Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The wolf-man is a simplistic reduction of our myriad selves. "Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands." Reading this passage helped me discover the meaning of the oscillating gun in my fiction manuscript SNOW AT 5 PM. The truth of multiplicity comes home to Harry Haller at the climax of the Magic Theater, with all its doors leading to different versions of himself. The chess player in one room is surely a predecessor of the Magister Ludi of the glass bead game. All past, present, and future selves available to one. Not for nothing is Hesse a disciple of Nietzsche, and his eternal recurrence. For me, Hesse will always be the most miraculous and unexpected connector.  After reading Safranski's biography of Goethe, I find Goethe appearing to Harry Haller in a dream. The accusation of ...

Picked up Rüdiger Safransk's biography of Goethe, Life as a Work of Art , translated by David Dollenmayer, in a bookstore before the shop closings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading this well-written work in the last few days before I turn 50, I found it very suggestive about the development of an artistic character. From young, Goethe was keenly aware of his immense creative gift, but learned in his young adulthood to apply his gift to the "objective" world of politics, finance, and science, in order to grapple with "reality." Astonishing too was his capacity to fall hard in love, right up to his eighties. "The example of Shakespeare had taught Goethe what characterizes a great dramatist: he doesn't identify only with his hero, but grants all his figures the right to life." (82) "He notes in his diary, Every work of man has what I would call a smell. As, in a rough sense, a rider smells of horse, a bookstore a little of mildew, and a h...

To put it in monetary terms, the first movement of Mendelssohn's Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64, as played by Anne-Sophie Mutter with the NYP last night, was worth the price of the ticket. And more. It was piercing and sensitive. It was vigorous and delicate. Its softest note does not lose its expressiveness; its loudest chord does not lose its complexity. The other two movements were very fine, but the first was divine.  I like too Overture to Ruy Blas , Op. 95, that opened the concert. Mendelssohn declared the Victor Hugo's play "beneath contempt," but did not want to disappoint the Leipzig Theatrical Pension Fund, the worthy organization that asked him for an overture to their performance of Hugo. James M. Keller's program note describes the piece:  In the span of seven minutes, this angry, fiery work perfectly evokes the play's brooding atmosphere, with a stentorian motif of sustained chords for woodwinds and brass regularly punctuati...

Today is the bicentennial of Mendelssohn's birth. Last night I attended the talk "Felix Mendelssohn and the Leipzig Tradition," a part of New York Philharmonic's Insights Series curated by James M. Keller.  Leipzig at the time of Mendelssohn's arrival from Berlin was a busy commercial center of population 45 000. It boasted a long musical tradition centered around St. Thomas Church, and the Gewandhausorchester. As Kapelmeister of the Gewandhause, Mendelssohn started a series of concerts that focused on important composers of the past. The practice was innovative since concerts then usually presented new works. Keller pointed to the music conservatism in the canonization of certain composers. For Mendelssohn, the three gods were Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.  Mendelssohn would found the Conservatory, as a kind of third pillar of the scene, or as Masur describes it, as part of the music oikos . The motto of the Conservatory could be translated as "Joy is a very s...