Schubert | Town Topics

March 9, 2016

Salted Peanuts and Pulp Fiction With Mike Hammer and Mickey Spillane

By Stuart Mitchner

From a gang land point of view, it makes more sense to put a body in the Pine Barrens than in the Hudson River. — John McPhee

I’m beginning a column about Mickey Spillane (1918-2006) with a quote from John McPhee to note the fact that yesterday, March 8, the author of The Pine Barrens celebrated his 85th birthday. While it may be difficult to imagine two writers with less in common, I have no doubt that McPhee could sit down tomorrow, do a month of research, and produce an essay or even a book that would stand as the go-to work about pulp fiction, the mass market paperback revolution, the McCarthy Era, and the author of Kiss Me, Deadly, who once admitted he’s not sure which side of midnight 1918 he was born on (he went with March 9).

Reading McPhee, who grew up in Princeton, you are in the company of a renowned master of non-fiction prose. Reading Spillane, who grew up in Elizabeth and made his fortune writing about the world of buried bodies, you are partaking of an experience that has been compared to eating take-out fried chicken. He himself once used a beloved American snack to tease “those big-shot writers” who “could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.” Besides creating Mike Hammer, the last word in brutal, sex-crazed private eyes, Spillane sold the equivalent of 200 million packs of “salted peanuts” worldwide, and as of 1980, seven of the top 10 all-time fiction best-sellers in America were written by him. more

January 30, 2013

A Birthday Schubertiad Featuring Janowitz and Gage, Goethe’s Mignon, and Nora the Cat

By Stuart Mitchner

Wilhelm followed every movement of the dear little creature, and felt surprised to see how finely her character unfolded itself as she proceeded in the dance …. At this moment he experienced at once all the emotions he had ever felt for Mignon.

—from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

Franz Schubert (1791-1828), whose birthday is this Thursday, January 31, found musical ideas in some unlikely places, including the old coffeemill he called his “most precious possession,” grinding away while telling a friend, “Melodies and themes just come flying in …. One sometimes searches for days for an idea which the little machine finds in a second.”

Though the anecdote comes from “a not absolutely reliable source,” according to Joseph Wechsberg’s Schubert, it sounds too good, too Schubertian, not to be true, and if he could find music in a coffee grinder, what’s to keep him from finding it in a cat? I’d like to think that at some point in his life Schubert had a feline at his feet as he was composing and that whenever he felt in need of some company he could reach down and stroke it while the creature gazed up at him the way cats do, as if he and the world were one. While I’m at it, let’s make the cat the 19th-century Viennese equivalent of our Nora, a ten-year-old tuxedo female with a white patch on her brow and white paws.

Our brother and sister tuxedos were named for that effervescent couple from the Thin Man movies, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy). Although the Dickensian puddle of lovable catness we call Nick has never been remotely effervescent, his sister Nora has been a screwball comedy, a Disney cartoon, a creature feature, and a silent musical all in one. Most kittens meet the challenge of climbing and descending the stairs in their own sweet way, some more playfully and lovably than others. Nora slid down the bannister. Nor did she simply trip kittenishly up the stairs: she took them in three effortless bounds. She did not romp: she flew. And she danced. The gavottes we witnessed had to be seen to be believed. When confronted by a suspect obstacle or a toy mouse she would jump straight up, halfway to the ceiling.

Nora and Mignon

Lately I’ve been listening with special attention to the Mignon songs in Schubert Lieder (Deutsche Grammophone), with soprano Gundula Janowitz and pianist Irwin Gage, while reading selectively (the emphasis on Mignon) in Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96). The more I read, the more I recognize qualities in the gentle, loving, otherworldly Mignon that remind me of our antic Nora.

“In her whole system of proceedings,” Goethe says of Mignon, “there was something very singular. She never walked up or down the stairs, but jumped. She would spring along by the railing, and before you were aware would be sitting quietly above upon the landing.” When Wilhelm asks her how old she is, she says, “No one has counted.” When asked who was her father, she says “The Great Devil is dead.” Later on, when Wilhelm is feeling low, “she laid her head upon his knees, and remained quite still. He played with her hair, patted her, and spoke kindly to her” (he also pats her after she performs her flawless blindfolded dance among the eggs). Mignon, like our small but mighty Nora, “was frolicsome beyond all wont.” Responding to a Punch and Judy show, she “grew frantic with gayety: the company, much as they had laughed at her at first, were in fine obliged to curb her. But persuasion was of small avail; for she now sprang up, and … capered round the table. With her hair flying out behind her, with her head thrown back, and her limbs, as it were, cast into the air, she seemed like one of those antique Mænads, whose wild and all but impossible positions … often strike us with amazement.”

Like I said, two of a kind — though, to be honest, our Mignon has mellowed into middle age and is now sweet, sensible (most of the time), and companionable.

Mignon Lives On

When it comes to singing, however, the resemblance between early Nora and Goethe’s Mignon becomes decidedly less credible. A review of a lieder recital at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall in New York in last Friday’s New York Times (“Of Goethe’s Land, Romantic and Full-Throated”) shows that Mignon is alive and well through German soprano Dorothea Röschmann’s performance of Schubert’s setting of “Heiss Mich Nicht Reden/Bid Me Not Speak.” In Wilhelm Meister, Goethe indicates what that song means for Mignon: “Often for the whole day she was mute. At times she answered various questions more freely, yet always strangely: so that you could not determine whether it was caused by shrewd sense, or ignorance of the language; for she spoke in broken German interlaced with French and Italian.”

A Potent Silence

A thoroughly mute and radiantly feline Mignon is 13-year-old Nastassja Kinski in Wrong Move/Falsche Bewegung (1974), the inventively free adaptation of Wilhelm Meister directed by Wim Wenders and written by Peter Handke. Having embarked on his adventures, Wilhelm (Rudiger Volger) is seated on a train bound for Bonn when he becomes aware of a presence, the full force of which is so magnificently impending you can feel him being literally turned in his seat by the penetrating gaze of the creature across the aisle. It’s an appearance in the most enigmatic sense of the word, revealed in a sequence of gradually more intimate camera movements until her face fills the screen, magnified to a mysterious glory by cinematic chemistry and the natural beauty of Kinski in her screen debut. Ten years later she’s the missing mother in Wenders’s Paris, Texas, one of the great films of the 1980s. Given the animal intensity with which she compel’s Wilhelm’s attention on the train, it’s no surprise that the same actress ends up starring in Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982).

A Notorious Tour

The notes to Schubert Lieder, which was recorded in Berlin in 1976 and 1977, refer to how Gage encouraged Janowitz to “sing as her own nature dictated.” I chose this recording not only because it includes performances of the Mignon songs but because Irwin Gage introduced me to great music when he and I were on the same student tour of Europe long long ago. The tour earned a certain notoriety when the bipolar leader had a nervous breakdown ten days into the itinerary. Among the numerous delusions consuming the man was one right out of Wilhelm Meister; he wanted us to become a traveling company of performers called the Golden Bear (after the Berkeley-based tour company). He even wrote nonsensical songs for us to sing (“Vi are di Europins uf di Golden Bear/Ve have stars und straw dust in are hair”). By the time we got to Oslo, our guide was totally out of control and had to be taken away by the police.

As the tour was shepherded through Europe for the next two months by a relay team of leaders, Irwin accompanied me to 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, presumably part of the same festival where 18 years later he and Janowitz would present a program (“The Fortunes of Women in Schubert’s Lieder”) around the time they made this record.

Mignon’s Songs

The extraordinary rapport between singer and accompanist (they had been playing together since 1970) is worth a column in itself, but in deference to my theme I’ll stick to Mignon’s songs, “Kennst du das land/Know thou the land,” in particular. It always struck me as odd that pieces meant to be sung by a haunted 13-year-old waif should be performed by ample, well-endowed middle aged women. As if anticipating the potential incongruity, Goethe describes Mignon’s singing in Wilhelm Meister in terms suited for adult performers looking for direction: “She began every verse in a stately and solemn manner, as if she wished to draw attention towards something wonderful, as if she had something weighty to communicate. In the third line, her tones became deeper and gloomier; the words, ‘Dost know?’ were uttered with a show of mystery and eager circumspectness; in ‘’Tis there! ’tis there!’ lay an irresistible longing; and her ‘Let us go!’ she modified at each repetition, so that now it appeared to entreat and implore, now to impel and persuade.”

Composed when Schubert was 18, and performed by Janowitz and Gage in just under five brilliant minutes, the song has everything: grandeur, passion, longing, and mystery: it’s wanderlust set to music. No doubt that’s why Thomas Wolfe used the poem as an epigraph for Of Time and the River, and why Wim Wenders, whose production company is called Road Movies, gave us the train scenes and Kinski’s Mignon in his version of Wilhelm Meister. And it’s why I see a tuxedo cat named Nora sliding down the bannister every time the piano breaks free and flies at the “Let us go!” moment of maximum longing.

January 23, 2013

A New Translation of “Werther” Opens the Gate to Goethe

By Stuart Mitchner

Wilhelm, what is the world to our heart without love? What a magic lantern is without light!

—from The Sufferings

of Young Werther

Bear with me please while I imagine a contemporary publisher of serious stature but limited taste and tact communicating with a 21st century incarnation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) about the denouement of his epistolary novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton paperback $13.95), newly available in Stanley Corngold’s engaging translation. The problem is that the path to the book’s moment of maximum emotional intensity is impeded by a mind-numbingly lengthy quotation from an epic poem concocted by a wily Scotsman impersonating an ancient bard he calls Ossian.

“With all due respect, Your Excellency,” says my imaginary publisher, “you’ve got us in your pocket, it’s Werther’s last moment with his beloved Lotte, he’s doomed and she knows it, down deep she’s crazy about him but she’s a good woman, a faithful wife (more’s the pity), so what does he do when he finally has her to himself (her uptight husband out of town)? He reads six and a half pages of bardic mumbojumbo by some poor man’s Tolkien who didn’t even exist, with all his Rynos and Dauras and Eraths and Ogdals and Colmas. But (no accounting for taste) she melts, he melts, and they have their moment, finally young Mr. Werther (who has no first name, never mind why) is really making out and she’s in a rapture of repressed passion, it’s happening, — I tell you, it had my heart beating like a drum machine, she’s squeezing his hands, pressing them to her breast, their ‘glowing cheeks’ are touching, ‘The world faded from them,’ he’s covering ‘her trembling, stammering lips with furious kisses.’ The reader’s feeling the book like never before! So why not just a little Ossian up front? Like maybe just the last bit about the drops of heaven, the one that pushes them over the emotional cliff?”

Goethe’s only answer is to shrug, sip some belladonna, and dissolve in a mist. In real life, even after it became known that Ossian was James McPherson’s invention, Goethe tried to justify the passage by making it symptomatic of Werther’s love-driven decline into suicidal madness, to go from “his beloved Homer” to “a death-drunk Gaelic poet,” as Corngold puts it in his introduction. The rub is that J.M. Coetzee spends a third of his massive essay in the New York Review of Books (“Storm Over Young Goethe,” April 26, 2012) expounding on McPherson’s ancient bards and quibbling about Corngold’s use of the original even while concluding that “reproducing a monstrous slab of Ossian in so short a novel is a misstep.”

But then who’s complaining? Not readers in the late 18th century and beyond who were caught up in Werthermania. Long before Byron woke up to find himself famous at roughly the same age (24-25), Goethe was already there, his Werther, in Corngold’s words, “being bought, pirated, read, translated, and imitated throughout Europe.” The luminary of the age, Napoleon himself, is said to have carried a copy in his knapsack and upon meeting Goethe in 1808 claimed to have read it seven times.

Opening the Gate

The only other time I tried to read Werther I found it almost as hard to get into as Melville’s fantastically overwrought but ultimately magnificent Pierre (which a review in 1852 called a New York Werther). Otherwise my acquaintance with Goethe’s kingdom was limited to a reading of Faust in college and Schubert’s settings of the poetry. Corngold’s translation finally opened the gate.

Comparing the new translation with Michael Hulse’s in Penguin Classics (1989), I don’t find Corngold’s that much more “modern,” perhaps because, as Michael Wood has noted, he’s been able to suggest “the modernity of the text without in any way modernizing it.” One conspicuous instance comes in the letter where Werther is describing how he’s drawn to visit his beloved Lotte in spite of himself: Hulse has it thus, “I am too close to her magic realm — snap your fingers! and there I am.” Corngold: “I am too close to her aura — whoosh! and I’m there.” Hulse’s snapping finger seems out of synch with a “magic realm,” more like a spell breaker than Corngold’s aura and whoosh, which feels casually right in a letter to a friend and suggests something closer to the telepathic instantaneity of access to his beloved that Werther fancies.

The Turning Point

In the long August 12 letter to Wilhelm that contains what is arguably the narrative’s pivotal scene, Werther expounds on the virtues of action and passion to Lotte’s eminently rational fiance, Albert, with a command that Napoleon must have appreciated. Impatient with the qualifying phrase (“True, but”) Albert uses following his account of an accident with a loaded gun, Werther admits a fondness for him, “up until his True, but; for isn’t it self-evident that every statement admits of exceptions? But the man is so eager to justify himself! When he thinks he’s said something in haste, a generality, a half-truth, he won’t stop limiting, modifying, and adding on and taking back, until there’s nothing left of the statement.” At this point, when language falls short, Goethe has Werther foreshadow his own fate by abruptly putting one of Albert’s guns to his forehead.

Repelled by the gesture, Albert grabs the unloaded pistol, saying he can’t imagine “that a man can be so foolish as to shoot himself.” Which inspires Werther to make his case for irrational behavior with several analogies, the last of which concerns a girl who “in an hour of ecstasy, gives herself over to the irresistible joys of love” (something Lotte comes dangerously close to doing with Werther in their last encounter). Albert contends that one “swept away by passion loses all his powers of reason and is viewed as a drunkard or a madman,” but Goethe has given all the rhetorical firepower to Werther, who delivers a vivid account of a girl who drowned herself for love, imagining every stage of the fatal affair up to the point where, feeling lost and alone, “cornered by the terrible need of her heart, she plunges down to stifle all her pains in the death that envelops her all around.”

Schubert’s Formula

The August 18 letter, possibly the strongest piece of writing in the book, begins with a question that led me to pencil “Schubert” in the margin: “Does it have to be this way, that whatever it is that makes a man blissfully happy in turn becomes the source of his misery?” This comes close to the emotional formula at the heart of Schubert’s music (of all music and all art, you could say), whether he’s composing lieder from Goethe’s verses or the fourth movement of the great piano sonata in B-flat, the back-and-forth dynamic that pianists are said to translate as “I know not if I’m happy — I know not if I’m sad.”

The passage that follows moves from “the full warm feeling of my heart for living nature” — the adoration of a landscape that nourished and inspired him (“how I felt like a god among the overflowing abundance”) — to a heart “undermined by the destructive force that is concealed in the totality of nature; which has never created a thing that has not destroyed its neighbor or itself,” and then to the harrowing conclusion, “And so I stagger about in fear! heaven and earth and their interweaving forces around me. I see nothing but an eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster.” Once again Corngold’s translation improves on Hulse’s “And so I go my fearful way betwixt heaven and earth and all their active forces; and all I can see is a monster, forever devouring, regurgitating, chewing and gorging.”

The Creature Reads It

Searching for signs of Werther’s impact on English literature in the late 18th-early 19th century, I found a line in Jane Austen’s epistolary juvenalia from 1790, Love and Friendship (“We were convinced he had no soul,” having “never read” the Sorrows of Werther), and in Keats from a September 1819 letter, spinning some “nonsense verses”: “A fly is in the milk pot — must he die/Circled by a humane society?/No no there mr Werter takes his spoon/Inverts it — dips the handle and lo, soon/The little struggler sav’d from perils dark/Across the teaboard draws a long wet mark.”

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge is discoursing in 1796 on the “false and bastard sensibility” that denies evils like “the continuance of the slave trade” which “by hideous spectacle or clamorous outcry are present to their senses and disturb their selfish enjoyments,” he imagines a “fine lady” whose nerves “are not shattered by the shrieks” sipping “a beverage sweetened with human blood, even while she is weeping over the refined sorrows of Werther.” Some three decades after that passage from his self-published journal, The Watchman, Coleridge pairs Wordsworth and Goethe as “spectators ab extra, — feeling for, but never with, their characters.”

The Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein finds a copy of The Sorrows “in a leathern portmanteau,” and thinks Werther “a more divine being that I had ever beheld or imagined.” Says the monster, “Besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many opinions are canvassed, and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to me obscure subjects, that I found in it a never-ending source of speculation and astonishment …. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it.”

Aimez-vous Goethe?

In J.D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924,” five-year-old Seymour Glass confesses in his prodigious letter home from camp that while he was swimming in the lake, “It was suddenly borne in upon me, utterly beyond dispute, that I love Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but do not love the great Goethe!” Even after reading Corngold’s first-rate Werther and watching Wrong Movement (1974), Wim Wenders’s fascinating, freely adapted film of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship with Nastassja Kinski making an unforgettable screen debut at 14 as Mignon, I’m still not inclined to love the great Goethe. But I did feel some affection for the version of him played by Alexander Fehling in Young Goethe in Love (2011) and I definitely loved Miriam Stein’s Lotte. Both films are available at the Princeton Public Library.