#pasqualatihaus

As someone who, in many ways, learned about music from books I read, I quickly learned that much of what was written about so-called Classical music sounded very much like catechism class. Much of what was said about the so-called “great” composers of the past was hagiography: a carefully constructed mythology designed to support the idea of their mysterious “genius.” Just as I could never fathom how certain saints had performed miracles, I could never hope to fathom how the great geniuses of the past were inspired to create their remarkable masterworks. The notion of how these great figures of the past deserved our worship was an underlying message: no doubt that was why concert halls were meant to be as silent as churches.

Needless to say, just as I lost my connection to the Catholic Church around the age of 16, by the time I hit undergraduate school, I was losing faith with the lives of the saints that constituted much of music history and music appreciation. So imagine my distress when Anthony Tomassini, the chief music critic of the New York Times, decided to pen a series of articles about the “greatest” composers, encouraging readers to write in and offer their opinions. Of course, his list reinforced the usual litany of saints.

This discomfort has worsened in the past two years, when I have found myself teaching, of all things, music history, needing to address all the dead white men that I look upon with suspicion. How do you talk about the history of the Western Art Music tradition (or WAM, as I often call it), and not simply perpetuate the canon? This past semester, after thoroughly deconstructing an iconic composer (none other than J.S. Bach), I came to the next class and apologized, quoting an essay by Debussy, who noted that yes, there have been many great composers in the past, but adding “Don’t ask me to admire them uncritically.” And that has, indeed, become my guiding principle: I’ll talk about the iconic composers of the past, but I will discuss them as real, frequently flawed, human beings, who ate, drank, shat, and fucked just like the rest of us. I want to look at their works not just as moments of “divine inspiration,” but the result of real sweat and imagination, as they attempted to manage their lives in the real world, whether that real world was the court of the Esterhazy family in 18th-century Austria, or a cramped little apartment in Paris in the 19th century. Because, ultimately, that’s what makes this music real to me.

For example, you can visit one of Beethoven’s many apartments in Vienna, in a building known as the Pasqualati house. The last time I was there was on Christmas eve, 2016, and the surly man working at the entrance when I didn’t understand his mumbled German and had to revert to English chewed me out for wasting his time. Perhaps he thought that surly was the appropriate mode for Beethoven. Certainly the famous scowl, featured in most likenesses of the composer, leads us to believe that the man was in a permanently cranky state.

And of course, in keeping with the myth-making of WAM, the apartment you can visit in the Pasqualati house, filled with odd Beethoven memorabilia and scores, may not really be the one Beethoven lived in...more likely, it was a flat a couple of floors down, currently occupied by another tenant, who is perpetually not at home. But we can walk around this space and pretend. 

But in one corner of the apartment is a delightful thing. The curators have stripped back two centuries of paint and wallpaper, to reveal a small section of the wallpaper they believe covered the walls of the apartment at the time when Beethoven actually lived in the building. Not the perfected white walls of a museum, but a slightly grimy beige or green with tiny flowers, that decorated a late 18th-century parlor or bedroom. It’s an uneven little excavation: not a square or rectangle as much as little modernist abstraction: it reminds me of Paul Klee. Yet this odd little moment is the most real thing in this curiously fetishized museum. It permits us to look, in a disorderly, messy way at what was actually there. I don’t have to pretend about divine influence or greatness: I can just check out what the wallpaper used to look like.

So many people ask me, who is my favorite composer? They never like my answer, which is that I don’t really have a favorite composer. There are a lot of composers I like and admire, though rarely do I like all of their work. In fact, it would be easier for me to make a list of my ten favorite works than my ten favorite composers. In many cases, those who created works I’m very fond of also wrote works I don’t care for at all, for one reason or another. Take Ludwig, since we’ve been looking at his wallpaper. The last movement of the Sonata No. 30 in E major never fails to move me, and this past summer I heard the Danish String Quartet play the late A minor String Quartet so beautifully that it just broke my heart. The hall was packed, and I can’t recall another audience that was so utterly silent while music was being played: that stillness in the room crowded with people was part of the beauty of the performance.

On the other hand, some years ago, at a dinner party in Vienna, surrounded by American and Austrian musicologists and music educators, I complained loudly that the Beethoven symphonies were the most overplayed works in the repertoire, and that I would die content if I never had to listen to another one. The Austrian woman across from me got a conflicted look on her face, part horror, and part delight, and she leaned forward, smiled, and said “You...are an evil man!”

365/129: Bassena