I am writing now not about the bright lights of success, the shining
glories of a life, but the bitter end.  I am speaking of the moments of
sad summation, when one looks back--or imagines oneself looking back--at
a life of promise incomplete.

Who has best captured these moments in music--intentionally or otherwise?

People write of the last Beethoven quartets, but I don't see resignation
there.  The great man was still exploring new worlds despite diminished
capacity.  Others quite rightly laud Mahler's 9th, the Four Last Songs
of Strauss, Brahms' Four Serious Songs or his Intermezzo, op.  118 #6
with its=

Dies Irae, or the 'Saturn' movement of The Planets.  But I'm not writing
of confrontation with or acceptance of death; this is of course a vast
subject.  I am writing instead about a realization of an unredeemable
failure of sorts in life.  Such may be made explicit by a composer, or
be discerned by biographical information and/or pessimistic musical
details.  Recent examples of the latter that come to mind are the Schnittke
7th and 8th or the Arnold 9th symphonies.  I would hope Listers would
have other examples to contribute.

I have three such to share.  One is explicit, one interpreted, and one
is intuitive.

The explicit musical depiction of a life's failure is the brief
but magnificent conclusion to Geirr Tveitt's Suite No.  2, Fifteen
(Hardanger) Mountain Songs, 'I saw so far away.' Anyone who has ever
climbed a mountain must have this work in their collection.  As put in
the notes to the Naxos CD: 'Finally, with clear-eyed gaze, the view of
a life unfulfilled: 'when I was young, I used to think I would climb
to blue distant hills; now I know I'll never reach so far." A plodding,
morosely descending march tune, relentlessly in a single modal key,
projects resignation with ever-expanding orchestration while dragging
down occasional upward fanfares that of former hopes.  A not-to-be-missed
gem!

My interpreted scenario of a type of life failure is the last symphony
of Shostakovich.  One of the first English-speaking writers to comment
on its perplexities, Hugh Ottaway, wrote:

   '[T]he listener is virtually prodded into asking what the composer
   had in mind ... Each musical step is beautifully clear, nowhere
   is there a note too many, and the scoring is lucidity itself.
   Paradoxically, this is also the most enigmatic of the symphonies,
   one in which the underlying thought seems most withheld.'

The symphony, along with the earlier Sinfonia of Berio, presaged
a fashion for quotation that later became a hallmark of a branch of
postmoderism.  It seems to me that Shostakovich used quotations in his
final symphony to suggest that Stalinism disfigured what might have been
a different life for him.  I suggest, with little documentary evidence,
that the symphony may well be an autobiography.  The first movement is
the young, uninjured Shostakovich, the brilliant devil-may-care composer
of the First Symphony and The Nose.  Hence the 'Lone Ranger' Rossini
quotation and Shostakovich's remark that the first movement was a
'toyshop.' The second movement is the 'Time of Judgment' for Shostakovich,
the early Stalin era and perhaps the war.  Since Shostakovich dealt
with the war extensively in his seventh and eighth symphonies, I'm
more inclined to ascribe the movement to the 'Muddle instead of music'
declaration, or even the vast 1937 purges, both of which gave so many
Amfortas' wounds to citizen psyches.  The third movement is a return to
the lighter touch, but this time a more carefully- step-lightly sarcasm.
To follow the admittedly artificial scenario, it might be considered a
characterization of the post-Stalinist period of semi-bungling government
oppression but less murder.

The fourth movement puts it all in context.  It is what the three
preceding eras did to the man.  It is his fate, as indicated by the
Die Walkure 'Fate' leitmotiv.  It is fate marred by death and fear of
death, as indicated by the drumbeats referencing Siegfried's Funeral
March.  'What is my afterlife94 Shostakovich asks as does Siegmund.
'What will I be remembered for94 Shostakovich declares it will not be
for love: a Tristan quote is cut off, as did Stalin cut off so many
lives.  Instead we hear a little ditty, punctuated again and again by
the Fate motiv.  'Let us save ourselves and hide our true feelings' is
what these passages say to me.  (Or perhaps Shostakovich is declaring a
failure to love.  I hear little love in his music except for the second
movement of the Second Piano Concerto.  A result of his psychic injuries?)

And what does Shostakovich say that he will be remembered for?  Bits
and snatches: (1) the Danse Macabre 'fossil' percussion at the conclusion,
a reference to his self-suppressed Fourth symphony, (2) mini-references
to the Fifth and 10th symphonies, and (3) most markedly, a melding of
menace - the Leningrad war-bolero tune pasted on to a reference to the
passacaglia of the self-suppressed First violin concerto, the latter a
passacaglia inspired by the maiming, bureaucratic stupidity of the 1948
Zhdanov pronouncements.  To me, this self-assessment of a movement is
not deliberately over-modest, it is a tired man's declaration of failure.
Compare the Shostokovich approach to self-assessment with that of Elgar
('We are the Music Makers') or, more embarrassingly, Strauss ('Ein
Heldenleben').

Finally, there is a third example of failure: a gut feeling I have
regarding most of the post-Palestrina music of Pfitzner.  I have yet
to analyze this in detail, but it seems that everything he wrote after
1920 seems to turn in on itself and say, 'Well, you're not going to like
this anyway, I hate it myself and you too!' There is a strange unfulfilled
longing in his music that is undercut.  Attempts at Wagnerian heroics
fall on their face.  Sinuous melodies fall in on themselves and go
nowhere.  Works like his piano concerto are universally condemned.  I
can't describe it, but somehow for me they succeed in failure, and his
works bear rehearing in this light, especially the piano concerto and
the C sharp minor symphony.

Three composers, three considerations of failure - but they all succeed
in their own way, more than we ever shall.

Jeff Dunn
Alameda, CA
[log in to unmask]