Three friends and I
crossed a long field,
skirting the wetlands behind
our dismal college.
On a dare, we each in turn
sang out the opening bars,
and major themes
of every movement
of all nine symphonies.
Beethoven, deaf,
cared not what key
we sang it in, but would
have smiled when we reached,
at last, the Ninth’s Finale.
We did it, we who sipped wine
on Ludwig’s December birthday.
Not one of us was a music major.
We knew these symphonies
the way we knew to breathe.
These nine stupendous works
cap off a vast and free
inheritance that belongs to all.
Today, I mention the Master
and those works’ long shadows
over everything that followed,
and most of those around me
squirmed and changed the subject.
Poor fools, do you think
there’s time enough in Heaven
to attend to serious music?
Who leaves a check
for a million dollars,
a life of ecstasies and joy,
unclaimed, uncashed?
Thoughts many years ago while hearing Georg Solti and The Chicago Symphony perform Act
III Of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung
in concert
1 Here
walks young Siegfried by the Rhine,
armed with a Ring the old
gods lost,
curled in a fist, that ancient gold,
its sun-gut
power crushed to grams
of portable might.
This hero, half-awake,
does not yet know himself.
He
has lived among bears and evil dwarfs.
He knows not what power
means,
nor in his brazen youth believes
the Rheingold
curse’s warning.
As the nixies taunt him, he almost hurls
the
thing into the river — let them have it;
it’s neither good
for food or fighting —
but he yields instead, self-irked
to
danger’s lure — his strong arms
enjoy a good battle. He
savors fear
as though the its loss would soften him. He will keep the Ring, to see what happens.
Already
you are drugged, young man:
the Tarnhelm poison pours
mercury
across your eyes, blinds you to envy
and to those
who tread along behind you.
You love the hunt, the running ardent
life; sun-gilded trinkets are nothing to you
since you eat from the nut-trees
and hunt-fire.
You are proud of your strength, your
certitude oblivious to oaths of greed and lust, the lure of pleasure the ends with knife-thrust.
As music soars, some listeners both hear and see. Others have obsidian, dead eyes, inverted smiles frozen in Republican hauteur, Mrs. and Mr. Gibichung in furs and wingtips. She has done nothing to harm anyone. He has perhaps done a great deal to a great many. The thin and tender line between cynic and murderer: one says no heroes live; the others makes sure all heroes are killed.
This opera is not for its audience. It dwells in a realm of ideas, forms crystallized in words sung, spun upon leitmotivs that make all words much more than their sum. Siegfried, you do not know you are being played through, lived through, a thousands voyeurs and auditors engaged in your triumph and love and loss. At
the last, pathetic youth,
when your eyes are cleansed by a
traitorous cup, when you at last remember everything, you see how Love and Art are yours,
how you were tricked into giving them away to fools; the Love you awakened
sent to warm the glutton crowds, Brunnhilde cast to Mrs and Mr Gibichung,
never to grace your own barren
hearth.
Then at the surge, when wings of worth
flap with
your just demand,
you are just as suddenly slain. Your terminus erupts in
raven wings and the All-Father who could have saved you does nothing. One funeral beat will serve for all. Everything must fall.
2 Now
proud Brunnhilde,
the spiteful demi-goddess, comes,
armed
with her timeless grace. Whom have you killed? she
asks He brought the sun to your side,
you heard his
songs, took me,
his freely given gift, in vain.
Come, light
the pyre, indeed!
Burn all the souls in whom the hero died,
see
if the withering youth in your breast
falls too, like his, when
the world
envelops darkness for an age.
His loss has cost
you me:
I’ll be no muse for coward bards.
All art and
song I strip from you.
Birds even shall be dumb.
Life
without Siegfried
must teach you what you have lost.
There
burns the maiden Art:
museums blaze, books fall
as leaves,
a flaming trumpet
melts, and in the wake
no hearth on earth
shall glow again.
The
floods of time and folly
bear off the Ring, while gods
who
thought themselves undying
turn to dust in an eye-blink.
Now
humankind will worship
a wimp’s god, a bloody thorn,
a
bleating lamb, a sigil.
Go
to the forest black, go where
no church steeple blights
horizon.
Stand there, and on a breeze you hear
Brunnhilde’s
hymn
changelessly re-sung:
to have lived, or died,
in
the love of the human best
is great, and answerless.
You, Wanderer, graybeard and granite-skinned, obdurate in wind, leaning upon an ancient staff:
what
storm
brews now inside
those stony silences?
You loved a woman once, a son sprung from her easily — through him, a son again.
Is
that the boy, now climbing the crag to goat heights, his golden locks a laugh at your receding
gray?
Who are you, anyway, the stripling asks, under that hat? Why is its brim so wide, why does it droop across your face like that?
You
answer uneasily, It is the way of travelers
to bend a hat against the wind.
He spies your missing eye, your need to defend a sightless
side. Somebody else whose way you blocked, no
doubt he plucked that eye out?
Taunting, the young man edges to
pass,
barred by your swifter arm, your staff of ash.
You know him now: Siegfried, son of
Sigmund. You say: The eye I lost is one of
the ones you use to see the one I have left.
He is not much for riddles. Lunging, he breaks your
staff.
He pushes you aside
like an inconvenient
boulder.
You have nothing to tell him
he cares to hear
about. Like father, like son: even with ravens to help,
you never saw anything
coming, either.
Entropy scorns the immortal. [Revised May 2019]
I just finished making an arrangement of my Elegy and Variations for string quartet, which I am calling my String Quartet No 1. The pitch-perfect Chengdu String Quartet recorded this in an abandoned movie theater near here, while Fritz watched out for police. After three takes, I think we got it down well. Some actual bats responded to the "bat-flight" segment, to general delight. The twelve-minute work consists of:
Here it is -- the culmination of my summer musical studies. This is my
first piece for string orchestra. The never-tiring and ever-patient
Squirrel Hill Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Meng Chiu-Lei, does the
honors here. This piece is an Elegy and Variations dedicated to the
memory of Dr. William Alexander, my first (and only) music theory
teacher from those ancient Edinboro days of yore. Since we both loved
the landscape of the lake and its environs, it seemed appropriate to
include some nature painting, so I have depicted bats and fireflies.
Alexander's sometimes grumpy persona comes out after that in a stormy
section that has bullfrog-like sounds in the bass. Then it meanders into
a distant key and the main theme gets a more soaring treatment,
reflective of Alexander's generosity and good works. The it fades back
into the elegiac quietude again in F-Sharp Minor, without ever returning to the C Minor
world in which it opened. If you have 12 minutes to enjoy some gloom,
stress, and Romantic angst, here it is for your enjoyment. Listen with
headphones to hear the full impact of the double-basses.
SUBJECTS: Edinboro, Brett Rutherford, musical works, string orchestra, William Alexander
This poem answers two questions that came to me from readers. The first was, "Don't you ever write love poems with girls in them?" The second was, "What is your oldest surviving poem?" I started writing some little verses soon after discovering Poe, then, under the guidance of Mrs. Van Kirk, my high school Latin teacher, I composed a few poems in Latin and then translated them into English. One of the Poe-esque poems has survived and is in my "Whippoorwill Road" collection. The other is here.
At age fifteen or so, I was hospitalized for a few days after a nearly-fatal nosebleed. I lost two-and-a-half pints of blood and was declared dead by an intern since I had no pulse while sitting up. After transfusions, I recovered. Sitting in my hospital bed, whose windows faced a cemetery lit up by a steel mill's red glow, I was given a little AM radio, on which I heard the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique for the first time. The radio announcer spelled out the program of this daring 1827 symphony. In the first movement, a young artist falls hopelessly in love, and the music depicts the storm of his passion, and his hopelessness when he isn't noticed. In real life, Berlioz was smitten with Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress who came to Paris to perform in Shakespeare. Of course she played Juliet.
My first "real" poem was written that night: lines written in response to the music and its program. What survives my later editorial destruction is marked as my Opus 16, and only two parts of the five survive. I cast the love affair of the first movement literally, as the starving young student in love with the famous artist. The third movement, when the poet is off in the mountains trying to forget his love, includes imitations of lonely shepherds playing their pipes, interrupted by thunder rolling off the Alpine mountains.
As an "ekphrastic" poem relating impressions of the Berlioz music, I think it conveys that adolescent ardor, so I offer it in response to the challenge question about whether I had any boy-girl love poems that didn't involve witches, goddeses or vampires. I wish that my efforts to describe the "March to the Gallows" and the "Witches' Sabbath" that end the symphony were printable, but they were truly dreadful, consisting of jingling rhymes in very short lines.
[Note since the first posting: I just discovered another revision of this poem that has more details corresponding to the outline of Berlioz' music. Alas, it also includes a grimmer ending to the Pastorale movement, in which our hero decides to go back to Paris and strangle his beloved. Well, that is where Berlioz takes it next, with a March to the Gallows for the hero. The text below is now the expanded, darker version of the poem.]
By the way, I still love the symphony as much as I did then.
So here is young Berlioz, as told by teen-aged Rutherford:
SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE
(After the Symphony by Berlioz)
1
First Movement: Dreams, Passions
I did not plan this passion.
Your voice intruded on my consciousness,
its foreign lilt, its strange inflections,
the way your meter’d tongue dropped pearls
of Shakespeare, Poe and Baudelaire,
the way your eyes implored me
as though it were my destiny
to grapple with some hooded Darkness
to win you for myself.
But what am I?
What is my frail embrace
to beauty such as yours?
All eyes are chained to you.
See how the students crave your neck,
the soldiers admire your slender waist,
the old men yearn for your kisses —
an army would not suffice for you!
I am your unknown conqueror.
I am the one who sends you violets,
a myrtle wreath, a sonnet.
Others impress you with jewelry,
offer to garb you in silk and velvet.
I stood at the fringe of the stage door crowd.
Strong ones pressed in toward you--
oh, the broad-shouldered ones,
the lion’s-mane heroes, the uniforms!
I was the shadow at the edge of gas lamp.
You smiled, touched hands,
absorbing their love like a thirsty plant,
rose blush rising on your ivory cheek.
You never noticed me —
not tonight, nor on all the other nights.
But then my heart rose up
a double timpani of triumph.
You entered your carriage,
one hand enfolding a billet doux
(still in its envelope, unread perhaps),
the other protecting a fragile bouquet —
my violets! my violets! oh god,
tonight you will read my poems,
tonight you will know that I love you!
I walk the streets all night,
chilled by the Seine
on half a dozen crossings.
I pause before the gray cathedral,
look up into the knowing clouds
that hurtle eastward
to the sunrise.
The rosette window is dark,
for all the candles
and their attendant prayers
have guttered out.
This night my angel, good or ill,
is absent. I am resigned.
The heavens will do nothing.
My words alone shall win you.
iii
Third Movement: Scene in the Fields
You shepherds, play!
You know not what your fluted night
does to the haunted.
You wind, rising in harmony,
I think you plowed great ships
across some sea,
you tasted salt not of tears only.
Look how you grapple
with the landlocked cedars,
birch staffs taut as ropes,
leaf sails tattering.
The trees snap back, you drown
the frail reed pipes
and rage with your own voice
among the mountain pines.
The shepherds flee. Now double thunder
rolls from peak to valley,
a mournful rumbling
of discontent, as though the gods
had lovers just as oblivious
as she to me.
If these vast and terrible beings
can gain no solace, then what of me?
Would I were dead and gone, would that
bare earth and unabating wind
outlived me, sole dwellers
of an everlasting night!
If I were left
to wolf and vulture,
to eagle, crow and carrion —
if only these pages (made orchestral by a hand unseen that guides my hand!)
remained, spun down
to the valley, the river, the sea.
If one day decades hence, this poem falls from an opened book
into your startled view, or,
passing the concert hall
you hear the corresponding melodies
and discern your name in them,
would you recall me then, knowing the one who loved you
left a bleached skull on a granite mountain a heartbeat petrified into a stony silence the thunder punctuates?
My solitary end is pointless unless its iron-black pole
can draw you to it.
I will live on, and draw new breath;
I will return to you, unwelcome
as my love has been, not loving,
but as the Messenger of Death.
The pale throat I love,
