Music, Ironies, and Tragedies

 Before removing a crown, beneath which my tooth was decaying, my dentist asked me what music I'd like to hear during the process. At first I wanted to say I didn't care, but then I asked for string quartets. "Which ones?" he asked. I opted for Haydn. 

The quartet his program chose contained the beautiful tune that eventually became the German national anthem. How ironic, I thought. Music originally written by an Austrian court composer for a Hapsburg emperor before there were nation states in Europe became the anthem of an aggressive nationalist state (and remains the anthem of a liberal democratic state). 

However, irony isn't the right term, at least if you attribute an ironic intention to History, with a capital 'H.' History, an entity that only exists in human minds, cannot have intentions and clearly can't be ironic.

Music is composed and performed at specific historical moments, and we hear and play it at different historical moments. That's a truism that applies to every sort of art. Artists live human lives and undergo historical events. Biographies are written about them, often trying to link their works to the events of their lives, personal and historical. But those links are surely speculative at best, irrelevant to the deep pleasure we get from art and the meaning we find in it.

As for speculation, what if Schubert, Mozart, Schumann, and Mendelssohn has lived as long as Haydn? What wonderful music they would have given us, and how different the history Western classical music would have been. The early deaths of these important composers were tragic for the men themselves and their families and friends, but not because History was writing a tragedy. Perhaps we appreciate their music more, knowing that they died too young.

We listen to their music our historical vantage point and may be puzzled that German culture, which produced a regime so monstrously evil that it's become iconic, should also have produced such profound and brilliant musicians. We are stuck with our vantage point and its puzzles. Art, however, can raise us out of history and present us with its own puzzles.