The Ellington Century (44 page)

“
Circle of Fourths
”

Ellington reached into his own book for this boppish romp, which was said to honor the four Shakespearean genres: tragedy, history, comedy, and sonnets. After “Half the Fun” it pulls us smartly out of the East and out of the Bard and back to Manhattan, back to business. It is the only movement of the suite that sounds like a head chart; it feels like a company bow. Ellington launches the piece with a four-bar, eleven-note motto and then it takes off. The piece, a showcase for Paul Gonsalves, has two structural components. The first is a twenty-four-bar harmonic progression around the circle of fourths, similar to the changes of “How High the Moon,” by Morgan Lewis. The progression is: C-F7-B
7-E
7-A
7-D
7-B7-E9-A7-D7-d7-G7. The second element is an eight-bar blues-tinged call-and-response idea built on the opening motto.

In retrospect this section on
Such Sweet Thunder
might have appeared in a chapter on politics rather than one on love, but in African American music, as in African American literature, the two subjects are inseparable. In the writings of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker the freedom to love demands a reclamation of manhood and womanhood. In
Such Sweet Thunder
Ellington and Strayhorn replaced the degraded images of Porgy and Bess with regal portraits of Othello and Cleopatra. In these figures sexuality is both public and private, both powerful and tender.

SECRET LOVE: THE LISTENER AS VOYEUR

Music is miraculous in that one can say everything in such a way that those in the know can understand it all, and yet one's own secrets, those which one will not even admit to oneself, remain undivulged.

—Arnold Schoenberg

In 1977 composer and theorist George Perle rocked the staid world of musicology with a document that was one part Rosetta stone, one part
National Enquirer
. He had tracked down a copy of the score of Alban Berg's
Lyric Suite
annotated in the composer's hand. The published score already contained some tantalizing clues, including musical quotations from the
Lyric Symphony
of Alexander von Zemlinsky (to whom
the work was dedicated) and the famous opening of Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde
, as well numerical oddities; both the metronome markings and the number of bars in each movement were derived from the numbers twenty-three and ten. The long-hidden annotations explained the meanings of pitches, themes, and even bar numbers and revealed that the final movement was based on a poem by Baudelaire, “De profundis clamavi”—not vaguely, but word for word, syllable for syllable, implying the need for an additional performer, a singer, following the precedent of Schoenberg's Quartet no. 2. The most important pitches of the work, H (B in German) F, A, and B (B
in German) were a cryptogram for Hanna Fuchs and Alban Berg. Berg likewise associated the numbers ten and twenty-three with these two masked characters. Perle found the score in the possession of Dorothea Robettin, daughter of Herbert and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, a wealthy and cultured couple with whom Berg stayed in May 1925 when his
Three Fragments from Wozzeck
was first performed in Prague, conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky. Berg returned chez Fuchs in November 1925 en route to the Berlin premiere of
Wozzeck
, by which time he felt the need to respond to his wife's anxieties about his relations with Frau Fuchs, a.k.a. Mopinka: “(…may I die of distemper if I ever sin against faithfulness!). Faithfulness towards you, and also towards myself, Music, Schoenberg (and
he
makes this really hard for one) even towards Trahütten.”
³⁸

Despite Berg's reassurances, rumors of the affair circulated in Vienna, even though the annotated score remained hidden; shortly after Berg's death in 1935, his student T. W. Adorno advised his widow “not to worry about the affair with Hanna since Berg ‘didn't write the
Lyric Suite
because he fell in love with Hanna Fuchs but fell in love with Hanna Fuchs in order to write the
Lyric Suite
.'”
³⁹
Adorno was recycling an old argument about the relation of Wagner's affair with Mathilde Wesendonck to the composition of
Tristan und Isolde
, but he may have been right.
⁴⁰

I was present when Perle revealed his discovery at a musicological meeting in New York. He looked like the cat that had swallowed the cream and the room crackled with the sense of a historic moment. A few days later the final movement was performed for the first time with voice, and many listeners felt they were finally hearing the work as Berg intended. Today I'm not so sure. Perle had decoded the piece by assuming the truth-value of Berg's annotations, but a man who could lie to his wife with the ease demonstrated in Berg's letter might just as easily deceive his mistress, or posterity. Taken on its own, the annotated score might
have been just an over-the-top thank-you note to a gracious hostess with whom Berg had shared perhaps no more than some kind of moment. (Or perhaps Berg, an overnight celebrity, attracted cultured groupies all over Europe.) Berg scholars, moreover, had resented Helene Berg's protective guardianship over her husband's papers and her longstanding refusal to allow for the completion of his opera
Lulu
. Perle's paper explained Frau Berg's diffidence all too conveniently; his mean-spirited portrait of Frau Berg in the third part of the
Lyric Suite
article verges on libel.

As for the composer's intentions, Perle gave the impression that the annotated copy represented the real piece (“My own belief is that the composer would not have been opposed to a vocal performance of the finale”), even though Berg never showed it to anyone except Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Had he really wanted it performed at some future time, when it would not embarrass either Mrs. Berg or Mrs. Fuchs, he could have sent a copy to his good friend Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel, who was married to Hanna's brother and certainly would have understood any romantic situation that might have existed. On the fine recording of the vocal version of the finale by Dawn Upshaw and the Kronos Quartet, the reconstructed voice line often sounds awkward in its tessitura and in its relation to the accompaniment. Most tellingly, the text (“Not even brook and tree, nor field nor flock”) and vocal line written above the score's quotation of the opening of Tristan do not clarify or even exploit the allusion but just cover it over. The annotated score may be less an urtext than a billet-doux.

Perle's revelation of the secret program marked a turning point in the hermeneutics of twentieth-century music from modernist formalism to postmodernist semiotics. Perhaps as an unforeseen consequence Perle revived long-repressed habits of programmatic reading, which modernists had consigned to the middlebrow milieu of musical appreciation. Post Perle, critics and scholars have routinely described the
Lyric Suite
as a cinema verité depiction of the affair between AB and HF, and soon enough scholars found other secret programs in Berg's music, without benefit of the composer's own notes.
⁴¹
Programmatic speculation became an even bigger business just a few years later with the publication of
Testimony
, said to be the work of Dmitri Shostakovich, which similarly claimed a decisive role for secret programs in an important and apparently misunderstood oeuvre. Arid formalism had turned into vulgar literalism overnight.

As an alternative to reductive styles of interpretation, and in pursuit of a Sontagian “erotics of listening” I propose that we read the
Lyric
Suite
in relation to a work rarely mentioned in the same breath, or even the same paragraph, “Jeux de vagues,” the second movement of Debussy's
La Mer
. Like the
Lyric Suite, La Mer
coincided with tumultuous romantic events. During the three years of its composition, 1903-5, Debussy left his first wife, Rosalie (“Lilly”) Texier, whom he had married just four years earlier, and began a relationship with Emma Moyse Bardac. Debussy's biographer, Marcel Dietschy, interpreting the music in Perle's manner, though without the smoking gun, presents
La Mer
as both a premonition and product of the dissolution of one marriage and the creation of another. As Debussy began work on the piece in the summer of 1903, Dietschy writes, “He had no idea that exactly twelve months later the turning-point would be reached. A ground swell would wash away all the past. He was preparing himself for it involuntarily; he hoped for it without knowing it.”
⁴²

Dietschy's
Portrait of Claude Debussy
(originally titled
La Passion de Claude Debussy
, but retitled and toned down in translation) exemplifies
cherchez la femme
musical criticism, perhaps well suited to a composer noted for his wandering eye, but, like Perle's account of the Berg-Fuchs affair, reductive and naïve in its readings. Its account of
La Mer
, though, suggests some intriguing parallels with Berg's
Lyric Suite
. Let me present them schematically: