Beethoven: revolutionary times
michael roberts
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He was born at the time of what has been called the ‘enlightenment’, when European thought broke from a subservience to religion and monarchy and raised the banner of free thinking, science and democracy – and there were the first glimmerings of a new economic order based of ‘free trade and competition’. Adam Smith published his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations, when Beethoven was six years old. And the American war of independence took place, in which the formerly British settlers broke from the British monarchy, with the financial and military support of France to establish a republic with voting rights, exercised again this year. In my view, Beethoven’s musical journey swung with the ups and downs of this revolutionary time that continued throughout his life, but particularly with the ebb and flow of the French revolution that ended monarchy, feudal rights and proclaimed equality, freedom and fraternity for all (men). As a teenager, Beethoven, like many other young 'middling' people in Europe, was a strong supporter of the revolution from the beginning. The son of a musician from a family of Flemish origin, his father, Johann, was employed by the court of the Archbishop-Elector of Bonn, Germany. He gave his first public performance aged seven and moved to Vienna in 1792 to study with Joseph Haydn, who, with Mozart (who had died the previous year aged 35), had shaped the city’s musical tradition. Vienna was under the rule of the Hapsburg absolutist empire. But Beethoven was wrapped up in Napoleonic ideas of freedom. He became a staunch republican and in both his letters and conversation spoke frequently of the importance of liberty. He did not care for royalty. To one of his earliest patrons, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, Beethoven wrote: “Prince, what you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am of myself.” Austrian monarch, Franz II allegedly refused to have anything to do with Beethoven, on the basis that there was “something revolutionary in the music”. And what friendship the composer had with great German writer and poet, Goethe, was ended abruptly in 1812 when, walking together in the park, they came across the Austrian Empress. Goethe bowed subserviently; Beethoven disdainfully turned his back. This revolutionary spirit inhabits much of his work. He propelled music into this new age. Bringing together the poetic power of the German literary scene and the French songs of revolution, he completely changed what music could be. "Beethoven is the friend and contemporary of the French Revolution, and he remained faithful to it even when, during the Jacobin dictatorship, humanitarians with weak nerves of the Schiller type turned from it, preferring to destroy tyrants on the theatrical stage with the help of cardboard swords. Beethoven, that plebeian genius, who proudly turned his back on emperors, princes and magnates - that is the Beethoven we love for his unassailable optimism, his virile sadness, for the inspired pathos of his struggle, and for his iron will which enabled him to seize destiny by the throat." (Igor Stravinsky). Beethoven changed the way music was composed and listened to. His music does not calm, but shocks and disturbs. I think we can divide up Beethoven’s musical work into four periods that match the economic and social ups and downs of his lifetime. His was the age of three great bourgeois revolutions: the industrial in England; the political in France; and the philosophical in Germany. The first period of his life as young boy and then as a young adult was during a revolutionary upswing in Europe; but also a new economic upswing in capitalist development, leading to the apex of the French revolution with the ascendancy of the radical Jacobin administration in 1792 when Beethoven was 22 years old. The second period from 1792 to 1815 was really one of setback for the revolution in France as the Jacobins were overthrown and the hero of the military defence of the revolutionary government, Napoleon Bonaparte, made himself dictator. But that also meant that Napoleon’s armies took the ideas and laws of the French revolution across Europe, overthrowing the reactionary semi-feudal absolute monarchies of Austria, Spain, Italy and Prussia. His victories made him an idol in Beethoven’s eyes. It was in this period that a maturing Beethoven composed some of his greatest works. His magnificent 5th symphony is brimming with references to the music of the revolution. In its composition, Beethoven remarks that his symphony expresses the words written about murdered French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat “We swear, sword in hand, to die for the republic and for human rights”. His only opera, Fidelio, tells of a lone woman freeing her husband, a political prisoner, from a Spanish jail (the setting having been moved from France for political reasons, reasons which included his hatred of the regime in Spain). A revolutionary spirit moves every bar of the Fifth. The celebrated opening bars of this work (listen) are perhaps the most striking opening of any musical work in history. By coincidence, they are the musical equivalent of the Morse code signal for "V" meaning victory, used to rally the French people to fight the German occupiers in WW2. "This is not music; it is political agitation. It is saying to us: the world we have is no good. Let us change it! Let's go!" (Nikolaus Harnancourt, conductor). Another famous conductor and musicologist, John Elliot Gardener, has discovered that all the main themes in Beethoven’s symphonies are based on French revolutionary songs. The “cry of alarm”, “Marchons, marchons” from “La Marseillaise”, the rallying call of the French Revolution, is echoed in the opening chords of the “Eroica” symphony. The Fifth Piano Concerto (“Emperor”) exudes “military energy”. The trumpet passages in Fidelio echo those in Handel’s Messiah that occur under the vocal line “the trumpet shall sound… and we shall all be changed”. But this great period of musical energy was increasingly marred by Beethoven’s terrible and tortuous illness, as he gradually went deaf, possibly with a type of meningitis – which affected his hearing. This started when he was 28 years old and at the peak of his fame. Although he did not become completely deaf until his last years, the awareness of his deteriorating condition made him unpredictable, depressed and even suicidal. There was also a deterioration in Europe’s economy from 1805, beginning with the blockade of France’s conquests by British naval power after the victory of its navy at Trafalgar, creating increasing shortages of food and staples. And Beethoven was also depressed with political events in this period. He had dedicated his 3rd symphony to Napoleon. But by 1802 Beethoven’s opinion of Napoleon was beginning to change. In a letter to a friend written in that year, he wrote indignantly: “everything is trying to slide back into the old rut after Napoleon signed the Concordat with the Pope.” Beethoven’s admiration finally turned to resentment when Napoleon declared himself Emperor in 1804. When Beethoven received news of these events, he angrily crossed out his dedication to Napoleon in the score of his new symphony. The manuscript still exists and we can see that he attacked the page with such violence that it has a hole torn through it. He then dedicated the symphony to an anonymous hero of the revolution: the Eroica symphony it became. The third period of Beethoven’s musical life matched a period of deep reaction and a shocking downturn in Europe’s economies. With Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 with the old monarchies restored in Europe, Beethoven was in despair, composing little. Everywhere progressive thought was in retreat: the great romantic poets of victorious England, Shelley and Byron, were forced into exile. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a novel that despairs at both bigoted superstition and racism as well as antagonism towards the uncontrolled scientific industrialism of the rising capitalist economy. This was the end of romanticism and revolution and now was the time for such as David Ricardo, more or less the same age as Beethoven, who in 1817 wrote his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, the definitive work of bourgeois economics, a paeon to capitalism. The years 1816-19 were terrible ones for the people of Europe, not dissimilar to this year of the COVID in 2020. The European economy fell into a permanent winter, both literally and economically. 1816 is known as the ‘Year Without a Summer’ (also the Poverty Year) because of severe climate abnormalities that caused temperatures in Europe to drop to the coldest on record. There were failed harvests. This resulted in major food shortages. In Germany, where the crisis was severe. Food prices rose sharply throughout Europe. Though riots were common during times of hunger, the food riots of 1816 and 1817 saw the highest levels of civic violence since the French Revolution. It was the worst famine of 19th-century mainland Europe. Suffocating in the reactionary atmosphere of Vienna, and despairing of any change for the better, Beethoven wrote: “As long as the Austrians have their brown beer and little sausages, they will never revolt.” However, the final decade of Beethoven’s life from the 1820s saw a revival in the European economy as the capitalist mode of production spread and industry began to replace a mostly rural Germany and Austria. Indeed, there was the first capitalist economic slump in 1825; and later, the first signs of proletarian struggle which eventually led to the overthrow of the restored Bourbon monarchy in France in 1830 and the 1832 Reform Act in England, allowing better-off adult males the right for the vote for the first time. And in 1824 Beethoven delivered his final masterpiece before his death in 1827. Beethoven had long been considering the idea of a choral symphony and took as his text the German poet Schiller's Ode to Joy, which he had known since 1792 and was originally published in 1785 taken from a drinking song for German republicans. In fact, Schiller had originally considered calling the song an Ode to Freedom (Freiheit), but because of the enormous pressure of reactionary forces, he changed the word to Joy (Freude). Those words of Schiller became the centrepiece of the 9th symphony (which is used by the European Union as its anthem now). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo_-KoBiBG0
The ninth symphony has been called The Marseillaise of Humanity. Beethoven revives the sound of revolutionary optimism. It is the voice of a man who refuses to admit defeat, whose head remains unbowed in adversity. Chicago Symphony Orchestra
On May 7, 1824, Beethoven shared his 9th Symphony with the world even though he could never hear it. On May 7, 2015 celebrate the anniversary of Beethoven’s most glorious and jubilant masterpiece with Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. An exhilarating testament to the human spirit, Beethoven’s Ninth bursts with brooding power and kinetic energy and culminates in the exultant hymn, “Ode to Joy.” Addendum “Beethoven’s Ninth” is a music documentary on the occasion of the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven. To this day, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of the most popular pieces of classical music around the world. In this 90-minute film, you will discover new interpretations of the famous Ninth, performed by passionate musicians. Watch as Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis works on Beethoven’s Ninth with his ensemble, MusicAeterna. Or observe Chinese composer and Oscar winner Tan Dun as he creates a new composition inspired by the great Beethoven symphony. Experience first-hand the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as they interpret the Ninth, in part using instruments built by the musicians themselves. Visit a favela in Brazil, where Beethovens’s music helps people get off the streets. Be amazed as a choir of 10,000 in Japan sings the “Ode to Joy,” the final chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with great enthusiasm. Learn how Paul Whittaker helps make Beethoven, who himself became deaf, accessible for deaf people. And find out how British DJ Gabriel Prokofiev performs a symphonic remix of Beethoven’s Ninth. At the end of this musical journey, you will see that in every country on the globe, people dream of a better world in which human beings can live as brothers and sisters. In playing and singing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, this dream becomes true, if only for a moment. A breathtaking documentary about the greatest symphony of all times. - shot in Shanghai, Osaka, Sao Paolo, Salzburg, Kinshasa, Barcelona, Bonn starring: Teodor Currentzis Tan Dun Gabriel Prokofiev Yutaka Sado Armand Diangienda Paul Whittaker Isaac Karabtchevsky . |
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Hope Moves In Shadowy And Offbeat Places: Bob Dylan, Death, And The Creative Spirit
=By= Edward Curtin
“The song ‘Political World’ could have been triggered by current events. There was a heated presidential race underway …. But I had no interest in politics as an art form….The political world in the song is more of an underworld….With the song I thought I might have broken through to something. It was like you wake up from a deep and drugged slumber and somebody strikes a little silver gong and you come to your senses.” Bob Dylan, Chronicles
We live in dark times when the prison gates of seeming hopelessness clang shut around us. Endless U.S. led and sponsored wars, a New Cold War, nuclear threats, economic exploitation, oligarchical rule, government spying, drone killings, loss of civil liberties, terrorism, ecological degradation, etc. – the list is long and depressing.
Awareness of a deep state hidden behind the marionette theatre of conventional politics has grown, even as the puppet show of electoral distractions garners the headlines. Readers of the alternative media learn the truth of government conspiracies involving assassinations – JFK, MLK, RFK, et al. – and countless other evil deeds without cessation. Excellent writers uncover and analyze the machinations of those responsible. Anger and frustration mount as people listen to a litany of bad news and propaganda spewed out by the mainstream corporate media. It is easy to be overwhelmed and disheartened.
Despite the mute despair and apathy that fill the air, hope is needed to carry on and resist these destructive forces. Sometimes in such a dark time the eye begins to see and the ear hears hope in unexpected places. Doing so necessitates a bit of a sideways move to discover pockets of resistance hiding in the shadows. There are torches of illumination in the underworld, but we need to come to our senses to get there.
“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” Carl Jung
If you’ve ever played music or basketball, fell dizzyingly in love, or lapsed into a spell writing words or being engrossed in a passionate pursuit, you’ll easily grasp what follows. But maybe these specific experiences aren’t necessary. You’ve lived, you’re alive, and you can hear the pitter-patter beat of your dribbling heart. That’s probably plenty. You know the game can be a roller-coaster ride with all its ups and downs, and when it ends you will have won or lost something, exactly what being of the essence.
Rhythm, melody, and movement: from these life is born and sustained. They are also integral to sports and art – music, writing, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. – even when they are apparently absent.
Tall Walking Figure by Alberto Giacometti. (Credit: Billy Liar.)
If, for example, one looks at Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, Tall Walking Figure, its immobility implies movement. Such paradoxical inclusiveness pertains to still-life painting as well. While seemingly immobile, and defined by some as dead life, such paintings are encompassed by the presence of the absence of movement and change, the essence of all living things. To grasp the paradoxical nature of art – and life – one must approach them as an artist and see the wholeness in broken pieces. “Everything is broken,” Bob Dylan sings, “take a deep breath, feel like you’re choking.”
“Life is the best play of all.” Sophie Michel, a 7 year-old musician
I think it is fair to say that living is the ultimate art and as the artists of our lives our medium is time and space. And that it is in sound that time and space are epitomized. Musical sounds carry us through time and space in a reverberating vital impulse. Music brings us to our senses. Being emotional, it sets us in motion. We are moved.
Sports, as the etymology of the word suggests (desporter – to divert), is a diversion from something. Sports involve us in movement through time and space to an unnecessary goal where someone wins and someone losses. In sports we choose to overcome superfluous obstacles for fun and for deeper reasons we may not realize. Sports only matter because they don’t.
“What we play is life.” Louis Armstrong
A few years ago my friends and I were playing in basketball tournaments for men over fifty and we qualified for the Senior Olympics at the University of Pittsburgh. We acquired a sponsor, a local funeral home that made warm-up jerseys for us. Being used to dealing with bodies at rest, these comedians knew we were a bunch of aging hoopsters intent on keeping our bodies in motion for as long as we could. So they had shirts made with that up-beat and adolescent cliché printed on the front, “Basketball is Life.” Lest we forgot, and being in the trade of taking bodies at rest to the underworld, on the back they had printed “Leave the Rest to Us: Flynn and Dagnoli Funeral Home.”
Most of us found the juxtaposition hilarious (including one funny Irishman who ended up dead at the funeral home), but one teammate found it disturbing, which gave the rest of us additional sardonic laughs. Sex and death and one’s ongoing vitality are the stuff of uneasy laughter in the locker rooms of aging men. It’s a place for essentials.
“He was like a great singer with a style all his own, a pacing that was different, a flair for the unusual.” Chick Hearn, play-by-play announcer for The Los Angeles Lakers about Pete Maravich
I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan’s fascinating and poetic memoir, Chronicles: Volume I, and came upon his recounting of hearing of the news of the death of “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the greatest scorer in college basketball history and a magician without par on the court. It was January 5, 1988.
My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to
talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morn-
ing news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich,
the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in
Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I’d seen Maravich
play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New
Orleans Jazz. He was something to see – mop of brown hair,
floppy socks – the holy terror of the basketball world – high
flyin’ – magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled
the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket –
dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass
and caught his own pass. He was fantastic. Scored something
like thirty-eight points. He could have played blind. Pistol Pete
hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of
as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people
seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like
they didn’t fade away at all.
Dylan has the poet’s touch, of course, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic that draws you into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truth. In ways he’s like the Latin American magical realist writers who move from fact to dream to the fantastic in a puff of wind.
He goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete’s sad death playing pickup basketball, he started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day, and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen. The news of one creative spirit’s death gave birth to another creative spirit’s gift to life. (I am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father’s death.) “It’s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them …. The wind could never blow it out of my head. This song was a good thing to have. On a song like this, there’s no end to things.”
One can hear echoes of Hemingway, another artist obsessed with death, in those last few sentences. Unlike Hemingway, however, Dylan’s focus on death is in the service of life and hope. For him there is no end, while Hemingway is all ending – nada, nada, nada – nothing, nothing, nothing – “it was all a nothing and a man was nothing too,” he writes in his haunting story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Dylan’s focus on the shadow of death is seen within the light of life – todo – all or everything. The darkness is there but is encompassed by the light. Nada within todo. As he told the AARP magazine last year in a fascinating interview, he’s been singing about death since he’s been twelve. And out of that singing – year after year for fifty plus years and counting – he has found and expressed the light of hope.
Bob Dylan (Credit: Moderate Voice)
Dylan is our Emerson. His artistic philosophy has always been about movement in space and time through song. Always moving, always restless, always seeking a way back home through song, even when, or perhaps because, there are no directions. “An artist has got to be careful never to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere,” he’s said. “You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming and as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll be alright.”
Sounds like living, right.
Sounds like Emerson, also. “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. Thus one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes.”
It was about ten years ago when we traveled to that Senior Basketball Olympics at the University of Pittsburgh. We drew many uneasy smiles as we paraded around with the backs of our shirts announcing the services of the men who take us to the underworld. We won a few games and lost others; were eliminated and left for home disappointed, some of us more than others, depending on each man’s competitive fire to defeat the foe. Like all athletes, losing felt like a small death. Even small deaths are hard to swallow, however, especially when knowing how way leads on to way and you doubt you will ever come back. As evening was darkening the Amish countryside, we departed east through country roads in silence, each lost in his interior monologue on the journey ahead. Playing low on the radio, from my back seat I could barely make out Dylan singing, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
Two years ago there was a short Grantland documentary, “The Finish Line,” about Steve Nash, the latest Pistol Pete. An uncanny player, Nash was battling injuries and age, and the documentary shows him pondering whether or not to retire or continue his rehabilitation and attempt a comeback. In the opening scene Nash goes out with his dog into the shadowy pre-dawn where he muses on his dilemma. His words are hypnotic. “I feel,” he said, “that there’s something that I can’t quite put my finger on that – I don’t know – I feel that it’s blocking me or I can see it out of the corner of my mind’s eye, or it’s like this dark presence ….is it the truth that I’m done?”
Hobbled by a nerve injury that severely limited his movement, he played a few more games and retired within a year. Like Pete Maravich, he had brought an infectious joy to his playing, but he left without fulfilling his dream of winning an NBA championship. Of his retirement he said, “It’s bittersweet. I already miss the game deeply, but I’m also really excited to learn to do something else.” Unlike many athletes, Nash was moving on; his “dark presence” wasn’t a final death but a step on the road to a hard rebirth. It was a Dylanesque restless farewell: “And though the line is cut/It ain’t quite the end/I‘ll just bid farewell till we meet again.”
“A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They’re like strange countries that you have to enter. You can write a song anywhere …. It helps to be moving. Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving.” Bob Dylan, Chronicles
Dylan has long been accused of abandoning his youthful idealism and protest music. I think this is a bum rap. He was never a protester, though his songs became anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements. There is no doubt that those songs were inspirational and gave people hope to carry on the good fight. But in turning in a more oblique and circumspect musical direction, following his need to change as the spirit of inspiration moved him, Dylan’s songs have come to inspire in a new way. You know his sympathies lie with the oppressed and downtrodden, but he doesn’t shout it. A listener has to catch his drift. If you go to the music, and dip into his various stylistic changes over the decades, you will find a consistency of themes. He deals with essentials like all great poets. Nothing is excluded. His work is paradoxical. Yes, he’s been singing about death since twelve, but it has always been countered by life and rebirth. There is joy and sadness; faith and doubt; happiness and suffering; injustice and justice; romance and its discontents; despair and hope. His music possesses a bit of a Taoist quality mixed with a Biblical sensibility conveyed by a hopelessly romantic American. He has fused his themes into an incantatory delivery that casts a moving spell of hope upon the listener. He is nothing if not a spiritual spell-binder; similar in many ways to that other quintessential American – the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whose best work was a poetic quest for an inspired salvific poetry.
If the listener is expecting an argument, a thesis, inductive reasoning, or a didactic approach from Dylan, he is out of luck, and rather than be inspired he will be disappointed. This is art, not theory, and art of a special kind since Dylan is an artist at war with his art. His songs demand that the listener’s mind and spirit be moving as the spirit of creative inspiration moved Dylan. A close listening will force one to jump from verse to verse – to shoot the gulf – since there are no bridges to cross, no connecting links. The sound carries you over and keeps you moving forward. If you’re not moving, you’ll miss the meaning.
“A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” Chinese Proverb
So if the world is getting you down and all the news is bad to your ears, don’t lose hope. Step to the side, out of the glare of the sun, the blare of the headlines where lies and fears shout in our ears and echo down our days like a repetitive nightmare. Give Dylan a listen. As he has said of spiritual songs, “They brought me down to earth and they lifted me up all in the same moment.” His songs have the same paradoxical power because he excludes nothing. That is why they are truthful.
It is fitting that his latest album, “Shadows in the Night,” comprised of ten beloved old ballads sung by Frank Sinatra, from “The Night We Called it a Day” to “Some Enchanted Evening,” has him changing again, going back to go forward. He is full of surprises, which any child will tell you bring joy because surprises and change are the core of living. To change this crazed world, we must change and find hope and joy along the way. Repetition will kill us. Dylan’s artistic metamorphoses and ingenious song writing offer offbeat sources of hope. Just listen.
Having been compared to Frank Sinatra with these songs, he’s said, “You must be joking. To be mentioned in the same breath as him must be some sort of high compliment. As far as touching him goes, nobody touches him. Not me or anyone else …. But he never went away. All those things we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But he never did.” Sinatra, like Pistol Pete, didn’t fade away because he too inspired Dylan to inspire us to hope and carry on. If it feels dark and night-like to you, move sideways into the shadows. Look away and you’ll see the light.
Or if you like basketball or dancing, like to move to the beat, listen to Dylan singing “Hurricane,” a long narrative song about the framing of the boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter. It will get your blood flowing, your passions riled, and your body moving. It’s perfect for practicing all the dribbling tricks Pistol Pete performed. I thought of using it at the Senior Olympics, but the beat seemed a little too rapid and excitable for the over fifty AARP crowd. The shirts were sending an undertaking message that I didn’t want made real. Hope is one thing, but traveling too fast is another. Anyway, one of my teammates was in swift pursuit of a woman there whom he described as a twin of his ideal woman – Pamela Anderson. He didn’t need any more excitement.
Edward Curtin is a writer who teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and has published widely.
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Remembrances & Thoughts On the Streets of Buenos Aires In the Year 2006
JOURNEYS into
YESTERDAYS
An installation by Gaither Stewart and Patrice Greanville
Musical selections & commentary by Patrice Greanville
Once again I am back in Buenos Aires. From my two brief visits here years ago only vague memories of this Paris-like Latin American city remain. Though a brutal military dictatorship came and left in the interim, this is still the New World … though for me it seems to be located in the Old. Instead of in a downtown hotel as before, I am living in an apartment in the centrally located barrio of La Recoleta, an area of expensive boutiques and elegant hotels and sumptuous apartment buildings. Nearby is the monumental Cementerio de Recoleta where lie many Argentine notables including Eva “Evita” Peron and Nicolas Rodriguez Pena, for whom my street is named. Lunching outside at the famous Café La Biela (the rod that links certain parts of an automobile), under the spreading branches of the internationally known, 18th century gum tree, one can watch the beautiful people of well-to-do Buenos Aires come and go. Though this was once the café of the automobile racing crowd, hence its name, it was also the favorite café of Jorge Luis Borges and two generations of intellectuals and artists. Today it is the café of a certain chic Buenos Aires. The 2006 version of Buenos Aires at the Café Biela shows no visible effects of the economic crisis the nation has only recently emerged from. Yet, underneath, the scars are there, not only from the economic crisis but especially from the moral crisis caused by the years of the dictatorship from 1976-1983. People of this rich barrio, like many Germans after WWII, are uncertain about what went wrong in a nation that permitted the horror of at least thirty thousand desaparecidos and the moral degeneration the terror engendered. As much as Beautiful Buenos Aires wants to come to terms with that past, it is still an elusive operation. Who is guilty is still an open question in Argentina. At least formally so since the social forces served by the brutal military dictatorship are clear. One fourth of Argentina’s forty million people lives in Greater Buenos Aires, three million of them in the city itself. It is one of the major urban centers in the world. Buenos Aires is a concentrate of Argentina as Paris is of France. The problems of the nation are the problems of Buenos Aires. The problems of Buenos Aires are the problems of the nation.
EL CHOCLO (1)
One of the most iconic compositions in the history of this genre
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]riginal Spanish settlers wanted to create a European city here around the great natural port. Greedy Spanish colonialists were cruel as have been all colonialists down through history. Despite claims about the “good of bringing civilization to savages,” there has never been any altruism in colonialism. Those sixteenth century colonialists wanted neither to assimilate others nor to be assimilated. They succeeded: they conveniently annihilated the natives, or so they believed, and established a European city.
My barrio here could be Paris or Madrid. It could be the Upper East Side in New York. White skins predominate. Though officially less than one per cent of Argentina’s population is of indigenous descent since the new Spanish arrivals simply “eliminated” the people they found here, and though a majority of people in north Buenos Aires are of European stock, the number of apparent mestizos even in chic Recoleta and Palermo continues to surprise me.
Yesterday I walked to the Retiro train station to take a look, for it is at train stations that one sees best the cross sections of a country. And they were there, in big numbers: the Indios and mestizos, the half-breeds and quarter-breeds. Maybe some are Bolivians or Indios from Brazil but most are Argentines.
In wandering around the huge city I find that an even greater number of persons have certain particular but elusive features—a square facial structure and thick cheekbones—in which I seem to see traces of man’s North Asian period that followed the diaspora of the first men from Africa, the original mother and motherland of all of us.
It’s still possible to run into couples doing a tango exhibition right on the streets of Buenos Ires.
Although this is not the place for an anthropological survey, I am as usual on the qui vive for what links us all. I always hope to pinpoint the prototype of Man. I am continually searching for the Man in which I believe we all converge. On the plane from Rome to Buenos Aires, sitting among mainly Argentines, I saw in many faces what I thought was that original Man. Strangely and inexplicably those features were especially in the faces of white-skinned women. In these first days in Buenos Aires I have therefore intensified my search, convinced I will see the original Man here. I stop in crowds and peer into passing faces and sometimes I believe I see him.
There he is! There is Man!
The man from Siberia who never faltered, who never deviated from his southern course toward the bottom of the world, who filtered southwards down the still unnamed continent and became the “indigenous” Man, the first man in Argentina. Somehow he survived the Spanish invasion and the mass extermination. He both assimilated his Spanish executioner and was himself secretly assimilated. Again and again he mixed with the new blood arriving in waves from Europe, from Italy and Germany. Argentines marking the arrival of the Spanish five centuries ago on the Day with the ugly name of “Day of the Race” on October 12 wonder how best to call what happened here at the mouth of what they called the Rio de la Plata: Discovery? Meeting of cultures? Usurpation? Conquest?
They are right to wonder. None of the names apply.
Far too many people forget that Carlos Gardel was not only one of the best singers of all time, but also an extremely gifted and influential composer.
Por Una Cabeza (2)
(See full lyrics, translation and notes at the bottom of this article)
The Fifth Sun (Punto Press). He serves as senior editor with The Greanville Post (TGP) and European correspondent for both TGP and Cyrano’s Journal Today. His home base is Rome.
Reminiscencias de mi Buenos Aires querido
(Reminiscing about our beloved Buenos Aires—Or how you can reach Buenos Aires via Naples)
Segunda—
Patrice Greanville
The soul of Buenos Aires is a soul filled with nostalgia. Great cities tend to be cold and businesslike, ruthless and impersonal in their dealings. New York comes immediately to mind in this regard; the summoning of its image when one speaks of a cold metropolis something of a cliché. Others, like Shanghai, we approach gingerly as one approaches a massive beehive where one’s humanity could swiftly vanish into a featureless common denominator. Buenos Aires is big, some porteños would proudly say huge. But there’s nothing impersonal about Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires often feels up close and personal, like a small town. Perhaps it is her Mediterranean fabric—half Spanish, half Italian, with generous sprinklings of other transplanted races, all embedded in the magnanimous embrace of the long-suffering, resigned, often despised Amerindian pachamama—that makes the character of this city so human, so captivating, so contradictory and so hard to resist. Buenos Aires is twice as big as Madrid, just about the size of London in population (the biggest metropolis in the EU), and ten times the size of Naples, but its aura of intimacy, the badly concealed mien of the old villorrio, its ability to tug at the heart is the same.
Like all big assemblages of humanity the Buenos Aires cultural DNA carries many infusions. The colonial Spanish pool, reinforced by 19th and 20th century migrations, remains strong, but the city can’t be properly recognized without acknowledging the enormous influence of Italians, chiefly from Sicily and the Campania. The Italians came and mostly remained in the River Plate estuary, rarely venturing beyond the city’s ample limits, the Argentinean hinterland, the realm of the cabecitas negras.
Most of them bore the scars of immemorial poverty, the erratic employment at home, a life of literal servitude made doubly awful by two global wars that shook the peninsula to its roots but did not remove the old social chains, disdain, and prejudices against mezzogiornini, and the lower orders, in general, an attitude that has not entirely died even in the 21st century. Out of this proud but dilapidated mix the Neapolitan strain soon became one of the most influential in the new land. Thus, in the City of Fair Ayre, more than any other ingredient, it was Naples that smoothed the excessive harshness and rigidity so typical of the Spanish character, a trick Neapolitans had mastered over centuries of close acquaintance with their onetime nominal Hispanic overlords.
Who are you, Naples? And how did you get to the banks of the River Plate?
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nyone who knows anything about these matters can attest that there’s no city in the world like Naples in terms of ostensible emotionality and popular talent for lyricism. Naples is the cradle of most famous Italian popular songs. O Sole Mio came from Naples. So did Torna a Surriento. And that enduring hymn to filial love, Mamma. There are many other songs like that: all beautiful, all sad (or poignantly joyous); all celebrating the most irrepressible emotions the human heart is heir to. All rendered in that curious hybrid vernacular that distinguishes the Amalfi region, a language that endlessly oscillates between Italian proper and old Spanish, never quite making up its mind.
Naples has a well deserved reputation for cunning resiliency, bordering on the bizarrely criminal. At times it can be downright comical. To many outsiders the inhabitants seem over-exuberant, histrionic, even caricaturesque. In his searing La Pelle (The Skin) native son Curzio Malaparte, himself a hybrid, an Italo-German with unsettled loyalties, painted Naples in the closing hours of WW2 as a sea of shifting humanity at wits’ end, future uncertain, with the streets and beds an arena of desperate Darwinism, the whole mess improbably supervised by a conquering, swaggering horde of supremely naive semi-barbaric Americans. The Germans were clearly foreign to the Neapolitan way, but the Americans were simply another species.
Against this backdrop Malaparte conjures up visions that could only make sense in a place as culturally supple and old as Naples, the site of a grand uninterrupted farandula. It could only happen in Naples, Malaparte assures us, because Naples is above all tolerant; like an old being it has seen it all, like an old mother, it forgives all. Genuine scandal cannot really faze her. The tumult that betrays internal emotions is alien to her character: too abrupt, too ill-mannered to be accepted into the wove of Naples instinctive gentility, every single one an expert in the art of savoir vivre. The external fireworks is another matter, for the sake of bella figura, an Italian imperative, but they too soon pass and calm is restored.
Indeed, only a culture as flexible and complicated as Naples can produce a femminiello, a testament to the people’s adaptability. As a Neapolitan scholar has pointed out, (3):
In the variegated world of homosexuality, still ill defined both scientifically and culturally, the position of the Neapolitan femminello is a privileged one…they live mostly in the poor quarters in a welcoming atmosphere, surrounded by good-natured consensus. They were born in a squalid slum, bereft of air and light, into families where promiscuity is the rule and all the children generally sleep in one bed…he is usually the youngest male child, ‘mother’s little darling,’ and tends to imitate his mother’s feminine sweetness…It is unusual for a poor family to view the femminiello as a family disgrace in any sense of the word; he is useful, he does chores, runs errands and watches the kids…and a mother would have no second thoughts about asking a femminiello to babysit.
This is what Malaparte well understood when he spoke provocatively in The Skin of the somewhat blatant “Congress of Homosexuals,” the “tide of Internationale of invertiti [those who are ‘inverted’] each one a ‘noble Narcissus,’ streaming back to Naples through broken German lines after the liberation of southern Italy in September 1943—back to Naples, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the most important carrefour of the forbidden vice. They brought with them the hope that the “liberation” of Europe from tyranny would somehow at last translate into lasting sexual freedom.* (4)
Against such visions, the legend that Neapolitans managed to steal a whole American destroyer, without leaving a trace (not to mention untold numbers of lesser objects), seems tame. Anything to survive, because life, after all, is the ultimate accomplishment.
In her award-winning film Settebellezze Director Lina Wertmuller paid mordant tribute to the supreme Neapolitan “survivor”, depicting him as a mass of contradictions in which opportunism, sentiment, and honor are in constant combat with none winning the decisive upper hand. The quest for dignified opportunism—”onore“— is scarcely unique to Naples. Other regions of Italy, notably Sicily, also rate as powerful entrants in the contest, and to some extent the rest of the world, for the art of survival against great odds is almost a universal gift, often acquired out of necessity. That said, what distinguishes Naples is that, hard as she may need to be, she’s never afraid to show her soft side, her maternal side, and her wiles are always displayed with memorable haunting panache. Vittorio de Sica, the man who gave us Ladri di Biciclette and other masterpieces, described Rome as the calculating mind of Italy, but Naples, he averred, was her heart. Who could have thought that the same heart would find some day a new home 7,000 long miles from the lap of the Vesuvius in the Southern Cone of Latin America?
Gardel’s debt to Naples
The music of a culture reflects its temperament, and the music of the people of Buenos Aires is the tango. The tango speaks to losses, just like Naples’ songs. The poor feel its message deeply. Unfinished journeys. Defeats. Prolonged absences. Fidelity to one’s great primal loves. The inexorable passage of time. Its music has echoes of classic Eurolatin melodiousness with the cadence of the new Amerindian rhythm. The passion that infuses its steps has roots firmly planted in both continents.
The tango’s pre-eminent artist, never surpassed, is Carlos Gardel, at once a versatile, unique, deeply haunting interpreter and gifted composer of scores of songs, many arranged with the aid of his loyal friend in life and death (literally) the lyricist Alfredo Le Pera.(2)
Gardel—el “Zorzal criollo”.
Gardel was one of the first truly international superstars. His fame reached not only every corner of Latin America, but Paris, (where he was revered), Berlin, London, Tokyo, Helsinki, and even Russia. Equally surprising, he was known even in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles (America is usually a planet apart)—where he went to make some recordings and movies for the internal regional Latin markets. Despite the brevity of his visits he impressed many local artists, including a callow Frank Sinatra, whom he counseled to get serious about his crooning.
Gardel was not Neapolitan. Of very humble origins, he was born in Toulouse, Southern France, in 1890. His mother, apparently a laundress, left the city a few years later, probably to escape the stigma of having a child born out of wedlock. In early 1893 in Bordeaux, France, mother and son boarded the ship SS Don Pedro and sailed to Buenos Aires, arriving on 11 March 1893. Gardel grew up watching his mother battle poverty, but the wounds of that squalid life were quickly palliated by the boy’s quick ascent from anonymity and the almost tribal, fierce love he received from everyone in the barrio, la barra de los muchachos.
In many regards, buoyed by the support of his friends, many immigrant sons and daughters themselves, el francesito—”frenchie”—as his friends called him, managed to escape the more sordid and depressing injuries of class. Gardel never forgot his roots nor that early embrace, and his love for the common people soon found expression in multiple motifs that seem now, in retrospect, like the artist’s unconscious effort to repay a big emotional debt.
Both Buenos Aires and Naples are unapologetically sentimental and much of Gardel’s music, like tangoes in general, is sentimental. But this is not cheap sentimentality; classic tango has nothing mawkish in it, nothing soap operatic. Tango—like Jazz— is not self-pitying, though its natural call is to witness the loser’s progress, with whom it identifies, a path full of frustrations, love’s disappointments and bittersweet illusions. Tango sings the blues in Spanish.
Journeys are particularly important to the tango repertory and Gardel often incorporated the idea in his best compositions. The hard transplantation to a new continent resonated with a collectivity full of immigrants, economic exiles, in reality, and tango spoke to their repressed pain. Those that have never uprooted themselves from native soil, or been forced by circumstance into foreign exile will have trouble understanding. Such journeys are both geographic and emotional, and then there’s the journey of life itself, the one in which our memories constitute the main road.
The compulsion to return—”Volver”
[dropcap]G[/dropcap]ardel was quick to seize on that motif. He felt it intensely. For Gardel life was a round trip: No matter where we begin, we always long to go back to our point of origin, to the land, to the spot that saw us in our youth, to sort things out a final time. The heart demands it. Not for nothing the old Latin word for “remember” is “recordare”. Fellini’s homage to his youth was called Amarcord—I remember. For recordare is not to pass a thought through the mind but through the heart. Il cuore. We remember with the heart. The mind just organizes our words; the heart controls the tears, the logical punctuation for the inexpressible inside.
I have mentioned Naples and now Gardel at some length because without knowing something about them it’s really impossible to comprehend Buenos Aires. Naples in her songs sheds tears for those who have left in search of new horizons and for those left behind, counting the days when a longed-for reunion will be possible. The journey home is both geographic and biographic. The miles and the years that separate one from one’s point of departure, the moment when the first emotional debts are incurred, resonate with the soul of the old porteño. They understand what that implies. And Gardel is always there to show them the way. In Volver, one of his signature pieces (lyrics by his collaborator Alfredo Le Pera) Gardel paid homage to many of the motifs spelled out earlier, and that remain dear to the soul of Buenos Aires: the voyage of life, the return to settle one’s emotional accounts, the brevity of our existence, the persistence of orphaned illusions from youth. As Le Pera wrote,
To feel
that life is a mere breath
Volver (Carlos Gardel)
(Lyrics and commentary in appendix below.)
VOLVER (To Return, Music by Carlos Gardel; lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera)
Yo adivino el parpadeo
de las luces que a lo lejos
van marcando mi retorno.
I discern the faint blinking of the lights
that far away
are marking my return
Son las mismas que alumbraron
con sus pálidos reflejos
hondas horas de dolor.
They are the same that illuminated
with their pale reflections
terrible hours of heartache
Y aunque no quise el regreso
siempre se vuelve
al primer amor.
And although I did not want to return
You always go back
to your first love
La vieja calle
donde me cobijo
tuya es su vida
tuyo es su querer.
The old street
that harbors me now
life and love
belong to you
Bajo el burlón
mirar de las estrellas
que con indiferencia
hoy me ven volver.
Under the mischievous
gaze of the stars
that now with some indifference
watch me come back.
Volver
con la frente marchita
las nieves del tiempo
platearon mi sien.
To return
withered forehead
the snows of time
have silvered my temples.
Sentir
que es un soplo la vida
que veinte años no es nada
que febril la mirada
errante en las sombras
te busca y te nombra.
To feel
that life is a mere breath
that twenty years is nothing
how feverish my eyes
stumbling in the shadows
seek you out and call your name.
Vivir
con el alma aferrada
a un dulce recuerdo
que lloro otra vez.
To live
with the soul clinging
to a sweet memory
that I mourn once again.
Tengo miedo del encuentro
con el pasado que vuelve
a enfrentarse con mi vida.
I fear the encounter
with the past that will
confront my life.
Tengo miedo de las noches
que pobladas de recuerdos
encadenen mi soñar.
I fear the nights
that populated with memories
will now enslave my dreams.
Pero el viajero que huye
tarde o temprano
detiene su andar.
But the traveler that flees
sooner or later must come
to a halt.
Y aunque el olvido
que todo destruye
haya matado mi vieja ilusión,
And although oblivion
that destroys everything
may have killed my old illusion,
guardo escondida
una esperanza humilde
que es toda la fortuna
de mi corazón.
I keep hidden
a humble hope
that constitutes the
entire fortune of my heart.
(Bis)
Volver
con la frente marchita
las nieves del tiempo
platearon mi sien.
Sentir
que es un soplo la vida
que veinte años no es nada
que febril la mirada
errante en las sombras
te busca y te nombra.
Vivir
con el alma aferrada
a un dulce recuerdo
que lloro otra vez.
To live
with the soul clinging
to a sweet memory
that I mourn once again.
Appendix
In the songs that follow I provide a brief commentary on the cultural motifs discussed above, especially the leave-takings and returns. The duty to the mother (as felt and understood primarily by commoners or the poor, since the rich have always marched to a different, largely unsentimental tune); the debt to the old paese, and the trip back to the places that witnessed our youth. In some cases a translated excerpt suffices to convey the force and purity of these enduring compositions. When possible, a video version accompanies each selection. Complete lyrics for all these songs can be easily found through a simple Google search.
MAMMA (Cesare Andrea Bixio; lyrics by Bixio Cherubini)
Mamma, son tanto felice
Perche ritorno da te
La mia canzone ti dice
Ch’ il pi bel sogno per me
Mamma son tanto felice
Viver lontano perche
Mamma I am so happy
Because I’m returning to your side
My song tells you
That this is the most beautiful dream for me
Mamma I am so happy
To live far away—whatever for?
Mamma, solo per te la mia canzone vola
Mamma, sarai con me, tu non sarai piu’ sola…
Mamma, only for you my song takes flight
Mamma, you will now be with me, you will no longer be alone.
•••
Vide’o mare quant’è bello,
spira tantu sentimento,
Comme tu a chi tiene a’ mente,
Ca scetato ‘o faie sunnà.
Look at the sea, how beautiful it is,
it inspires so many emotions,
like you do with the people you have at heart.
You make them dream while they are still awake.
Guarda gua’ chistu ciardino;
Siente, siente sciure arance:
Nu profumo accussi fino
Dinto ‘o core se ne va…
Look at this garden
and the scent of these oranges,
such a fine perfume,
it goes straight into your heart,
E tu dice: “I’ parto, addio!”
T’alluntane da stu core…
Da sta terra de l’ammore…
Tiene ‘o core ‘e nun turnà?
And you say: “I am leaving, goodbye.”
You go away from my heart,
away from this land of love,
And you have the heart not to come back.
O SOLE MIO (Eduardo di Capua; Lyrics by Giovanni Capurro, 1898)
O Sole Mio Di Capua
NOTES
(1) “El Choclo” (Spanish: meaning “The Corn Cob”) is a popular song written by Ángel Villoldo, an Argentine musician. Allegedly written in honour of and taking its title from the nickname of the proprietor of a nightclub, who was known as “El Choclo”. It is one of the most popular tangos in Argentina. The piece was premiered in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1903 – the date appears on a program of the venue – at the elegant restaurant El Americano on Cangallo 966 (today Teniente General Perón 966) by the orchestra led by José Luis Roncallo.
Interpreted by Katica Illényi and her sister. Katica Illényi is a Hungarian violinist and singer. On her concerts she plays classical pieces on the violin, jazz standards, world famous movie soundtracks and evergreens. She was born in Budapest, Hungary, and comes from a classical music family. [Violin: Katica Illenyi (Illényi Katica); Cello: Aniko Illenyi (Illényi Anikó); Angel G. Villoldo: El Choclo, tango]
This string quartet version of the beloved tango, featured in the Al Pacino movie “Scent of a Woman”, was played by Dominika Dancewicz, Johnny Chang, Violins, Hillary Schoap, Viola and Olive Chen, Cello. The concert was held at Jennyoga in Houston, TX. Audio/Video productions by Mark Chen Photography.(2) Le Pera died with Gardel in June 1935 in a plane crash in Medellín, Colombia. Gardel was only 44.
| In this epic tango, composed by Carlos Gardel, the interplay between losing at the race track and losing with women is carefully woven into a poem to fate. |
Version en castellano |
English version (P. Greanville) |
| Por una cabeza de un noble potrillo que justo en la raya afloja al llegar y que al regresar parece decir: no olvides, hermano, vos sabes, no hay que jugar… Por una cabeza, metejon de un dia, de aquella coqueta y risueña mujer que al jurar sonriendo, el amor que esta mintiendo quema en una hoguera todo mi querer. Por una cabeza todas las locuras su boca que besa borra la tristeza, calma la amargura. Por una cabeza si ella me olvida que importa perderme, mil veces la vida para que vivir… Cuantos desengaños, por una cabeza, yo jure mil veces no vuelvo a insistir pero si un mirar me hiere al pasar, su boca de fuego, otra vez, quiero besar. Basta de carreras, se acabo la timba, un final reñido yo no vuelvo a ver, pero si algun pingo llega a ser fija el domingo, yo me juego entero, que le voy a hacer. |
Losing by a head of a noble horse who slackens just down the stretch and which when it comes back it seems to say: don’t forget brother, You know, you shouldn’t bet. Losing by a head, a passionate tumble with that flirtatious and cheerful woman who, swearing with a smile a love she’s lying about, burns in a blaze all my love. Losing by a head all the craziness; her mouth that kisses wipes out the sadness, and soothes the bitterness. Losing by a head if she forgets me, who cares if I’m lost my life a thousand times; what is there to live for? Many deceptions, losing by a head… I swore a thousand times not to try again but if a look wounds me on passing by her lips of fire, I want to kiss them again. Enough of race tracks, no more gambling, a photo-finish I’m not likely to see again, but if a pony looks like a sure thing on Sunday, I’ll bet everything again, it can’t be helped! |
(4) Jeff Mathews, The Femminiello in Neapolitan Culture.Below, on the next page, how North Americans see the tango, and execute it, literally, for good and for ill.
Appendix
Patrice Greanville
Tango “American style”—or how to murder a musical genre in broad daylight and get away with it
Some Americans simply massacre the tango. They do it with all the feeling and understanding of someone interpreting martian music. Others, for reasons that will remain mysterious, fall right into the groove, so to speak. One of them is Tommy Chong. On Dancing with the Stars, an improbable venue for reasons clarified below, the 72 y/o former comedian performed the tango with an elegant seriousness that at least evoked the spirit of true tango. Kudos. (As seen on Dancing with the Stars, on ABC network, October, 2014.)
On the other hand…
Many others in America continue to perform ludicrous, massively ignorant and unfeeling simulations of the tango. They may or may not know it, but they are in reality insulting the tango (and the equally innocent audiences entrusted to their “expertise”). For generations now ballroom dancing versions of various genres have been stylised caricatures of the real thing, but nowhere do we find as unhinged from reality versions of any paticular genre as on Dancing with Stars, which, unfortunatey, happens to be the primary window for many Amercans to appreciate the dance forms of other cultures. In the same program that Tommy Chong displayed his chops, another couple also purported to do the tango, but the results were a cruel joke to anyone knowing anything Argentine music and dance, yet this is what passes—to great acclaim—in the US and many parts of the world for real tango. The show’s producers and critics should be simply ashamed—or taken out to the nearest public square and flogged— for their pathetic ignorance, not to mention that of the “professional artists” involved, who indulged in some alarmingy imbecilic choreography for the genre. See for yourselves.
Pete Seeger: a Troubadour for Peace and Justice
Pete Seeger was my first hero. I cannot remember a time when I did not know who he was. I first listened to him on my parent’s 78s of the Almanac Singers singing “Talking Union” and “I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister,” and then on a Folkways record of work songs, singing “The Young Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn.” I begged my dad for more, and my first LP on Folkways was The Rainbow Quest and then American Ballads. And of course there were Weavers albums. Eventually I got all of them.
I was a little too young to know about the blacklist. Somewhere around the time I was eight or nine, Seeger was supposed to play a concert at Temple University in Philadelphia. We arrived at the show to find out it was cancelled. Maybe a year later, I finally saw him at Town Hall in Philly. The great Texas blues singer Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins was his special guest. In 1961, when I was nine, Seeger was convicted of Contempt of Congress for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee six years before citing not the Fifth Amendment, but the First Amendment. He was sentenced to a year in prison. I wrote him a letter and he responded on photographic paper below pictures of his family can his cabin home in Beacon, New York, saying the case was under appeal. I still have that letter framed. I saw him again in concert not long after, and again in 1963.
At the concert in 1963, my life changed. It was only a few days after his famous concert at Carnegie Hall, released on Columbia, We Shall Overcome. Most of the songs at that concert weren’t old folk songs, but new songs. Songs from the Civil Rights demonstrations in the South and songs from a new group of folksingers in Greenwich Village, including songs by Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan. The Bob Dylan songs he sang that Father’s day afternoon were “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” I knew “Hard Rain” was like no other song I’d heard before. It was my introduction to Bob Dylan.
Over the next several years, I saw Seeger several more times, at Broadside Magazine Topical Song Hoots at the Village Gate, at innumerable anti-Vietnam rallies and demonstrations and in concert at Carnegie Hall. Seeger’s whole thing in concert was getting the audience to sing, and I will never forget being way up in one of the high balconies at Carnegie while the entire audience sang, “We Shall Overcome.” At the beginning of the documentary film on Seeger, Power Of Song, Bob Dylan (decades after Newport) described it perfectly:
Pete Seeger, he had this amazing ability to look at a group of people and make them sing parts of the song. He’d make an orchestration out of this simple little song with everybody in the audience singing, whether you wanted to or not, you’d find yourself singing a part. It was beautiful.
Seeger came from a musical family. His father was a musicologist. He attended Harvard in the same class as John F. Kennedy, but dropped out to learn folk music. He bummed around the country with Woody Guthrie, playing union halls. He sang protest and topical songs early on. He played with Leadbelly. And he was a communist.
But he was also one of the great collectors of folk music. He recorded hundreds of old ballads for Folkways. The Leadbelly films easily findable on youtube today are because of him. He consistently put other musicians first, and always pointed to those who came before.
In 1948, with Lee Hays, a fellow Almanac Singer, he formed The Weavers with Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert. They soon got a gig singing at The Village Vanguard where they were a big hit. Bandleader Gordon Jenkins saw them there, and signed them to Decca Records. Jenkins orchestra backed them. In 1950, they had a huge hit with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene.” They had other hits and were set to have their own TV show, but in 1953 it all ended when they were identified as Communists in the magazine Red Channels. Seeger started playing solo shows at colleges and anywhere else he could play and wrote instruction books on the banjo, the guitar and the 12-string guitar.
In 1955, The Weavers reunited at Carnegie Hall and the concert was recorded by a small classical label Vanguard Records. The Weavers At Carnegie Hall kicked off the folk movement that bloomed in the ’60s. Every single folk group that came after is in their debt.
Though it is the last thing Seeger would want to be remembered for, he wrote or was involved in several hit records for other artists. With Lee Hays, he wrote “The Hammer Song,” better known as “If I Had A Hammer.” He wrote “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” and “Turn Turn Turn.” He brought “Wimoweh” later done by the Tokens as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” to this country. And he had an influence on the sound of several bands. Roger (originally Jim) McGuinn of the Byrds started out as a side musician playing guitar and banjo for The Chad Mitchell Trio, Bobby Darin and Judy Collins among others. His biggest influence on banjo and 12-string guitar was Pete Seeger. Mike Campbell, lead guitarist of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers was directly influenced by Jim McGuinn. Peter Buck of REM was influenced by both McGuinn and Campbell. It is not a stretch to say that there were thousands of kids who picked up a banjo and a guitar because of Pete Seeger and learned from his instruction books.
Seeger wrote a regular column for Sing Out!, the folksong magazine called “Johnny Appleseed Junior,” and that is how he saw himself musically, as the spreader of seeds. And some will argue his versions of songs were corruptions of the originals, but because of him a lot of people went back and found the old records and the original musicians and there is no doubt that is what Seeger wanted.
And there are some who will say The Weavers may have been the biggest corruptors of all. But The Weavers sang with a zest and a vibrancy that none of the groups who came after possessed. During the Woody Guthrie Centennial two years ago, I discovered a little known fact, that Guthrie himself rewrote his own songs so The Weavers could turn them into hits. He would sit on the floor of the studio while they were recording, rewriting his songs. He was into it!
The other Weavers referred to Seeger as “The Saint.” He quit the group after they recorded a commercial for L&M cigarettes.
In 1960 John Hammond took a bold step and signed Pete Seeger to Columbia Records, where he recorded some of his best albums, most of them live in concert. One of the best is called Strangers And Cousins recorded during his world tour in 1963 and 1964. On that record is a version of Dylan’s “Masters of War” recorded in Japan, while a translator translates the words to Japanese. It is one of the scariest renditions of that song.
Seeger was blacklisted from TV for most of the ’60s. In 1963, ABC TV started the Hootenanny Television show filmed live on college campuses with fresh faced folksingers. Hootenanny was a word coined by Seeger and Guthrie, but he was not allowed on show. Many singers including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan refused to appear o the show because of that. In the mid-’60s, Seeger finally got a television show, The Rainbow Quest on educational television, and presented innumerable musicians from Elizabeth Cotten to Richard and Mimi Farina to Judy Collins, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and Johnny Cash. Several of the episodes are on youtube. Finally in 1967, The Smothers Brothers invited him on their show. Seeger sang his original anti-Vietnam song, “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy,” but CBS cut it from the show. The Smothers Brothers persisted and finally in 1968, Seeger finally appeared on national TV singing that song. Johnny Cash followed suit a year or two later and had him on his ABC show, which was a hell of a bold move for a Nashville recording artist.
Seeger of course will be remembered for his activism as much as his music. He spoke out for peace, for civil rights, for justice and for environmentalism his entire life and never stopped. He risked his life going to the deep South early in the Civil Rights movement. In the ’30s and ’40s he sang for the unions. He sang for peace all over the world, and through his ship the sloop Clearwater, he is more responsible than anyone for cleaning up the Hudson River.
And in his own way, be could be pretty funny as his appearance not long ago on David Letterman’s show demonstrated. When he sang “This Land Is Your Land” with Springsteen at Obama’s inauguration in 2009, you could see the delight on his face as he sang the once banned verses of the song, especially the verse about the sign that said private property, but on the other side it didn’t say nothing. In 1965 or ’66 an article appeared in Sing Out!with the byline attributed to Seeger’s wife Toshi, that was a review of all of Seeger’s albums up to that point. It totally ripped into the records and his performing style, how he sang harmony to himself, tearing into his banjo and guitar style. Letters of protest followed in subsequent issues. Several months later, Seeger owned up to writing the article.
Unfortunately, Seeger is maligned in the online Bob Dylan community over Newport ’65. But Dylan made it clear in the movie clip and in an interview in Song Talk magazine in 1991 where he told interviewer, Paul Zollo, “Pete Seeger, he’s a great man,” that he doesn’t feel that way.
When Bruce Springsteen did his Seeger Sessions album and subsequent tour covering mostly the folk songs that Seeger recorded in the ’50s on Folkways, however well intentioned (and the shows and band were great), he kind of missed the point or more accurately the feel. The shows were a fun romp, but not much more than that. My memory of Seeger concerts was leaving them inspired and full of a now destroyed word called hope. The only performer I’ve seen who makes you leave a concert feeling that way is Arlo Guthrie, who of course recorded a couple of live albums and did several tours with Seeger. Seeger had the ability to make you believe that a peaceful [and just] world was achievable.
I stopped going to Pete Seeger concerts a long time ago. I didn’t need to anymore. But I still have all those records my dad bought me more than half a century ago, and every now and then I’ll pick one up in a used record store I didn’t get back then. To me, his example as a man who stood up, lived live on his own terms and never stopped speaking out is equaled by very few. He started me on this crazy road of a life in music and that’s something I’ll never forget.
Peter Stone Brown is a freelance writer and singer-songwriter. His site and blog can be found at: http://www.peterstonebrown.com/
Random Acts of Culture: Carmen at Restaurant le 5
Weekend Treats—
The opera CARMEN presented spontaneously at a popular restaurant in Grenoble.