How beautiful they were

Hey, future dead people.

How beautiful they were, those old people. I mean father and mother - how simple, how clear, how untroubled…(Virginia Woolf, diary entry from December 1940).

I agree with the soprano Laura Strickling that “Parents,” from Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, is a perfect song. In a 1940 diary entry, several months after her home was destroyed in the Blitz and several months before she took her own life, Woolf writes about looking through old photos. The music begins in a solemn, gentle march, like a reminiscence of a wedding or funeral. As the singer sinks into memory, the piano melts into a sweet triplet rhythm, alternating between lullaby and dance, and then it surfaces into a conversational tempo for the singer’s contemporary observation of her own nostalgia.

To conjure that kind of time travel is remarkable, and the song evokes joy and deep sorrow in me as I play it. It feels like the opposite of nostalgia, but instead like a musical doppelgänger of the human heart.

A bunch of us are doing a lil concert this afternoon, and all the music has something to do with very famous dead women from the worlds of music and writing. None of these women lived in obscurity. Clara Schumann’s 61-year career was one of the 19th century’s most prominent. Mathilde Kralik ran a salon in Vienna, where her compositions were performed in the flagship theaters. Pauline Viardot ruled the opera stage for decades, hung with musicians and writers, lived in a throuple, and got most of her music published in her lifetime. Régine Wieniawski (Poldowski) ran concert series in Europe and the US, and used to dine and dash with Noël Coward. And Virginia Woolf exhorted us all to get a room and kick the angels out of it.

They are not forgotten, these superstars, but the size and impact of their careers were diluted over time. That happens to most of us - actually, most of us disappear over time, and quickly - but none of the musicians on this list made it into the exclusive club of dudes whose careers grew more significant over time, who still get presented as a sort of compositional genius throughline, a family tree of mostly Germans who lead inexorably and logically from one to the next, either through legacy or groundbreaking opposition. That’s true in spite of the fact that two of those women belonged to Europe’s most renowned and lauded performers (in addition to composing, teaching, and championing the music of others).

We still tend to imagine that music survives and gains its reputation over time on its own merits, even though it’s obvious that this only happens through advocacy, through people teaching and performing it. So we’re performing some music written by these women. In Virginia Woolf’s case, the composition’s by a man who read her diaries and connected deeply with her words (and with the performer who would first sing them - the story of the From the Diary’s composition is a story of Argento deeply considering the gifts and personalities of the individual women he wrote for).

There’s something mystical about taking up the road map left by some stranger decades or centuries ago, learning its contours, investigating its unanswered questions. You decide your relationship to it. Is it The Word, or an ancient scroll that needs your contemporary context?

Either decision is one based in imagination.

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Knowing that a seven-months-pregnant Clara Schumann saved her family the night of the Dresden uprising doesn’t tell me anything about how to play the calm D flat major chords at the beginning of Ihr Bildnis. I may think that I hear Poldowski’s predilection for opium in the achingly slow, misty twists of Á Clymène, but that’s just surface-level linking of biography and harmony. And yet that’s where imagination starts. That’s where you begin making decisions: tiny micromanage-y ones, big weird leaps of faith, and everything in between.

And then there’s your partner, taking some poem in some other language and from some other time and place, and learning a melody also constructed by someone else, putting their voice and inflection behind it and miraculously retrofitting intention and spontaneity into it so that it sounds like these ancient sentences are coming straight from their own minds and hearts.

And then you just up and do this music together, at the same time! What! Honestly, I play piano with other people making music at the same time because it’s so much more interesting, unpredictable, and ultimately harder than playing alone. No disrespect to soloists: I know you often have a lot more notes to learn, but let’s face it, you need that virtuosity - otherwise, who wants to hear one person monologuing? Well, okay, a lot more people than want to hear classical vocal concerts (ouch).

But collaboration is harder, I won’t take it back. You have to leave the door open for your partner. You both have to be willing to say yes to the other, or to help if something goes wrong. I understand the thrill response to the daredevil soloist. Lord knows we have myriad examples of people exciting us with performances that don’t have to take anyone else into account. When dedication to precision and practice leads that kind of hair’s-breadth execution, it can blow you away. Other times, it’s just hectoring. Similarly, what looks like a collaboration can be people falling in line behind a leader out of fear, confusion, or hope of reward. But when it’s really a dance of equal daring and shared generosity, I swear there’s nothing better, even if you can’t control everything.

Because you can’t.

Because you can’t.

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We don’t remember most of what happens in our own lives, much less what anyone else ever did. This is part of what makes knowledge handed down so magical, and part of what makes it ridiculous to restrict what’s handed down. Of the four women musicians whose music we’ll sound tonight, I learned about one during my Reagan administration college years, Clara Schumann, presented to me as a great pianist and second-rate composer. But I know enough now in the last third of my life to know that art doesn’t survive because it’s the best (see: the compositions of Poldowski’s famous father), it survives because someone chooses it, engages with it, interacts with it, and takes action to tell its story.

I wonder who will tell ours.

Back to the ladies of this evening, in a place and time where it’s hard to hold on to anything.

How beautiful they were.

…but if I read as a contemporary, I shall lose my child’s vision and so must stop. Nothing turbulent, nothing involved, no introspection.

Thanks to Jamie, Jen, Kimberly, Mark and Morgan.