上周五我在誠品買下二月份的Gramophone，為的是封面人物Franz Liszt--今年是他兩百周年誕辰紀念，故特別為他做了封面故事。從那之後心裡醞釀著打算寫一篇「為何人人不愛李斯特」的文章，東西很多，然無奈每到下手就作罷。
李斯特之外，這本Gramophone許多文章非常精彩，其中一篇專欄，由Washington Post的專欄作家Philip Kennicott執筆，此次主題是寫他聽Bach's Choconne。由於作者寫出了我對音樂寫作的期待，當下讀完便想拿此文做為讀者服務，但或許因為雜誌出刊時間太近，也可能本人網路搜尋功夫太糟，我找不到此文任何的網路檔案，最後決定採取最原始的打字方式，轉刊此文，以饗大眾。
我是沒那才掉轉翻成中文，以及文中對於音樂的形容、比喻和描述，得用英文才夠精緻，故此文以英文呈現，大家隨意取用。
打完之後，Feltsman彈Chopin Noctunes也結束了，剛好。
*************************************************************************************************
標題：When grief is as engulfing as a tidal wave, Bach's Chaconne provides the only solace.
In the other room my mother is dying.
Underneath a great pile of sheets and coverlets, her once formidable presence is reduced to two hands and an ashen face, her breath labored and her eyes remote and teary. She’s almost gone, the nurses say, and everything that mattered about her—the voice, the temper, the delight in small things—has preceded her into nothingness.
For the past few days, the only music I can tolerate is Bach’s Chaconne in D minor for solo violin, the sprawling fantasy on a simple, descending theme that concludes the Partita No. 2. Why does everything else seem so insipid, so irrelevant? There are other monumental works by Bach that might be pressed into service, the Goldberg Variations, the Cello Suites. But the former seem too busy, too much of the dance to serve a mind that is blank and listless. The latter, for some reason, feel exhausted to me, perhaps because I put them to work the last time the Grim Reaper called and now they sound hollowed out and dry.
There are some who believe the Chaconne was Bach’s memorial to his 1st wife, but that speculation doesn’t interest me at the moment. Music that is explicitly about the death often seems trivial in the face of death itself. Manon dying (“Sola, perduta, abbandonata”) feels false and overwrought. If anyone in the house made that kind of noise now, I’d show them the door. Bach’s Chaconne may be a commanding sonic display, testing the limits of the instrument, but it also feels intimate and quiet.
I think in all of opera, the only death that feels remotely familiar is that of Prince Andrei, in Prokofiev’s War and Peace. And it’s not an accurate picture of death, but the suffering and struggle during that last, luminal phrase of life. Perhaps Parsifal’s anguished cry upon learning from Kundry of the death of his mother has truth to it too, but it’s a moment of truth in four hours of feverish fantasy that has nothing to do with the spirit of my family’s house today.
My mother played the violin, so it’s possible that’s the reason the Chaconne is so vital at this moment. But she never played the violin the way Sergey Khachatryan plays it and she wasn’t partial to Bach. It was Khachatryan’s set of the Bach Partitas and Sonatas that I grabbed, in a vacant moment, thinking perhaps there’d be time to listen to something in the car or on the headphones during the hours and days—no one can ever tell you how long—of the vigil. And I’m glad I did.
Khachatryan will probably want to record these works again. And when he does, my guess is that he’ll focus more intently on the contrapuntal character of the music, on the illusion of a chorus of violins summoned from a single instrument. But there is a lot to admire in this young man’s reading, which is surprisingly gentle and tender, always returning from grand gestures to a home place of sweetness. His Adagio from the Sonata No 3 begins far away, quiet and searching, a powerful layering of tentative ideas. He seems happiest in the slow movements—or am I most attuned to them? Certainly there’s no slighting his technique, which is never taxed, even in the huge chords, skips and whirlwind figuration of the Chaconne.
Khachatryan’s whispering pianissimo at the beginning of the middle section, in D major, breaks my heart. Bach built in this piece in three parts, the middle turning to a major key. Khachatryan plays it as if delicately stroking a beloved face, or remembering a private, sustaining scene from childhood.
Some of the chemicals that modern medicine pours into ailing bodies result in, among other side effects, an increase in sensitivity to sounds. My mother, whose superhuman hearing enabled her to command the entire house, to detect from the depths of a deep sleep the sound of the refrigerator door opening, grew agitate and irritable at music that was too loud. Near the end of her life, she liked the “Meditation” from Thais and not much else. I think I might have changed her mind about Bach if I had played her this passage from Khachatryan’s performance. But that’s one of the many things that death eliminates the sharing of music.
It’s easy to build too much philosophy into the music of Bach and the Chaconne, with its thrilling diversity built over what is one of the simplest descending motifs in music, is rich in metaphorical possibilities. As have many others over the almost 300 years of the life of this music, I hear mortality in its repeating line, a reminder of the inevitable trajectory of every life. And in everything else, the 63 variations built on top and around it, I hear life, variety and invention. All of life is here, including death, and in that D major passage that Khachatryan plays so eloquently, life and death come together into a single, acceptable, manageable fact of existence.
Grief renders one temporarily allergic to silliness and banality of the world, the smiling weatherman with shiny teeth, the idiotic billboards advertising things people don’t need, the pop songs and inane comedies and empty politicians spouting their populist gibberish. Most season’s of the year I am happy to hear Bach’s Chaconne, but I don’t search it out. For a time now, and I don’t know how long, its main service is to provide a cocoon, shutting out the stupidity of the world. There is, in fact, very little music that is as deep as life itself, perhaps only a handful of pieces, which is why it is wise to reserve them for when they’re needed.
文章定位：
