frequencies causes a phonological disturbance, which we hear as a “disturbed” music, “troubled”, “sad”, “unstable”, “dark”, “passionate”, or whatever.
Come off it, Lennie. I’m surprised your dark, gay, Jewish soul is so blind and insensitive to what is going on. The cause is not mechanical and physical, but tragic and metaphysical. The world fabric is not strong and consonant, but frayed and ill-fitting, corrupt and festering. Only an analytical machine would hear the major overtone in a minor chord. What a real, perceptive human would hear is the strain of raising that third higher, the huge distance between it, the human element, and the divine frame of the fifth, the loneliness and heartache of our existence. And moreso with crushing suspensions, and moreso yet with suffocating chains of suspensions that don’t “resolve” into nice, smiley-faced, easy intervals for what Charles Ives called “sissy ears”.
Only one composer in the history of music has consistently told it like it is, has actually digested the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: that all life is Suffering. If life is truly suffering, why would suspensions ever be resolved, as if they were trivial misfittings, falling into place? Why not write music which is fundamentally misfitting, in which consonance is the occasional accident in an island of pain, music of the concentration camps, work detail after nail extractions, starvation after whipping, passing tones of human solace in typhoidal surroundings, music like a film negative, establishing blackness as the ground color, with occasional wisps of light. “They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” “Nothing you can do about it”, “No use struggling”, “The essential doesn’t change”. “I can’t go on like this,” says Estragon. And Vladimir’s response? -- “That’s what you think.”
Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) felt this kind of pain throughout his life. Frustrated in his career, impoverished, he suffered as a student under the malevolent eyes of Bohemian Jesuits, and was beaten by his musician father for his musical mistakes. He played the double bass. Imagine the pain of schlepping that instrument around, making grunts with it all his life while wanting, like Tubby the Tuba, to sing out, an opportunity which never came. When the Dreseden Kapellmeister, Johann David Heinichen was ill, Zelenka took over all his duties for years with no recognition; at Heinichen’s death, Zelenka was passed over for the job, and his rival Johann Adolf Hasse, (whose name by no accident, means “hate”), was appointed to the position, and Jan Dismas spent his last years in loneliness, poverty and disappointment in a small dark room. He died unmarried on Christmas eve while the world outside was en-famille, celebrating the birth of the “Savior”.
This is reality: frustration, violence, lack of recognition. Only a Zen master could digest such a mess of pottage, and Zelenka was no Zen master, though his name began with Z. But he was an accurate reporter.
Frustration, violence and lack of recognition have their musical analogues, and they are the foundation of Zelenka’s world-realistic, truth-telling music. Frustration is expressed by the inability of his music, long before the wandering chromaticism of the nineteenth century, to settle down harmonically in any predictable location. There is huge violence in some of his cadences and turns of phrase, falsity upon falsity, melodic and harmonic holes in the flooring in which the unwary earfoot gets bashed and mangled. What is not recognized is any kind of dignity of man or experience, any appearance of redemption, any lasting meaning to the whole sordid affair of human “striving”.
A representative Zelenka masterpiece is his “Lamentationes Jeremia Prophetae”,a piece written for performance during the “dark hours” of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Good Saturday. He was well familiar with the role of the unheeded prophet, and just as informed about the condition of the broken world -- a ruined city, weeping bitterly in the night, abandoned by her lovers, seething with treacherous “friends”. This is a composition from a place of exile, without pasture, without strength, a place where the righteous are mocked and spit upon. Sin and corruption reign, and in the once-royal city infants and babes faint in the streets and cry out for their mothers. All Zelenka can do is appeal to “the steadfast love of the Lord”, and wait, quietly.
We do not own a score to this work, so I can’t do any detailed musical analysis. But any listener can appreciate the intense revelation of a concentration camp world. In the very first Thursday lamentation, we can hear how the letters Aleph, Beth, Ghimel, Daleth, and He tower over the landscape, facistically fencing the text in, setting up the space in which anything will be allowed to live or be expressed. The letters are fundamentally unperformable, with no place for a human singer to breathe. The opening phrase consists of suspension piled upon discordant suspension in an inexorable 4/4 march of pain. “Incipit lamentation Jeremiae Prophetae”, and the strange, drawn-out twisting of “Prophetae” is only the first of a set of words particularly tortured and torturing: the melismatic insistence on the false friends who have become despising enemies, the graphic setting of “iniquitatem ejus”, the pain of being captive in front of the enemy, “ante faciem tribulantis.” Let Zelenka/Jeremiah call out as he will: the Lord is not quick to answer. Jerusalem, over and over, two dozen times, Jerusalem, convertere, please convert, please, ad Dominum Deum tuum, to the Lord, who, like Godot, may or may not respond.
In the first of Saturday’s lamentations, Zelenka offers up an uncharacteristic major section, with recorders of purity and light replacing dark, nasal, nasty oboes. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never end”. Is he serious? Does he believe this? He talks to himself amidst deep and twisty viols, counseling quiet waiting for the salvation of the Lord: “It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when he has it laid upon him. Let him put his mouth in the dust -- there may yet be hope. Let him give his cheek to the smiter, and be filled with insults.” Good, Jan Dismas, you do that. And what comes of it? Back to bassoons, oboes and high, snarly strings to describe holy stones scattered in the street, hungry children begging in vain for food, and corpses on ash heaps. The hope was all in vain: an entirely false, bouncy, major key concludes the work, as Zelenka/Jeremiah gently asks Jerusalem once again to convert to the Lord. Irony: the unkindest cut of all.
Zelenka never wrote a happy piece of music -- why should he have? He had the perspicacity and courage to see the world as Buddha saw it, a vale of tears unmediated by smiley faces or false relationships. How could a woman love such a man? How could a female consciousness, sunk in gossip and scents, appreciate the black vision of this visionary, the greatest composer who ever lived, Jan Dismas Zelenka?
B+
Alan, good work. Some parts of this are beautifully written, and capture well the pain in some of Zelenka’s writing. I don’t entirely agree with you about his place in the history of music. (Much of his music is just coming to light, as you know, so we will have to wait to consider the whole opus.) How much is his personal view, and how much the tradition of the time, or of the genre. For instance Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah also set the Hebrew letters. Would you draw the same metaphysical/emotion conclusions from those? The use of compounded dissonance was always represented by some composers in every age -- Gesualdo, Corelli, Bach in the organ works -- it’s not restricted to Zelenka.. And alos -- the greatest composer who ever lived?
Some of your writing is too slangy for my taste (“where it’s at”, “nicey-nice”, “Come off it, Lennie”), but I do appreciate the passion which you bring to your listening, and the skill with which you describe it. I hope your world-view is not as bleak as it would appear. (I believe “Suffering” was only the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.) By the way, I would end the essay without referring to his relationship with women. We don’t know very much about this aspect of his life.
Laura Schwartz.
P.S. I particularly liked the notion of the third being the human element in the frame of the tonic and the fifth. I think you could develop this quite original thought, and do a lot with it.