Listen To This

ALEX ROSS

FOURTH ESTATE • London

FOR DANIEL ZALEWSKI

AND

DAVID REMNICK

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

PREFACE

PART I

1. LISTEN TO THIS: Crossing the Border from Classical to Pop

2. CHACONA, LAMENTO, WALKING BLUES: Bass Lines of Music History

3. INFERNAL MACHINES: How Recordings Changed Music

PART II

4. THE STORM OF STYLE: Mozart’s Golden Mean

5. ORBITING: Radiohead’s Grand Tour

6. THE ANTI-MAESTRO: Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Los Angeles Philharmonic

7. GREAT SOUL: Searching for Schubert

8. EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES: Björk’s Saga

9. SYMPHONY OF MILLIONS: Classical Music in China

10. SONG OF THE EARTH The Arctic Sound of John Luther Adams

11. VERDI’s GRIP: Opera as Popular Art

12. ALMOST FAMOUS: On the Road with the St. Lawrence Quartet

13. EDGES OF POP: Kiki and Herb, Cecil Taylor and Sonic Youth, Sinatra, Kurt Cobain

14. LEARNING THE SCORE: The Crisis in Music Education

15. VOICE OF THE CENTURY: Marian Anderson

16. THE MUSIC MOUNTAIN: Inside the Marlboro Retreat

PART III

17. I SAW THE LIGHT: Following Bob Dylan

18. FERVOR: Remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

19. BLESSED ARE THE SAD: Late Brahms

Notes

Suggested Listening

Index

Acknowledgments

Also by Alex Ross

Where to Listen

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

Writing about music isn’t especially difficult. Whoever coined the epigram “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—the statement has been attributed variously to Martin Mull, Steve Martin, and Elvis Costello—was muddying the waters. Certainly, music criticism is a curious and dubious science, its jargon ranging from the wooden (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with three Gs and an E-flat”) to the purple (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with fate knocking at the door”). But it is no more dubious than any other kind of criticism. Every art form fights the noose of verbal description. Writing about dance is like singing about architecture; writing about writing is like making buildings about ballet. There is a fog-enshrouded border past which language cannot go. An art critic can say of Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow that it consists of an area of yellow paint floating above an area of orange paint, but what good does that do for someone who has never seen a Rothko? The literary critic can copy out a few lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal”—

And out of what sees and hears and out

Of what one feels, who could have thought to make

So many selves, so many sensuous worlds …

—but when you try to spell out the meaning of those lines, when you try to voice their silent music, another hopeless dance begins.

So why has the idea taken hold that there is something peculiarly inexpressible about music? The explanation may lie not in music but in ourselves. Since the mid-nineteenth century, audiences have routinely adopted music as a sort of secular religion or spiritual politics, investing it with messages as urgent as they are vague. Beethoven’s symphonies promise political and personal freedom; Wagner’s operas inflame the imaginations of poets and demagogues; Stravinsky’s ballets release primal energies; the Beatles incite an uprising against ancient social mores. At any time in history there are a few composers and creative musicians who seem to hold the secrets of the age. Music cannot easily bear such burdens, and when we speak of its ineffability we are perhaps protecting it from our own inordinate demands. For even as we worship our musical idols we also force them to produce particular emotions on cue: a teenager blasts hip-hop to psych himself up; a middle-aged executive puts on a Bach CD to calm her nerves. Musicians find themselves, in a strange way, both enshrined and enslaved. In my writing on music, I try to demystify the art to some extent, dispel the hocus-pocus, while still respecting the boundless human complexity that gives it life.

Since 1996, I’ve had the huge good fortune to serve as the music critic of The New Yorker. I was twenty-eight when I got the job, too young by any measure, but I strove to make the most of my luck. From the start, my editors encouraged me to take a wide view of the musical world: not simply to cover star performers at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera but also to lurk in smaller spaces and listen for younger voices. Following my distinguished predecessors Andrew Porter and Paul Griffiths, I’ve maintained that modern composers deserve the same lavish treatment that is given to canonical masters—a conviction that led to my first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. I’ve also periodically detoured into pop and rock, although, having grown up in classical music, I feel unsure of my footing outside it. In all, I approach music not as a self-sufficient sphere but as a way of knowing the world.

Listen to This combines various New Yorker articles, several of them substantially revised, with one long piece written for the occasion. The book begins with three aerial surveys of the musical landscape, encompassing both classical and pop terrain. The first chapter, from which the title comes, began as a preface to The Rest Is Noise, although I soon realized that it had to be a freestanding essay. It is a kind of memoir turned manifesto, and when it was published it elicited an unexpectedly strong response from readers, with hundreds of letters and e-mails arriving over several months. Many of these messages came from music students and recent conservatory graduates who were struggling to reconcile the grand tradition in which they had been schooled with the pop culture in which they had come of age. The intense frustration that they and I feel in the face of the pince-nez stereotype of classical music runs throughout the book. The second chapter, “Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues,” is the new thing—a whirlwind history of music told through two or three recurring bass lines. “Infernal Machines” brings together various thoughts on the intersection of music and technology.

With a rough map in place, I follow the traces of a dozen or so musicians living and dead: composers, conductors, pianists, string quartets, rock bands, singer-songwriters, high-school band teachers. In the final section, I try in a more personal way to describe three radically different figures—Bob Dylan, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Johannes Brahms—who touch on things almost too deep for words. My last book unfolded on a big historical canvas, with political forces constantly threatening to overwhelm the solitary voice; this book is more intimate, more local, revisiting many times the abiding question of what music means to its creators and its listeners on the most elemental level. Above all, I want to know how a powerful personality can imprint itself on an inherently abstract medium—how a brief sequence of notes or chords can take on the recognizable quirks of a person close at hand.

Maybe the only trait these musically possessed men and women have in common is that they are unlike one another or anyone else. Many are exiles, wanderers, restless searchers. A shy avant-garde Finn becomes a Los Angeles celebrity. An Icelandic singer dances her way through the streets of Salvador, Brazil. A Japanese pianist interprets the German repertory in the foothills of Vermont. An elder of rock and roll meanders across the land, deconstructing his hits. A great German composer traverses an inner landscape ravaged by sadness. One way or another, they unsettle whatever genre they inhabit, making the familiar strange.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in one of its saner moments, defined music as “a specific variant of the sound made by people.” The difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being. It’s tricky work, presumptuous in the case of the living and speculative in the case of the dead. Still, I hope to give a few lingering glimpses of all those sensuous selves.

PART I

1 LISTEN TO THIS CROSSING THE BORDER FROM CLASSICAL TO POP

I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of “the music.” Some jazz aficionados also call their art “America’s classical music,” and I propose a trade: they can have “classical,” I’ll take “the music.”

For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider other names in circulation: “art” music, “serious” music, “great” music, “good” music. Yes, the music can be great and serious, but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane. Composers are artists, not etiquette columnists; they have the right to express any emotion, any state of mind. They have been betrayed by well-meaning acolytes who believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that replaces an inferior popular product. These guardians say, in effect, “The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.” They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world.

When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.” The music is described in terms of its distance from the present, its difference from the mass. No wonder that stories of its imminent demise are commonplace. Newspapers recite a familiar litany of problems: record companies are curtailing their classical divisions; orchestras are facing deficits; the music is barely taught in public schools, almost invisible in the media, ignored or mocked by Hollywood. Yet the same story was told forty, sixty, eighty years ago. Stereo Review wrote in 1969, “Fewer classical records are being sold because people are dying … Today’s dying classical market is what it is because fifteen years ago no one attempted to instill a love for classical music in the then impressionable children who have today become the market.” The conductor Alfred Wallenstein wrote in 1950, “The economic crisis confronting the American symphony orchestra is becoming increasingly acute.” The German critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt wrote in 1926, “Concerts are poorly attended and budget deficits grow from year to year.” Laments over the decline or death of the art appear as far back as the fourteenth century, when the sensuous melodies of Ars Nova were thought to signal the end of civilization. The pianist Charles Rosen has sagely observed, “The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.”

The American classical audience is assumed to be a moribund crowd of the old, the white, the rich, and the bored. Statistics provided by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that the situation is not quite so dire. Yes, the audience is older than that for any other art—the median age is forty-nine—but it is not the wealthiest. Musicals, plays, ballet, and museums all get larger slices of the $50,000-or-more income pie (as does the ESPN channel, for that matter). The parterre section at the Metropolitan Opera plays host to CEOs and socialites, but the less expensive parts of the house—as of this writing, most seats in the Family Circle go for twenty-five dollars—are well populated by schoolteachers, proofreaders, students, retirees, and others with no entry in the Social Register. If you want to see an in-your-face, Swiss-bank-account display of wealth, go look at the millionaires sitting in the skyboxes at a Billy Joel show, if security lets you. As for the graying of the audience, there is no denying the general trend, although with any luck it may begin to level off. Paradoxically, even as the audience ages, the performers keep getting younger. The musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic are, on average, a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

The music is always dying, ever-ending. It is like an ageless diva on a nonstop farewell tour, coming around for one absolutely final appearance. It is hard to name because it never really existed to begin with—not in the sense that it stemmed from a single time or place. It has no genealogy, no ethnicity: leading composers of today hail from China, Estonia, Argentina, Queens. The music is simply whatever composers create—a long string of written-down works to which various performing traditions have become attached. It encompasses the high, the low, empire, underground, dance, prayer, silence, noise. Composers are genius parasites; they feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender something new. They have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years, facing external obstacles (Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics) as well as problems of their own invention (“Why doesn’t anyone like our beautiful twelve-tone music?”). But they may be on the verge of an improbable renaissance, and the music may take a form that no one today would recognize.

The critic Greg Sandow has written that the classical community needs to speak more from the heart about what the music means. He admits that it’s easier to analyze his ardor than to express it. The music does not lend itself to the same kind of generational identification as, say, Sgt. Pepper. There may be kids out there who lost their virginity during Brahms’s D-Minor Piano Concerto, but they don’t want to tell the story and you don’t want to hear it. The music attracts the reticent fraction of the population. It is an art of grand gestures and vast dimensions that plays to mobs of the quiet and the shy.

I am a white American male who listened to nothing but classical music until the age of twenty. In retrospect, this seems bizarre; perhaps “freakish” is not too strong a word. Yet it felt natural at the time. I feel as though I grew up not during the seventies and eighties but during the thirties and forties, the decades of my parents’ youth. Neither my mother nor my father had musical training—both worked as research mineralogists—but they were devoted concertgoers and record collectors. They came of age in the great American middlebrow era, when the music had a rather different place in the culture than it does today. In those years, in what now seems like a dream world, millions listened as Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony on national radio. Walter Damrosch explained the classics to schoolchildren, singing ditties to help them remember the themes. (My mother remembers one of them: “This is / The sym-pho-nee / That Schubert wrote but never / Fi-nished …”) NBC would broadcast Ohio State vs. Indiana one afternoon, a recital by Lotte Lehmann the next. In my house, it was the Boston Symphony followed by the Washington Redskins. I was unaware of a yawning gap between the two.

Early on, I delved into my parents’ record collection, which was well stocked with artifacts of the golden age: Serge Koussevitzky’s Sibelius, Charles Munch’s Berlioz, the Thibaud-Casals-Cortot trio, the Budapest Quartet. The look and feel of the records were inseparable from the sound they made. There was Otto Klemperer’s Zeppelin-like, slow-motion account of the St. Matthew Passion, with nightmare-spawning art by the Master of Delft. Toscanini’s fierce renditions of Beethoven and Brahms were decorated with Robert Hupka’s snapshots of the Maestro in motion, his face registering every emotion between ecstasy and disgust. Mozart’s Divertimento in E-flat featured the famous portrait in which the composer looks down in sorrow, like a general surveying a hopeless battle. While listening, I read along in the liner notes, which were generally written in the over-the-top everyman-orator style that the media favored in the mid-twentieth century. Tchaikovsky, for example, was said to exhibit “melancholy, sometimes progressing to abysmal depths.” None of this made sense at the time; I had no acquaintance with melancholy, let alone abysmal depths. What mattered was the exaggerated swoop of the thought, which matched my response to the music.

The first work that I loved to the point of distraction was Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. At a garage sale my mother found a disc of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic—one of a series of Music-Appreciation Records put out by the Book-of-the-Month Club. A companion record provided Bernstein’s analysis of the symphony, a road map to its forty-five-minute sprawl. I now had names for the shapes that I perceived. (The conductor’s Joy of Music and Infinite Variety of Music remain the best introductory books of their kind.) Bernstein drew attention to something that happens about ten seconds in: the fanfarelike main theme, in the key of E-flat, is waylaid by the note C-sharp. “There has been a stab of intrusive otherness,” Bernstein said, cryptically but seductively, in his nicotine baritone. Over and over, I listened to this note of otherness. I bought a score and deciphered the notation. I learned some time-beating gestures from Max Rudolf’s conducting manual. I held my family hostage in the living room as I led the record player in a searing performance of the Eroica.

Did Lenny get a little carried away when he called that soft C-sharp in the cellos a “shock,” a “wrench,” a “stab”? If you were to play the Eroica for a fourteen-year-old hip-hop scholar versed in Eminem and 50 Cent, he might find it shockingly boring at best. No one is slicing up his wife or getting shot nine times. But your young gangsta friend will eventually have to admit that those artists are relatively shocking—relative to the social norms of their day. Although the Eroica ceased to be controversial in the these-crazy-kids-today sense around 1830, within the “classical” frame it has continued to deliver its surprises right on cue. Seven bars of E-flat major, then the C-sharp that hovers for a moment before disappearing: it is like a speaker stepping up to a microphone, launching into the first words of a solemn oration, and then faltering, as if he had just remembered something from childhood or seen a sinister face in the crowd.

I don’t identify with the listener who responds to the Eroica by saying, “Ah, civilization.” I don’t listen to music to be civilized; sometimes, I listen precisely to escape the ordered world. What I love about the Eroica is the way it manages to have it all, uniting Romanticism and Enlightenment, civilization and revolution, brain and body, order and chaos. It knows which way you think the music is going and veers triumphantly in the wrong direction. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen once wrote a monologue for the spirit of Music, in which he or she or it says, “I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it.”

Around the time I got stabbed by Beethoven’s C-sharp, I began trying to write music myself. My career as a composer lasted from the age of eight to the age of twenty. I lacked both genius and talent. My spiral-bound manuscript book includes an ambitious program of future compositions: thirty piano sonatas, twelve violin sonatas, various symphonies, concertos, fantasias, and funeral marches, most of them in the key of D minor. Scattered ideas for these works appear in the following pages, but they don’t go anywhere, which was the story of my life as a composer. Still, I treasure the observation of one of my college teachers, the composer Peter Lieber-son, who wrote on the final page of my end-of-term submission that I had created a “most interesting and slightly peculiar sonatina.” I put down my pen and withdrew into silence, like Sibelius in Järvenpää.

My inability to finish anything, much less anything good, left me with a profound respect for this impossible mode of making a living. Composers are in rebellion against reality. They manufacture a product that is universally deemed superfluous—at least until their music enters public consciousness, at which point people begin to say that they could not live without it. Half of those on the League of American Orchestras’ list of the twenty composers most frequently performed during the 2007–2008 season—Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Copland—hadn’t been born when the first draft of the repertory got written.

Throughout my teens, I took piano lessons from a man named Denning Barnes. He also taught me composition, music history, and the art of listening. He was a wiry man with tangled hair, whose tweed jackets emitted an odd smell that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just odd. He was intimate with Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin, and he also loved twentieth-century music. Béla Bartók and Alban Berg were two of his favorites. He opened another door for me, in a wall that I never knew existed. His own music, as far as I can remember, was rambunctious, jazzy, a little nuts. One day he pounded out one of the variations in Beethoven’s final piano sonata and said that it was an anticipation of boogie-woogie. I had no idea what boogie-woogie was, but I was excited by the idea that Beethoven had anticipated it. The marble-bust Beethoven of my childhood suddenly became an eagle-eyed sentinel on the ramparts of sound.

“Boogie-woogie” was a creature out of Bernstein’s serious-fun world, and Mr. Barnes was my private Bernstein. There was not a snobbish bone in his body; he was a skeleton of enthusiasm, a fifteen-dollar-an-hour guerrilla fighter for the music he loved. He died of a brain tumor in 1989. The last time I saw him, we played a hair-raising version of Schubert’s Fantasia in F Minor for piano four hands. It was full of wrong notes, most of them at my end of the keyboard, but it felt great and made a mighty noise, and to this day I have never been entirely satisfied with any other performance of the work.

By high school, a terrible truth had dawned: I was the only person my age who liked this stuff. Actually, there were other classical nerds at my school, but we were too diffident to form a posse. Several “normal” friends dragged me to a showing of Pink Floyd The Wall, after which I conceded that one passage sounded Mahlerian.

Only in college did my musical fortress finally crumble. I spent most of my time at the campus radio station, where I had a show and helped organize the classical contingent. I fanatically patrolled the boundaries of the classical broadcasting day, refusing to surrender even fifteen minutes of Chamber Music Masterworks and the like. At 10:00 p.m., the schedule switched from classical to punk, and only punk of the most recondite kind. Once a record sold more than a few hundred copies, it was kicked off the playlist. The DJs liked to start their sets with the shrillest, crudest songs in order to scandalize the classical crowd. I tried to one-up them with squalls of Xenakis. They hit back with Sinatra singing “Only the Lonely.” Once, they followed up my heartfelt tribute to Herbert von Karajan with Skrewdriver’s rousing neo-Nazi anthem “Prisoner of Peace”: “Free Rudolf Hess / How long can they keep him there? We can only guess.” Touché.

The thing about these cerebral punk rockers is that they were easily the most interesting people I’d ever met. Between painstakingly researched tributes to Mission of Burma and the Butthole Surfers, they composed undergraduate theses on fourth-century Roman fortifications and the liberal thought of Lionel Trilling. I began hanging around in the studio after my show was over, suppressing an instinctive fear of their sticker-covered leather jackets and multicolored hair. I informed them, as Mr. Barnes would have done, that the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg had prefigured all this. And I began listening to new things. The first two rock records I bought were Pere Ubu’s Terminal Tower compilation and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. I crept from underground rock to alternative rock and finally to the full-out commercial kind. Soon I was astounding my friends with pronouncements like “Highway 61 Revisited is a pretty good album,” or “The White Album is a masterpiece.” I abandoned the notion of classical superiority, which led to a crisis of faith: If the music wasn’t great and serious and high and mighty, what was it?

For a little while, living in Northern California after college, I thought of giving up on the music altogether. I sold off a lot of my CDs, including all my copies of the symphonies of Arnold Bax, in order to pay for more Pere Ubu and Sonic Youth. I cut my hair short, wore angry T-shirts, and started hanging out at the Berkeley punk club 924 Gilman Street. I became a fan of a band called Blatz, which was about as far from Bax as I could get. (Their big hit was “Fuk Shit Up.”) Fortunately, no one needed to point out to my face that I was in the wrong place. It is a peculiar American dream, this notion that music can give you a new personality, a new class, even a new race. The out-of-body experience is thrilling as long as it lasts, but most people are eventually deposited back at the point where they started, and they may begin to hate the music for lying to them.

When I went back to the classical ghetto, I chose to accept its limitations. I realized that, despite the outward decrepitude of the culture, there was still a bright flame within. It occurred to me that if I could get from Brahms to Blatz, others could go the same route in the opposite direction. I have always wanted to talk about classical music as if it were popular music and popular music as if it were classical.

For many, pop music is the soundtrack of raging adolescence, while the other kind chimes in during the long twilight of maturity. For me, it’s the reverse. Listening to the Eroica reconnects me with a kind of childlike energy, a happy ferocity about the world. Since I came late to pop, I invest it with more adult feeling. To me, it’s penetrating, knowing, full of microscopic shades of truth about the way things really are. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks anatomizes a doomed relationship with a saturnine clarity that a canonical work such as Die schöne Müllerin can’t match. (When Ian Bostridge sang Schubert’s cycle at Lincoln Center a few years ago, I had the thought that the protagonist might never have spoken to the miller girl for whose sake he drowns himself. How classical of him.) If I were in a perverse mood, I’d say that the Eroica is the raw, thuggish thing—a blast of ego and id—whereas a song like Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” is all cool adult irony. The idea that life is flowing along with unsettling smoothness, the dark C-sharpness of the world sensed but not confirmed, is a resigned sort of sentiment that Beethoven probably never even felt, much less communicated. What I refuse to accept is that one kind of music soothes the mind and another kind soothes the soul. It depends on whose mind, whose soul.

The fatal phrase came into circulation late in the game. From Machaut to Beethoven, modern music was essentially the only music, bartered about in a marketplace that resembled pop culture. Music of the past was either quickly forgotten or studied mainly in academic settings. Even in the churches there was incessant demand for new work. In 1687, in the German town of Flensburg, dismissal proceedings were initiated against a local cantor who kept recycling old pieces and neglected to play anything contemporary. When, in 1730, Johann Sebastian Bach remonstrated with the town council of Leipzig for failing to hire an adequate complement of singers and musicians, he stated that “the former style of music no longer seems to please our ears” and that expert performers were needed to “master the new kinds of music.”

Well into the nineteenth century, concerts were eclectic hootenannies in which opera arias collided with chunks of sonatas and concertos. Barrel-organ grinders carried the best-known classical melodies out into the streets, where they were blended with folk tunes. Audiences regularly made their feelings known by applauding or calling out while the music was playing. Mozart, recounting the premiere of his “Paris” Symphony in 1778, described how he milked the crowd: “Right in the middle of the First Allegro came a Passage that I knew would please, and the entire audience was sent into raptures—there was a big applaudißement;—and as I knew, when I wrote the passage, what good effect it would make, I brought it once more at the end of the movement—and sure enough there they were: the shouts of Da capo.” James Johnson, in his book Listening in Paris, evokes a night at the Paris Opéra in the same period:

While most were in their places by the end of the first act, the continuous movement and low din of conversation never really stopped. Lackeys and young bachelors milled about in the crowded and often boisterous parterre, the floor-level pit to which only men were admitted. Princes of the blood and dukes visited among themselves in the highly visible first-row boxes. Worldly abbés chatted happily with ladies in jewels on the second level, occasionally earning indecent shouts from the parterre when their conversation turned too cordial. And lovers sought the dim heights of the third balcony—the paradise—away from the probing lorgnettes.

In America, musical events were a stylistic free-for-all, a mirror of the country’s mixed-up nature. Walt Whitman mobilized opera as a metaphor for democracy; the voices of his favorite singers were integral to the swelling sound of his “barbaric yawp.”

In Europe, the past began to encroach on the present just after 1800. Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 biography of Bach, one of the first major books devoted to a dead composer, may be the founding document of the classical mentality. All the earmarks are there: the longing for lost worlds, the adulation of a single godlike entity, the horror of the present. Bach was “the first classic that ever was, or perhaps ever will be,” Forkel proclaimed. He also said, “If the art is to remain an art and not to be degraded into a mere idle amusement, more use must be made of classical works than has been done for some time.” By “idle amusement” Forkel probably had in mind the prattling of Italian opera; his biography is addressed to “patriotic admirers of true musical art,” namely the German. The notion that the music of Forkel’s time was teetering toward extinction is, of course, amusing in retrospect; in the summer of 1802, Beethoven began work on the Eroica.

Classical concerts began to take on cultlike aspects. The written score became a sacred object; improvisation was gradually phased out. Concert halls grew quiet and reserved, habits and attire formal. Patrons of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, which opened in 1876, were particularly militant in their suppression of applause. At the premiere of Parsifal, in 1882, Wagner requested that there be no curtain calls for the performers, in order to preserve the rapt atmosphere of his “sacred festival play.” The audience interpreted this instruction as a general ban on applause. Cosima Wagner, the composer’s wife, described in her diary what happened at the second performance: “After the first act there is a reverent silence, which has a pleasant effect. But when, after the second, the applauders are again hissed, it becomes embarrassing.” Two weeks later, listeners rebuked a man who yelled out “Bravo!” after the Flower Maidens scene. They did not realize that they were hissing the composer. The Wagnerians were taking Wagner more seriously than he took himself—an alarming development.

The sacralization of music, to take a term from the scholar Lawrence Levine, had its advantages. Many composers liked the fact that the public was quieting down; the subtle shock of a C-sharp wouldn’t register if noise and chatter filled the hall. They began to write with a silent, well-schooled crowd in mind. Even so, the emergence of a self-styled elite audience had limited appeal for the likes of Beethoven and Verdi. The nineteenth-century masters were, most of them, egomaniacs, but they were not snobs. Wagner, surrounded by luxury, royalty, and pretension, nonetheless railed against the idea of a “classical” repertory, for which he blamed the Jews. His nauseating anti-Semitism went hand in hand with a sometimes charming populism. In a letter to Franz Liszt, he raged against the “monumental character” of the music of his time, the “clinging firmly to the past.” Another letter demanded, “Kinder! macht Neues! Neues!, und abermals Neues!” Or, as Ezra Pound later put it, “Make it new.”

Unfortunately, the European bourgeoisie, having made a demigod of Beethoven, began losing interest in even the most vital living composers. In 1859, a critic wrote, “New works do not succeed in Leipzig. Again at the fourteenth Gewandhaus concert a composition was borne to its grave.” The music in question was Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. (Brahms knew that things were going badly when he heard no applause after the first movement.) At around the same time, organizers of a Paris series observed that their subscribers “get upset when they see the name of a single contemporary composer on the programs.” The scholar William Weber has shown how historical repertory came to dominate concerts across Europe. In 1782, in Leipzig, the proportion of music by living composers was as high as 89 percent. By 1845, it had declined to around 50 percent, and later in the nineteenth century, it hovered around 25 percent.

The fetishizing of the past had a degrading effect on composers’ morale. They started to doubt their ability to please this implacable audience, which seemed prepared to reject their wares no matter what style they wrote in. If no one cares, composers reasoned, we might as well write for one another. This was the attitude that led to the intransigent, sometimes antisocial mentality of the twentieth-century avant-garde. A critic who attended the premiere of the Eroica saw the impasse coming: “Music could quickly come to such a point, that everyone who is not precisely familiar with the rules and difficulties of the art would find absolutely no enjoyment in it.”

In America, the middle classes carried the worship of the classics to a necrophiliac extreme. Lawrence Levine, in his book Highbrow/Lowbrow, gives a devastating portrait of the country’s musical culture at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a world that abhorred virtuosity, extravagance, anything that smacked of entertainment. Orchestras dedicated themselves to “the great works of the great composers greatly performed, the best and profoundest art, these and these alone,” in the redundant words of the conductor Theodore Thomas, who more or less founded the modern American orchestra.

In some ways, Levine’s sharp critique of Gilded Age culture goes too far; while much of the audience unquestionably appropriated European music as a status symbol, many leaders of the orchestral world—among them Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony—saw their mission in altruistic terms, welcoming listeners of all classes, nationalities, and races. The cheaper seats at the big urban concert halls didn’t cost much more than tickets for the vaudeville, usually starting at twenty-five cents. All the same, paternalism stalked the scene; classical music began to define itself as a mode of spiritual uplift, of collective self-improvement, rather than as a sphere of uninhibited artistic expression.

Within a decade or two, the American symphony orchestra seemed so ossified that progressive spirits were calling for change. “America is saddled, hag-ridden, with culture,” the critic-composer Arthur Farwell wrote in 1912. “There is a conventionalism, a cynicism, a self-consciousness, in symphony concert, recital, and opera.” Daniel Gregory Mason, a maverick Columbia professor, similarly attacked the “prestige-hypnotized” plutocrats who ran the New York Philharmonic; he found more excitement at open-air concerts at Lewisohn Stadium, in Harlem, where the audience expressed itself freely. Mason delightedly quoted a notice that read, “We would respectfully request that the audience refrain from throwing mats.”

In the concert halls, a stricter etiquette took hold. Applause was rationed once again; listeners were admonished to control themselves not only during the music but between movements of a large-scale composition—even after those noisy first-movement codas that practically beg for a round of clapping and shouting. German musicians and critics concocted this rule in the first years of the twentieth century. Leopold Stokowski, when he led the Philadelphia Orchestra, was instrumental in bringing the practice to America. Mason wrote in his book: “After the Funeral March of the Eroica, someone suggested, Mr. Stokowski might at least have pressed a button to inform the audience by (noiseless) illuminated sign: ‘You may now cross the other leg.’ ”

In the 1930s, a new generation of composers, conductors, and broadcasters embraced Farwell’s idea of “music for all.” The storied middlebrow age began. David Sarnoff, the head of NBC, had a vision of Toscanini conducting for a mass public, and the public duly materialized, in the millions. Hollywood studios hired composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Aaron Copland, and Bernard Herrmann, and even pursued the modernist giants Schoenberg and Stravinsky (both of whom asked for too much money). The Roosevelt administration funded the Federal Music Project, which in two and a half years entertained ninety-five million people; there were concerts in delinquent-boys’ homes and rural Oklahoma towns. Never before had classical music reached such vast and diverse audiences. Those who consider the art form inherently elitist might ponder an irony: at a time of sustained economic crisis, when America moved more to the left than at any time in its history, when socialistic ideas threatened the national religion of free enterprise, classical music attained maximum popularity. Toscanini’s Beethoven performances symbolized a spirit of selflessness and togetherness, both during the Great Depression and in the war years that followed.

Yet many young sophisticates of the twenties and thirties didn’t look at it that way. They saw the opera and the symphony as cobwebbed fortresses of high society, and seized on popular culture as an avenue of escape. In 1925, a young socialite named Ellin Mackay, the daughter of the chairman of the board of the New York Philharmonic, caused a stir by abandoning the usual round of debutante balls for the cabaret and nightclub circuit. She justified her proclivities in a witty article titled “Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains,” which appeared in a fledgling magazine called The New Yorker; the ensuing publicity enabled that publication to get on its feet. Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera was one of the dreaded rituals from which the Jazz Age debutante felt liberated. Mackay caused an even greater scandal when she became engaged to Irving Berlin, the composer of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Her father publicly announced that he would disinherit his daughter if she went through with her plans. Ellin and Irving married anyway, and Clarence Mackay became a buffoonish figure in the popular press, the very image of the high-culture snob.

The defections were legion. Carl Van Vechten, the notorious author of Nigger Heaven, started out as a classical critic for The New York Times; he witnessed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and hailed the composer as a savior. Then his attention began to wander, and he found more life and truth in ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, blues, and jazz. Gilbert Seldes, in his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, declared that “ ‘ Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ‘I Love a Piano’ are musically and emotionally sounder pieces of work than Indian Love Lyrics and ‘The Rosary’ ”—Gilded Age parlor songs—and that “the circus can be and often is more artistic than the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.” For young African-American music mavens, the disenchantment was more bitter and more personal. In 1893, Antonín Dvořàk, the director of the National Conservatory in New York, had prophesied a great age of Negro music, and his words raised hopes that classical music would assist in the advancement of the race. The likes of James Weldon Johnson awaited the black Beethoven who would write the music of God’s trombones. Soon enough, aspiring young singers, violinists, pianists, and composers ran up against a wall of racism. Only in popular music could they make a decent living.

There had been a major change in music’s social function. In the Gilded Age, classical music had given the white middle-class aristocratic airs; in the Jazz Age, popular music helped the same class to feel down and dirty. A silly 1934 movie titled Murder at the Vanities sums up the genre wars of the era. It is set behind the scenes of a Ziegfeld-style variety show, one of whose numbers features a performer, dressed vaguely as Liszt, who plays the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Duke Ellington and his band keep popping up in the background, throwing in insolent riffs. Eventually, they drive away the effete classical musicians and play a takeoff called Ebony Rhapsody: “It’s got those licks, it’s got those tricks / That Mr. Liszt would never recognize.” Liszt comes back with a submachine gun and mows down the band. The metaphor wasn’t so far off the mark. Although many in the classical world spoke in praise of jazz—Ernest Ansermet lobbed the word “genius” at Sidney Bechet—others fired verbal machine guns in an effort to slay the upstart. Daniel Gregory Mason, the man who wanted more throwing of mats, was one of the worst offenders, calling jazz a “sick moment in the progress of the human soul.”

The contempt flowed both ways. The culture of jazz, at least in its white precincts, was much affected by that inverse snobbery which endlessly congratulates itself on escaping the elite. (The singer in Murder at the Vanities brags of finding a rhythm that Liszt, of all people, could never comprehend: what a snob.) Classical music became a foil against which popular musicians could assert their cool. Composers, in turn, were irritated by the implication that they constituted some sort of moneyed behemoth. They were the ones who were feeling bulldozed by the power of cash. Such was the complaint made by Lawrence Gilman, of The New York Tribune, after Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall. Gilman didn’t like the Rhapsody, but what really incensed him was Whiteman’s suggestion that jazz was an underdog fighting against symphony bigwigs. “It is the Palais Royalists who represent the conservative, reactionary, respectable elements in the music of today,” Gilman wrote. “They are the aristocrats, the Top Dogs, of contemporary music. They are the Shining Ones, the commanders of huge salaries, the friends of Royalty.” The facts back Gilman up. By the late twenties, Gershwin was making at least a hundred thousand dollars a year. In 1938, Copland, one of the best-regarded composers of American concert music, had $6.93 in his checking account.

Despite the ever-cresting surge of jazz and pop, classical music retained a high profile in America as the era of depression and war gave way to the Cold War and its attendant boom economy. Money was poured into the performing arts, partly in an effort to out-culture the Russians. Grants from the Ford Foundation led to a proliferation of musical ensembles, orchestras in particular; where there had been dozens of professional orchestras, now there were hundreds. Multipurpose performing-arts centers went up in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., their façades evoking sleek secular cathedrals. In the early years of the LP era, classical music made quite a bit of money for the major record labels; Decca ended up selling eighteen million copies of its pioneering studio recording of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung.

The real reckoning arrived in the 1960s, when classical music made a decisive and seemingly permanent move to the cultural margin. The advent of Dylan and the Beatles again jeopardized classical music’s claim on “high art,” and this time an entire generation seemed to come of age without identifying strongly with the classical repertory. The audience grayed, attendance declined. According to one report, the classical share of total record sales dropped from 20 percent to 5 percent in the course of the decade. The music now occupies somewhere around 2 percent of the market. In an ironic twist of fate, jazz now has about the same slice of the mass audience, leaving Duke Ellington in the same league as Mr. Liszt.

All music becomes classical music in the end. Reading the histories of other genres, I often get a funny sense of déjà vu. The story of jazz, for example, seems to recapitulate classical history at high speed. First, the youth-rebellion period: Satchmo and the Duke and Bix and Jelly Roll teach a generation to lose itself in the music. Second, the era of bourgeois pomp: the high-class swing band parallels the Romantic orchestra. Stage 3: artists rebel against the bourgeois image, echoing the classical modernist revolution, sometimes by direct citation (Charlie Parker works the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into “Salt Peanuts”). Stage 4: free jazz marks the point at which the vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant-garde. Stage 5: a period of retrenchment. Wynton Marsalis’s attempt to launch a traditionalist jazz revival parallels the neo-Romantic music of many late-twentieth-century composers. But this effort comes too late to restore the art to the popular mainstream.

The same progression worms its way through rock and roll. What were my hyper-educated punk-rock friends but Stage 3 high modernists, rebelling against the bloated Romanticism of Stage 2 stadium rock? In the first years of the new century there was a lot of Stage 5 neoclassicism going on in what remained of rock. The Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Stills, the Thrills, the White Stripes, and various other bands harked back to some lost pure moment of the sixties or seventies. Many used old instruments, old amplifiers, old soundboards. One rocker was quoted as saying, “I intentionally won’t use something I haven’t heard before.” A White Stripes record carried this Luddite notice: “No computers were used during the recording, mixing, or mastering of this record.”

The original classical music is left in an interesting limbo. It has a chance to be liberated from the social clichés that currently pin it down. It is no longer the one form carrying the burden of the past. Moreover, it has the advantage of being able to sustain constant reinterpretation, to renew itself with each repetition. The best kind of classical performance is not a retreat into the past but an intensification of the present. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.

In 2003, I bought an iPod and began filling it with music from my CD collection. The device, fairly new at the time, had a setting called Shuffle, which skipped randomly from one track to another. There was something seductive about surrendering control and letting the iPod decide what to play next. The little machine went crashing through barriers of style in ways that changed how I listened. One day it jumped from the furious crescendo of “Dance of the Earth,” ending Part I of The Rite of Spring, into the hot jam of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.” The first became a gigantic upbeat to the second. On the iPod, music is freed from all fatuous self-definitions and delusions of significance. There are no record jackets depicting bombastic Alpine scenes or celebrity conductors with a family resemblance to Rudolf Hess. Instead, as Berg once remarked to Gershwin, music is music.

A lot of younger listeners seem to think the way the iPod thinks. They are no longer so invested in a single genre, one that promises to mold their being or save the world. This gives the lifestyle disaster called “classical music” an interesting new opportunity. The playlists of smart rock fans often include a few twentieth-century classical pieces. Mavens of electronic dance music mention among their heroes Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. Likewise, younger composers are writing music heavily influenced by minimalism and its electronic spawn, even as they hold on to the European tradition. And new generations of musicians are dropping the mask of Olympian detachment (silent, stone-faced musician walks onstage and begins to play). They’ve started mothballing the tuxedo, explaining the music from the stage, using lighting and backdrops to produce a mildly theatrical happening. They are finding allies in the “popular” world, some of whom care less about sales and fees than the average star violinist. The borders between “popular” and “classical” are becoming creatively blurred, and only the Johann Forkels in each camp see a problem.

The strange thing about classical music in America today is that large numbers of people seem aware of it, curious about it, even knowledgeable about it, but they do not go to concerts. The people who try to market orchestras have a name for these annoying phantoms: they are “culturally aware non-attenders,” to quote an article in the magazine Symphony. I know the type; most of my friends are case studies. They know the principal names and periods of musical history: they have read what Nietzsche wrote about Wagner, they can pick Stravinsky out of a lineup, they own Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations and some Mahler and maybe a CD of Arvo Pärt. They follow all the other arts—they go to gallery shows, read new novels, see art films. Yet they have never paid money for a classical concert. They almost make a point of their ignorance. “I don’t know a thing about Beethoven,” they announce, which is not what they would say if the subject were Henry James or Stanley Kubrick. This is one area where even sophisticates wrap themselves in the all-American anti- intellectual flag. It’s not all their fault: centuries of classical intolerance have gone into the creation of the culturally aware non-attender. When I tell people what I do for a living, I see the same look again and again—a flinching sideways glance, as if they were about to be reprimanded for not knowing about C-sharps. After this comes the serene declaration of ignorance. The old culture war is fought and lost before I say a word.

I’m imagining myself on the other side—as a forty-something pop fan who wants to try something different. On a lark, I buy a record of Otto Klemperer conducting the Eroica, picking this one because Klemperer is the father of Colonel Klink, on Hogan’s Heroes. I hear two impressive loud chords, then what the liner notes allege is a “truly heroic” theme. It sounds kind of feeble, lopsided, waltzlike. My mind drifts. A few days later, I try again. This time, I hear some attractive adolescent grandiosity, barbaric yawps here and there. The rest is mechanical, remote. But each time I go back I map out a little more of the imaginary world. I invent stories for each thing as it happens. Big chords, hero standing backstage, a troubling thought, hero orating over loudspeakers, some ideas for songs that don’t catch on, a man or woman pleading, hero shouts back, tension, anger, conspiracies—assassination attempt? The nervous splendor of it all gets under my skin. I go to a bookstore and look at the classical shelf, which seems to have more books for Idiots and Dummies than any other section. I read Bernstein’s essay in The Infinite Variety of Music, coordinate some of the examples with the music, enjoy stories of the composer screaming about Napoleon, and go back and listen again. Sometime after the tenth listen, the music becomes my own; I know what’s around almost every corner and I exult in knowing. It’s as if I could predict the news.

I am now enough of a fan that I buy a twenty-five-dollar ticket to hear a famous orchestra play the Eroica live. It is not a very heroic experience. I feel dispirited from the moment I walk in the hall. My black jeans draw disapproving glances from men who seem to be modeling the Johnny Carson collection. I look around warily at the twenty shades of beige in which the hall is decorated. The music starts, with the imperious chords that say, “Listen to this.” Yet I somehow find it hard to think of Beethoven’s detestation of all tyranny over the human mind when the man next to me is a dead ringer for my dentist. The assassination sequence in the first movement is less exciting when the musicians have no emotion on their faces. I cough; a thin man, reading a dog-eared score, glares at me. When the movement is about a minute from ending, an ancient woman creeps slowly up the aisle, a look of enormous dissatisfaction on her face, followed at a few paces by a blank-faced husband. Finally, three smashing chords to finish, obviously intended to set off a roar of applause. I start to clap, but the man with the score glares again. One does not applaud in the midst of greatly great great music, even if the composer wants one to! Coughing, squirming, whispering, the crowd suppresses its urge to express pleasure. It’s like mass anal retention. The slow tread of the Funeral March, or Marcia funebre, as everyone insists on calling it, begins. I start to feel that my newfound respect for the music is dragging along behind the hearse.

But I stay with it. For the duration of the Marcia, I try to disregard the audience and concentrate on the music. It strikes me that what I’m hearing is an entirely natural phenomenon, the sum of the vibrations of various creaky old instruments reverberating around a boxlike hall. Each scrape of a bow translates into a strand of sound; what I see is what I hear. So when the cellos and basses make the floor tremble with their big low note in the middle of the march (what Bernstein calls the “wham!”) the impact of the moment is purely physical. Amplifiers are for sissies, I’m starting to think. The orchestra isn’t playing with the same cowed force as Klemperer’s heroes, but the tone is warmer and deeper and rounder than on the CD. I make my peace with the stiffness of the scene by thinking of it as a cool frame for a hot event. Perhaps this is how it has to be: Beethoven needs a passive audience as a foil. To my left, a sleeping dentist; to my right, a put-upon aesthete; and, in front of me, the funeral march that rises to a fugal fury, and breaks down into softly sobbing memories of themes, and then gives way to an entirely new mood—hard-driving, laughing, lurching, a bit drunk.

Two centuries ago, Beethoven bent over the manuscript of the Eroica and struck out Napoleon’s name. It is often said that he made himself the protagonist of the work instead. Indeed, he fashioned an archetype—the rebel artist hero—that modern artists are still recycling. I wonder, though, if Beethoven’s gesture meant what people think it did. Perhaps he was freeing his music from a too specific interpretation, from his own preoccupations. He was setting his symphony adrift, as a message in a bottle. He could hardly have imagined it traveling two hundred years, through the dark heart of the twentieth century and into the pulverizing electronic age. But he knew it would go far, and he did not weigh it down. There was now a torn, blank space on the title page. The symphony became a fragmentary, unfinished thing, and unfinished it remains. It becomes whole again only in the mind and soul of someone listening for the first time, and listening again. The hero is you.

2 CHACONA, LAMENTO, WALKING BLUES BASS LINES OF MUSIC HISTORY

At the outset of the seventeenth century, as the Spanish Empire reached its zenith, there was a fad for the chacona, a sexily swirling dance that hypnotized all who heard it. No one knows for certain where it came from, but scattered evidence suggests that it originated somewhere in Spain’s New World colonies. In 1598, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo, a soldier and court official who had spent a decade in Peru, included the chacona in a list of locally popular dances and airs whose names had been “given by the devil.” Because no flesh-and-blood person could resist such sounds, Oquendo wrote, the law should ignore whatever mischief they might cause.

The devil did fine work: the chacona is perfectly engineered to bewitch the senses. It is in triple time, with a stress on the second beat encouraging a sway of the hips. Players in the chacona band lay down an ostinato—a motif, bass line, or chord progression that repeats in an insistent fashion. (“Ostinato” is Italian for “obstinate.”) Other instruments add variations, the wilder the better. And singers step forward to tell bawdy tales of la vida bona, the good life. The result is a little sonic tornado that spins in circles while hurtling forward. When an early-music group reconstructs the form—the Catalan viol player Jordi Savall often improvises on the chacona with his ensemble Hespèrion XXI—centuries melt away and modern feet tap to an ancient tune.

The late Renaissance brought forth many ostinato dances of this type—the passamezzo, the bergamasca, the zarabanda, la folia—but the chacona took on a certain notoriety. Writers of the Spanish Golden Age savored its exotic, dubious reputation: Lope de Vega personified the dance as an old lady “riding in to Seville from the Indies.” Cervantes’s novella La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Scullery-Maid), published in 1613, has a scene in which a young nobleman poses as a water carrier and plays a chacona in a common tavern, to the stamping delight of the maids and mule boys. He sings:

So come in, all you nymph girls,

All you nymph boys, if you please,

The dance of the chacona

Is wider than the seas.

Chacona lyrics often emphasize the dance’s topsy-turvy nature—its knack for disrupting solemn occasions and breaking down inhibitions. Thieves use it to fool their prey. Kings get down with their subjects. When a sexton at a funeral accidentally says “Vida bona” instead of “Requiem,” all begin to bounce to the familiar beat—including, it is said, the corpse. “Un sarao de la chacona,” or “A Chaconne Soirée,” a song published by the Spanish musician Juan Arañés, presents this busy tableau:

When Almadán was married,

A wild party was arranged,

The daughters of Anao dancing

With the grandsons of Milan.

A father-in-law of Don Beltrán

And a sister-in-law of Orfeo

Started dancing the Guineo,

With the fat one at the end.

And Fame spreads it all around:

To the good life, la vida bona,

Let’s all go now to Chacona.

A surreal parade of wedding guests ensues: a blind man poking girls with a stick, an African heathen singing with a Gypsy, a doctor wearing pans around his neck. Drunks, thieves, cuckolds, brawlers, and men and women of ill repute complete the scene.

King Philip II, the austere master of the Spanish imperium, died in 1598, around the time that the chacona first surfaced in Peru. In the final months of his reign, Philip took note of certain immoral dances that were circulating in Madrid; religious authorities had warned him that the frivolity rampant in the city resembled the decadence of the Roman Empire. The debate continued after Philip’s death. In 1615, the King’s Council banned from public theaters the chacona, the zarabanda, and other dances that were deemed “lascivious, dishonest, or offensive to pious ears.” In truth, officialdom had little to fear from these naughty little numbers. They give off a frisson of rebellion, yet the established order remains intact. The errant nobles in Cervantes’s story resume their proper roles; the characters in “Un sarao de la chacona” surely return to their usual places the following day. Tellingly, Arañés dedicated his collection of songs to his employer, the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See. Courtly life had no trouble assimilating the chacona, which soon became a respectable form in what we now call classical music.

The subsequent history of the chacona cuts a cross-section through four centuries of Western culture. As the original fad subsided, composers avidly explored the hidden possibilities of the dance, ringing intricate variations on a simple idea. It passed into Italian, French, German, and English hands, assuming masks of arcane virtuosity, aristocratic elegance, minor-key cogitation, and high-toned yearning. Louis XIV, whose empire eclipsed Philip’s, danced la chaconne at the court of Versailles; in the modern era, the French term for the dance has generally prevailed. Johann Sebastian Bach, in the final movement of his Second Partita for solo violin, wrote a chaconne of almost shocking severity, rendering the form all but unrecognizable. In the Romantic age, the chaconne fell from fashion, but amid the terrors of the twentieth century composers once again picked it up, associating it with the high seriousness of Bach rather than the ebullience of the original. The chaconne has continued to evolve in music of recent decades. In 1978, György Ligeti, an avant-gardist with a long historical memory, wrote a harpsichord piece titled Hungarian Rock (Chaconne), which revived the Spanish bounce and infused it with boogie-woogie.

The circuitous career of the chaconne intersects many times with that of another ostinato figure, the basso lamento. This is a repeating bass line that descends the interval of a fourth, sometimes following the steps of the minor mode (think of the piano riff in Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack”) and sometimes inching down the chromatic scale (think of the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, or, if you prefer, Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate”):

If the chaconne is a mercurial thing, radically changing its meaning as it moves through space and time, these motifs of weeping and longing bring out profound continuities in musical history. They almost seem to possess intrinsic significance, as if they were fragments of a strand of musical DNA.

Theorists warn us that music is a non-referential art, that its affective properties depend on extra-musical associations. Indeed, with a change of variables, a rowdy chaconne can turn into a deathly lament. Nothing in the medium is fixed. “I consider music by its very nature powerless to express anything,” Stravinsky once said, warding off sentimental interpretations. Then again, when Stravinsky composed the opening lament of his ballet Orpheus, he reached for the same four-note descending figure that has represented sorrow for at least a thousand years.

FOLK LAMENT

Across the millennia, scholars have attempted to construct a grammar of musical meaning. The ancient Greeks believed that their system of scales could be linked to gradations of emotion. Indian ragas include categories of hasya (joy), karuna (sadness), raudra (anger), and shanta (peace). In Western European music, songs in a major key are thought to be happy, songs in a minor key sad. Although these distinctions turn hazy under close inspection—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in muscular C minor, defies categorization—we are, for the most part, surprisingly adept at picking up the intended message of an unfamiliar musical piece. Psychologists have found that Western listeners can properly sort Indian ragas by type, even if they know nothing of the music. Likewise, the Mafa people of Cameroon, who inhabit remote parts of the Mandara Mountains, easily performed a similar exercise with Western samples.

The music of dejection is especially hard to miss. When a person cries, he or she generally makes a noise that slides downward and then leaps to an even higher pitch to begin the slide again. Not surprisingly, something similar happens in musical laments around the world. Those stepwise falling figures suggest not only the sounds that we emit when we are in distress but also the sympathetic drooping of our faces and shoulders. In a broader sense, they imply a spiritual descent, even a voyage to the underworld. In a pioneering essay on the chromatic lament, the composer Robert Müller-Hartmann wrote, “A vision of the grave or of Hades is brought about by its decisive downward trend.” At the same time, laments help to guide us out of the labyrinth of despair. Like Aristotelean tragedy, they allow for a purgation of pity and fear: through the repetitive ritual of mourning, we tame the edges of emotion, give shape to inner chaos.

In 1917, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, a passionate collector of folk music, took his Edison cylinder to the Transylvanian village of Mânerău and recorded the bocet, or lament, of a woman pining for her absent husband: “Change me to a rainbow, Lord, / To see where my husband is.” The melody goes down four sobbing steps:

This pattern shows up all over Eastern European folk music. In a village in the Somogy region of Hungary, a woman was recorded singing a strikingly similar tune as she exclaimed, “Woe is me, what have I done against the great Lord that he has taken my beloved spouse away?” At Russian weddings, where a symbolic “killing the bride” is part of the nuptial rite, the wailing of the bride often presses down a fourth. Comparable laments have been documented in the Mangystau region of Kazakhstan and in the Karelian territories of Finland and Russia, with more distant parallels appearing among the Shipibo-Conibo people, in the upper Amazon, and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea.

If you twang those four descending notes forcefully on a guitar, you have the makings of flamenco. The motif is especially prominent in the flamenco genre known as siguiriya, which stems from older genres of Gypsy lament. On a 1922 recording, Manuel Torre sings a classic siguiriya, with the guitarist El Hijo de Salvador repeatedly plucking out the fateful figure:

Siempre por los rincones I always find you

te encuentro llorando … weeping in the corners …

Flamenco is more than lament, of course; it is also music of high passion. As Federico García Lorca wrote of the siguiriya, “It comes from the first sob and the first kiss.”

Of course, not every descending melody has lamentation on its mind. Lajos Vargyas’s treatise Folk Music of the Hungarians contains a song called “Hej, Dunaról fuj a szél,” whose slow-moving, downward-tending phrases display the markers of musical sadness. But it is actually a song of flirtation, with the singer turning a bleak situation to her advantage: “Hey, the wind’s blowing from the Danube / Lie beside me, it won’t reach you.” Likewise, certain laments lack telltale “weeping” features: the aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, begins with a decorous, upward-arching phrase in a sunny major mode.

In other words, there are no globally consistent signifiers of emotion. Music is something other than a universal language. Nonetheless, the lament topos occurs often enough in various traditions that it has become a durable point of reference. Peter Kivy, in his book Sound Sentiment, argues that musical expression falls into two categories: “contours,” melodic shapes that imitate some basic aspect of human speech or behavior; and “conventions,” gestures that listeners within a particular culture learn to associate with particular psychological states. The falling figure of lament is more contour than convention, and it is a promising thread to follow through the musical maze.

THE ART OF MELANCHOLY

Emotional archetypes came late to notated or composed music. In the late Middle Ages, a stylized array of chantlike lines worked equally for texts of lust, grief, and devotion. Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of Rupertsberg (1098–1179), exhibited one of the first strongly defined personalities in music history, yet the fervid mysticism of her output emanates more from the words than from the music. The opening vocal line of Hilde-gard’s “Laus Trinitati” (“Praise be to the Trinity, who is sound, and life”) has much the same rising and falling shape as “O cruor sanguinis” (O bloodshed that rang out on high”). Still, you can identify a few explicitly emotional effects in medieval music—“not mere signs but actual symptoms of feeling,” in the words of the scholar John Stevens. The lament contour might be among the oldest of these. In the twelfth-century liturgical drama The Play of Daniel, the prophet lets out a stepwise descending cry as he faces death in the lion’s den: “Heu, heu!”

As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, “symptoms of feeling” erupted all over the musical landscape. Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), the most celebrated practitioner of the rhythmically pointed style of Ars Nova, dilated on the pleasures and pains of love, and you can hear a marked difference between the gently rippling figures of “Tant doucement” (“So sweetly I feel myself imprisoned”) and the stark descending line of “Mors sui” (“I die, if I do not see you”). This emphasis on palpable emotion, bordering on the erotic, was probably connected to the growing assertiveness of the independent nobility and of the merchant classes. In the following century, Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher, described music as presenting “the intentions and passions of the soul as well as words … so forcibly that it immediately provokes both the singer and the audience to imitate and act out the same things.” The conception of music as a spur to individual action was an implicit challenge to medieval doctrine, and, indeed, Ficino’s revival of Greek ideas led to suspicions of heresy.

When secular strains infiltrated sacred music, a major new phase in composition began. The high musical art of the later Renaissance was polyphony, the knotty interweaving of multiple melodic strands. A cadre of composers from the Low Countries—cultivated first by the dukes of Burgundy and later by such patrons as Louis XI of France and Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence—wrote multi-movement masses of unprecedented complexity, perhaps the first purposefully awe-inducing works in the classical tradition. These composers adopted a new practice, English in origin, of letting a preexisting theme take control of a large-scale piece. At first, the melodies were taken from liturgical chant, but popular tunes later came into play. The master of the game was Johannes Ockeghem (d. 1497), who is said to have sung with a deep bass voice and who lived to a grand old age. Around 1460, Ockeghem wrote a chanson titled “Fors seulement,” whose lovelorn text begins with the lines “Save only for the expectation of death / No hope dwells in my weary heart.” Its opening notes match up with the lament contour of various folk traditions:

Ockeghem’s song became widely popular, inspiring dozens of arrangements; a version by Antoine Brumel added a text beginning with the words “Plunged into the lake of despair.” In due course, the tune served as a cantus firmus, or “fixed song,” for settings of the Mass. The Kyrie of Ockeghem’s own Missa Fors seulement begins with a terraced series of descents, the basses delving into almost Wagnerian regions. The illusion of three-dimensional space resulting from that vertical plunge is one novel sensation that Ockeghem’s music affords; another is the cascading, overlapping motion of the voices, an early demonstration of the magic of organized sound. As the Mass goes on, the song of despair is transformed into a sign of Christ’s glory.

After reaching a peak of refinement in the works of Ockeghem’s disciple Josquin Desprez, polyphony faded in importance in the later sixteenth century. Listeners demanded new, often simpler styles. The marketplace for music expanded dramatically, with the printing press fostering an international, nonspecialist public. Dance fads such as the chaconne indicated the growing vitality of the vernacular. The Church, shaken by the challenge of the Reformation and its catchy hymns of praise, saw the need to make its messages more transparent; the Council of Trent decreed that church composers should formulate their ideas more intelligibly, instead of giving “empty pleasure to the ear” through abstruse polyphonic designs.

For a host of reasons, then, emotion in music became a hot topic. The theorist Gioseffo Zarlino, in his 1558 text Le istitutioni harmoniche, instructed composers to use “cheerful harmonies and fast rhythms for cheerful subjects and sad harmonies and grave rhythms for sad subjects.” Zarlino went on: “When a composer wishes to express effects of grief and sorrow, he should (observing the rules given) use movements which proceed through the semitone, the semiditone, and similar intervals”—a reference to the sinuous chromatic scale, which had long been discouraged as musically erroneous but which in these years became a modish thing. Various scholars promoted the idea of a stile moderno, or “modern style”—music strong in feeling, alert to the nuances of texts, attentive to the movement of a singing voice.

The passions of the late Renaissance primed the scene for opera, which emerged in Italy just before 1600. In the decades leading up to that breakthrough, the great laboratory of musical invention was the madrigal—a secular polyphonic genre that allowed for much experiment in the blending of word and tone. While early madrigals tended to be straightforwardly songful, later ones were at times willfully convoluted, comparable in spirit to Mannerist painting. High-minded patrons encouraged innovation, even an avant-garde mentality; the dukes of Ferrara commissioned a repertory of musica secreta, or “secret music.” The arch-magus of musical Mannerism was Carlo Gesualdo, a nobleman-composer who put forward some of the most harmonically peculiar music of the premodern epoch. His madrigal Moro lasso—“I die, alas, in my grief”—begins with a kaleidoscopic sequence of chords pinned to a four-note chromatic slide; Dolcissima mia vita ends with a briar patch of chromatic lines around the words “I must love you or die.” The words are ironic in light of Gesualdo’s personal history: in 1590, he discovered his wife in bed with another man and had both of them slaughtered.

The madrigal fad spread to England, where Elizabethan intellectuals were raising their own banners of independence. Drowning oneself in sorrow was one way of resisting the outward hierarchy of late-Renaissance society, the beehive ideal of each human worker performing his assigned task. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which was first performed around 1601, is the obvious case in point. The grief of the Prince of Denmark shines like a grim lantern on Claudius’s rotten kingdom, exposing not only Hamlet’s private loss but the hollowness of all human affairs: “I have that within, which passeth show; / These, but the trappings and the suits of woe.” Music was a favorite site for brooding in the Danish style. The composer Thomas Morley set down some guidelines in his 1597 textbook A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke: “If [the subject] be lamentable, the note must goe in slow and heavy motions, as semibriefs, briefs, and such like … Where your dittie speaketh of descending, lowenes, depth, hell, and others such, you must make your musick descend.” This echoed Zarlino’s literal-minded directive of 1558. In Elizabethan England, an inordinate number of ditties spoke of lowness, depth, and hell, leaving the heavenly register somewhat neglected.

The supreme melancholic among English composers was the lutenist John Dowland. Like so many of his international colleagues, Dowland indulged in chromatic esoterica, but he also showed a songwriter’s flair for hummable phrases: his lute piece Lachrimae, or Tears, achieved hit status across Europe in the last years of the sixteenth century. When, in 1600, Dowland published his Second Book of Songs, he included a vocal version of Lachrimae, with words suitable for a Hamlet soliloquy:

Flow my tears, fall from your springs,

Exil’d forever let me mourn

Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,

There let me live forlorn.

The first four notes of the melody have a familiar ring: they traverse the same intervals—whole tone, whole tone, semitone—that usher in Ockeghem’s “Fors seulement.” Underscoring the personal significance of the theme, Dowland made it the leitmotif of his 1604 cycle of pieces for viol consort, also titled Lachrimae.

In Dowland’s instrumental masterpiece, no reason for the flow of tears is given, no biblical or literary motive. Music becomes self-sufficient, taking its own expressive power as its subject. Lachrimae could have been cited as an illustration in Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, which meditates on music’s capacity to conquer all human defenses: “Speaking without a mouth, it exercises domination over the soul, and carries it beyond itself, helps, elevates, extends it.” Music might inject melancholy into an otherwise happy temperament, Burton concedes, but it is a “pleasing melancholy.” That phrase encapsulates Dowland’s aesthetic. His forlorn songs have about them an air of luxury, as if sadness were a place of refuge far from the hurly-burly, a twilight realm where time stops for a while. The Lachrimae tune becomes, in a way, the anthem of the eternally lonely man. Indeed, as the musicologist Peter Holman points out, Dowland anticipated Burton’s thought in the preface to his collection: “No doubt pleasant are the tears which Musicke weepes.”

It has long been understood that music has the ability to stir feelings for which we do not have a name. The neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, in his book Music, Language, and the Brain, lays out myriad relationships between music and speech, and yet he allows that “musical sounds can evoke emotions that speech sounds cannot.” The dream of a private kingdom beyond the grasp of ordinary language seems to have been crucial for the process of self-fashioning that so preoccupied Renaissance intellectuals: through music, one could make an autonomous, unknowable self that stood apart from the order of things. In a wider sense, Dowland forecast the untrammeled emotionalism of the Romantic era, and even the moodier dropout anthems of the 1960s, the likes of “Nowhere Man” and “Desolation Row.” As Oscar Wilde wrote of Hamlet, “The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.”

OPERA

In 1589, Ferdinando de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, married Christine of Lorraine. The duke had acquired his title two years earlier, after the sudden demise of his older brother, Francesco. Modern analysis has confirmed what rumor long held: Francesco died of arsenic poisoning. Against this suitably sinister backdrop the art of opera arose. For decades, Medici festivities had offered dramatic musical interludes within a larger theatrical presentation. These intermedi, as they were called, grew ever more extravagant as the century went on, serving, in the words of the poet Giovanni Battista Strozzi the Younger, to “stun the beholder with their grandeur.” The play accompanied the music rather than the other way around. The writers and composers of Florence eventually decided to let the music run continuously. It was a new kind of sung drama, modeled on the theater of ancient Greece.

The first true opera was apparently Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, presented in Florence in 1598, with a text by Ottavio Rinuccini. Two years later, for another Medici wedding, Peri set Rinuccini’s Euridice, telling of the unhappy adventures of the poet and musician Orpheus. In a preface to the score, Peri announced the ascendancy of “a new manner of song,” through which grief and joy would speak forth with unusual immediacy. Peri’s chief rival, the singer-composer Giulio Caccini, wrote an opera on the same Euridice libretto not long after, and managed to get his version into print first. Claudio Monteverdi, an ambitious younger composer from Cremona, trumped them both with his five-act opera Orfeo, which had its premiere in 1607, at the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua, and which still holds the stage more than four centuries later.

Without the lament, opera might never have caught fire. The story of Orpheus is little more than a string of lamentations: the bard bewails the loss of Euridice, goes down into the underworld to rescue her (his plaint wins Hades over), and then, with one ill-timed backward glance, loses her again. Both Euridice operas, despite their tacked-on happy endings, perform familiar gestures of musical weeping. Peri briefly applies the falling four-note figure to Orpheus’s words “Chi mi t’ha tolto, ohime” (“Who has torn you from me, alas”). There’s a noteworthy expansion of the motif in Caccini’s treatment of the same text. After Orpheus finishes his lament, a nymph and various other voices echo him, bemoaning “Cruel death.” Caccini’s version is slower and grander than Peri’s, making more deliberate use of repetition. Seven times the chorus sings the formula “Sospirate, aure celesti, / lagrimate, o selve, o campi” (“Sigh, heavenly breezes / Weep, o forests, o fields”), with four-note laments threaded through the voices. The spaciousness of the sequence seems essentially operatic.

The next step was to back away from aristocratic refinement and incorporate elements of popular song and dance. Spain served as a primary source. Back in 1553, the viol player Diego Ortiz published a set of improvisations over a repeating bass line—a basso ostinato, or ground bass. The art of improvising on an ostinato went back centuries, although it had gone largely undocumented in notated music. When composers finally took hold of it, the effect was exhilarating, as if someone had switched on a rhythmic engine. Renaissance harmony in all its fullness was wedded to the dance. As Richard Taruskin observes, in his Oxford History of Western Music, this mammoth event—the birth of modern tonal language—was a revolution from below. A “great submerged iceberg” of unrecorded traditions, in Taruskin’s phrase, came into view, not least because publishers realized there was money in it.

The chaconne was one such bass-driven dance. The first major composer to impose his personality on the form was the magisterial Italian organist Girolamo Frescobaldi, another beneficiary of the largesse of the dukes of Ferrara. In 1627, Frescobaldi published Partite sopra ciaccona, or Variations on the Chaconne, in which the popular formula is sent through the compositional wringer: the bass line breaks away from its mold, the rhythmic pulse speeds up and slows down, and the harmony darkens several times from major to minor, with a spooky dissonance piercing the texture just before the end. Frescobaldi also wrote Partite on a related ostinato dance, the passacaglia, holding to the minor mode until the very end. (Chaconnes were generally in major keys and passacaglias in minor ones, although composers enjoyed subverting the rule.) A decade later, Frescobaldi upped the ante with his Cento partite, a dazzling sequence of one hundred variations that includes both passacaglias and chaconnes. In the words of the scholar Alexander Silbiger, Cento partite is “a narrative of the flow and unpredictability of human experience.” It deserves comparison with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and other consummate displays of compositional virtuosity.

Monteverdi, the reigning Italian master, appropriated the chaconne at around the same time. Although he held the lofty title of maestro di cappella, or director of music, at the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, he never lost his ear for the music of the streets. A rocketing chaconne propels the 1632 duet Zefiro torna, on a Rinuccini text:

Zephyr returns and blesses the air

with his soft perfume, draws bare feet to the shore,

and, murmuring among the green branches,

makes the flowers dance in the meadows to his pretty tune.

The buoyant rhythm neatly captures Rinuccini’s springtime imagery. The voices imitate one another and tease against the beat, like dancers weaving around a maypole. In the final lines, the sonnet takes a surprising turn: the protagonist of the poem reveals himself to be a disconsolate loner, singing and weeping over the absence of two fair eyes. And the bouncing beat gives way to a heaving lament. As in Lorca’s flamenco, sobs and kisses, pleasure and anguish, coincide.

Zefiro torna was a certifiable hit of the 1630s, grabbing the attention of many rival composers. Monteverdi deployed ostinato basses in several other pieces, most memorably in Lamento della ninfa, or Lament of the Nymph, which he published in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, of 1638. In an introduction to the volume, Monteverdi declared that he wished to give a complete musical picture of what he called the three passions—“anger, temperance, and humility or supplication.” Anger, he said, had never been properly depicted in music before, and he proudly underlined the groundbreaking achievement of his “madrigals of war.” But the Lamento is no less inventive in the way it goes about illustrating the third passion, that of the humbled soul. A solo female voice, representing a distraught nymph, sings a plaint—

Let my love return to me

as he was before

or take me then and kill me

so I rack myself no more.

—while three male voices paraphrase her woe (“unhappy one, ah, no more, she cannot suffer so much ice”). The bass line follows the classic lamenting shape. The notes A-G-F-E are heard thirty-four times in succession, never yielding.

The ostinato in Zefiro torna exudes a giddy, carefree air. The one in Lamento della ninfa is different. First, obsessive repetition focuses and magnifies the melancholy affect of the stepwise descent. Indeed, as the musicologist Ellen Rosand maintains, this work made the association almost official; the falling motif became an “emblem of lament,” one that composers employed consciously, with reference to Monteverdi’s model. Second, the ostinato has a symbolic function, carrying a tinge of psychological compulsion. The voice keeps tugging against the bass line, pushing upward, stretching its phrases beyond the two-bar unit, giving rise to dissonant clashes, breaking down into chromatic steps. The implacability of the bass suggests that these attempts at escape are in vain. Instead, the piece ends in a mood of shattered acquiescence, as the voice subsides to the note from which it began. Even so, there is no denying the seduction of repetition, the psychic pull of the circling motion. The ceremony of lament interrupts the ordinary passage of time, and therefore, paradoxically, holds mortality at bay.

In the early seventeenth century, opera spread across Italy, becoming more of a commercial entertainment in the process. In 1637, one year before Monteverdi published Lamento della ninfa, a touring troupe brought opera to the republic of Venice. The season took place during Carnival, the time of dissolution and self-reinvention. Opera was reborn as a many-layered, stylistically ravenous form, combining lyric tragedy with lewd comedy—the musical counterpart of the high-low drama of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Mythological subjects took on a modern edge; castrato singers flamboyantly restyled classical heroes; star divas enacted scenes of madness and lament; and a diverse public showed lusty approval. For the remainder of the century, up to five theaters were operating in Venice at one time, drawing an audience that included not only the upper crust but also courtesans, tourists, well-born students, and a smattering of ordinary people. In Ellen Rosand’s words, “opera as we know it assumed its definitive identity.”

Monteverdi was nearly seventy when opera came to Venice, but the phenomenon allowed him to experience a second youth. His two surviving late operas, The Return of Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea, revel in extreme emotions, oscillating between suicidal angst and orgiastic joy. The two extant scores of Poppea—a drama of lust and greed in the high Roman Empire—both end with a disarmingly blissful duet between Nero and his lover Poppea, “Pur ti miro” (“I gaze upon you”), over a caressing major-key ground bass. Although scholars now believe that this duet was added by another composer, it communicates the heady allure of opera in its early days.

When Monteverdi died, in 1643, Francesco Cavalli, a gifted protégé, took his place. No less than his mentor had, Cavalli shaped the opera genre as we know it today, perfecting the transition from speechlike recitative to fully lyrical arioso singing. He had a particular gift for arias of lament, embedding them in velvety harmonic progressions. An early example appears in the 1640 opera Gli amori d’Apollo edi Dafne, which tells of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree. Toward the end, the god Apollo realizes that his beloved nymph has slipped from his grasp, and he declares himself miserable. Cavalli promptly unfurls the A-G-F-E bass line from Lamento della ninfa, making it the motor of a truncated arioso passage that bears the title Lamento:

As in Monteverdi, the repetition in the bass mimics the obsessive, circular thinking of the unhappy lover—the painful recollection of happy moments, the sick-hearted imagining of alternate outcomes. It follows the psychological rhythm of depression: the spirit sinking step by step, straining to recover, then sinking again.

The Venetian public evidently enjoyed Apollo’s monologue of misery, for Didone, Cavalli’s opera for the following season, features laments galore. In the first act, survivors of the fall of Troy—Hecuba, King Priam’s widow; her daughters Cassandra and Creusa; and the hero Aeneas, Creusa’s husband—bewail the end of their world even as more mayhem descends on them. Cassandra has hardly finished mourning for her beloved Coroebus when Creusa is abruptly slain. Hecuba enters, seeking to voice a feeling “beyond the tears,” and she finds release in an incantation that seems to portray not only the recent fall of Troy but also the future demise of Greece:

Porticos, temples are

Shaking and trembling,

Burning and tumbling.

Purple and empire,

Turn into dust,

Make clothes of ashes!

At this point Cavalli had a stroke of genius, one that reverberated through the centuries. He prolonged Monteverdi’s ostinato bass, so that it moved down by chromatic steps (G–F-sharp–F-natural–E–E-flat–D). There’s something claustrophobic about those close-set intervals: they give the feeling of a dismal shuffle, the gait of a lost soul.

The laments of Didone come mainly from the throats of women: Cassandra and Hecuba in the first act, Dido at the end. Almost from the start, male opera composers depended on the figure of the abandoned, vengeful, and/or maddened female. The musicologist Susan McClary, in her pioneering study Feminine Endings, identifies Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa as a harbinger of operatic mad scenes, describing the piece as “a display designed by men, chiefly for the consumption of other men.” McClary compares the music to a grille on an old asylum window through which passersby could watch mad people. Other scholars, though, have detected a certain defiant self-assertion in the female portraits set forth by Cavalli and other early operatic composers. Wendy Heller, in a discussion of Didone, describes the title character as a tragically constrained woman, but celebrates Hecuba as an intriguingly dangerous force of nature, her music charged with “a sense of the supernatural and the other-worldliness of [her] strength.”

The singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (1619–77), one of the few publicly recognized female composers of the Baroque period, reversed the standard equation in her cantata L’Eraclito amoroso (“The Amorous Heraclitus”). The text for this piece shows the Greek philosopher Heraclitus in a perpetual fit of despondency:

My only pleasure is in weeping,

I feed on tears alone.

Dolor is my delight,

And my joy is sighing.

Strozzi presumably sang the cantata herself, impersonating a male in extremis. An ornate vocal line unfolds over a steady iteration of the Lamento della ninfa bass. It is an ambiguous, even androgynous scene, with gender identity melting away into a purely musical space of lamentation. For Strozzi, as for Dowland, melancholy may have been a site of self-creation, even giving hints of future freedom.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH CHACONNES

The chaconne had its apotheosis at Versailles. The music master at the court of Louis XIV was Jean-Baptiste Lully, who, like the chaconne itself, came from lowly circumstances; the son of a Florentine miller, he started out laboring as a servant and tutor to a princess who was a cousin of the king. When Lully exhibited performing talent, Louis hired him as a dancer, and shortly after set him to work composing. Lully created a series of grand ballets that he and Louis danced side by side; in later years, he became the chief opera composer of the kingdom, his clout confirmed by his friendship with the sovereign and his scandalous homosexual affairs largely excused. Productions at Versailles were so staggeringly lavish that many in the audience came principally to see the theatrical machinery. Plots were taken from mythology and chivalric tales, with unhappy endings modified to meet the harmonious ideals of the Sun King’s world.

Lully’s theater works routinely culminate in a majestic chaconne or passacaille. The flowing motion of these dances symbolizes the reconciliation of warring elements and the restoration of happiness. At the same time, an exotic association remains; a scholarly study by Rose Pruiksma notes that Lully’s chaconnes and passacailles are linked to Italian, Spanish, North African, even Chinese characters and locales. In Cadmus, a chaconne is performed by “thirteen Africans dancing and playing the guitar.” In Armide, a four-note passacaglia bass stands for the sorcery of the title character. And in the Ballet d’Alcidiane, from 1658, the union of the island princess and the hero Polexandre prompts a Chaconne des Maures, or Chaconne of the Moors. Louis himself performed as one of eight Moorish dancers, donning a black mask. The verses for the scene invoke the irresistible attraction of the darker-skinned males:

One dreads the arms of these lovely shadowed ones

And everything gives way to their charms,

Blondes, I say farewell to you.

As Pruiksma explains, the sight of world cultures happily intermingling provided a mythological justification for Louis XIV’s marriage into the Spanish Habsburg family in 1660. Given the Hispanic origins of the chaconne, the music fit the occasion.

In these same years, the chaconne underwent its epic mutation, taking on a markedly more serious visage. Other dances of the day evolved in much the same way: the racy zarabanda became the stately sarabande, a medium of sober reflection for the likes of J. S. Bach and George Frideric Handel. Composers seemed to compete among themselves to see who could most effectively distort and deconstruct the popular music of the seventeenth century. They must have done so in a spirit of intellectual play, demonstrating how the most familiar stuff could be creatively transformed; such is the implicit attitude of Frescobaldi’s Partite sopra ciaccona and Cento partite. Louis Couperin, a keyboard composer of questing intellect, carried on the game by writing chaconnes that, in the words of Wilfrid Mellers, “proceed with relentless power, and are usually dark in color and dissonant in texture.” The same dusky aura hangs over a Chaconne raportée by the august viol player Sainte-Colombe, which, in a fusion of the chaconne and lamento traditions, begins with a lugubrious chromatic line.

English chaconnes, too, assumed both light and dark shades. The restoration of the English monarchy in the wake of Oliver Cromwell’s republican experiment called for musical spectaculars in the Lully vein, replete with sumptuous dances of enchantment and reconciliation. Several exquisite specimens came from the pen of Henry Purcell, the leading English composer of the late-seventeenth century. In his semiopera King Arthur, nymphs and sylvans in the employ of an evil magician attempt to lure the hero king with a gigantic passacaglia on a Lamento della ninfa bass. Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, a very free adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, culminates in a decorous, Lullyesque chaconne titled “Dance for Chinese Man and Woman.” (The play ends in a not very Shakespearean Chinese Garden.) In works of more intimate character, Purcell often reverted to the lachrymose manner of Dowland and other Elizabethan masters. The lamenting chromatic fourth worms its way through the anthem “Plung’d in the confines of despair” and the sacred song “O I’m sick of life.”

In 1689 or shortly before, Purcell produced the most celebrated ground-bass lament in history: “When I am laid in earth,” Dido’s aria at the end of the short opera Dido and Aeneas. Could Purcell have known Cavalli’s Didone? Probably not, but he did make unforgettable use of the same chromatic-ostinato device that Cavalli implanted in Hecuba’s song. Purcell takes care first to introduce the bass line on its own, so there is no mistaking its expressive role. This is from an eighteenth-century copy:

The notes are like a chilly staircase stretching out before one’s feet. In the fourth full bar there’s a slight rhythmic unevenness, a subtle emphasis on the second beat (one-two-three). You can hear the piece almost as an immensely slow, immensely solemn chaconne. Nine times the ground unwinds, in five-bar segments. Over it, Dido sings her valediction, a blanket of strings draped over her:

When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create

No trouble in thy breast,

Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

The vocal line begins on G, works its way upward, and retreats, with pointed repetitions of the phrases “no trouble” and “remember me.” Dido’s long lines spill over the structure of the ground, so that she finds herself arching toward a climactic note just as the bass returns to the point of departure. First she reaches a D, then an E-flat. With the final “remember me” she attains the next higher G, the “me” falling on the second beat. When the song is done, there is a debilitating chromatic slide, undoing, step by step, the effort of the ascent. The ostinato of fate seems triumphant. Yet Dido’s high, brief cry is the sound we remember—a Morse-code signal from oblivion.

CIACCONA IN D MINOR

Bach’s Ciaccona for unaccompanied violin, a quarter-hour-long soliloquy of lacerating beauty, stands at such a distance from the hijinks of the Spanish chacona that the title seems almost ironic. With its white-knuckle virtuosity, its unyielding variation structure, and its tragic D-minor cast, this is a piece from which la vida bona appears to have been banished utterly. Yet the ghost of the dance hovers in the background. The image of Bach as a bewigged, sour-faced lawgiver of tradition has caused both performers and listeners to neglect the physical dimension of his work. To hear the Ciaccona played on the guitar—there are richly resonant recordings by Andrés Segovia and Julian Bream—is to realize that bodily pleasure has its place even in the blackest corners of Bach’s world.

Bach made his name as an organist, joining a starry lineage of northern European organ players that went back to the Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621). Sweelinck, in turn, drew on the tortuous chromatic techniques of late-Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. In his Fantasia chromatica, Sweelinck subjects a descending chromatic figure and two companion themes to various contrapuntal manipulations, forming a spidery mass of intersecting lines. The finger-twisting brilliance of the writing is held in check by a taut tripartite scheme: in the first third, the theme proceeds at a regular tempo; in the second, it is slowed down; in the third, it goes faster and faster still. Such music marks the beginning of the Bachian art of the fugue.

The organists of the German Baroque, who included Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel, embraced the practice of “strict ostinato,” in which a short motif repeats in the bass while upper voices move about more freely. (The inescapable Pachelbel Canon is an ostinato exercise in a lulling major key.) The interplay between independent treble and locked-in bass acquires additional drama when the bass lines are bellowed out on the organ’s pedal notes—sixteen- and even thirty-two-foot pipes activated by the feet. Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor, a looser kind of ostinato piece, begins with the bass alone, in a pattern that winds upward from the initial C before spiraling down an octave and a half to a bottom C that should be heard less as a note than as a minor earthquake. Bach was especially attracted to bass lines that crawled along chromatic steps. One of these shows up in the third movement of the playful little suite Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, one of Bach’s earliest extant works. In the 1714 cantata “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen,” a corkscrew chromatic bass portrays the “weeping, wailing, fretting, and quaking” of Christ’s followers.

When, in 1723, Bach took up the position of cantor at St. Thomas School in Leipzig, he pledged that his music would be “of such a nature as not to make an operatic impression, but rather incite the listeners to devotion.” In employing Italian opera devices such as the lamento bass, he might have been trying to sublimate them, taming a dangerously sultry form. A man of religious convictions, Bach wrote in the margins of his favorite Bible commentary that music was “ordered by God’s spirit through David” and that devotional music showed the “presence of grace.” At the same time, though, his arioso melodies had the potential to undermine the austerity of the Lutheran service; even if he never wrote an opera, he displayed operatic tendencies. He presumably understood these contradictions, and possibly relished them. His comment about the “presence of grace” pertained to a faintly occult description of music-making at the Temple, in the second book of Chronicles: “It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and the singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord … The house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord.”

The Ciaccona for solo violin, which Bach composed in 1720 as part of his cycle of Sonatas and Partitas, possesses something like that ominous, cloudlike presence. It takes the form of sixty-four variations on a four-bar theme in D minor, with each four-bar segment generally repeated before the next variation begins. But the melodic strands of the opening bars—both treble and bass—disappear for long stretches as Bach explores new material. The “theme” is really a set of chords, framing limitless flux. (The copy reproduced on the previous page was probably made not long after Bach’s death.) Lament figures crop up throughout, sometimes plainly presented and sometimes hidden in the seams. A D-major middle section functions as a respite from the prevailing gloom of the piece, yet the apparition of a descending chromatic line high in the treble hints that these brighter days won’t last. Soon after, D minor returns, with a four-note lament motif planted firmly in the bass—the shade of “Fors seulement,” Lachrimae, and Lamento della ninfa.

It would appear that Bach has gone beyond rituals of mourning to a solitary, existential agony. In the words of Susan McClary, “the lone violinist must both furnish the redundant ostinato and also fight tooth and nail against it.” For McClary, the chaconne has become a formal prison for the struggling self. But Bach hasn’t entirely forgotten the sway of the dance. Alexander Silbiger, in a revealing essay, draws attention to passages of “repeated strumming,” “rustling arpeggiations,” “sudden foot-stamping.” Often Bach tests the limits of his variation scheme and lands back in D minor with a precarious lunge: “Some of these ventures bring to mind a trapeze artist, who swings further and further, reaching safety only at the last instant and leaving his spectators gasping.” The violin’s more florid gestures also make Silbiger think of jazz artists and sitar players, who “create the illusion of taking momentary flight from the solid ground that supports their improvisations, to the occasional bewilderment of their fellow performers.” In the end, the Ciaccona might be a grave dance before the Lord, the ballet of the soul in the course of a life.

In 1748 and 1749, the last full years of his earthly existence, Bach assembled his Mass in B Minor, rearranging extant works and writing new material in a quest for a comprehensive union of Catholic and Lutheran traditions. At the heart of the Mass is the section of the Credo that deals with the death of Jesus Christ on the cross:

Crucifixus etiam pro nobis He was also crucified for us

sub Pontio Pilato, passus under Pontius Pilate, suffered,

et sepultus est. and was buried.

To find music for this text, Bach went back thirty-five years in his output, to the “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” chorus, with its twelve somber soundings of a chromatic bass. But he stepped up the pulsation of the ground, so that instead of three half notes per bar we hear a faster, tenser rhythm of six quarter notes per bar. He changed the instrumentation, adding breathy flutes to tearful strings. He inserted a brief instrumental prelude, so that, as in Purcell, we first hear the bass line without the voices. Bach thus expanded the structure from twelve to thirteen parts. Whether he intended any symbolism in the number thirteen is unknown, although most of his listeners would have been aware that the Last Supper had thirteen guests. This is in Bach’s own hand:

As in Didone and Dido and Aeneas, the chromatic pattern evokes an individual pinned down by fate. This time, the struggler is not a woman but a man, one who knows full well what fate has in store. Bach makes Jesus Christ seem pitiably human at the moment of his ultimate suffering, so that believers may confront more directly their own grief and guilt. (Martin Luther vilified the Jews, but he also preached that Christians should hold none but themselves responsible for Christ’s killing.) It is a quasi-operatic scene, although it is witnessed at a properly awed distance. The voices wend away from the bass, moving in various directions. There are slowly pulsing chords of strings on the first and third beats, flutes on the second and third: they suggest something dripping, perhaps blood from Christ’s wounds, or tears from the eyes of his followers. In the thirteenth iteration, the bass singers give up their contrary motion and join the trudge of the continuo section. The sopranos, too, follow a chromatic path. The upper instruments fall silent, as if the dripping has stopped and life is spent. Fate’s victory seems complete. But then the bass suddenly reverses direction, and there is a momentous swerve from E minor into the key of G major. On the next page, the Resurrection begins.

ROMANTIC VARIATIONS

Bach died in 1750, and the Baroque era more or less died with him. Forms of rigid repetition lost their appeal as the Baroque gave way to the Classical period and then to the Romantic: increasingly, composers valued constant variation, sudden contrast, unrelenting escalation. Music became linear rather than circular, with large-scale structures proceeding from assertive thematic ideas through episodes of strenuous development to climaxes of overwhelming magnitude. “Time’s cycle had been straightened into an arrow, and the arrow was traveling ever faster,” the scholar Karol Berger writes. Music would no longer react to an exterior order; instead, it would become a kind of aesthetic empire unto itself. In 1810, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in which he differentiated the Romantic ethos from the more restrained spirit of prior centuries: “Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of Orcus. Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.”

For composers of Mozart’s time and after, the chaconne, the passacaglia, and the lamento aria would have been antique devices learned from manuals of counterpoint and the like. Yet they never disappeared entirely. Beethoven studied Bach in his youth, and at some point he came across the B-Minor Mass, or a description of it; in 1810 he asked his publisher to send him “a Mass by J. S. Bach that has the following Crucifixus with a basso ostinato as obstinate as you are”—and he wrote out the “Crucifixus” bass line. Beethoven was undoubtedly thinking of Bach when, in his Thirty-two Variations in C Minor of 1806, he elaborated doggedly on the downward chromatic fourth. Eighteen years later, a “Crucifixus” figure cropped up in the stormy D-minor opening movement of the Ninth Symphony. Thirty-five bars before the end, the strings and bassoons churn out a basso lamento that has the rhythm of a dirge: you can almost hear the feet of pallbearers dragging alongside a hero’s casket.

Yet the ostinato is a nightmare from which Beethoven wishes to wake. The finale of the Ninth rejects the mechanics of fateful repetition: in the frenzied, dissonant music that opens the finale, the chromatic descent momentarily resurfaces, and when it is heard again at the beginning of the vocal section of the movement the bass soloist intones, “O friends, not these tones!” At which point the Ode to Joy begins. Beethoven might have been echoing the central shift of the B-Minor Mass—the leap from the chromatic “Crucifixus” to the blazing “Et resurrexit.”

The lamento bass would not stay buried. It rumbles in much music of the later nineteenth century: in various works of Brahms, in the late piano music of Liszt, in the songs and symphonies of Mahler. It is a dominating presence in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, which ends with a slow movement marked Adagio lamentoso. Even in the first bars of the first movement, double basses creep down step by chromatic step while a single bassoon presses fitfully upward. (The scenario is much like the contrary motion of the upper and lower voices in Dido’s Lament.) The final Adagio begins with a desperately eloquent theme that contains within it the time-worn contour of folkish lament. In the coda, Tchaikovsky combines the modal and chromatic forms of the lamento pattern, creating a hybrid emblem of grief, somewhat in the manner of Bach’s chaconne. The passage plays out over a softly pulsing bass note that recalls the eternal basses of Bach’s Passions.

The affect of the Adagio lamentoso could hardly be clearer. Tchaikovsky seems to have reverted to the mimetic code of Renaissance writers such as Ficino: as the music droops, so droops the heart, until death removes all pain. Indeed, the tone of lament is so fearsomely strong that many listeners have taken it to be a direct transcription of Tchaikovsky’s own feelings. The work had its premiere nine days before the composer’s sudden death, of cholera, in 1893, and almost immediately people began to speculate that it was a conscious farewell. Wild rumors circulated: according to one tale, Tchaikovsky had committed suicide at the behest of former schoolmates who were scandalized by his homosexuality. That last story is a fascinating case of musically induced hallucination, for the biographer Alexander Poznansky has established that no such plot could have existed and that Tchaikovsky was actually in good spirits before he fell ill. The Pathétique is best understood not as a confession but as a riposte to Beethoven’s heroic narrative, the progression from solitary struggle to collective joy. In the vein of Dowland, Tchaikovsky asserts the power of the private sphere—the contrary stance of the happily melancholy self. Indeed, lament has never made so voluptuous a sound.

THE LIGETI LAMENTO

In the twentieth century, time’s arrow again bent into a cycle, to follow Karol Berger’s metaphor. While some composers pursued ever more arcane musics of the future, others found a new thrill in archaic repetition. Chaconne and related forms returned to fashion. Schoenberg, hailed and feared as the destroyer of tonality, actually considered himself Bach’s heir, and his method of twelve-tone writing, which extracts the musical material of a piece from a fixed series of twelve notes, is an extension of the variation concept. (So argued Stefan Wolpe, an important Schoenberg disciple, in an essay on Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor.) “Nacht,” the eighth song of Schoenberg’s melodrama Pierrot lunaire, is subtitled “Passacaglia,” its main theme built around a downward chromatic segment. The revival of Baroque forms quickened after the horror of the First World War, which impelled young composers to distance themselves from a blood-soaked Romantic aesthetic. The circling motion of the chaconne and the passacaglia also summons up a modern kind of fateful loop—the grinding of a monstrous engine or political force. In Berg’s Wozzeck, a passacaglia reflects the regimented madness of military life; in Britten’s Peter Grimes, the same form voices the mounting dread of a boy apprentice in the grip of a socially outcast fisherman.

No modern composer manipulated the lament and the chaconne more imaginatively than György Ligeti, whose music is known to millions through Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Indeed, Ligeti inspired the present essay. In 1993, I heard the composer give a series of dazzlingly erudite talks at the New England Conservatory, in Boston, during which he touched many times on the literature of lament. At one point Ligeti sang the notes “La, sol, fa, mi”—A, G, F, E, the Lamento della ninfa bass—and began cataloguing its myriad appearances in Western music, both in the classical repertory and in folk melodies that he learned as a child. He remembered hearing the bocet in Transylvania: “I was very much impressed by these Romanian lamentos, which old women sing who are paid when somebody is dead in a village. And maybe this is some musical signal which is very, very deep in my subconscious.” He noted a resemblance between Eastern European Gypsy music and Andalusian flamenco. He also spoke of Gesualdo’s madrigals, Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth,” Bach’s “Crucifixus,” and Schubert’s Quartet in G Major—about which more will be said in a later chapter.

Ligeti first encountered the older repertory while studying at the Kolozsvár Conservatory, in the early 1940s. The Second World War interrupted his schooling: after serving in a forced-labor gang, he returned home to discover that many of his relatives, including his father and his brother, had died in the Nazi concentration camps. His first major postwar work, Musica ricercata for piano (1951–53), dabbled in various Renaissance and Baroque tricks; the final movement, a hushed fugue, draws on one of Frescobaldi’s chromatic melodies. After leaving Hungary, in 1956, Ligeti entered his avant-garde period, producing scores in which melody and harmony seem to vanish into an enveloping fog of cluster chords, although those masses of sound are in fact made up of thousands of swirling microscopic figures. In the 1980s, Ligeti resumed an eccentric kind of tonal writing, in an effort to engage more directly with classical tradition; perhaps he also wished to excavate his tortured memories of the European past. The finale of his Horn Trio is titled “Lamento”; at the outset, the violin softly wails in a broken chromatic descent. Although the motif recurs in chaconne style, this is a somewhat unhinged ceremony of mourning, its funereal tones giving way to outright delirium. In the climactic passage, the three instruments execute musical sobs in turn, as if mimicking village cries that Ligeti heard as a child.

In the last phase of his career, Ligeti devised his own lament signature. Richard Steinitz, the composer’s biographer, defines it as a melody of three falling phrases, dropping sometimes by half-steps and sometimes by wider intervals, with the note of departure often inching upward in pitch and the final phrase stretching out longer than the previous two. That heightening and elongating of the phrases is another memory of folk practice. The Ligeti lamento cascades through all registers of the piano etude “Automne à Varsovie”; it also figures in several recklessly intense passages of the Violin Concerto (whose fourth movement is a Passacaglia) and of the Piano Concerto. And in the Viola Sonata, chaconne and lament once again intersect. The final movement of the sonata is titled “Chaconne chromatique,” and the rhythm of the principal theme—short-long, short-long, short-short-short-short long—recalls the languid motion of Dido’s Lament. Then the motif begins to accelerate, becoming, in Steinitz’s words, “fast, exuberant, passionate.” As in Hungarian Rock, Ligeti’s rollicking chaconne for harpsichord, the specter of the old Spanish dance returns, writhing behind a modernist scrim.

THE BLUES

In 1903, the African-American bandleader W. C. Handy was killing time at a train depot in Tutwiler, Mississippi—a small town in the impoverished, mostly black Mississippi Delta region—when he came upon a raggedly dressed man singing and strumming what Handy later described as “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” The nameless musician, his face marked with “the sadness of the ages,” kept repeating the phrase “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog,” and he bent notes on his guitar by applying a knife to the strings. The refrain referred to the meeting point of two railway lines, but it conjured up some vaguer, supernatural scene. Handy tried to capture the phantom singer of Tutwiler in such numbers as “The Memphis Blues,” “The Yellow Dog Blues,” and “The St. Louis Blues.” The last, in 1914, set off an international craze for the music that came to be known as the blues.

One feature common to many early blues, whether commercial or rural, is the old downward chromatic slide. It runs in an almost subliminal way through the opening sequence of “St. Louis Blues,” and makes an unmistakable appearance in Bessie Smith’s 1925 recording of the song, where the young Louis Armstrong traces rapierlike solos on his trumpet. In Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” it takes on burlesque exuberance, merging with the sassy glissando of the slide trombone.

In the late twenties and thirties, recording technology captured the voices of numerous authentic practitioners of the Delta blues: Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, and others. These singers made a living variously as field hands, laborers, drifters, and bootleggers, playing in their spare time. All over their records you hear a rapid articulation of the descending chromatic figure—think of the “Crucifixus” bass line sped up and stripped down. When Willie Brown plays it on “Future Blues,” the strings snap violently in emphasis:

Can’t tell my future, I can’t tell my past

Lord, it seems like every minute sure gon’ be my last.

Skip James, the canniest musician among Delta blues singers, uses the chromatic riff for ironic effect in “I’m So Glad”; it’s an ostensibly uplifting number with a gospel tinge, but the continual chromatic undertow undercuts the singer’s claim to be “tired of weeping, tired of moaning, tired of groaning for you.” Chromatic lines snake through James’s “Devil Got My Woman,” a beautifully baleful ode to love gone wrong: “I’d rather be the devil than be that woman[’s] man …” Robert Johnson, rumored to have sold his soul to the devil for the sake of his art, leaned heavily on the chromatic slide in such numbers as “Cross Road Blues,” “Me and the Devil Blues,” and “Walkin’ Blues.”

The origins of the riff are obscure. It seems to have deep roots in black music, reaching back through ragtime to the sketchily documented repertories of nineteenth-century African-American song. It might even be related to slithery chromatic lines that have been recorded in chants of the Ewe and Yoruba peoples, in West Africa. Although it holds to the classic devil’s-staircase shape, it has little apparent connection to the ostinato laments of previous eras: it’s a decorative element, not a bass line. And it gives off a different vibe, in keeping with the emotional complexity of blues form. A blues is sensual, knowing, tough; it’s full of resilience, even as it heeds the power of fate. The gesture of lament annuls itself and engenders its opposite. This is the subtext of Duke Ellington’s pathbreaking 1935 piece Reminiscing in Tempo, a thirteen-minute jazz fantasia propelled by a short chromatic ostinato. It was written in the wake of the death of the composer’s mother, but it keeps sorrow at bay, ending in a jaunty, urbane mood. The trudging ostinato becomes a walking, dancing bass.

Blues chromaticism entered the American mainstream through the hot jazz of the Roaring Twenties. It was also a favorite tool in the workshops of Tin Pan Alley: Gershwin loved to introduce half-step motion into the inner voices of songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me.” A hint of the descending chromatic bass shadows the opening of Richard Rodgers’s “My Funny Valentine.” Of course, Tin Pan Alley writers, many of them from Russian-Jewish backgrounds, had multiple sources for these tricks of the trade; they drew liberally on late-Romantic classical music and also on Yiddish song. One way or another, the sighing chromatic line became so widespread as a sign of worldly-wise sophistication that it turned into a journeyman cliché. Sometimes, though, it came bearing a more urgent message. When Frank Sinatra began making downcast concept albums in the later 1950s—In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, No One Cares, and other studies in Cold War melancholia—he seemed to require morose chromatic lines to set the tone. A lamenting pizzicato bass prowls through Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes,” whose Scotch-soaked emotional state goes from the vengeful to the suicidal (“Excuse me while I disappear”).

Sinatra’s nocturnal ballads of the fifties forecast a weird and wonderful twist of musical history: the return, circa 1965, of the chromatic basso lamento, in strict, almost neo-Baroque guise. Why it came back is difficult to explain. For one thing, the American folk-music revival of the fifties gave new life to ancient ballad forms, which depended on strophic repetition. Also, Baroque music was much in vogue in the later fifties, with I Musici’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Glenn Gould’s account of the chaconnelike Goldberg Variations selling in mass quantities. And perhaps Brazilian bossa nova played an assisting role; as Peter Williams points out, in his wide-ranging survey The Chromatic Fourth, liquid chromatic lines course through Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” also known as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.”

Whatever the reason, by the mid-sixties the lamento bass was again the rage. You hear it in “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” the waltzing chimney-sweep song in Richard and Robert Sherman’s movie musical Mary Poppins. You hear it also in “Michelle,” on the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, and in various later Beatles songs. It sounds seven times in Bob Dylan’s psychedelic manifesto “Ballad of a Thin Man,” setting up the refrain “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” (The song’s dramatis personae, consisting of one-eyed midgets, circus geeks, and sword swallowers in high heels, vaguely resembles the guest list for the wedding of Almadán, as described in Juan Arañés’s “Un sarao de la chacona.”) The rock scholar Walter Everett has catalogued dozens of chromatic basses in sixties and seventies pop: a peculiar playlist could be assembled from the likes of “How Could I Be Such a Fool?” “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” “My Way,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Time in a Bottle,” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” As Everett notes, the last song is fittingly set in a decadent Spanish-mission town, by the side of a desert highway.

It fell to Led Zeppelin, the behemoth hard-rock band of the seventies, to perfect the rock Baroque. Dylan and the Beatles may have won the plaudits of the intellectuals, but Led Zeppelin launched a no less ambitious raid on music history, commandeering rock, folk music, Delta blues, Indian and other non-Western music, and smatterings of classical tradition. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” and “Stairway to Heaven” both take off from meticulous finger-picking exercises for semi-classical guitar, with descending chromatic lines interwoven; washes of Bachian organ playing give a churchy aura to “Your Time Is Gonna Come” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” Several of the band’s weightiest creations rest on artfully repeating bass lines: “Kashmir” is built on a riff that climbs step by chromatic step.

Led Zeppelin’s early magnum opus was “Dazed and Confused,” a tormented love song that Jimmy Page, the band’s fleet-fingered, mildly satanic guitarist, first started playing when he was in the Yardbirds. Page borrowed many elements of the piece from a New York singer-songwriter named Jake Holmes, who included a track with the same name on his 1967 album “The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes. Holmes’s song is anchored in consecutive chromatic descents; they were the work of an itinerant bass guitarist named Rick Randle, whom Holmes later described as “absolutely stone, raving mad,” and who was last reported living in Utah with a witch.

In the Led Zeppelin version, which appeared on the band’s debut album of 1969, John Paul Jones gave the bass line a forbidding, organlike sound—the Delta blues riff monumentalized. In recordings from the band’s stadium tours of the early seventies, where the song stretches on for half an hour or more, the bass motto undergoes ostentatious transformations, sometimes shimmering on Page’s bowed guitar, sometimes shrieking in the high falsetto zone of Robert Plant’s voice. For long stretches, the bass falls silent while singer and guitarist call out to each other, like wanderers lost in a desolate landscape. Finally, in a climactic passage, the theme is thundered out on guitar and bass in tandem, saturating the musical space.

When the chacona first surfaced, at the end of the sixteenth century, it promised an upending of the social order, a liberation of the body. The same outlaw spirit animates modern rock and pop: the swirl of a repeating bass line allows a crowd of dancing fans to forget, for a little while, the linear routines of daily life. When Frescobaldi and Bach recast the dance as a stern, inward-turned form, bending it toward lament, they hinted at a different sort of freedom, that of the individual defining himself in opposition to the mass. “Dazed and Confused,” in its inner sections, implies a similar quest for self: the raw drive of rock and roll gives way to spacey variations. It’s a big, brash rock anthem at heart, but, just as the dance abides in Bach’s chaconne, the lament lingers in the rock arena. Above all, the song demonstrates how the same deep musical structures keep materializing across the centuries. If a time machine were to bring together some late-sixteenth-century Spanish musicians, a continuo section led by Bach, and players from Ellington’s 1940 band, and if John Paul Jones stepped in with the bass line of “Dazed and Confused,” they might, after a minute or two of confusion, find common ground. The dance of the chacona is wider than the sea.

3 INFERNAL MACHINES HOW RECORDINGS CHANGED MUSIC

More than a century ago, the composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa warned that technology would destroy music. Testifying before the United States Congress in 1906, he said, “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left.” Sousa expanded on the theme in subsequent articles and interviews. “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he declared. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa also said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”

Before you dismiss Sousa as a curmudgeon, you might consider how drastically music has changed in the past hundred years. It has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disc; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with forty thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people do in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. When we walk around the city on an ordinary day, our ears will register music at almost every turn—bass lines pumping from passing cars, bits of hip-hop seeping out of the headphones of teenagers on the subway, a lawyer’s cell phone tweeting Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—but almost none of it will be the immediate result of physical work by human hands or voices. Fewer and fewer people know how to play instruments or read music. In the future, Sousa’s ghost might say, reproduction will displace production. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.

Ever since Edison invented the phonograph cylinder, in 1877, people have been assessing what the medium of recording has done for and to the art of music. Inevitably, the conversation has veered toward rhetorical extremes. Sousa was a pioneering spokesman for the party of doom, which was later filled out by various reactionaries, contrarians, Luddites, and post-Marxist theorists. In the opposite corner are the utopians, who argue that technology has not imprisoned music but liberated it, bringing the art of the elite to the masses and the art of the margins to the center. Before Edison came along, the utopians say, Beethoven’s symphonies could be heard only in select concert halls. Now recordings carry the man from Bonn to the corners of the earth, summoning the throng hailed in the “Ode to Joy”: “Be embraced, millions!” Glenn Gould, after renouncing live performance in 1964, predicted that within a century the public concert would disappear into the electronic ether, with a largely beneficial effect on musical culture.

Having discovered much of my favorite music through LPs and CDs, I am not about to join the lamenting party. Modern urban environments are often so soulless or ugly that I’m grateful for the humanizing touch of electronic sound. But neither can I accept Gould’s slashing futurism. I want to be aware of technology’s effects, positive and negative. I want a pragmatic theory that mediates between live performance and reproduction, without either apocalyptic screeching or corporate hype. Fortunately, scholars and critics have been methodically exploring this terrain for many decades, trying to figure out exactly what happens when we listen to music with no musicians in the room. They have reached no unshakable conclusions, but they give us most of the conceptual tools we need in order to listen with the alertness—and the ambivalence—that this magical medium demands.

The principal irony of the history of recording is that Edison did not make the phonograph with music in mind. Rather, he conceived of his cylinder as a business gadget, one that would supersede the costly, imperfect practice of stenography and have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased. In an 1878 essay titled “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Edison or his ghostwriter proclaimed that his invention would “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” “Annihilation” is an interestingly ambiguous figure of speech. Recording opened lines of communication between far-flung worlds, but it also placed older art and folk traditions in danger of extinction. With American popular culture as its house god, it brought about a global homogenization of taste, the effects of which are still spreading.

Although Edison mentioned the idea of recording music in his 1878 article, he had no inkling of a music industry. He pictured the phonograph as a tool for teaching singing and as a natural extension of domestic music-making: “A friend may in a morning-call sing us a song which shall delight an evening company.” By the 1890s, however, alert entrepreneurs had installed phonographs in penny arcades, allowing customers to listen to favorite songs over ear tubes. In 1888, Emile Berliner introduced the flat disc, a less cumbersome storage device, and envisioned with it the entire modern music business—mass distribution, recording stars, royalties, and the rest. In 1902, the first great star was born: the tenor Enrico Caruso, whose voice remains one of the most transfixing phenomena in the history of the medium. The ping in Caruso’s tone, that golden bark, made the man himself seem viscerally present, proving Edison’s theory of the annihilation of space and time. Not so lucky was Johannes Brahms, who, in 1889, attempted to record his First Hungarian Dance. The master seems to be sending us a garbled message from a spacecraft disintegrating near Pluto.

Whenever a new gadget comes along, salespeople inevitably point out that an older gadget has been rendered obsolete. The automobile pushed aside the railroad; the computer replaced the typewriter. Sousa feared that the phonograph would supplant live music. His fears were excessive but not irrational. The Victor Talking Machine Company, which the engineer Eldridge Johnson founded in 1901, marketed its machines not just as vessels for music but as instruments in themselves. In a way, Victor was taking direct aim at the piano, which, around the turn of the century, dominated domestic musical life, from the salon to the tavern. The top-selling Victrola of 1906, a massive object standing four feet tall and weighing 137 pounds, was encased in “piano-finished” mahogany, if anyone was missing the point. Ads showed families clustered about their phonographs, no piano in sight. Edison, whose cylinders soon began to lag behind flat discs in popularity, was so determined to demonstrate the verisimilitude of his machines that he held a nationwide series of Tone Tests, during which halls were plunged into darkness and audiences were supposedly unable to tell the difference between Anna Case singing live and one of her records.

Each subsequent leap in audio technology—microphones, magnetic tape, long-playing records, stereo sound, transistors, digital sound, the compact disc, and the MP3—has elicited the same kind of over-the-top reaction. The latest device inspires heady confusion between reality and reproduction, while yesterday’s wonder machine is exposed as inadequate, even primitive. When, in 1931, the composer and critic Deems Taylor heard a pioneering example of stereophonic recording, he commented, “The difference between what we usually hear and what I heard was, roughly, the difference between looking at a photograph of somebody and looking at the person himself.” Twenty years later, Howard Taubman wrote of a long-playing record on the Mercury label: “The orchestra’s tone is so lifelike that one feels one is listening to the living presence.” (Mercury promptly adopted “Living Presence” as its slogan.) A high-fidelity ad of the 1950s offered users “the finest seat in the house”—an experience not simply equal to the concert hall but superior to it, cleansed of the inconvenience of “audience distraction.” A television commercial of the seventies, starring Ella Fitzgerald, famously asked, “Is it live or is it Memorex?” Compact discs promised “perfect sound forever.”

Just as inevitably, audiophile happy-talk leads to a backlash among listeners who doubt the rhetoric of fidelity and perfection. Dissenters complain that the latest device is actually inferior to the old—artificial, inauthentic, soulless. Greg Milner has documented this never-ending back-and-forth in his book Perfecting Sound Forever, a smartly skeptical account of the ideology of audio progress. Some enthusiasts of the Edison cylinder felt that no other machine gave such a faithful sensation of the warmth of the human voice. When electrical recording came in, a few stalwarts detected nothing but fakery in the use of microphones to amplify soft sounds and invent a sonic perspective that does not exist for human ears. “I wonder if pure tone will disappear from the earth sometimes,” a British critic wrote in 1928.

Magnetic tape led to the most crucial shift in the relationship between recordings and musical reality. German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder, or Magnetophon, during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing in the middle of the night. After the war was over, Mullin tracked down a Magnetophon and brought it to America. He demonstrated it to Bing Crosby, who used it to tape his broadcasts in advance. Crosby was a pioneer of perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon. Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as readily as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet.

The magnetic process also allowed performers to invent their own reality in the studio. Errors could be corrected by splicing together bits of different takes. In the sixties, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, following in the wake of electronic compositions by Cage and Stockhausen, constructed intricate studio soundscapes that could never be replicated onstage; even Glenn Gould would have had trouble executing the mechanically accelerated keyboard solo in “In My Life.” The great rock debate about authenticity began. Were the Beatles pushing the art forward by reinventing it in the studio? Or were they losing touch with the rugged intelligence of folk, blues, and rock traditions? Bob Dylan stood at a craggy opposite extreme, turning out records in a few days’ time and avoiding any vocal overdubs until the seventies. The Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin points out that while the Beatles spent 129 days crafting Sgt. Pepper, Dylan needed only 90 days to make his first fifteen records. Yet frills-free, “lo-fi” recording has no special claim on musical truth; indeed, it easily becomes another effect, the effect of no effect. Today’s neoclassical rock bands pay good money to sound old.

The advent of digital recording was, for many skeptics, the ultimate outrage. The old machines vibrated in sympathy with their subjects: the hills and valleys on a cylinder or a flat disc followed the contours of the music. Digital technology literally chopped the incoming vibrations into bits—strings of 0’s and 1’s that were encoded onto a compact disc and then reconstituted on a CD player. Traditionalists felt that the end product was a kind of android music. Neil Young, the raw-voiced Canadian singer-songwriter, was especially withering: “Listening to a CD is like looking at the world through a screen window.” Step by step, recordings have become an ever more fictional world, even as they become ever more “real.” The final frontier—for the moment—has been reached with Auto-Tune, Pro Tools, and other forms of digital software, which can readjust out-of-tune playing and generate entire orchestras from nowhere. At the touch of a key, a tone-deaf starlet becomes dulcet and a college rock band turns Wagnerian.

Yet some audio equivalent of the law of conservation of energy means that these incessant crises have a way of balancing themselves out. Fakers, hucksters, and mediocrities prosper in every age; artists of genius manage to survive, or, at least, to fail memorably. Technology has certainly advanced the careers of nonentities, but it has also lent a hand to those who lacked a foothold in the system. Nowhere is this more evident than in the story of African-American music. Almost from the start, recording permitted black musicians on the margins of the culture—notably, the blues singers of the Mississippi Delta—to speak out with nothing more than a voice and a guitar. Many of these artists were robbed blind by corporate manipulators, but their music got through. Recordings gave Armstrong, Ellington, Chuck Berry, and James Brown the chance to occupy a global platform that Sousa’s idyllic old America, racist to the core, would have denied them. The fact that their records played a crucial role in the advancement of African-American civil rights puts in proper perspective the debate about whether or not technology has been “good” for music.

Hip-hop, the dominant turn-of-the-century pop form, gives the most electrifying demonstration of technology’s empowering effect. As Jeff Chang recounts, in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the genre rose up from desperately impoverished high-rise ghettos, where families couldn’t afford to buy instruments for their kids and even the most rudimentary music-making seemed out of reach. But music was made all the same: the phonograph itself became an instrument. In the South Bronx in the 1970s, DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. Later, studio-bound DJs and producers used digital sampling to assemble some of the most densely packed sonic assemblages in musical history: Eric B. and Rakim’s Paid in Full, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

Sooner or later, every critique of recording gets around to quoting Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” written in the late 1930s. The most often cited passage is Benjamin’s discussion of the loss of an “aura” surrounding works of art—the “here and now” of the sacred artistic object, its connection to a well-defined community. This formulation seems to recall the familiar lament, going back to Sousa, that recordings have leeched the life out of music. But when Benjamin spoke of the withering of aura and the rise of reproducible art, lamentation was not his aim. While he stopped short of populism, he voiced a nagging mistrust of the elitist spiel—the automatic privileging of high-art devotion over mass-market consumption. The cult of art for art’s sake, Benjamin noted, was deteriorating into fascist kitsch. The films of Charlie Chaplin, by contrast, mixed comic pratfalls with subversive political messages. In other words, mechanical reproduction is not an inherently cheapening process; an outsider artist may use it to bypass cultural gatekeepers and advance radical ideas. That the thugs of commerce seldom fail to win out in the end does not lessen the glory of the moment.

Although classical performers and listeners like to picture themselves in a high tower, remote from the electronic melee, they, too, are in thrall to the machines. Some of the most overheated propaganda on behalf of new technologies has come from the classical side, where the illusion of perfect reproduction is particularly alluring. Classical recordings are supposed to deny the fact that they are recordings. That process involves, paradoxically, considerable artifice. Overdubbing, patching, knob-twiddling, and, in recent years, pitch correction have all come into play. The phenomenon of the dummy star, who has a hard time duplicating in the concert hall what he or she purports to do on record, is not unheard of.

Perhaps there is something unnatural in the very act of making a studio recording, no matter how intelligent the presentation. At the height of the hi-fiera, leading classical producers and executives—Walter Legge, at EMI; Goddard Lieberson, at Columbia Records; and John Culshaw, at Decca, to name three of the best—spent many millions of dollars engaging top-of-the-line orchestras, soloists, and conductors in an effort to create definitive recordings of the peaks of the repertory. They met their goal: any short list of gramophone classics would include Maria Callas’s Tosca, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Tristan und Isolde, Georg Solti’s Ring, and Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, all recorded or set in motion in the fifties. Yet the excellence of these discs posed a problem for the working musicians who had to play in their wake. Concert presenters began to complain that record collectors had formed a separate audience, one that seldom ventured into the concert hall. Recordings threatened to become a phantasmagoria, a virtual reality encroaching on concert life. (Gould claimed that the Decca Ring achieved “a more effective unity between intensity of action and displacement of sound than could be afforded by the best of all seasons at Bayreuth.”) When people did venture out, they brought with them the habits of home listening. The solitary ritual of absorbing symphonies in one’s living room almost certainly contributed to the growing quietude of the classical public; that applause-free spell after the first movement of the Eroica matches the whispery groove on the long-playing record.

Like Heisenberg’s mythical observer, the phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed not only how people listened but also how they sang and played. Mark Katz, in his book Capturing Sound, calls these changes “phonograph effects.” (The phrase comes from the digital studio, where it is used to describe the crackling, scratching noises that are sometimes added to pop-music tracks to lend them an appealingly antique air.) Katz devotes one chapter of his book to a shift in violin technique that occurred in the early twentieth century. It involved vibrato—the trembling action of the hand on the fingerboard, whereby the player is able to give notes a warbling sweetness. Early recordings and written evidence suggest that in prior eras vibrato was used more sparingly than it is today. By the twenties and thirties, many leading violinists had adopted continuous vibrato, which became the approved style in conservatories. Katz proposes that technology prompted the change. When a wobble was added to violin tone, the phonograph was able to pick it up more easily; it’s a “wider” sound in acoustical terms, a blob of several superimposed frequencies. Also, the fuzzy focus of vibrato enabled players to cover up inaccuracies of intonation, and, from the start, the phonograph made players more self-conscious about intonation than they were before. What worked in the studio then spread to the concert stage.

Robert Philip, a British scholar who specializes in performance practice, tackles the same problem in his book Performing Music in the Age of Recording. He proposes that when musicians listened to records of their own playing they passed through a kind of mirror stage; for the first time, they were forced to confront their “true” selves. “Musicians who first heard their own recordings in the early years of the twentieth century were often taken aback by what they heard, suddenly being made aware of inaccuracies and mannerisms they had not suspected,” Philip writes. When they went back onstage, he says, they tried to embody the superior self that they glimpsed in the phonographic mirror, and never again played in quite the same way.

Philip gives a riveting description of what classical performances sounded like at the turn of the last century. “Freedom from disaster was the standard for a good concert,” he writes. Rehearsals were brief, mishaps routine. Precision was not a universal value. Pianists rolled chords instead of playing them at one stroke. String players slid expressively from one note to the next—portamento, the style was called—in imitation of the slide of the voice. In a 1912 recording, the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe “sways either side of the beat, while the piano maintains an even rhythm.” Orchestras flirted with chaos in an effort to generate maximum passion—witness Edward Elgar’s recordings of his music. And the instruments themselves sounded different, depending on the nationality of the player. French bassoons had a pungent tone, quite unlike the rounded timbre of German bassoons. French flutists, by contrast, used more vibrato than their German and English counterparts, supplying a warmer, mellower quality. American orchestral culture, which brought together immigrant musicians from all European countries, began to erode the differences, and recordings helped to cement the new standard practice. Whatever style sounded cleanest on the medium—in these cases, German bassoons and French flutes—became the golden mean. Young virtuosos today may have recognizable idiosyncrasies, but their playing seldom indicates that they have come from any particular place or that they have emerged from any particular tradition.

Opera is prey to the same standardizing trend. The conductor and scholar Will Crutchfield cites a startling example of a “phonograph effect” in an essay on changing perceptions of operatic style. He once sat down to compare all extant recordings of “Una furtiva lagrima,” the plaintive tenor aria from Donizetti’s bel-canto comedy L’elisir d’amore. Crutchfield wanted to know what singers of various eras have done with the cadenza—the passage at the end of the aria where the orchestra halts and the tenor engages in a few graceful acrobatics. Early recordings show singers trying out a range of possibilities, some contemplative, some florid, none the same. Then came Caruso. He first recorded “Una furtiva lagrima” in 1902, and returned to it three more times in the course of his epochal studio career. After that, tenors began imitating the stylish little display that Caruso devised: a quick up-and-down run followed by two slow, tender phrases. Out of more than two hundred singers who have recorded the aria since Caruso’s death, how many try something different? Crutchfield counts four. Many operagoers would identify Caruso’s cadenza as the “traditional” one, but Crutchfield calls it the “death-of-tradition” cadenza, the one that stifled a long-flourishing vocal practice.

The tics and traits of old-school performance—moving ahead or behind the beat, sliding between notes, breaking chords into arpeggios, improvising cadenzas, adding ornaments as the style demands—are alike in bringing out the distinct voices of the performers, not to mention the mere fact that they are fallible humans. Most modern playing tends to erase all evidence of the work that has gone on behind the scenes: virtuosity is defined as effortlessness. One often-quoted ideal is to “disappear behind the music.” But when precision is divorced from emotion it can become anti-musical, inhuman, repulsive. Is there any escape from the cycle? Robert Philip, having blamed recordings for a multitude of sins, ends by saying that they may be able to come to the rescue. By studying artifacts from the dawn of the century, musicians might recapture what has gone missing from the perfectionist style. They can rebel against the letter of the score in pursuit of its spirit. There are, however, substantial psychic barriers in the way of such a shift: performers will have to be unafraid of trying out mannerisms that will sound sloppy to some ears, of committing what will sound like mistakes. They will have to defy the hyper-competitive conservatory culture in which they came of age, and also the hyper-professionalized culture of the ensembles in which they find work.

In at least one area, performance style has undergone a sea change. Early music long had the reputation of being the most pedantically “correct” subculture in classical music, but in recent years the more dynamic Renaissance and Baroque ensembles—Jordi Savall’s Hespèrion XXI, William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants, Rinaldo Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano, and various groups led by the violinist Andrew Manze and the keyboard player Richard Egarr, to name a few—have begun exercising all the freedoms that have gone missing in much modern performance. They execute some notes cleanly and others roughly, they weave around the beat instead of staying on top of it, they slide from note to note when they are so moved. If the score calls for or expects a cadenza or improvisation, they execute one of their own invention. As a result, the music feels liberated, and audiences respond in kind, with yelps of joy. Christie has said that his group is modeled on Duke Ellington’s band of 1929: players amble in and out of the spotlight, adding daubs of color before rejoining the background. If, in coming years, the freewheeling spirit of the early-music scene enters into performances of the nineteenth-century repertory, classical music may finally kick away its cold marble façade.

For those of us who grew up during the extended heyday of recordings, the digital landscape of the early twenty-first century presents a confusing picture. The record labels, which long held sway with an iron or velvet fist, are reeling, their products downloaded everywhere on file-sharing networks, their attempts to police piracy verging on the fascistic. The concept of a discrete album of songs or works is probably in terminal decline. In pop, the main money is now to be made in the packaging of tours and the selling of merchandise. Prince gave away millions of copies of his 2007 album Planet Earth as a way of luring audiences to his shows. In the same year, Radiohead offered its latest album, In Rainbows, through its own website, instructing fans to pay whatever they wished. The technology of easy access has become so sophisticated that it is undermining the corporate structure which brought it into being—a development that might have delighted Walter Benjamin. The brainy moguls of decades past are to be mourned, but in the long run it may not be a bad thing that young people have stopped hoarding music in the form of packaged objects. Music is no longer a prize in a collection; it is returning to its natural evanescent state.

Classical music, or a portion thereof, is thriving online in unexpected ways. Perhaps no one should be surprised; if, as people say, the Internet is a paradise for geeks, it would logically work to the benefit of one of the most opulently geeky art forms in history. The more resourceful organizations are offering live and archived audio (you can hear almost every event in London’s summertime Proms series through the website of the BBC), setting up online listening guides (the San Francisco Symphony has hightech maps of the Eroica and The Rite of Spring), assembling fastidious archives (the Metropolitan Opera site can tell you in a matter of seconds when any singer made his or her debut), and peddling studio-master-quality audio downloads (the Tallis Scholars sell their impeccable recordings of Renaissance masses). Web-savvy young composers, meanwhile, no longer depend on publishers to reach their public, distributing their wares through blogs, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever social network becomes fashionable after this book goes to press.

The diffusion of classical music online is a boon for fans, and it may also ease the fears of the infamous “culturally aware non-attenders.” Novice concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, read synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, read performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings out on the tundra of the classical experience. First-time record-buyers can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the gaze of a grumpy record clerk. In the days before the collapse of the record business, when megastores like Tower Records were thriving, sepulchral soundproofed doors divided the classical department from the rest of humanity. For better or worse, classical music no longer inhabits a separate room; it is in the mix.

At the same time, classical music stands partly outside the technological realm, because most of its repertory is designed to resonate naturally within a room. By contrast, almost all pop music is written for microphones and speakers. In a totally mediated society, where some form of electronic sound saturates nearly every minute of our waking lives, the act of sitting down in a concert hall, joining the expectant silence in the moments before the music begins, and surrendering to the elemental properties of sound can have an almost spiritual dimension. Classical supremacists of prior years might have described it as a rite of elevation, but for me it is something more primal and enigmatic. Forms coalesce and then vanish, like Rimsky-Korsakov’s phantom city of Kitezh.

In 1926, twenty years after Sousa foretold doom, the critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt reflected on the mechanization of music and came to this eminently sane conclusion: “The machine is neither a god nor a devil.” Mark Katz uses that quotation as an epigraph to Capturing Sound, and it nicely sums up the whole shebang. Neither the utopian nor the apocalyptic vision of the musical future has come to pass. People have plenty of pirated music in their cupboards, but they are still turning out for live performances, paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to catch a glimpse of their idols. Music education is in tatters, but the impulse to make music with the voice, with an instrument, or on a computer remains. The critic David Hajdu, in an essay on the phenomenon of home remixing (creating new versions of songs on home computers), notes a curious throwback. “Members of the musical public are again assuming participatory roles, interpreting compositions at home, much as late Victorians played sheet music in parlor musicales,” he writes. In other words, we are almost back to where we started.

When I sift through my musical memory, I find that real and virtual events are inextricably jumbled. The strongest echoes are of live performances that shook me to the core: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of the incomparable choral conductor Robert Shaw, with more than four hundred singers roaring forth in the first- and second-tier boxes; the post-punk bands Fugazi and the Ex in a sweat-drenched church basement in Washington, D.C., firing up a mass of youthful bodies; Gidon Kremer and five other musicians in an Austrian village church at midnight, presenting an extraordinarily eerie chamber arrangement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. Then again, certain recordings carry an acute emotional charge: I think of the Bernstein Eroica that I pretended to conduct as a child, the LPs of Mahler’s Sixth that I blasted in high school late at night, the Pere Ubu CD that forced me to abandon my cavalier dismissal of rock music. But I can’t replicate the psychic impact of those first encounters. They were unrepeatable events on a private stage. As the composer and theorist Benjamin Boretz has written, “In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.”

Nothing in my listening life can compare to the experience of Hans Fantel, an author and critic who for many years covered audio matters for The New York Times. In 1989 he wrote about what it was like for him to listen to a CD reissue of a classic disc: a live recording, made on January 16, 1938, of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, under the direction of Bruno Walter. Fantel spent his childhood in Vienna, and he attended that performance with his father.

“We could not know on that winter Sunday that this would turn out to be the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler crushed his homeland to make it part of the German Reich,” Fantel wrote. “The music, captured that day by the bulky old microphones I remember strung across the stage, was the last to be heard from many of the musicians in the orchestra. They and their country vanished.” Fantel put on the record and relived the occasion. “I could now recognize and appreciate the singular aura of that performance: I could sense its uncanny intensity—a strange inner turmoil quite different from the many other recordings and performances of Mahler’s Ninth I had heard since.”

Some of the turmoil was Fantel’s own. “This disc held fast an event I had shared with my father: seventy-one minutes out of the sixteen years we had together. Soon after, as an ‘enemy of Reich and Führer,’ my father also disappeared into Hitler’s abyss. That’s what made me realize something about the nature of phonographs: they admit no ending. They imply perpetuity … Something of life itself steps over the normal limits of time.”

PART II

4 THE STORM OF STYLE MOZART’S GOLDEN MEAN

Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, as he usually spelled his name, was a small man with a plain, pockmarked face, whose most striking feature was a pair of intense blue-gray eyes. When he was in a convivial mood, his gaze was said to be warm, even seductive. But he often gave the impression of being not entirely present, as if his mind were caught up in some invisible event. Portraits suggest a man aware of his separation from the world. In one, he wears a hard, distant look; in another, his face glows with sadness. In several pictures, his left eye droops a little, perhaps from fatigue. “As touchy as gunpowder,” one friend called him. Nonetheless, he was generally well liked.

He was born in the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1756, and he died in the imperial capital of Vienna in 1791. He was a thoroughly urban creature, one who never had much to say about the charms of nature. A product of the artisan classes—his ancestors were bookbinders, weavers, and masons—he adopted aristocratic fashions, going around Vienna in a gold-trimmed hat and a red coat with mother-of-pearl buttons. He was physically restless, quick-witted, sociable, flirtatious, and obscene; one of the more provocative items in his catalogue is a canon for six voices titled Leck mich im Arsch (K. 231/382c). He frittered away money, not least on apartments that he could ill afford. He had considerable success, although he knew that he deserved more. If audiences were occasionally perplexed by his creations, listeners in high places recognized his worth. Emperor Joseph II was a fan of Mozart’s work, and, in 1787, to prevent “so rare a genius” from going abroad, he gave the composer a well-paying position that required little more than the writing of dances. In a letter to his father, Leopold, Mozart had warned that “the Viennese gentry, and in particular the Emperor, must not imagine that I am on this earth solely for the sake of Vienna.”

As a child, Mozart was advertised in London as “the most extraordinary Prodigy, and most amazing Genius, that has appeared in any Age.” Leopold dubbed him “the miracle whom God allowed to be born in Salzburg.” Prince Kaunitz, Joseph II’s chief minister, said, “Such people only come into the world once in a hundred years.” Praise at this level, however justified, takes its toll on a man’s humility. Mozart, by his own admission, could be “as proud as a peacock,” and the Archbishop of Salzburg, whose service he quit in 1781, was not the only person who considered him “dreadfully conceited.” Conceit edges easily into paranoia, and Mozart was not immune. “I think that something is going on behind the scenes, and that doubtless here too I have enemies,” he wrote from Paris, in 1778. “Where, indeed, have I not had them?” As he traces conspiracies, mocks the French, and extols the Germans, he sounds curiously like Richard Wagner.

Later, in Vienna, Mozart clung to the idea that Antonio Salieri, the Imperial Kapellmeister, was plotting against him. Whether or not such intrigues existed—John Rice’s biography of the supposedly dastardly Salieri portrays him as a likable character, and an intermittently imaginative composer—Mozart himself was not above politicking: when he applied for the job of second Kapellmeister, he pointedly observed that “Salieri, that very gifted Kapellmeister, has never devoted himself to church music.”

Playfulness was Mozart’s saving grace. His counterpart in modern times is perhaps George Gershwin, who was charming and self-infatuated in equal measure. Latter-day attempts to find a dark, despondent layer in Mozart’s psychology have been unconvincing. In his correspondence, he once or twice displays depressive symptoms—alluding to his “black thoughts,” describing sensations of coldness and emptiness—but context is all-important: in the first instance, he is begging for money, and in the second he is telling his wife, the demanding Constanze, how much he misses her. Nor should too much be made of a letter in which Mozart tells his dying father that death is the “true goal of our existence,” the “best and truest friend of mankind.” These sentiments were commonplace in a world where lives ended early and without warning. Of the seven children born to Leopold and Maria Anna Mozart, Wolfgang was one of two who survived infancy; only two of his own six children lived to adulthood. Against this backdrop, Mozart seems, if anything, indefatigably optimistic.

Leopold Mozart said of his son, “Two opposing elements rule his nature, I mean, there is either too much or too little, never the golden mean.” Often, an artist sets forth in his work what he cannot achieve in life, and Mozart’s music is the empire of the golden mean. Nicholas Kenyon, in The Pegasus Pocket Guide to Mozart, writes, “Other great composers have expressed the extremes of life: affirmation, despair, sensual pleasure, bleak emptiness, but only in Mozart can all these emotions coexist within the space of a short phrase.” Mozart inhabits a middle world where beauty surges in and ebbs away, where everything is contingent and nothing pure, where, as Henry James’s Madame Merle says, an envelope of circumstances encloses every human life. It is a place where genres meld; where concertos become operatic and arias symphonic; where comedy and tragedy, and the sensual and the sacred, are one.

You can find the golden mean running through the Andante of the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, from 1779–80. A beguiling four-bar melody appears twice, in E-flat major in the middle and in C minor at the end. The first time, the major mode is briefly shadowed by a turn into the relative minor. The second time, minor is flecked by major, creating the effect of a light in the night. The two passages are more or less the same, but the space between them could contain a novel.

The musicologist Scott Burnham has observed that Mozart offers the “sound of the loss of innocence, the ever renewable loss of innocence.” There is no more potent subject for an artist, and it explains why Mozart remains so vivid a presence. As ever, the slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 sends us into a pensive trance, the finale of the “Jupiter” Symphony wakes us up into a uniquely Mozartian kind of intelligent happiness, and the catastrophic climax of Don Giovanni stirs our primal fear of being weighed in the balance and found wanting. The loss of innocence was Mozart’s, too. Like the rest of us, he had to live outside the complex paradise that he created in sound.

Thousands of books have been written about Mozart, and they present a bewildering variety of images. For a long time, well into the twentieth century, many people pictured Mozart as the “eternal child”—an antic boy-man who happened to write sublime music. This was a theme of Alfred Einstein’s 1945 biography, long considered the standard work. Pushkin, in his play Mozart and Salieri, came up with an influential variant: Mozart as “idle hooligan.” This led to the eternal adolescent of the play and movie Amadeus—a potty-mouthed punk who happened to write sublime music. Other commentators have made Mozart out to be a Romantic in the making or a modernist before the fact—an aloof, tortured character, an agent of sexual subversion, or a clandestine social revolutionary.

Present-day scholars are picking away at the myths and fantasies that have encrusted the composer. They describe him not as a naïve prodigy or a suffering outcast but as a hardworking, ambitious, successful musician—“Mozart as a Working Stiff,” to borrow the title of an essay by Neal Zaslaw. One notable upshot has been the rehabilitation of Leopold Mozart, who long loomed over his son’s life story as an oppressive, even abusive, figure. Maynard Solomon, in his 1995 biography, presented damning evidence against Leopold, writing of the father’s “erotically tinged drive to dominate” his son. Leopold is said to have exploited Wolfgang in his early years, squirreling away profits from their European tours. When the gifted child became a problematic teen, Leopold exhibited an unhealthy possessiveness, opposing his son’s marriage plans and berating him for what he considered spendthrift behavior. His letters contain passages of world-class manipulation. “Your whole intent is to ruin me so you can build your castles in the air,” Leopold wrote in 1778, not long after his wife died while accompanying her son to Paris. “I hope that, after your mother had to die in Paris already, you will not also burden your conscience by expediting the death of your father.”

Leopold was a bit of a monster, but the job of raising the Miracle of Salzburg would have sapped anyone’s patience. Ruth Halliwell made the case for Leopold in her illuminating 1998 book, The Mozart Family. The father didn’t so much exploit the son as make him possible. Those long European tours gave Mozart an incomparable education; he went to London, Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Munich, met the monarchs and princes of the day, and talked to most of the leading composers. Knowing that his son’s musical gifts far exceeded his own, Leopold offered advice on the practical aspects of art and life, in which he was rather better versed. Who can deny the truth of Leopold’s maxim “Where money is plentiful, everything is dear, and where living is cheap, money will be scarce”? Or: “The best way to make people feel ashamed of themselves is to be extremely friendly and polite to those who are your enemies”? Mozart’s path would have been easier if he had absorbed a few of the bland but useful adages that his father passed along.

The letters between father and son become much livelier when music is the subject. On musical matters, the Mozarts are essentially of one mind; Leopold never seems to be reining in his son’s imagination. In late 1780 and early 1781, Mozart was in Munich, preparing his first major opera, Idomeneo, while Leopold was in Salzburg, supervising the librettist. The young composer was unleashing every expressive device available to him: as David Cairns writes, in his 2006 book Mozart and His Operas, Idomeneo touches on “love, joy, physical and spiritual contentment, stoicism, heroic resolution; the ecstasy of self-sacrifice, the horrors of dementia, the agonizing dilemma of a ruler trapped in the consequences of his actions; mass hysteria, panic in the face of an unknown scourge, turning to awe before the yet more terrible fact; the strange peace that can follow intense grief; the infinite tenderness of a father’s last farewell to his son.” Leopold was mostly a bystander to Mozart’s feat, but he did make one crucial contribution: for a pivotal scene in Act III, when the voice of Neptune’s oracle rises from the depths, he requested “moving, terrifying, and altogether unusual” music, and went on to suggest a series of sudden crescendos and decrescendos in the brass and winds, bracketing the vocal phrases. Exactly this effect appears in the finished score.

Perhaps Leopold’s greatest gift to his son was the instruction to compose with both musical insiders and the general public in mind. In a letter from 1782, Mozart takes that favorite phrase of his father’s—“the golden mean”—and weaves around it a pragmatic philosophy that is just as relevant now as it was in the eighteenth century:

These concertos [Nos. 11, 12, and 13] are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why … The golden mean of truth in all things is no longer either known or appreciated. In order to win applause one must write stuff which is so inane that a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that it pleases precisely because no sensible man can understand it.

One wonders what Mozart would have made of today’s musical scene, where the gap between inanity and unintelligibility is spectacularly wide.

Scholars have also demolished the old picture of Mozart as an idiot savant who transcribed the music playing in his brain. Instead, he seems to have refined his ideas to an almost manic degree. Examination of Mozart’s surviving sketches and drafts—Constanze threw many manuscripts away—reveals that the composer sometimes began a piece, set it aside, and resumed it months or years later; rewrote troubling sections several times in a row; started movements from scratch when a first attempt failed to satisfy; and waited to finish an aria until a singer had tried out the opening. Ulrich Konrad calls these stockpiles of material “departure points”—“a delineation of intellectual places to which Mozart could return as necessary.” In other words, the music in Mozart’s mind may have been like a huge map of half-explored territories; in a way, he was writing all his works all the time. The new image of him as a kind of improvising perfectionist is even more daunting than the previous one of God’s stenographer. Ambitious parents who play the Baby Mozart video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard, and, if Constanze was right, by working himself to death.

In 1991, the Philips label issued a deluxe, complete Mozart edition—180 CDs—employing such distinguished interpreters as Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, and Colin Davis. The set was later reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. One day I transferred it to my iPod and discovered that Mozart requires, at the minimum listenable bitrate, 9.77 gigabytes.

On a computer, you can use search functions to create cross-sections of Mozart—a dreamworld of adagios, a neo-Baroque swirl of fantasias and fugues, a nonet of quintets (all major works). To listen to his twenty-seven settings of the Kyrie is to appreciate his inexhaustible invention: they range from the ravishingly sweet to the forbiddingly severe, each a convincing simulacrum of the power of the Lord. But the obvious challenge was to go through the whole megillah—to begin with the Andante in C Major (K. 1a), which Mozart wrote when he was five, and proceed to the bitter end, the Requiem (K. 626), which he left unfinished at his death, at thirty-five. It took me three months. I can’t claim to have given every bar close attention—a patch of recitative in the early opera La finta semplice (The Pretend Simpleton) was disrupted by a protracted public-address announcement at Detroit Metro Airport, and most of the Contredanse No. 4 in F (K. 101) was drowned out by the crack drum corps Drumedies performing in the Times Square subway station—but I did get a bird’s-eye view of Mozart’s achievement, and was more in awe than ever.

From the start, the music is astonishingly well made. (A caveat from the scholarly demythologizers: most of the earliest works were “corrected” by Leopold.) Young Mozart shows an uncanny ability to mimic the styles and forms of the day: Baroque sacred music, opera buffa and opera seria, Gluckian reform opera, Haydn’s classicism, the Mannheim symphonic school, Sturm und Drang agitation, and so on. Quite a bit of the music is reassuringly routine; Hermann Abert writes, in his massive 1921 biography of the composer, that Mozart “evolved along sound lines, without any supernatural leaps and bounds.” But very early there are flashes of individuality. Some of the first come in the London Sketchbook, which dates from Mozart’s London sojourn of 1764 and 1765 (and which Leopold did not touch). A piece in G minor (K. 15p) features a stormily descending chromatic bass line—a Bachian gesture with a trace of boyish impudence. A piece in E-flat major (K. 15kk) has gently murmuring chords and mournful slips into the minor, forecasting time-suspending andantes and adagios to come.

Hearing so many premonitions of future masterworks, I got the feeling that Mozart’s brain contained an array of musical archetypes that were connected to particular dramatic situations or emotional states—figures connoting vengeance, reconciliation, longing, and so on. One example appears in La finta semplice, the merry little opera buffa that Mozart wrote when he was twelve. In the finale, when all misunderstandings are resolved, there is a passage marked “un poco adagio,” in which Giacinta and her maid Ninetta ask forgiveness for an elaborate ruse that they have pulled on Giacinta’s brothers. “Perdono,” they sing—“Forgive.” Not just the words but the music prefigures the stupendous final scene of The Marriage of Figaro, in which the wayward Count asks the Countess’s forgiveness—“Contessa, perdono!”—and she grants it, in a half-hopeful, half-heartbroken phrase. I looked at the New Mozart Edition scores side by side, and noticed that the two passages not only waver between the same happy-sad chords (G major and E minor) but pivot on the same rising bass line (B-C-D-E). It is unlikely that Mozart thought back to La finta semplice when he composed Figaro, but the idea of forgiveness apparently triggered certain sounds in his mind.

As Mozart grows toward adulthood, there is a palpable thrill of emergence. The routine becomes rare, the extraordinary ordinary. Having proved himself as an able technician of theatrical and sacred music (Lucio Silla, of 1772, and the Sacramental Litany, of 1776, are high-water marks of his youth), Mozart now imports exterior drama and interior reflection to instrumental genres: the hard-driving Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, the swashbuckling violin concertos of 1775, the spacious String Quintet No. 1 in B-flat, and, most strikingly, the Piano Concerto No. 9, which is a three-act instrumental opera of energetic play, melancholy withdrawal, and happy return. Whether any of these forward leaps can be connected with events in Mozart’s life remains a matter of debate. Did the traumas of 1778—the failure of his venture to Paris, the death of his mother, Leopold’s scathing criticism—create in Mozart a new musical maturity? During that Paris summer, Mozart wrote his taut, tense Piano Sonata in A Minor, another landmark in his development. The trouble is that we don’t know whether it was written before or after Maria Anna’s death, and, in the absence of other information, we have to assume that one day Mozart banged an A-minor chord like a wedge into the middle range of the piano and liked the way it sounded. Stanley Sadie, in his 2005 book Mozart: The Early Years, concludes unsentimentally, “There is no real reason to imagine that [Mozart] used his music as a vehicle for the expression of his own personal feelings.”

Then again, it’s hard not to see some connection between the life and the art in the period from 1781 to 1786, when a series of independent acts—Mozart’s escape from Salzburg to Vienna, his marriage to Constanze, his defiant response to Leopold’s objections to the above—coincides with a staggering outpouring of inspiration: the six string quartets dedicated to Haydn, fifteen concertos for piano and orchestra, the “Haffner” and “Linz” and “Prague” Symphonies, the Mass in C Minor, the operas The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Marriage of Figaro, and a dozen other pieces without which classical programming would grind to a halt. The instrumental works, with their architecturally imposing first movements and their slow movements that open up multiple inner worlds, are the most expansive of their time, looking forward to Beethoven only insofar as Beethoven looked back at them. Yet the futuristic broadening of scope is made possible by a study of the past; Mozart immerses himself in the art of Bach, prompted by a fad for old music in aristocratic circles. (The emperor liked fugues.) Also, in the slow movements spasms of dissonance are used to offset the surplus of beauty; Scott Burnham notes that the famous Andante of the Concerto No. 21 contains a quietly shuddering five-note collection that is not so much a chord as a cluster. Counterpoint and dissonance are the cables on which Mozart’s bridges to paradise hang.

Mozart’s operas, meanwhile, abandon artifice in favor of moment-to-moment psychological realism. In The Abduction from the Seraglio, Belmonte ventures into the Ottoman Empire in search of his kidnapped love, Constanze. Having learned that she is nearby, he sings of the anxious beating of his heart (“O wie ängstlich, o wie feurig”). The heartbeat is indicated in a soft but insistent pattern of falling thirds, in which, Mozart wrote proudly to his father, “you see the trembling, the faltering.” A fluttering, innocent-sounding kind of worry is suggested by rapid runs of flute and muted violins. Toward the end of the aria, the “throbbing” figure comes back in the minor mode, and it is reinforced by winds in unison. It ends up sounding obsessive and fearful—a lover’s paranoia creeping in. This insistent deepening of an ostensibly comic situation would become Mozart’s signature in the next several years; The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosìfan tutte, the three operas that he created in tandem with his ideal librettist, the Italian Jewish polymath Lorenzo Da Ponte, sprawl across the boundary between the comic and the tragic, defining life as what happens in between.

After 1786, the storm of style abates slightly. In this period, Mozart was no longer attracting sufficient numbers of subscribers to his public concerts, in part because of the economic effects of an expensive war with Turkey. So the production of piano concertos tapers off, and there are no symphonies after the “Jupiter,” of 1788. Instead, the completist listener must get through thickets of minuets, contredanses, and other popular dances, the result of Mozart’s new, revenue-enhancing job as the emperor’s Kammermusicus. These pieces are a little exasperating in large quantity, but they are full of witty, even zany details, and serve as a reminder that eighteenth-century composers were expected to be adept at producing both “popular” and “serious” styles. Period dances are deployed to dramatic effect in the ballroom scene in Don Giovanni, in which an aristocratic minuet, a popular contredanse, and a working-class Deutscher unfold simultaneously, in three different meters. The episode demonstrates Mozart’s ability to move as a free agent through the social and cultural hierarchies of his time.

In his last years, Mozart is less prolific than before. He seems to be groping his way toward a new style, more concise in form and more melodically compressed. Charles Rosen, in his book The Classical Style, isolates a telltale episode in the Adagio of the String Quintet in D (1790)—a quietly radical sequence in which, as Rosen writes, “four completely different kinds of rhythm [are] superimposed in a contrapuntal texture at once complex and deeply touching.” One violin moves up by steps, the other moves haltingly down, the two violas sigh on repeated seconds and thirds, and the cello undermines the harmony with a jazzy pizzicato figure that plunges down an octave and a half. Right afterward comes a radiant little theme of rising-and-falling phrases, which brings back one of the oldest recurring motifs in Mozart’s language—an archetype of love or longing. There is something elegiac in this gesture toward the past; Mozart, near the end, goes back to his beginnings. Yet it is hazardous to connect the elusive emotions of the late works with the fact of the composer’s approaching death. Julian Rushton wryly notes that critics used to detect “feelings of impending doom” in the Clarinet Concerto and the Piano Concerto No. 27, both of which appeared in Mozart’s final year; it turns out that the first movement of each was sketched several years earlier.

What Mozart might have done next is no one’s guess. The pieces that emerged from the suddenly productive year 1791—The Magic Flute, the ultimate Leopoldian synthesis of high and low; La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus), a robust revival of the aging art of opera seria; the silken lyricism of the Clarinet Concerto; the Requiem, at once cerebral and raw—form a garden of forking paths. Mozart was still a young man, discovering what he could do. In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity—The Tempest, Hamlet, the two-part Faust—but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, Don Giovanni.”

With the Mozart myths perpetually rising out of the ground where scholars have tried to bury them, the usefulness of Don Giovanni is that it puts a stake through the heart of the chocolate-box Mozart, the car-radio Mozart, the Mozart-makes-you-smarter Mozart. If the opera were played in bus stations or dentists’ waiting rooms, it would spread fear. It might cause perversion in infants. No matter how many times you hear the punitive D-minor chord with which the opera begins, or the glowering diminished seventh that heralds the arrival of the stone statue of the Commendatore (“Don Giovanni, you invited me to dinner, and I have come”), it generates a certain mental panic. Mozart’s harmonies of disaster are all the more terrifying because they break through the frame of what purports to be a saucy comedy about an aristocratic rake—a successor to Figaro. The fact that Figaro is actually quoted in the score—“Non più andrai” is one of the airs that the Don enjoys at dinner, just before the Commendatore arrives—suggests that Mozart is consciously subverting his reputation as a supplier of ambient musical pleasure.

The scholars Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz have put together an anthology titled The Don Giovanni Moment, which leaves aside the discussion of who Mozart really was and addresses the music’s impact on Western culture. That influence is enormous; if you wanted to locate the moment at which the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic age, you might well settle on Don Giovanni. As various writers in The Don Giovanni Moment recount, Goethe set to work in earnest on his Faust after seeing a performance of Don Giovanni, in 1797; Kierkegaard was excited by the “sensuous genius” of Mozart’s music, and by the Don’s chase after erotic release; the ambivalent liberal Pushkin was torn between the Don’s swagger and the Commendatore’s rectitude; George Bernard Shaw riffed on the opera in Man and Superman, letting the Don end up in heaven. Wagner was deeply in Mozart’s debt; when the tragic god Wotan sings the words “Das Ende!” in the Ring, he traverses the same intervals with which the Commendatore intones Don Giovanni’s name.

The leading Romantic rhapsodist of Don Giovanni was the novelist, storyteller, critic, and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose 1813 story-essay “Don Juan” is analyzed by Richard Eldridge in the anthology. For Hoffmann, the character of the Don is uninteresting on paper—“a bon vivant who loves wine and girls immoderately, who arrogantly invites the stone man, who portrays the old father whom he cut down in self-defense, to join him at his festive table.” Mozart’s music transforms the Don into a radical sensualist, a seeker of extremes. But he is a Romantic gone to seed: infinite longing devolves into sexual predation, a contempt for the ordinary curdles into cynicism. On the other side stands Donna Anna, the Commendatore’s daughter, whom the Don attempts to rape in the first scene of the opera. Hoffmann’s narrator speculates that Donna Anna actually succumbed to the Don’s advances, and swears vengeance to cover up her shame. Hoffmann is right in hearing something weirdly violent in Donna Anna’s utterances, especially the aria “Or sai chi l’onore” and the ragged recitative that introduces it. There is a blackness at the heart of her righteousness, just as there is a life force in the Don’s malice. Mozart’s quest for middle ground takes him into the risky space between good and evil. Both the terms and the outcome of this “conflict between godly and demonic powers,” as Hoffmann called it, are murky.

When the Don finally goes down to hell, you are not sure whether you are hearing infernal legions celebrating his arrival or the armies of heaven rather too enthusiastically enjoying their capacity for destruction—or, perhaps, some unholy concert of the two. The scene is structured around a staggered sequence of upward-creeping lines, sometimes in the bass and sometimes in the treble. Twice, the strings embroider that pattern with vehement up-and-down scales, and the fact that each scale is a half-step higher than the previous one gives the impression that the music is obliterating everything in its path, like a death machine in a medieval etching. Toward the end, a thumping four-note figure comes to the fore; it recalls the Commendatore knocking at the door but ends up sounding like the stomping of feet.

At the same time, as Michel Noiray observes in The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia, the scene has an archaic, religious aspect, echoing Renaissance and Baroque sacred music. In the first bars of the opera, immediately after the colossal opening chords, Mozart revives the device of the chromatic lamento bass. There might be a certain irony in the gesture; Peter Williams calls it “fate being underlined with a familiar and mundane formula, like doggerel verse in Faust.” When the Commendatore exacts his revenge, the formula is reversed: instead of trudging down, as in the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B-Minor Mass, the bass line plows relentlessly upward. As it happens, the same effect appears in several of Mozart’s youthful masses, in settings of the word “Crucifixus.” In addition, Mozart probably took inspiration from the hectic, dissonant dance that concludes Gluck’s 1761 ballet Don Juan—a diabolical chaconne in the key of D minor. For perhaps the first time in musical history, references to the past become a modernist gesture, a radical haunting.

The Don’s almost existential fate, his crucifixion without resurrection, is a singular event in Mozart’s world. Most of his operas end in a great scene of reconciliation, in keeping with Enlightenment ideals. In Figaro, the Countess pardons the Count; in Idomeneo, Neptune’s oracle, in whose music Leopold Mozart took such an interest, proclaims the power of love; in The Abduction from the Seraglio, Pasha Selim forgives his enemy’s son; and in The Magic Flute and La clemenza di Tito, both Sarastro and the Emperor rise above vengeance. (Così fan tutte is the other problem case; its reuniting of lovers is troubled by the fact that Fiordiligi has expressed high passion for the wrong man.) Jessica Waldoff, in her 2006 study Recognition in Mozart’s Operas, connects these scenes to Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis, or recognition, the “change from ignorance to knowledge.” In Don Giovanni, Waldoff points out, the moment of recognition is withheld: the Don remains “unflinching, unreflecting.” That is why the Romantics revered him: he does not stray from the extreme path that he has chosen. He is more Faustian than Goethe’s Faust—who does, in the end, repent.

A final twist awaits. In a cosmically laughing epilogue, the remaining principals gather to proclaim, in bouncy, up-tempo music, that evildoers always meet the same bad end. The Romantics had such difficulty accepting this seeming anticlimax that they routinely cut it from the opera. Richard Strauss was one of the first to recognize its ironic intelligence, and to restore it in performance. The scholars Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht write that the ending imagines “life without awe,” a truly human existence beginning on the other side of tragedy. The world may be a duller place without the Don and his occult nemesis, but it is still suffused with Mozartian bliss. We can live without extremists, however much they may stimulate our faculties of lust and rage.

Don Giovanni, which is many people’s choice for the greatest opera ever written, ends with something like a humble gesture: it dissolves its own aura of greatness. Having marched us to the brink of heaven and hell, Mozart abruptly pulls us back, implying that, in the manner of Shakespeare’s epilogues, all is show, a pageant melting into air. “I’m just the composer, I don’t have any answers,” he seems to say. “Life goes on!” And he walks away at a rapid pace, his red coat flapping behind him.

5 ORBITING RADIOHEAD’S GRAND TOUR

On a hot day in May 2001, the city of Bilbao was shaken by a velvety roar, not unlike the sound of a jet plane waiting on a tarmac. At one end of Calle de Iparraguirre, which cuts across the town, the silver shell of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum was glistening in the sun. For a moment, it seemed as if the noise were coming from there—as if the building were about to lift off and rocket elsewhere. In fact, the source of the disturbance was a local bullring, the Vista Alegre, where a German experimental DJ named Christoph de Babalon was testing his gear. He was the opening act for Radiohead, a five-man British group that had the reputation of being the most artistically formidable rock band since the Beatles. Radiohead fans were gathered at the entrance, staring up at the sound and asking what it meant. One had on a Kafka T-shirt, and others wore shirts with a Radiohead logo, which can only be described as a demon in tears.

A side door led to a concrete corridor, where the bulls run on an ordinary day. From there, planks reached out to a temporary stage. Christoph was in the center, eyeing his mixer and his CD players. With ice-blond hair and black sunglasses, he looked like a young Bond villain, but he turned out to be a friendly, chatty sort of sonic terrorist. “I am familiar with dark, small clubs,” he said after the sound check. “Now it is like I am in a gladiator film.” He mentioned some of his musical influences, which included avant-garde figures like Merzbow and the composer Morton Feldman. “Sometimes I work with beats, sometimes with layers,” he said. “Tonight I do layers.”

Christoph went to his dressing room, and the stage was empty for a while. Two shirtless old men sat on stone steps, looking as though they had not moved since Franco died. Radiohead’s gear basked in the sun. On the left-hand side was a rack of guitars—twenty-three in all. Up front, in an area set aside for Ed O’Brien, one of three guitarists in the band, was a tangle of pedals, samplers, and inch-thick cords. In the center of the stage, to be shared by Colin Greenwood, the bass player, and Thom Yorke, the singer, were various keyboards, a piano, and an upright bass. Equipment for Colin’s younger brother, Jonny Greenwood, stood on the right: more guitars, more keyboards, a xylophone, a transistor radio, a sci-fi stack of analog synthesizers, and a modified ondes Martenot, one of the earliest electronic instruments. The ondes Martenot is controlled by a ring that slides along a wire; fewer than a hundred people have mastered it, and Jonny is one. The only really conventional-looking apparatus was the drum set, although you could tell by some distress on the edges of the drums that the player, Phil Selway, had attacked the sides as well as the skins.

Backstage, the members of Radiohead were eating dinner. Colin Greenwood hovered over the catering table, inspecting an array of Basque dishes. He is typical of the group in that he looks nothing like a celebrity who has sold fifteen million records. He is a pale, slender man with jet-black hair and large, kindly eyes. He is easily distracted and delighted by the world around him, favoring the words “mad,” “brilliant,” and “amazing”—the last spoken with a long, liquid stress on the second syllable. He has a habit of suddenly burying his face in his hands, as if he were sinking into despair or falling asleep; after a moment, his face lights up again. Lavishly well-read, he can talk at length about almost any topic under the sun—Belgian fashion, the stories of John Cheever, the effect of different types of charcoal on barbecued meat—but he gets embarrassed by his erudition and cuts himself off by saying, “I’m rambling.” He is not above wearing a T-shirt that says “Life’s a beach and then you shag.” You might peg him as a cultish young neo-Marxist professor, or as the editor of a hip quarterly. But he is a rock star, with several Web pages devoted to him.

“It’s full on out there, isn’t it?” Greenwood said, looking toward the bullring, which was filling up with fans. “I’m scared.” He occupied himself by talking about Faust’s Metropolis, Alexandra Richie’s thousand-page history of Berlin. Outside, Christoph began to play for real, and was received in bemused silence.

An hour later, Radiohead hit the stage with a confidence that had been invisible before the show. The sound was huge, but it was awash in colors, contrasts, and detail. It was grand in effect, cool in tone, dark in mood. The set combined music from the band’s breakthrough albums of the mid-nineties—The Bends and OK Computer—with more recent material from the albums Kid A and Amnesiac. The older songs had choruses that the fans knew by heart, but the newer ones, which some rock critics had described as “anticommercial,” made the crowd dance harder. (In a demolition of conventional wisdom, Kid A, a hypnotic blend of rock riffs, jazz chords, classical textures, and electronic noise, had gone to the top of the Billboard chart the previous year.) “Idioteque” set off fierce rhythmic clapping, even though it was dominated by jagged beats, computer-music samples, and squawks from the analog synths. It must have helped that the singer, when he was done singing, launched into a demonically silly dance, kicking his legs as if someone were firing a gun at his feet. It may also have helped, on an unconscious level, that love-drunk chords from Tristan und Isolde lurked at the heart of the song, courtesy of Paul Lansky’s 1973 computer composition mild und leise.

In the middle of the set, Radiohead played a song called “Airbag,” which typifies the band’s crafty balance of art and pop. Jonny started off with a melody that snaked along in uneven time—one-two-three-one-two-three-one-two—and swayed between A major and F major. O’Brien added leaner, brighter curlicues on guitar. Selway came in with a precise but heavily syncopated beat. Then Yorke began to sing, in a well-schooled, plaintive voice, an oblique account of a near-fatal collision: “In the next world war / In a jackknifed juggernaut / I am born again.” At the mention of war, Colin let loose a jumpy bass line, giving a funky spin to the hymns in the treble. The music cut through a jumble of verses and choruses, then held fast to a single chord, as Yorke fell into sync with O’Brien’s chiming lines. Just before the end, Colin grinned, leaped in the air a couple of times, and seized hold of his brother’s tune, the one that had set the song in motion. The doubling of the theme, a very Led Zeppelin move, had thunderous logic, as if an equation had been solved. The interplay was as engaging to the mind as anything that had been done in classical music recently, but you could jump up and down to it.

In the old days, rock bands had a haircut, a lingo, a house style. The disconcerting thing about Radiohead is that its members aren’t much alike.They have in common the fact that they were born between 1967 and 1971, and that they grew up in Oxfordshire, England, where most of them still live, but beyond that their personalities diverge. Yorke, who writes most of the songs, is compact, boyish, and impish; he has a lethally quick mind and a subtly potent charisma. O’Brien, almost a foot taller than Yorke, has the jutting jaw and floppy bangs of an actor in a period war movie; he is suave and direct and seems to have rolled in from a different posse. Jonny Greenwood, a lanky figure with unruly black hair, is more cautious than his brother, Colin, but when he starts talking he excitedly involves himself in dense, Victorian sentences, biting clauses out of the air. Phil Selway, the oldest, is bald and sweet-faced, and talks in a gentle voice. He looks like the nice, ordinary one, but he often has a trace of a wicked smile.

How these five quirky Englishmen became the Knights Templar of rock and roll—the most closely analyzed, fervently admired, hotly debated, and slavishly imitated band of the modern era—is anyone’s guess. They are not too sure themselves. “Everyone comes to us with their heads bowed, expecting to be inducted into the mystery of Radiohead,” Selway said. He made a King Tut gesture with his arms. “We were hoist on our own petard with that. At a certain point, around 1997, we were simply overwhelmed and had to vanish for a bit. This was our honest reaction to the situation we were in. But some people thought we were playing a game, or had started taking ourselves too seriously. Really, we don’t want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff. What we do is pure escapism.”

What happened to Radiohead in 1997 was that they caught a wave of generational anxiety. The album OK Computer, with titles like “Paranoid Android,” “Karma Police,” and “Climbing Up the Walls,” pictured the onslaught of the information age and a young person’s panicky embrace of it. Yorke’s lyrics seemed a mixture of overheard conversations, techno-speak, and fragments of a harsh diary. The songs offered images of riot police at political rallies, anguished lives in tidy suburbs, yuppies freaking out, sympathetic aliens gliding overhead. In “Let Down,” Yorke even dared to describe the feeling of disappointment that follows a blast of hype, such as the one his band was producing. The album sold more than four million copies worldwide, enabling the group to become, by 1999, an independent operation. Radiohead were the poster boys for a certain kind of knowing alienation—as Talking Heads and R.E.M. had been before.

Radiohead remain a magnet for misfits everywhere, but their outsider status is only a part of their appeal. What fans seem to like, even more than the content of the songs, is the sense that the band members have labored over every aspect of the product. They are skilled, first of all, at inventing the kinds of riddles that people enjoy unraveling. The records, the videos, the official website, even the T-shirts all cry out for interpretation. Why are words spelled funny? What are all these charts and diagrams? What about the grinning bears and crying Minotaurs? “We liked worrying over that kind of thing when we were kids, and we’re still in the same mind-set a lot of the time,” Selway said. “But it’s a bit incidental. We’re dead set on the music. That’s the thread running through this whole thing. We met at school playing music together, and we still get together over music now. We like solving musical puzzles. That’s what Thom gives us.”

A Radiohead song is usually written in three stages. First, Yorke comes up with a rough sketch; then, Jonny, who studied composition briefly at Oxford Brookes University, fleshes out the harmony; finally, the others digest it for a while, working out their parts on their own. It can be months, even years, before a song comes together in a way that satisfies all of them. Take away any one element—Selway’s flickering rhythmic grid, for example, crisp in execution and trippy in effect—and Radiohead is a different band. The five together form a single mind, with its own habits and tics—the Radiohead Composer. This personality can be glimpsed in the daily bustle of the group, but you can never meet it face-to-face, because it lives in the music. A lot of what has been written about Radiohead—there are a dozen books, hundreds of magazine articles, and millions of words on the Internet—circles around an absent center.

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