By Stuart Mitchner
During the past year I’ve been tearing up old letters for recycling. Among the few survivors is a six-decades-old handwritten letter from pianist Irwin Gage, remembered as a “legendary American accompanist” and “one of the greatest German lieder accompanists of all time” when he died on April 12, 2018. There’s no hint of his illustrious European career on the letter’s first page, which bears the seal of a Jewish fraternity at the University of Michigan, begins with a sarcastic reference to the football team’s recent victory, and closes with a suggestion that I come up for the Indiana game (“I have a ticket and accommodations and can get you a date with any of several fabulous femmes”).
The first page also features gossip about the European tour Irwin and I took the previous summer, along with 26 other students. Not until the second page does he mention that things “are going well technically on the piano,” that he’s practicing seven hours a day, and “doing the Bach Italian Concerto and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin” in “Music School honors.” In the same paragraph, he adds that he’s “very excited” about the upcoming publication of my first novel and is already brainstorming a score for the film version (“a flute solo with a haunting theme, for the opening credits”), his way of harking back to our tour identities, he the composer, I the novelist.
Driving with Brahms
Throughout this tumultuous year, I’ve been driving toward Irwin’s September 4 birthday listening to a CD of his Lieder ohne Sanger: Songs without Singers with the car stereo on continuous replay. With this inspired performance of Brahms’s piano music, my old friend is as present as he was when playing a composition of his own for me more than half a century ago on a rainy day in England’s Lake District. Because the reports of his death say it followed “a long period of physical impairment and illness,” there’s an added emotional dimension to the flow of feeling in the car that follows me, my daily accompaniment as I drive from January through August, with daily visits to the library, market, post office, dentist and doctor, plus occasional extended listenings on drives to Hamilton, New Brunswick, and Lambertville.
The Apple Music listing for the CD suggests that Irwin is playing the songs “as piano solos,” which explains why his performance is so personal and so powerful, a tour de force of 18 songs minus the inevitable distraction of a singer, blended into a single self-contained work in which the pianist achieves a kind of compositional partnership with Brahms, “the great poet of the ambiguous, in-between, nameless emotions,” according to prize-winning critic Alex Ross, who writes, “In the world of Brahms, it is, above all, always late. Light is waning, shadows are growing, silence is encroaching.”
Beyond Grieving
I’ve been quoting from Ross’s essay, “Grieving with Brahms,” written after learning of his mother’s death. Ross finds “enormous sadness” in Brahms’s work, “a sadness that glows with understanding, that eases gloom by sharing its own. The music seems in a strange way to be listening to you, even as you listen to it….With Brahms, everything passes through layers of reflection.” Among the nameless emotions Ross names are “ambient unease, pervasive wistfulness, bemused resignation, contained rage, ironic merriment, smiling through tears, the almost pleasurable fatigue of deep depression.”
“To an Aeolean Harp”
The little German I know was picked up from Schubert’s songs, also recorded “without singers” by Irwin Gage. Compared to the lieder of Brahms, Schubert’s songs are known quantities, as with Irwin’s performance of “Im Frühling (“In Spring”),” with its ragtime coda. For me, the songs of Brahms are an unknown country, with the unfamiliar German titles actually contributing to the sense of a single uniform work. You get an idea of the 18-song range with a quick tour of the titles in English, which begin with “How I leapt up in the Night” and end with “Eternal Love,” while in between “old love” blends with a May night, then a summer night, a young girl’s song, her blue eyes, a lullaby, a message, a visit to the churchyard and the fields and the lake, and two serenades. In the first song, Irwin’s playing evokes the refrain “in the night, in the night” and the moment peering down into the “ambient unease” of the millstream that “flowed so quietly but not a single wave ever flowed back.”
The second song, “To an Aeolean Harp,” is the one that immediately impressed me and that I’ve known by title from the beginning, perhaps because the harp serves as the metaphorical opening to everything else, but mainly due to the moments in which the pianist somehow emotionally empowers single notes and chords with a force that rouses my memory of the rainy afternoon in the Lake Country when Irwin played his own work for me.
In Irwin’s Company
I tried several times to get in touch with Irwin over the years. Except for that letter from college in the aftermath of the tour, he never wrote back, most likely because having spent most of his adult life in Europe accompanying famous lieder singers, he’d come to regard the student tour as an interlude of silly, memorably embarrassing collegiate fun. All I know is that I’ll always be grateful for his company at a stirring outdoor concert of Respighi’s Pines of Rome in Venice, a performance of Turandot at the Baths of Caracalla, and a Mozart program in Salzburg.
A Twilight of Life Song
The most striking moments in the Songs Without Singers bring to mind “Intermezzo Opus 117, No. 1,” the piano piece Alex Ross found particularly moving when grieving for his mother. Writing about Brahms a little over two years ago (“Brahms at 190: Variations and Intermezzos”), I found special pleasure in “Intermezzo Opus 118, No. 2,” which impressed me as a “twilight of life song.” During a walk by the lake, I kept the thread of the melody in play, softly whistling something that never quite completely happens, that appears and returns, rises and strives and sinks and rises softly and gently again, expressing qualities like Ross’s “pervasive wistfulness” and “smiling through tears,” which I felt while watching the YouTube performance by Anna Dmytrenko, a young Ukrainian-American pianist who began her studies at the age of 7 at the Mariupol School of Music in the city razed during Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Brahms’s music also lives in my memory of a close friend who died on April 16, 2022, having told me not long before then that he “took refuge in Brahms’s intermezzos. With Brahms you are listening to the creation of beauty.”