New music that exposes the axis of eloquence


Given the desperate need to find common ground between the Christian and Islamicate worlds it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to the influence of Persian literature on 19th century Romanticism, an influence which left its mark on many of the great minds of the West. The bridge between the two cultures was built by the German poet, translator, and professor of Oriental languages Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) who translated into German the poetry of Rumi (who he described as "a great Sufi"), Sa'di, Jami and Hāfez.

It was Goethe's admiration for the gazals (lyric poems) of Hāfez in translation that inspired his West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan) which was published in 1819 and from which Daniel Barenboim's band takes its name. Little is known about Hāfez. He lived all his life (1320-1389, which is contemporaneous with Chaucer) in the Persian city of Shiraz. He was a Sufi master, philosopher, mystic of Islam and spiritual rebel who wrote more than 5000 poems. Only around 700 of these survive, the rest were destroyed by clerics because of their ecstatic and heretical content encouraging union with the Divine - an action which presaed the persecution of Sufis by today's Muslim fundamentalists. Goethe wrote his West-östlicher Divan both as a tribute to Hāfez - who Goethe referred to as his "spiritual leader" - and as a humanitarian treatise that transcends cultures and centuries.

Among the composers who set poetry from the West-östlicher Divan were Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. The influence of Hāfez's gazals spread beyond Goethe to Victor Hugo and to the pioneer American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who acknowledged him as “a poet for poets”. Goethe's West-östlicher Divan was also one of the routes that led Nietzsche to Persian culture, a route that led on to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and further onwards to Wagner, Hitler and, surprisingly, to Delius.

Goethe's admiration and debt to Hāfez influenced his worldview as well as his poetry. It is often overlooked that Goethe opined that there is "much nonsense in the doctrines of the [Christian] church." (Conversations with Eckermann and Soret, 1832). In his Divan Goethe stresses the benefit of the Sufi teaching of valuing the precious present moment against the Christian attitude of waiting for the next life and therefore, devaluing what God gives humankind in every moment of life. He also denounced sectarianism, saying "If Islam means submission to God, we all live and die in Islam". Goethe read the Qur'an in German translation and his ecstatic poem Mahomets Gesang (The Song of Mohammed) was set in an uncompleted work by Schubert.

Much more recently a 2013 project supported by the Goethe Institut à Paris and Festival d'Ile de France brought together in a new music commission which is available in a CD/DVD release the poetry of Hafez and Goethe . The Divān project was the brainchild of the Syrian-born French-resident composer and musician Abed Azrié; Azrié's 1991 Nonesuch album Aromates is acknowledged by John Adams as an influence on Act 1 of The Death of Klinghoffer, and his syncretic Arabic setting of the Gospel of John featured here in 2010. Divān juxtaposes the poetry of Goethe and Hafez, sung in German by tenor Jan Kobow and Arabic by Abed Azrié respectively. The music by Abed Azrié, which is scored imaginatively for bandoneón, violin, string bass and piano, continues the theme of influence, with the German settings indebted to Schubert and Weill, and the Arabic to Azrié's native Syria - see music samples below.

The recent barbaric attack at Westminster can only be condemned in the strongest possible terms. But the mawkish and unhelpful outpourings of both the mainstream and social media that followed must also be condemned for different reasons. Much reflective silence leavened by sparing exposure to the mystical power of the axis of eloquence that unites East and West is the only balm that will heal the present wounds.




With thanks to Yahya Lequeux of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order. No review samples used. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

Philip Amos said…
So very fitting that the 'Hafiz Goethe' Memorial is in Weimar, which is'twinned' with Shiraz, and on Beethovenplatz, locations that resound.
5:47 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

Does it have integrity and relevance?

Image
Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
Read more

Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

Image
One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin
Read more

The paradox of the Dalai Lama

Image
The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the regional capital of Leh, where I had travelled overland from Delhi in July to observe the Kalachakra teachings given by the Dalai Lama. My accompanying photos capture that intensely moving spiritual event; but they also capture a great spiritual tra
Read more

Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

Image
With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so
Read more

I am not from east or west

Image
The ranking of the Muslim Rumi as America's best-selling poet is, like the embrace of vinyl by a hard-core digital culture, one of the paradoxes of recent times. Rumi's inclusive message of joy and love explains his universal but still surprising appeal , and in populist interpretations by Coleman Barks and others this message resounds in verses such as "I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian nor Muslim, I am not from east or west" and "I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars". Rumi's life-affirming poetry has been set to music by notable figures including Philip Glass , John Tavener , Jonathan Harvey , R. Murray Schafer and Karol Szymanowski , while takes on Rumi by rock musicians have included the 1996 album Three Fish by the eponymous band led by Pearl Jam 's Jeff Ament. All of these settings of Sufi poetry use translations of varying accuracy of Rumi's original vers
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
Read more

In the shadow of Chopin

Image
The music police are already telling us how we will be celebrating the Chopin bicentennial this year. So, never one for musical correctness , my header photo honours another giant of the piano, in status if not in stature, who is buried literally in the shadow of Frédéric Chopin. Michel Petrucciani, compositeur - pianiste de jazz , died in 1999 aged just 36. He is buried alongside birthday boy Chopin in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his pianistic genius has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . Père Lachaise has more musicians per acre than any other burial ground, and they include Georges Bizet whose headstone is seen below. Bizet's grave is surprisingly understated for France's most famous musician and the dates on it are a sobering reminder that he was the same age as Michel Petrucciani when he died. Adjacent to Bizet is the more contemporary resting place of Georges Enescu who died in 1955. Enescu (Enesco in France) taught Yehudi Menuhin , Arthur Grumiau
Read more

Music as a wave of probability

Image
Within yourself, music plays without pause, Vibrating strings are not the cause. This music comes from the Word, says Kabir; It pervades subtly for all to hear. This sound divine makes the seeker free, Then in maya's  clasp he shall no more be. That poem is a free rendering by the Himalayan Yogi Swami Rama of verse by the great Indian poet Kabir. The painting above portrays Kabir; it is by the contemporary Indian artist Arpana Caur ; as are all the other graphics. If my overgrown paths are noted for anything it is for their abstruseness , and this long read takes that dubious distinctiveness to a new level, as it links a medieval mystic to an example of misunderstood 20th century Western classical music, and on through quantum physics to propose that there is no such thing as a music masterpiece Little is known about Kabir's life: both the place and date of his birth are unverified, but it is generally thought he was born in AD 1398 in Varanasi. Kabir's poetry
Read more