Greatness in Music
And Chopin's Waltz in
Ab, Op.69
BY
EDWARD GREEN
Part 2
Eli Siegel on Confidence and
Uncertainty
"In order to see what greatness in music is," Mr. Siegel said in that 1975
class, "we have to see what human beings have wanted to hear." He explained
that among the opposites which people most are concerned with are confidence
and uncertainty, hope and fear. And these opposites take a technical form
in music: "Everything in music," he continued, "expands and contracts,
and sometimes both."
That is what we hear in Chopin's melody--and why, I believe, in a particular,
pointed way, it makes for such large emotion as we hear it: [Play
8 bars--melody only] Is it rising hopefully, or sinking with uncertainty?
Is it contracting, tightly circling around itself--or is it in search,
constantly, of new territory--expanding? It seems to be doing both.
Expansion and contraction in music show, as Mr. Siegel said, in every
aspect of sound: in the swell and receding of a melody; in the growing
louder, and then diminishing of sound; and also, very much, in the relation
of major and minor--with major generally standing for expansion, and minor
for contraction. You can hear it in the contrast of a major [Play
Ab major chord] and a minor chord [Play Ab minor chord]
. You just can't help but feel more confident with that major chord, more
uncertain with that minor.
This waltz--especially in its great opening section--is a technical
miracle of major and minor. Though it is in Ab major, it begins
harmonically at a distance from the key, with a falling progression that
suggests strongly a minor key. To show this, I'll play again the
opening eight bars, but rather than end them they are written, I'll alter
the last bars slightly so that they end in the key of F minor. It will
sound so natural that you'll have to remind yourself the original does
end in the major: [Altered opening 8 bars]
Hearing this you can see how much Chopin succeeded in imbedding the
minor, with its accent on darkness and uncertainty, right in the midst
of a waltz that is, in fact, major from start to finish. He was so successful,
in fact, that in at least three books I have seen this waltz listed not
in its true key, but instead in F minor!
Chopin is one of the great composers of the world, and a large reason
why has to do with the meaning of that interchange of major and minor.
As they mingle in his music, we hear a new
relation of pleasure and pain, brightness and darkness, confidence
and uncertainty. Opposites that people feel ordinarily are so separate--both
in the world, and in their own lives--and so hard to make sense of, Chopin
gloriously shows in his music are one. In his essay "Art as Ethics,"
Mr. Siegel writes:
There has been a disposition for criticism to judge an artist in keeping
with how much of reality the artist has seen, or been just to...To see
a larger world is to be more ethical; to see more subtly is to see more
ethically; to see more delicately is to see more ethically.
The main power of this waltz, is the power of nuance; Chopin makes our
picture of the world larger by making it more delicately exact. In other
works--like the "Revolutionary Etude" for example--he showed he also had
the other power: the power to trumpet forth boldly the rocky grandeur of
things.
But Chopin was troubled about these two kinds of music--and in many
letters we can see him trying to place the delicate nuances he so much
loved to the thunderous and massive effects he also could manage, but which
other composers seemed more steadily interested in. For instance, this
is from a letter to Countess Delfina Potocka in which he compares himself
to Beethoven and Bach, and says:
I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe
will be the soul and heart of man. It is there that I look for nuances
of every feeling, which I transfer to music as well as I can.
I wish Chopin could have known what Mr. Siegel so grandly and kindly taught--that
"the soul and heart of man" and the large universe have something central
in common. "The world, art, and self explain each other," he stated, "each
is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." There was a fight in Chopin's mind--as,
I learned from Aesthetic Realism, there usually is in people--between a
sense of the world as close to us, intimate--the world of our private feelings,
and the world as large. A fight, in other words, about contraction and
expansion, confidence and uncertainty.
In an issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled,
"Sureness, Unsureness, and Music," Class Chairman Ellen Reiss writes:
We will be sure when we feel there is a structure in us that makes
sense--in fact, has grandeur--for it like music. We will be sure when we
feel the opposites in us are not things we have to be tossed between or
which we adroitly play off against each other--but these forces and desire
can become a vibrant integrity in us, as they are in music.
As a person who often felt "tossed between" and also "adroitly played off"
a kind of jaunty, seeming confidence, and a morose humility, I am very
grateful to have been learning in classes taught by Miss Reiss, the meaning
of being an integrity--both as man and musician.
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