Greg Stepanich

Playing music for peace

In time of war, music is often called on to express what cannot be expressed in words.

We live now in a period in which more war, not less, would appear to be in our future, and it seems to me that we can only be certain that dark days lie ahead. I don’t think we’re going to see street-by-street fighting in our own country, but we will be taking part in, and witnessing, a great deal of armed conflict elsewhere.

I suppose that’s a more pessimistic view than some would have, but I don’t see any other outcome at this point. Which leads me to believe that over the next few months, those of us who are non-combatants are likely to hear this or that piece dedicated to the victims of the failure of politics, or entire memorial concerts, or tours undertaken with the objective of raising awareness.

Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered a “prayer for peace� by way of Johannes Brahms at a dinner hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Here’s a clip of that performance, which features a bit from a Brahms violin sonata (the violinist has pitch problems) and then Rice is heard in two very brief excerpts from the Intermezzo in A, Op. 118, No. 2.

It’s well-known that Rice is a major Brahms fan, and this piece has been a favorite of pianists for decades because of its beautiful tune and its autumnal coloring. It’s not that difficult to play, but it sounds harder than it is because of the canny writing for the piano that exploits all the riches of the instrument, which was by the time this piece was written in about 1892, essentially the piano we know today.

As a prayer for peace, the Brahms has something to recommend it in its sweet, reassuring tone and its sense of gentle forward motion. It would work just as well in a choral setting, or with strings, or a full orchestra, and I don’t doubt that some enterprising souls along the way have done just that. For that matter, much of late Brahms works for meditative, solemn purposes, such as the 11 organ chorales with which he closed his compositional career.

But are there other pieces that would serve well as prayers for peace, and there have been many that were written explicitly for that purpose. If you widen the net to include works that sound serene, then you’ve got quite a few to draw on.

Off the top of my head, I’d offer up:

a) Almost anything by Palestrina. His music has a built-in kind of serenity that is inherently transporting to a place where we think of nobler things. (In that same period, many of the sacred works of Schütz and Lassus would work well, too.)

b) The Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony of Mahler. Surely the most well-known of Mahler’s pieces, it’s nevertheless a beautiful, somewhat tortured song for strings and harp. The end of the Third Symphony works for this purpose, too, with its long, delayed D major cadences.

c) The slow movement of the String Quartet in A minor, Op, 132, of Beethoven. The Heiliger Dankgesang is a study in rapture, and the contrasting Andante sections (“Feeling new strength�), could be interpreted to represent the joy to be felt at the cessation of strife.

Just pulling those out of the air, really. Anyone else have a good peace-prayer playlist? Post something, and we’ll discuss it.

More on Stanzerl: The other afternoon, while in downtown Delray, I stopped at the newsstand to pick up new reading material to have dinner by, and as is my pretentious wont, I picked up (in addition to the Sunday NYT) a copy of Le Monde and and another of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. I studied French and German, but don’t really speak them, but I like to pick up papers in these languages now and again to see what I can remember.

And in the July 15 edition of the FAZ, on page 37 of the Feuilleton section, there was a short piece about the Frau Mozart photograph whose authenticity has been questioned. The piece, as far as I could read it, made the case for authenticity, saying scholars had noted a large growth on the right hand of Constanze Mozart, calling it a “gouty hand,� They cite this as proof of her advanced arthritis.

The article also says the picture was taken on Max Keller’s 70th birthday, which was Oct. 7, 1840, and that it was probably taken by the grandson of Johann Nepomuk della Croce, an artist who painted Mozart en famille when the composer was young. The mystery continues.