Sudbin Plays Sexy Scriabin: Pleasurable Climaxes for All

I'm a musicologist, whatever that means. If you ask Mr. Wilkins (not his real name), a music teacher I know, musicologists do something, but it doesn't have much to do with making music. Really, the important thing is to make a clean tone on your instrument, respect the composer's intentions, and play with feeling and expression.

I'm the first to admit that Mr. Wilkins is a much better musician than I am. But I can't agree with him that music history is "simply in the music": Beethoven doesn't naturally lead to Wagner, nor Brahms to Schoenberg. Wagner and Schoenberg, of course, wanted you to think their music was a natural result of Beethoven's and Brahms's influence. But if you don't take composers at their own estimation, you can discover some interesting things. Schoenberg, to my ears, owes more to Wagner than to Brahms; his claim to be Brahms' heir was simply a way of asserting his legitimacy to fans of "absolute music." Wagner owes more than he would like to acknowledge to Meyerbeer; but as a leading composer of "New German" music, it was more important to him to stress his debt to Beethoven.

This is why it's important to think critically about composers and their agendas, to interrogate their writings the way you would question a witness in a trial. This is why musicologists need such broad training, since our field involves history, musical analysis, historiography by way of our immediate subject matter, and economic history, social history, political history, gender and sexuality history (and other subjects), by way of context.

There are plenty of performers who could do my job in addition to their own: they have great scholarly knowledge. But then there are people like Yevgeny Sudbin.

Yevgeny Sudbin is an extremely talented young pianist. I came to know his work through his album of Scriabin piano music, fiendishly difficult material which Mr. Sudbin carries off with passionate intensity. In fact, if you're looking for an introduction to Scriabin's music, Mr. Sudbin's album is a great place to start.

Mr. Sudbin wrote his own liner notes. He obviously worked hard over them and they are well-written and well-researched. He has read Scriabin's letters and other writings. But while the resulting notes tell us a good deal about Scriabin, there are times when they tell us more than I need to know about Mr. Sudbin's fusion of his sexual and artistic activities.

Of course, Scriabin tied his sexuality and his creativity together, as Sudbin points out. What is disturbing is how completely Sudbin buys into Scriabin's decadent aesthetic without any kind of critical distance. For example, consider the following quotation from Sudbin's essay:

"(Scriabin wrote: 'the creative act is inextricably linked to the sexual act. I definitely know that in myself the creative urge has all the signs of sexual stimulation...') The Fifth Sonata, regrettably, is only a do-it-yourself version of all this." (italics mine)

The last sentence arouses an image of the performer pleasuring himself through performing Scriabin. I would rather not know that this music is Sudbin's pianistic masturbation.

But is the performer pleasuring HIMself? Here's another quotation from Sudbin:

"The whole piece is based around a series of cadences, repeated over and over again. This creates a feeling of closely spaced multiple climaxes that, ideally, should become stronger each time they happen - even if the performer is male."

The last clause makes it pretty clear, I think, that Sudbin has gone beyond Scriabin's stated merging of sensual arousal and artistic creativity: he now posits an interpretation of Scriabin's music which resembles Wagner's theory of the androgynous artist. Apparently, playing Scriabin is the closest Sudbin will ever get to multiple orgasms, short of a sex-change operation.

There's much, much more I could comment on in Sudbin's essay, such as (I think) his use of the word "sick" as a sign of approval. I would like to close, however, with a passage which suggests that Sudbin views himself as Scriabin's heir:

"As the summit of his life work and the culmination of his visions, Scriabin was preparing the final salvation of mankind: not through atonement of sins (as had been attempted before) but by consecration through art. This was to be achieved by synthesizing all the human senses through one orgiastic performance of his final piece: Mysterium. The performance was planned to last seven days in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas, beginning with bells suspended from the clouds. They would shatter the universe with their lethal vibrations, after which humanity was to be replaced by better, 'nobler beings'. He never completed the piece. Just as he was preparing some texts about death, death arrived. A pimple formed on his lip, which became infected, and Scriabin died of septicæmia before he could fulfill his final calling. Although to my mind he did, but maybe not in the way he had in mind: the moment his music became part of my life, a better being emerged." (boldface and italics mine).

To sum up: playing Scriabin is a masturbatory act for Sudbin, one that takes place in public (in his concerts), and is marketed and sold on CDs for the enjoyment of the listening public. And now that he interacts with Scriabin in this way, Sudbin is better person than before.

Classical. Music. Pornography?

Wagner in Today's World

As part of my summer teaching, I just led a group of students through Das Rheingold. Most were enthusiastic about the music, and Wagner's aggressive stance against the Parisian opera industry drew their sympathy.

Yet even on the first day, the Nazi party's use of Wagner came up. Later, we read some of Wagner's infamous essay "Das Judentum in der Musik" (Jewishness in Music). The class, which was normally talkative and smiling, got cold and uncomfortable: how could such a great composer hold such outrageous views? Eventually conversation picked up. Wagner obviously still has value for modern audiences today, and the students worked through ways of separating Wagner's ideas from his music.

But did Wagner actually separate his art from his ideas? After all, Wagner's essay attacks Meyerbeer (a Jewish composer who dominated the French opera scene) and claims that Jewish people are incapable of real artistic expression - are subhuman, in effect. Wagner's failure to mount a production of his operas in Paris in the 1840s seems to have led to his disillusionment with grand opera, a genre which he came to view as commercialized, privileging the medium (musical display) over the message (drama). Thus Wagner's attempt to fashion an orchestrally-dominated "German" style of music drama in opposition to the conventions of grand opera seems tied to his opposition to music he considered most commercial and Jewish.

But so what? you could say: As listeners, we are not bound to think what Wagner thought. The reader determines much of the message received from a text; we can take a different meaning from Wagner's work than he intended. After all, the music is beautiful; the works remain influential even if only viewed from a musical point of view; their importance as national myth, as part of the zeitgeist of the succeeding generations is hard to ignore. We can't ignore Wagner. All good points and I was pleased with the students for engaging with such a difficult issue.

Yet I'm still disturbed by the topic. It's easy enough to situate Wagner in a distant past, to say that his ideas were wrong but the music he wrote was lovely. It's easy enough to assume that Wagner's nationalist program to create "true German art" in opposition to a "commercial Jewish art" died by 1945 at the latest. But what if the nationalist aspect of Wagner reception is still alive? If someone tells you in 2010 that Wagner is first and foremost a GERMAN (with all the baggage that entails), then what are the implications? Many Israelis seem to understand Wagner solely in terms of his antisemitism. While, as a musician, I applaud Daniel Barenboim's efforts to play Wagner's beautiful music, as a thinking person, I have to wonder: what if the Israelis are right? What if the nationalistic, antisemitic, hateful side of Wagner culture has not died?

For example, see this website http://www.georgehutchins.com/, our local example of Tea-Party fundamentalism. I mean no personal disrespect to Mr. Hutchins, a military veteran, and I should make clear that my own political views are centrist: I don't vote on party lines. Hutchins seems to waging an ardent war against the Republican Party itself, which seems to be distancing itself from his fundamentalist stance.

If you scroll down Mr. Hutchins' page far enough, you will find that an American politician actually used the "Ride of the Valkyries" to promote his political campaign in 2010, and that he did so "to honor German Americans who served America since 1775." (He thinks the piece comes from Goetterdaemmerung, but that's neither here nor there). As a German-American myself, I'm not entirely sure we need special praise ; nor am I convinced we need Wagner to honor us (why couldn't he use Beethoven?) Wagner's political views are an embarrassment, and the further we keep Wagner away from OUR politics, the better. (And who uses an appeal to a German-American audience as a political platform? Yes, there are plenty of people of German heritage in North Carolina, but I'm not aware that we were a political power-base waiting to be tapped.)

More disturbing is Mr. Hutchins' concept of national pride, which is largely of the flag-waving kind. Thus his site refers constantly to "honor" and claims that his supporters are "patriots" (implying that his opponents are...not patriotic - way to respect the dissent essential to a functioning democracy). Hutchins also seems to assume that most Americans are European or English (I'm guessing that makes you white): thus the page "Win the Culture War" (no comment) leads to a picture of Hutchins at Stonehenge, with the caption: "Stonehenge, England, is a...part of our American Heritage, which our ancestors brought with them from Europe, to America."

So Hutchins is a white politician who assumes that the Americans he needs to reach have long European heritages, and he uses Wagner's music to promote his campaign. Yet he's not antisemitic; he is a firm supporter of Israel, etc., etc.

So what gives? Does it really matter if one politician used Wagner in his campaign? Given Mr. Hutchins' avowed respect for the Torah and support of Israel, I think he would be horrified to read "Das Judentum in der Musik." Probably, his use of Wagner is caused by ignorance. At least I hope so. After Auschwitz, I hope that the first thing American people think when they hear Wagner is not "Gee, I'm proud of my German heritage."

Mr. Hutchins seems to think it might be.