The Camerata Pacifica plays its November concert at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, in Hahn Hall at the Music Academy of the West, 1070 Fairway Road, Santa Barbara.
The program will consist of two works: Sergei Prokofiev‘s “Violin-Piano Sonata No. 1 in f-minor Opus 80 (1938-46),” and Olivier Messaien‘s “Quartet for the End of Time (1942).”
Performances are by Gilles Vonsattel, piano; Bil Jackson, clarinet; Giora Schmidt, violin; and Ani Aznavoorian, cello.
It is surely a deliberate choice that both of these works were written and first played when their respective composers were captives of a totalitarian state:
Prokofiev, in the Soviet Union, under Stalin; Messaien, in a P.O.W. camp run by Nazi Germany, under Hitler.
Though the sonata and the quartet are quite different from one another, they share an atmosphere of unmitigated gloom.
“The only real information contained in any piece of music,” Beethoven told his friend, Anton Schindler, “Is what was going on in the composer’s mind when he wrote it.”
Throughout the 1920s, the Soviets made concerted efforts to woo Prokofiev into returning to Russia.
It wasn’t that they liked his music — probably, except for the so-called “Classical Symphony,” they didn’t — but he was a world famous composer and pianist, and his return would be a tremendous propaganda coup for the fledgling worker’s state.
The Soviets also made overtures to Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. For reasons of his own, which had nothing to do with ideology, Prokofiev was the only one who took the bait.
He began his first “Violin Sonata” in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s brutal purges, and he finished it after the Allies had won World War II — known, in the USSR, as the Great Patriotic War.
It also was after Prokofiev had taken a disastrous fall down a flight of stairs that marked the beginning of the end of his life.
(The official explanation, never contradicted, even by rabid anti-communists, was he had suffered a stroke at the top of the stairs, brought on by his “chronic high blood pressure.”
Since Prokofiev had defied the apparatchiks censuring him for his music by turning his back on them while they were delivering their condemnation, I think it equally plausible that he had been flung down the stairs by Stalin’s goons.
People always underestimate the conscienceless brutality of totalitarian operators.)
The sonata was written for, dedicated to and premiered by Prokofiev’s friend, David Oistrakh. Their friendship had gotten off to a rocky start:
First when Prokofiev trashed the playing of the teenaged Oistrakh, and then, a couple of years later when Oistrakh had trashed Prokofiev in a game of chess, a considerable blow to his vanity.
But each had soon recognized the value of the other. The two violin sonatas are the most tangible fruits of their friendship.
It is a fact of grotesque pathos — to call it ironic is to misunderstand the word — that Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin, failing to outlive his nemesis by two hours.
One can scarcely imagine a more dramatic setting of a premiere than that of the “Quartet for the End of Time:”
A Nazi prison camp in mid-winter, the temperature well below zero, barbed wire and Wehrmacht helmets as a skyline, shivering inmates and smirking guards.
The only public first performance of a work of art in any genre that comes anywhere close is Tom Paine reading aloud his first “Crisis” paper, as soon as he wrote it, to the men huddled around the fire with him, men of the rag-tag Continental Army who had just vowed to take on the entire British Empire —
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. …”
— except that, as I hear the “Quartet for the End of Time,” Messaien is not urging resistance but resignation. He tells us, in the preface to the published score, that he had been reading the Book of Revelations (which Roman Catholics call The Apocalypse) and that was where he had found the title for this extraordinary work:
“And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: …”
Which reminds me, inescapably, of a passage from a play by a modern master as austere and uncompromising as Messaien himself, Samuel Beckett‘s Endgame:
“You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.
(Nicely put, that.) And now?
Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over,
reckoning closed and story ended.”
Admission to this concert is $56. For tickets and other information, show up at the box office, call Camerata Pacifica at 884-8410, or email tickets@cameratapacifica.org
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.