Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday July 3, 2010
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THE NINTH: Beethoven and the World in 1824
Harvey Sachs
Random House
ISBN 978 1 4000 6077 1
225 pages
$26
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Fifty years ago, it was a truth commonly, if not universally, acknowledged that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was the greatest composer of all time. With his granite visage and wild Einsteinian hair, he looked every inch the musical titan.
His famous Fifth Symphony opened with the most thrilling four notes in the repertoire -- four hammer blows, like Fate pounding on the door of the soul. The "Eroica" (Symphony No. 3) was only slightly less famous, in part because it had originally been dedicated to Gen. Bonaparte, until Napoleon decided he'd rather be emperor. The sweet Sixth (the "Pastoral") has always had its admirers, too, though some connoisseurs have long preferred the Seventh, which Richard Wagner characterized as "the apotheosis of the dance."
In recent years, however, Mozart has gradually edged out Beethoven as classical music's favorite poster boy. In truth, the multitalented Mozart is a far more lovable genius than the prickly romantic-revolutionary, whose compositions could never be used as background music for a dinner party.
This is particularly true of Beethoven's introspective late works, written at the end of his life when he was completely deaf, in particular the last five string quartets and the final symphony, the great D Minor. Sometimes called the "Choral" Symphony because its last movement requires soloists and a chorus, the Ninth begins in darkness and chaos and rises to a transcendent celebration of universal brotherhood.
As Harvey Sachs reminds us in his study of this masterpiece, the Ninth Symphony -- and especially the "Ode to Joy" that is at the heart of its conclusion -- has become our go-to music for occasions of deep solemnity: "The opening of the United Nations, the signing of a peace treaty at the end of a war, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the consecration of a new concert hall: It is perceived as a vessel for a message that confers a quasi-religious yet nondenominational blessing on all 'good' and 'just' people, institutions, and enterprises -- in short, on 'our side,' whatever that may be."
In "The Ninth," Sachs -- author of a fine biography of conductor Arturo Toscanini and several other books -- looks at the symphony from various perspectives. In Part 1 he situates the work in Beethoven's life and career, with a detailed account of its first performance in Vienna in 1824. He reminds us that Beethoven was the first composer to think seriously about posterity, to intend his music to survive him. In near-suicidal despair over his deafness, he wrote in his "Heiligenstadt Testament": "It seemed impossible to leave the world before I had brought forth all that I felt destined to bring forth."
In Part 2, Sachs sets the work in its time. Through a series of potted biographies, he presents a tour d'horizon of the romantic movement in 1824, a year that included "the Ninth Symphony, Byron's death" -- fighting for Greek freedom, by the way -- "Pushkin's Boris Godunov and 'To the Sea,' Delacroix's Massacre at Chios, Stendhal's Racine and Shakespeare, and Heine's Harz Journey and North Sea Pictures." He notes that "if there is a hidden thread that connects Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to the works created in and around 1824 by other significant artists, it is precisely this quest for freedom: political freedom, from the repressive conditions that then dominated Europe, and freedom of expression, certainly, but above all freedom of the mind and spirit."
Part 3 is largely given over to an extended verbal analysis of the music itself. Sachs apologizes for even attempting to "describe the indescribable" without resorting to technical musical terminology. He does a superb job. "The first movement of the Ninth neither beguiles nor coerces us; it befalls us." Listeners, he enjoins, "must approach this piece of music -- probably the most courageous orchestral composition ever written, and the most horrifying one -- obliquely, circumspectly, lest it crush them."
Later, of the Ninth's third movement, Sachs asserts that "nothing more beautiful ... has ever been written for the symphony orchestra." Again he quotes Toscanini: "One ought to conduct it on one's knees." Only in the glorious fourth and last movement does Beethoven introduce his chorus and soloists -- and the words to Friedrich von Schiller's "Ode to Joy": "Freude, schoner Gotterfunken / Tochter aus Elysium" -- "Joy, beautiful divine spark / Daughter of Elysium." The music gradually builds to a proclamation of universal human equality with "Alle Menschen werden Bruder" -- "All men become brothers."
Here Sachs pauses to describes the challenges Beethoven imposed on his soloists: "The tenor is forced to cross both the alto and the bass lines at various moments, and each of the singers has such long, florid passages that the only alternative to breathing in the middle of individual words would be learning to breathe through the ears. The composer knew that he was demanding the impossible but went ahead and demanded it all the same."
In Part 4 Sachs offers another survey, this time tracing the impact of the Ninth Symphony on 19th-century composers born before 1824, Berlioz and Wagner in particular. Because they were born after his cut-off date, Sachs omits Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler -- all three of whom, he admits, were haunted by the shadow of the Ninth. This was, in my view, a bad call, and their symphonies should have been discussed.
Finally, in a "postlude" Sachs recalls his own boyhood discovery -- in Cleveland -- of Beethoven and touches on the composer's importance to him. Not just the Ninth, he concludes, but Beethoven's music in general "adds to the fullness when life feels good, and it lengthens and deepens the perspective when life seems barely tolerable. It is with me and in me. And I suppose that this book is a vastly oversized and yet entirely inadequate thank-you note to Beethoven."
It's more than that. "The Ninth" isn't a profoundly scholarly work, but it will send readers to their CD players. There are many magnificent performances of this masterpiece, but stand-outs include Wilhelm Furtwangler's classic 1951 recording and the 1994 version on period instruments by John Eliot Gardiner.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE MARROWBONE MARBLE COMPANY
Glenn Taylor
Ecco
ISBN 978 0 06 192393 7
360 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Eric Miles Williamson, the author of three novels, a book of literary criticism and the forthcoming collections "14 Fictional Positions" and "Say it Hot!"
In the summer of 2008, West Virginia University Press published "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart," a brilliant, moving and mythlike novel by Glenn Taylor. Set in the hills of West Virginia, the novel chronicles the 108-year life of Trenchmouth Taggart and in doing so tells the story of the 20th century in America generally and West Virginia specifically. Taylor's prose was lyrical and precise, his research meticulous, his moral urgency unwavering but never preachy. "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" was a major achievement.
The book went virtually unnoticed, the usual fate of small-press novels, receiving only one major newspaper review. The National Book Critics Circle, however, noticed "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" and voted it a finalist for its annual award. Ecco Press subsequently purchased the rights and reissued it, and now, less than two years later, Ecco has published Taylor's second novel, "The Marrowbone Marble Company."
Like the earlier book, this one, beginning in 1941 and ending with the moon walk in 1969, is set in the backwoods of West Virginia, portrayed as a deeply racist land rife with corruption, layered with soot and coal dust and populated by a strange commingling of hillbillies, beaten-down blacks, violent cops, corrupt politicians and visionaries.
One such visionary is Loyal Ledford, an orphan who works the swing shift at Mann Glass Company. There he meets the company owner's granddaughter, Rachel Ball, who works as plant nurse. Also working at Mann Glass is Mack Wells, a black janitor with whom Loyal is friends, much to the white folks' disgust. Loyal and Rachel marry, and a month later the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Loyal joins the Marines and goes to war, where he sees and participates in unimaginable atrocities.
When he returns from the war, he's a gambler and a drunk, until things fall into place. The right people die, and Rachel inherits a pile of cash. Meanwhile, Loyal discovers his roots -- the Bonecutter family of Marrowbone Cut -- and after a cross is burned on Mack Wells' lawn, he decides to move his growing family to his ancestral homelands, taking the Wells family with him. At Marrowbone Cut, he follows a voice he heard in a dream that said, "Make marbles," and he builds a marble factory -- the Marrowbone Marble Company.
The company becomes much more than a factory: As it grows, malcontents and social outcasts, black and white, move to Marrowbone Cut and take jobs there. The company becomes a self-sustaining, mixed-race commune, loathed by racists and lauded by progressives. Outside the commune, the civil rights movement is underway. As the children of Marrowbone Cut grow older, they pair up interracially. Politicians who hate Loyal's commune and want the Bonecutter land intervene, setting up a remarkable and harrowing showdown.
More than anything else, "The Marrowbone Marble Company" is a novel of social protest, an expose of America's violent and deplorable race relations history. Taylor's overt didacticism follows in the footsteps of authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Ralph Ellison and John Steinbeck. But noble as Taylor's agenda is, and though there is much to admire here, "The Marrowbone Marble Company" does not live up to the promise of his first novel.
The writing throughout is uneven, the sentences often loose and baggy. Many characters are no more than stereotypes (the most egregious example being Loyal's utterly good, marble-playing retarded son, an innocent of staggering proportions who suffers at the hands of evil men). Scenes are related with perfect obviousness and clarity, then followed up with explanatory summations as if Taylor does not trust his readers. He beats them over the head with his message: Racism is bad, and good people will fight against it.
First novels, like first record albums, represent the best of a lifetime's worth of work. Second efforts are often hurried imitations. But Taylor is an author of great talent, to be sure. His next novel should better showcase that skill.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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TOCQUEVILLE'S DISCOVERY OF AMERICA
Leo Damrosch
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978 0 374 27817 5
277 pages
$27
Reviewed by H.W. Brands
The enduring appeal of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" lies not in its insights into the working of American politics (James Bryce's "American Commonwealth" from 1888 is better on this subject), not in the comprehensiveness of its account of 1830s American life (Tocqueville acknowledged that he barely sampled the varieties of contemporary experience), not in the clarity of its organization (anyone who tries to use it experiences frustration with the author's rambles, discursions and backtracks) and not in the brilliance of its prose (which depends, for American readers, very much on the skills of the translator). Rather, the appeal of "Democracy in America" is that of any good coming-of-age story: We see the possibilities of youth struggling against the realities of adulthood, and even as we slide toward old age, we reimagine all that we might have been.
Leo Damrosch, in the best book on this subject in 70 years, deftly depicts the fateful encounter between the young Tocqueville and adolescent America. The former displayed much of the turbulence of a teenager. "I must have either moral or physical agitation, even at the risk of my life," he told a friend. In the rugged new country, things almost came to that. Tocqueville's traveling companion and collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, gave the two of them up for dead when their Ohio steamboat struck a submerged rock in the ice-laden stream. "Our boat is shattered; it's sinking before our eyes," Beaumont desperately scribbled in his journal. "Two hundred passengers on board, and only two lifeboats that might hold ten or twelve people apiece. The water rises, rises; already it's filling the cabins. ... Tocqueville and I look out at the Ohio, which in that place is more than a mile wide and filled with huge blocks of ice; we shake hands as a gesture of farewell." But the boat hit bottom with its upper deck still dry, and the travelers were spared.
Tocqueville couldn't decide what to make of his hosts. "The people here seem to be stinking with national conceit," he wrote his mother. "They harass you continually to force you to praise them, and if you resist all their attempts, they praise themselves." Americans rejected the idea that wealth, education or attainment might lift certain groups above others. "The entire society seems to have merged into the middle class." In contrast to the French legal system, which was based on a carefully crafted code, the American system was a hodgepodge of English precedent and local prejudice. This benefited only the lawyers, who resisted attempts at rationalization. "Since the law would become accessible to ordinary people, they would lose some of their importance," Tocqueville said. "They would no longer be like Egyptian priests, sole interpreters of occult knowledge."
Tocqueville deemed democracy a mixed blessing. "Democracy doesn't give people the most competent government, but it does what the most competent government is often powerless to do. It spreads through the entire social body a restless activity, a superabundant strength, an energy that never exists without it." On this point, his friend Beaumont -- of whom Damrosch makes effective use throughout the book -- was characteristically harsher: "To win an election, candidates have to enter into very intimate relations with the citizens (and that's everyone)," Beaumont explained. "They must drink with them in taverns and beg for their votes. These are things that a man who is at all distinguished by education and social position will never do."
Beaumont underestimated American politicians in this regard; soon the bluest bloods learned to press the flesh. Yet, like Tocqueville, he didn't consider mediocrity in governance an insuperable problem for Americans. "This society is full of life and prosperity, but the source of its strength is not its extreme democracy, as our demagogues in Europe claim," he said. "To anyone who is willing to see things as they are, it is obvious that their prosperity has material causes completely independent of this extreme democracy, in spite of which it prospers."
Tocqueville observed the ugliest aspects of American life. He and Beaumont traveled briefly with a group of Choctaw Indians forced by federal law to relocate west. "In the whole of this spectacle there was an air of ruin and destruction, something that felt like a final farewell with no returning," Tocqueville wrote of the removal. "One couldn't look on without a pang at the heart." In a mental asylum, he met a black slave driven insane by the cruelties inflicted by an especially vicious trader. "Day and night the Negro I'm speaking of sees this man dogging his steps and tearing off bits of his flesh," Tocqueville wrote. The slave shuddered at the approach of any white man. "His face expressed both terror and fury. ... He threw off his covering, raised himself up on his hands, and cried, 'Get out! Get out!'"
Damrosch, who has written on Rousseau, Pope and other literary figures of the early modern period, follows Tocqueville back to France and traces the evolution of his masterwork. He polished his notes and letters, and in the process polished his portrait of America. The result made his reputation, selling swiftly and inspiring broad admiration for the author's analytical powers. But Tocqueville met a series of personal reverses, losing his place in the French government and dying relatively young -- in 1859, just before the contradictions of American democracy produced the cataclysm that tore the veil of innocence to tatters.
Afterward, Tocqueville appeared more important to Americans than ever: his complaints a portent of the tribulations that had in fact come, his praise a reminder of what we might have been.
H. W. Brands is the author of "Andrew Jackson" and the forthcoming "American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE
E. Lynn Harris
St. Martin's
ISBN 978 0 312 54191 0
297 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Robin Givhan
Let's get this basic fact out of the way: This is not a well-written novel. E. Lynn Harris, who completed "In My Father's House" before his death in 2009, does not have a poetic voice or even a particularly eloquent one. This is not a work of detail-oriented craftsmanship.
To be fair, Harris wasn't aiming for high prose, but rather a fast-paced tale that mashes up Harlequin-style melodrama with a crime potboiler. His distinctive twist has the drama unfolding against the backdrop of the upscale black, gay social scene -- a favorite trope that made him a best-selling author. But in this case, at least, his lumbering writing distracts from the enjoyment, as when he describes a character as "thick as a piece of corn bread" and "interpersonally generous."
"In My Father's House" is a journey through the sex-filled life of Bentley L. Dean III, an African-American man born into wealth. When Dean reveals to his parents -- portrayed as two-dimensional snobs -- that he's gay, the dashing son is cast out and must make his own fortune as the co-owner of a model agency based in Miami.
As the company struggles through the recession, a mysterious businessman knocks on his door with a shady proposition that could revitalize the agency. Sex, violence and overwrought descriptions of impossibly attractive men follow: "Watching Warren stroll up to me with a big, childlike grin that was at odds with his powerfully built adult male body, I'd never seen him look more handsome. It was as if something so perfectly formed had stepped right out of nature itself. As if he were another one of God's gifts to mankind, just like the hills and lakes in the distance."
In order to give shape to the characters, whose stories stretch from Miami Beach to Detroit to Los Angeles, Harris relies heavily on the semiotics of stuff: Oddly placed details about the merchandise people consume stand in for character development. "While he was far more Internet savvy than most of his colleagues who relied on secretaries, Father was old school when it came to the newspapers. He had to read them in his kitchen every morning. Though he had stainless steel appliances and every modern convenience, he said a successful man stuck to certain habits to anchor his day." Rarely have refrigerators and dishwashers been put to such symbolic use.
There's little nuance in Harris' descriptions of emotional family interaction, sexual encounters or long-term relationships. Indeed, the sex scenes border on the pornographic, not because they are especially tawdry but because they are wholly focused on the physical and give little attention to the inner life of these characters.
All of the shenanigans ascribed to Harris' heavy-breathing, beautiful people eventually lead to a wholly implausible denouement. Loyal readers who see this tale to its dubious conclusion should be congratulated for their stubborn perseverance.
Robin Givhan is the fashion editor of The Washington Post.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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