Reflections from the 19th Century

For more than two years, I’ve been reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. As I’m surely the slowest reader on planet Earth, the Herculean summit of more than 800 pages is not easily conquered, and progress is further decelerated by my thirst for fragments of story and for the full experience of the world in which David’s life unfolds. For months, I’ve been stagnant, reading only a little at a time, not because I don’t want to know what happens, but because I want to dwell in that place and time as long as possible. I have a love for the characters and the world they inhabit. As with the setting of every excellent story, it has come to feel like a real place, one I will be sorry to leave when the last page is turned. The story is told in first person, so the reader views the world entirely through David’s eyes, and what a charming sense of goodness it inspires; David himself is quite intelligent, but also sincere, even-tempered, and incredibly kind. As an adult, he retains a certain innocence complemented by great sensibility, and as a child, he perceives quite keenly, despite his innocence, the truest forms of joy and qualities of character that merit admiration. The purity
with which he engages the world is past endearing, past contagious, and I’ve found myself, many times, turning the page with a full heart and eyes welled with tears. Dickens describes his life, particularly his tumultuous youth, in a way that feels universally relevant, skillfully sketching some of the loveliest, most tender, most bittersweet images from any childhood. In Chapter III, a very young David, of perhaps only five or six years, relates his regard for little Emily, Mr. Peggotty’s niece, whom he meets on his first trip to Yarmouth: “Of course I was in love with little Em’ly. I am sure I loved that baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life, high and ennobling as it is. I am sure my fancy raised up something round that blue-eyed mite of a child, which etherealised, and made a very angel of her. If, any sunny forenoon, she had spread a little pair of wings, and flown away before my eyes, I don’t think I should have regarded it as much more than I had had reason to expect…. I told Em’ly I adored her, and that unless she confessed she adored me I should be reduced to the necessity of killing myself with a sword. She said she did, and I have no doubt she did.” This confession always brings a smile, as something in it transcends all manner of wisdom or sensibility, and it becomes clear that one is in the presence of greatness. And what is truly angelic is not so much little Emily, but rather David himself and his view of her. The image, in all its humor comingling ever sweetly with the genuine affection his young heart surely feels, is as irresistible as air. It is a greatness too frequently overlooked or trivialized. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus directs his disciples not to hinder the little children wishing to approach him, “…for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” And I believe it does. The vigor and exuberance excited in that time of life is the stuff of glory, and what becomes us best is to embrace it, and worst, to scorn or to disregard it.

I believe I began to read David Copperfield at a good time of life; never before have I so treasured the simplicity of youth or seen more clearly the danger in the wearisome and convoluted “wisdoms” of age and so-called “experience.” More often than not, we seem to renovate our understanding of the past in order to validate whatever ways we may be presently mistaken. Often it is the clarity of youth that gives judgment its best opportunities, and the spiritual renewal of sincerity and humility is the gateway back to that child-like mind that age and experience would otherwise bury. These reflections arrived in such a timely way, as I began to see the revelation alive in other situations. Often a thought or an idea translates easily across art forms and modes of expression; I have, in fact, heard the greatness I mentioned previously in the concert hall.

I should note that nearly everything I know of classical music I learned from my father, whose contagious love of music was a mainstay of my own youth. From him I learned the various forms of Western music, of which the symphony is among the most prominent, and which, in our time, seems to have gone almost entirely out of fashion. But in the heyday of Romanticism, the early 19th century produced some of the most memorable, deeply personal, and altogether heavenly musical scores in the way of symphonies.

The Viennese Joseph Haydn is sometimes credited as the father of the symphony, but in truth, many composers of the classical period wrote symphonies before him. What Haydn did accomplish was the adoption of a specifically classical framework, which he used to write over a hundred symphonies and which was further utilized by his pupil, Mozart. Of course, any discussion of the symphony must eventually default to the one justifiably credited as its master. Composers over the decades have moved in subtly different directions within the artistic eras and had myriad opinions of each other’s work. Both Brahms and Dvorak revered the masters of the past, whereas other Romantics such as Wagner favored the leitmotif approach, which tended to literalize musical themes and narrow the interpretation of a larger work. Brahms, in particular, was heavily criticized by composers like Tchaikovsky, who was, in turn, criticized by Rimsky-Korsakov and his prodigious student, L’enfant terrible, Igor Stravinsky. Furthermore, Stravinsky and his fellow Parisian Debussy also objected to the leitmotifs of Wagner. And so the criticism continues as one’s scholarship of Western music is built. And yet, all of them, romantics and contemporaries alike, seemed to agree on the supremacy of one, one with whom Western music, and particularly the symphony, received a level of artistry and innovation unparalleled, before or since. This composer is Beethoven. If all the great composers were a council of Jedi, he is the Yoda, the Shakespeare, the sonic sovereign to which every knee must bend, a brilliant and impervious titan, the gravity to which all minds in the musical universe capitulate. None can deny his supreme level of achievement in the majority of musical forms of his day, particularly the symphony. Beethoven wrote only nine in this form, a seemingly modest accomplishment next to the prolific efforts of Haydn and Mozart. However, with those nine, he achieved a breadth of inspiration and greatness like no other and became the first musical voice of Romanticism in music. While his first two symphonies are wonderful in their own rights and provide a variety of imaginative and individualistic passages, perhaps his first notable of the nine was the Third, known as “Eroica.” Having originally intended to dedicate the work to Napoleon, who he believed would bring democracy to France, Beethoven was enraged when the great military marvel committed his own worst sin by crowning himself emperor, at which point Beethoven decided simply to dedicate the symphony to the memory of a heroic man. At once epic and pastoral, and exceedingly greater in length than any symphony by Haydn or Mozart, the Third Symphony was a revolutionary act, a milestone many have come to regard as the end of Classicism and the beginning of the Romantic era in music. He followed this with symphonies of equal and even greater design, including the Fifth Symphony (the opening three-note motif of which is among the most memorable themes in all of music); that lovely and effervescent ode to bucolic life and lore, the Sixth, known as the “Pastoral”; the exuberant and dance-like Seventh, the closing pages of which some initial critics attacked as simply “noise” (and what a joyful noise!); and of course, the monumental Ninth Symphony, known as the “Choral” due to the final movement in which Beethoven set to music, for chorus and four soloists, the poem “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich Schiller, a work he saw as perfectly articulating the brotherhood of all humanity. Indeed the Ninth Symphony is often said to rank among the highest achievements of humankind, next to works like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or King Lear.

My dad once told me he had gone through several seasons of life during which different symphonies held the rank of his favorite. I believe he said it was once the Fourth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, an LP of which was the first recording he ever bought, at I-have-no-idea-what age. For a time, I believe it was the First Symphony of Mahler, known as “Titan.” And I distinctly remember his account, on more than one occasion, that the First Symphony of Brahms held the lead in his heart for many years. Some musicologists have referred to Brahms’ First as “the Tenth,” as though it were what Beethoven himself would have given us had he written a tenth. At any rate, having grown up beside the hearth of my father’s musical passions, I eventually came to regard this vast historical legacy of music with great interest, though it was some time before I had sampled enough of the classical canon to know which composers and which pieces most suited me and in which direction my own taste would tend.

At length, I found a deep affection for the music of another German master, Franz Schubert. Like many great artists before and since, Schubert met his end at a young age, but left behind an extensive host of universally beautiful oeuvre. Schubert succumbed to syphilis in 1828, about a year and a half after the death of Beethoven, whom he had revered from afar for most of his years in Vienna. Schubert was, however, granted his wish to be buried next to Beethoven, their graves remaining side-by-side in the Währing cemetery in Vienna until 1888, at which point both were moved to the Zentralfriedhof, in the city’s Simmering district, where they remain interred to this day, not far, incidentally, from the grave of Brahms. From the first, I heard a great universality in Schubert’s music, which came to me shortly following the death of my older brother, a time when I was hungry for aesthetic meditations on the subject of mortality (an idea that frequently inspired Schubert, given his illness). This universality seemed to be confirmed when finally I read the words of the composer Robert Schumann, who once said of Schubert: “…Innumerable as are the shades of human thought and action, so various is his music” (Cross, 675). And when I ask myself what I may consider my favorite symphony, aside from the variety of masterworks already mentioned here, one stands out for me above all others, a symphony for which my own affection is so great, I dare not listen too often; as many times as it already has graced my ears, it should not become worn or cheapened upon repetition and elude my sensitivity to its majesties. It is Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, more commonly referred to as the Great C Major Symphony. Robert Schumann once wrote of the piece in a letter to his future wife:

“Oh, Clara, I have been in paradise today! They played at the rehearsal a symphony of Franz Schubert’s. How I wish you had been there, for I cannot describe it to you. The instruments all sing like remarkably intelligent human voices, and the scoring is worthy of Beethoven. Then the length, the divine, length, of it! It is a whole four-volume novel, longer than the choral symphony. I was supremely happy, and had nothing left to wish for, except that you were my wife and that I could write such symphonies myself” (Fisk, 101).

What Schumann refers to as the divine, or “heavenly,” length seems, to me, to indicate something in Schubert’s manner of thematic development. Rarely do I find myself wishing to hear a satisfying melody in the symphony that it does not then pick up that very theme and treat me to another delightful taste. Even with its length, as with Beethoven, there is never a sense that a note is wasted or that themes and passages are needlessly repeated. There is nothing meandering or derelict about Schubert’s melodies here. Each volume of the novel seems to unfold with tremendous ease, as if the music had been written beforehand, and Schubert had simply taken down some heavenly dictation.

But I have not yet mentioned the true sublimity of this work, for this dictation is the voice of a child. And thank heavens it is so, because no other symphony sounds quite like it. Schumann wrote generally regarding Schubert’s work, and said this:

“Experiences that youth has not yet achieved are necessary to the evaluation of Bach; it even underestimates Mozart’s greatness. Mere musical studies are not enough to enable us to understand Beethoven, just as in certain years he inspires us with one work rather than with another. It is certain that equal ages exert a reciprocal attraction upon each other, that youthful enthusiasm is best understood by youth, and the power of the mature master by the full-grown man. So Schubert will always remain the favorite of youth. He gives what youth desires—an overflowing heart, daring thoughts, and swift deeds; he tells them what they most love, romantic stories of knights, maidens, and adventures; he intermingles a little wit and humor, but not so much that the basic softness of the mood is thereby troubled. Moreover, he gives wings to the performer’s own imagination like no other composer save Beethoven” (Fisk, 101).

This spirit of youth is just what I hear and feel in the presence of the Great C Major Symphony. Imagine a young boy of David’s temperament, a boy of perhaps seven or eight, somehow gifted with the skill to write an epic symphony, and the Great C Major would be the result, a work of surpassing weight, but guided by the judicious yet playful intrigues of a tender-hearted boy who sees nothing amiss in falling on a sword for the love of his maid, a little girl his own age whose smile cannot help but shame the sun and stars for all their wont of light. He sees whole mornings full of God’s praise horizoned in her eyes, and her every part so tiny, so delicate as to inspire a great honor to spare her harm with his very life.

From the time I was a young child until well into my teens, each night as I sank beneath the covers to welcome sleep, I would let my thoughts turn toward a love fantasy. I would conjure such wholesome scenarios, dream of pure and hesitant infatuations, following some elaborate plot to the moment at which the love between myself and the young lady were cautiously revealed, the fragile moment when first we acknowledged our affection, and the thrill, the euphoric joy of some great tenderness between us carefully unfolding, the gentlest whisper of a touch or a kiss in which the fullness of our devotion was so surprisingly alive. In the balm of this fanciful invention, I would fall asleep, enveloped in the peace of so rich a thought, swallowed whole by that beauteous moment for which I so eagerly yearned. It is the same young boy within me now, the same boy that resonates with the stories of David’s youth and with the Schubert who could write so grand a symphony as the Great C Major.

Even now, my heart aches to know what maid may yet lie awake as I do, dreaming of me next to her. What damsel in distress might dream of danger so wondrous that might bring me to her? And what is it in me that dreams of gallantry and rescuing, and of rendezvous that last a lifetime? Whatever age I am, I must come to her as a man, but with the spirit of a boy, for that is the purest part of me, which would seek to savor her in my arms, her hand in mine, her moments of grace and of awkwardness equally delighting—her every curve, every smile, every touch, a celebration in me; our kiss, a tenderness that breaks me. It is the man who would indulge, but the boy who would honor. How remarkable now is the realization that somewhere in the Neverlands of my heart, Dickens and Schubert have written the same novel, and by reflections of their artistry, having dwelled so richly there, I have a mind to grow ever smaller in my own aspect, despite the years that may yet stretch before me. They come to nothing. Each year, the last. Each kiss, the first.

Works Cited

• Cross, Milton, & Ewen, David. Milton Cross’ Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music. Doubleday, 1962.
• Fisk, Josiah. Composers on Music: Eight Centuries of Writings. Northeastern University Press, 1997.