Ditz

Cold nor'easter today, wind whipping leafless branches and rain slapping everything. The bassess and tenors of the RI Civic Chorale, which I'm a tenor in, had a sectional rehearsal this morning because, well, we suck.

Not totally, of course. But a number of guys have serious problems pronouncing foreign languages, and we're doing one piece each in two of the more difficult languages to sing, German and French. German's difficult because the consonants are so percussive, and you need to keep the percussion right on your teeth and lips in order to be intelligible at all. With words like "knabe" and "gnade" and "noch jetzt", tongue-twisters start to seem easy. And even some of the softer sounds, the blends, can be tricky. "-ig" sounds like "ich", but isn't as far back in the mouth as "-och". Even if you know the correct pronunciation it's hard to keep them all straight sometimes, especially when you're more concerned with rhythm, phrasing or (we're amateurs, after all) notes.

And French...it's in some ways the opposite of German. The consonants are in some cases ignored, or lightly flipped over, in an unstoppable flowing stream of constantly changing vowels. When the delicate timing involved in a dipthong becomes tiresome, it can sometimes start to run together and seems like there's only one vowel in the language: "-eugh". As for the double-vowels, take the word for sleep, "sommeil", pronounced "sohm-MAY". The "may" syllable requires some attention. It's not a single vowel sound--there are at least two, and more if you really want to color it. But at a minimum, you've got "ehhh-ee", with the "ee" barely appearing at the end before you move on. English has many diphthongs like that, but French is bursting with them. Then, there are three different accents for the letter "e", and even without accents, a few different ways to pronounce it. Many wrestle that letter and lose every time they sing it.

So we had some pronunciation issues to work on today. I deeply love the German and French pieces--Nun danket alle Gott by Johann Pachelbel, and Cantique de Jean Racine by Gabriel Faure'--and they happen to be fairly easy, with no extremely fast runs, and pretty much squarely in the middle of my range. So far as I'm able, I can float through them and enjoy the ride. So this morning was a big confidence-booster for me, two hours spent on the pieces I'm most confident with, and I felt pretty studly because I could nail the pronunciation.

Now, our concert is next Saturday night, and I've still got to, ahem, get a little more familiar with Mozart's Sparrow Mass in the next six days, but I will. I'm not the best musician among the tenors, or the most highly-trained voice, but I am the loudest, so I feel a certain responsibility.

On the way home I picked up fixings for sushi tonight (we finished the first bottle of soy! Hurrah) as well as two rental DVD's: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (got to introduce Kate to young Eastwood and spaghetti Westerns--she thought I'd made the term up) and Amadeus.

I can't speak of Mozart of Beethoven as my favorite musicians when I'm hardly familiar enough with their work to discuss it at all. I've performed Mozart's requiem perhaps ten times, and several of his masses and other pieces (I sing Ave Verum to Eva many evenings), but the man wrote over 600 pieces of music, and I've sampled only a small fraction of that--30 or 40, maybe. Just a taste. The requiem does set my imagination afire like almost no other (only Beethoven's) music can.

The opening chords are so modest, grand and dreadful, and they grow with such grace and ghostly foreboding that I feel surrounded in a shroud of music already, within the first ten seconds. The thrills, dread, despair, hope and at times violent emotion within a soul anticipating death are like the facets of the jewel that is his requiem mass. Flash ahead in the post a bit--we watched Amadeus tonight--and the latter half of the film is occupied with Mozart's composition of this requiem, his last piece. He got barely halfway through it, according to tradition, dictating the Lacrimosa from his deatbhed, at 35. Purportedly his student, Franz Sussmayr, finished it (the last movement being largely a quote of the first, and the intervening five (from Lacrimosa up to Lux Aeterna, the finale) being Sussmayr's. Say history and myth what they may, the Lacrimosa is the beating, crying, screaming heart of the mass. The music feels so infinitely heavy that I can't even imagine a person creating it. It's of the sort of grandeur that simply exists, without beginning.

This requiem will be peformed not far from where we live, next Sunday, the day after the Chorale's concert. Kate's willing to go (and we'll bring Eva, of course). We could be in for a community theater-quality performance, with accurate chords and cutoffs few and far between, but I think it's worth checking out. And if it's Kate's first time listening to the piece in its entirety, or at least listening to it live, then some occasional errors will be forgivable.

(The only Beethoven piece I'm comparably familiar with is the Ninth, but that's worth an essay--er, post--of its own, so I won't degrade it with a tangent here.)

So, Beethoven and Mozart, two lordly figures whom I would have studied madly and obsessively had I chosen a life in music.

I wasn't sure I wanted to see something as heavy as Amadeus--of course, much of Mozart's life was colorful and brilliant, but it comes to a tragic end, and he was surrounded by treachery of those who wanted to squelch or control his talent--so part of me leaned toward Good, Bad and Ugly. I threw the decision over to Kate and she chose Amadeus. Sigh--this would be a much harder film to watch, but then, I'll have tonight and tomorrow to consider it, and recover.

We made our dinner (and another family movie. Osbournes, we're gaining on you!...), placed it in front of the TV, and got ready for the show. Kate pulled out the disc and looked at both sides. "Side B," she mentioned, "wide-screen edition. Side A, wide-screen...crap! Well, I guess it doesn't matter what version we have now."

I looked at the video box, and it seemed to me that one side was the movie, the other side extra features. So dropped the disc in the tray, loaded it, and we started watching. The first scene showed a long, shadowy tunnel, with a man walking past. Then, the same man walking down a street. Soon, we saw a haggard Mozart working in his salon, when a sharp rap came at the door. There stood a tall figure in a black robe, with a black two-faced mask. Mozart recoiled in terror, and the figure demanded he write a requiem, "For one who didn't receive it but deserves it," without naming the patron.

The story carried on from there, with Mozart composing the requiem and some other operas by turn, as his fortunes and health both failed. He died in the night as rival composer Antonio Salieri pushed him to keep composing the death mass, meanwhile taking it down in dictation. (In the movie, his plan was to claim authorship. He's not a nice guy, at all, in this film.)

It ended rather abruptly, we thought, since we'd had some trouble identifying whether Salieri was in fact the man in the mask (he was), and being very surprised when it was revealed that Salieri was, in later years, in an insane asylum. Besides, we'd both remembered distinctly a scene where a young Wolfgang played a harpsichord, while being held upside down. We didn't both miss the scene...was it in the Beethoven movie? Kate wondered. But I hadn't seen the Beethoven movie...

Enter Wikipedia. Salieri's life showed him to not necessarily have been so insanely jealous of Mozart, and that his scheme to murder Mozart was very likely a complete fiction. The film also vastly understates his actual inflence on the musical world, but it's true that where Mozart is a household name, Salieri is now known only to those who study music, or are familiar with Mozart.

We both grew suspicious that the film should be longer, especially when Kate saw "Running time: 180 mins." on the box, and we'd been watching for not even an hour and a half. So she flipped the disc over, hit play...and the movie began.

Teehee.

I can't honestly call it her mistake, because if I'd known any better, I'd've said something ninety minutes earlier when we started watching the movie from the middle. Still, knowing the resolution made the treachery of the film's major characters somewhat easier to digest as it happened, though it was painful to compare the later state of Mozart's house with its magnificence earlier in the movie.

Salieri is an effective narrator, a musician sensitive to Mozart's music but jealous of his own comparative incompetence. The film goes so far as to make him reject God, for God's having rejected Salieri's prayer to be an immortal of music. "To give me the desire to celebrate God in music, and then to strike me mute...why?" A bit melodramatic, but a good narrative tool. It keeps the story in human terms, from being too fawning at moments and vicious at others. When the fawning over Mozart's musical triumphs would be greatest, Salieri's envy crescendoes as a counterpoint. When Mozart descends into loutishness, the pulsing rhythm is Salieri's confusion and awe that the source of sublimity can be so impish.

But like his music, Salieri himself in the film can be forgotten. There's only Mozart's music, always charming, sometimes chilling.