Now It Can Be Told!

In the 1960s, I was sued for $2 million for libel by Barry Goldwater. The publisher (Ralph Ginzburg),  the  magazine (fact:), and I were sued for our part in publishing articles in fact: magazine arguing that Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be President.

OK, finally: the entire truth.

I had resigned from the magazine in anger before the Goldwater issue came out. I was angry because the publisher let David Bar-Illan, the Israeli pianist and a left-winger then, rewrite the article I had written about Goldwater. Bar-Illan's idea was that Goldwater was "schizophrenic"--whatever that meant. He took out much of what I had written and kept repeating that Goldwater was schizophrenic.
My article argued that Goldwater had doubts about his masculinity, and I relied heavily on a study of right-wingers called The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodore Adorno and others.

Bar-Illan didn't want his name used and wanted complete anonymity. I didn't want my name on the main article, but agreed to have my name on a report about a poll about psychiatrists about Goldwater.

The magazine's lawyer emphasized to me: The defense must seem united. Nothing about my resignation -- nothing about any disharmony. So I didn't reveal that Bar-Illan was mainly responsible for the published article. And that I had resigned in anger.

Anyway, the magazine and the publisher were fined $75,000. And the magazine, the publisher, and I were assessed $1 in damages. So I wound up being hit with 0.33 cents.

Probably the lawyer had given us good advice.

An Encounter with Evil

An Encounter With Evil

I joined the Ridgewood Hobbyists in NJ, a men’s social group,  because I wanted to befriend a variety of people, not just Jews like me. And I’ve made friends there, good friends, Jews and non-Jews.

But the group is somewhat wary of  Jews. I’m told that Jews cannot become president of the club. (The club meets in a Presbyterian church, by the way.) When I wanted to do a musical Christmas program on Christmas  carols, sung by opera singers, a loudmouth objected—without explaining why. (I knew why.) He was the same loudmouth who said he was surprised I would permit him to do a program on requiems. (I run the music club.)

I told a funny joke to the club, involving priests—and a few Catholics got very angry. (The joke was harmless—and it needed priests…because of the hierarchy, nuns, priests, bishops.)

I haven’t tried to conceal my Jewishness as a member of the club. I’ve told jokes involving Jews.

One person told an anti-Semitic joke at a general meeting. About how money-minded Jews are. A joke featuring Morris and Becky. His joke was greeted with stony silence. He repeated: Morris and Becky! No response. The club is actually a good club with decent people. Holocaust survivors have spoken before the club….

I entered the church one day, and someone I didn’t know—Catholic, Irish—came over to me and said, belligerently, Did you say… and finished the sentence with something very insulting to Christians. Like “the virgin Mary was a whore.” (I don’t remember what he actually said.)

I was shocked—and horrified. No! I said loudly, and walked away.

I’ve thought about it. What should I have said or done? Demanded to know who had spread this filthy accusation? And confronted him? An evil person. Like the fellow who forged a letter ostensibly from Ben Franklin disparaging Jews. Or who wrote the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

“Evil” is the best word for such people. 

Tchaikovsky: Three Mysteries

Tchaikovsky: Three Mysteries

BY Warren Boroson

The former chief music critic of the New York Times, Harold Schonberg, had this to say about Tchaikovsky: He was “lacking in elevated thought.”

     Schonberg also had contempt for George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and his American in Paris. He called them “junk.”

     For sophisticated music lovers like Schonberg, music that is mainly melodies—even beautiful melodies—simply is not enough. They want development—variations on the beautiful melodies—complexity.

    And T. didn’t choose to write in sonata form—the traditional Western form of music.

       Anyway, I myself like T. and his beautiful melodies. Not as much as I like Beethoven and Schubert and Mozart, because Schonberg had a point. You can get tired of eating only desserts. As a kid I loved T.’s Romeo and Juliet—but I can no longer listen to it. Still, I’m grateful for much of the other music he wrote.

   That’s one mystery about T.—why so many critics look down on him. His music is lovely but....

         Another mystery is: Why did Nadezhda von Meck stop giving him money?

        She was a wealthy widow—Russian—and she had learned that he had financial problems. So she offered him a regular stipend and to live on her estate. With this proviso: they should never meet. This went on for 13 years. Twice they encountered each other—accidentally. Each scurried away. (Sort of like Dante and Beatrice.)

     Von Meck had had 13 children, 11 of whom lived.

She also supported Claude Debussy financially—and Anton Rubinstein.

    He wrote his “beloved friend,” as she called her, 1,200 or so letters.

    Von Meck had had 13 children, 11 of whom lived. She was a controlling person—and micromanaged her children. She wrote to T.:  “I am very unsympathetic in my personal relations because I do not possess any femininity whatever; second, I do not know how to be tender, and this characteristic has passed on to my entire family. All of us are afraid to be affected or sentimental…” 

    And then she stopped giving T. money and broke off with him. Why? Was her money running out? No. Was she upset upon learning of his homosexuality? She must have known, T’s biographers say. Did her children object? It’s very possible. In fact, that seems to be the best explanation.

      T. was devastated by the breakup. He wrote: “Perhaps it is because I never knew NF  personally that she seemed to me the ideal of a human being; I could no imagine inconstancy in such a demigoddess.”

                                                ***      

   A key event in T.’s life was, as a child, his leaving his mother to go to boarding school. He himself wrote that he had loved her “with a sort of morbidly passionate love.”

            He grew up in Russia to be a nervous, shy, melancholy person. No doubt this was related to his homosexuality—about which he was deeply ashamed. When he was young, he went on a trip with a friend of his father’s, working as his secretary—and discovered that that friend had “the most vile qualities of mind. Up till then I had not suspected that such incredibly base persons existed on this earth.” David Nice, a biogapher, suspects that his father’s friend “made sexual advances” to T.—who wasn’t aware of his own homosexuality then “and reacted with a disproportionate sense of revulsion.” One can imagine his shock when he found that he himself, like his father’s friend, was an “incredibly base person.”

     Later he wrote about his homosexuality: “It is a fact that [missing words—my inclinations?] create an impossible gulf between the majority of people and myself. They impart to my character a host of features—a sense of alienation, fear of others, timidity, excessive shyness, mistrustfulness—which make me more and more unsociable.”

   He decided that he had to get married—for his own sake, and for the sake of other members of his family. His brother was also homosexual, and T. wrote to him that “for both of us our dispositions are the greatest and most insuperable obstacle to happiness and we must fight our natures to the best of our ability.”

   Some famous homosexuals also got married—to persuade their followers that they were hetereosexual. Rock Hudson, Elton John, Cole Porter, Vincente Minnelli.

    So T. married a young woman who was madly in love with him—after explaining to her that there was to be nothing physical in the marriage. Antonina Milyukova. She said she understood.

    At some stage, David Nice writes, the sexual aspect of their marriage reared its head.  (“Not, perhaps as swiftly as Ken Russell has Glenda Jackson make the attempt in the film ‘The Music Lovers.’”) T. “found his bride physically repulsive as well as musically insensitive….” So he supposedly jumped into the Moscow River, hoping to die of pneumonia. Actually, his health, writes one biographer, improved because of the cold bath!

    Divorce was impossible—she was convinced he loved her.

    Antonina outlived T. by 25 years, but she spent most of them in an insane asylum.

     T.’s Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique, which he wrote just before his death, is supposed to be autbiographical—“…he bared his torment over the forced concealment of his sexual nature and relived the crisis of his marriage,” wrote Nice.

                                                            +++

     His father had wanted him to become a lawyer, but approved of his son’s trying to become a composer instead. And T. quickly showed his musical genius. Anton Rubenstein, a famous pianist, took T. under his wing, and T. dedicated hs first piano concerto to him. When T. played the first movement for him, Rubenstein said he hated it—and that it was unplayable—and asked T. to completely revise it. T. angrily replied that he wouldn’t change one note. Eventually Rubenstein played the music and acknowledged his error.

    Gradually T.’s music won him attention and praise all over the world. (“Gradually.” “One critic referred to his “melodic monotony.”)

    He became a friend of Tolstoy, whom he considered the greatest writer in the world (ahead of even Dickens). In fact, T. wrote that he was “never was more flattered in my life…as when Lev Tolstoy beside me listening to [T.’s music] dissolved in tears.”(Tolstoy, as he had told Rachmaninoff  and Chaliapin, expressed his complete contempt for Beethoven to T.)

     T. loved Mozart, and especially Don Giovanni. “It is to Mozart that I am indebted for the fact that I have dedicated my life to music.” Why Mozart? T.’s own explanation: “…perhaps it is because as a man of my times I am broken and morally sick that I so love to seek peace and consolation in Mozart’s music.” 

     T., besides writing music, worked as a music critic. He didn’t like Moussorgsky’s Boris Godunov,  calling it “utterly and damnably awful….” But he loved Bizet’s Carmen—“In ten years,” he predicted, in 1879, “Carmen wil be the most popular opera in the world.” He went to Bayreuth to listen to a complete performance of Wagner’s Ring…and had reservations. When the Ring ended, he wrote, “I felt as if I had been liberated from captivity.” Even so, he admired Wagner and acknowledged that his own music had been influenced by Wagner’s.

   He met and befriended Edvard Grieg—he admired Dvorak—thought Brahms’s music cold and shallow—he admired the “astounding talent” of Gustav Mahler—as well as works by the young composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff—like the Prelude in C Sharp Minor.

      The biggest mystery about T., of course, is: Did he commit suicide? Did the Czar  himself  ORDER T.’s suicide because a horrible scandal about his homosexuality was about to explode? Did T.’s former classmates at the School of Jurisprudece order his suicide?

            Biographer Nice writes, “… it had to be suicide.” He deliberately drank a glass of polluted water at a time when cholera was epidemic in Moscow.

      In a book that Bard College compiled a in 1998, Alexander Poznansky argues that T.’s death was certainly NOT suicide—that homosexuality was common and accepted during T.’s day—that T. was leading a happy life—and that T. and others at the time paid little attenton to warnings about the drinking water. Poznansky forcefully argues against the suicide theory. He works at Yale’s Sterling Library and has written extensively on T. He is described in the Bard book, by the editor Leslie Kearney, as “the leading authority on T.’s life.”

      Poznansky writes that “we have no factual evidence whatsoever that T. attempted suicide after his marriage by wading into the freezing cold Moscow River.” And that there was no fatal drug that imitates the symptoms of cholera. Besides, he argues, T. finally had accepted his homosexuality. And as a composer, he was now idolized throughout the world; he led the first concert ever given at Carnegie Hall; audiences in Boston  went mad over his piano concerto.

   As for his supposed suicide, Poznansky writes that T.’s “recklessness was self-evident; nor was he alone in ignoring elementary hygienic measures.”

   

      Normally, given a colorful, exciting explanation and an alternative, dull, commonplace explanation, it’s wise to accept the dull, commonplace explanation. Oswald alone shot Kennedy; fellow named Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.  And I suspect T. was simply not careful what he drank because of his profound misery — and guilt over the fate of his wife.

Shame on the New York Times

As a retired journalist, I’ve worked for some pretty cheesy publications in my time. Like Precis, which offered free articles to magazine and newspaper editors—all the articles containing plugs for our sponsors.

   But I was appalled by the free publicity the Times gave to The Week magazine the other day. The PR person who placed the story deserves a huge raise. And the Times deserves an enormous raspberry.

  The Week is an ever-so-shallow substitute for a solid news source. And yet the Times article was fulsome in its praise of this second-rate publication. Not one word of criticism.

  Read it—and be appalled at the crap that the Times will publish these days…

The Week Magazine’s Subscriber Base Grows

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEYDEC. 14, 2014

Photo

While many people treat the holidays as the perfect time to give the latest iPhone or video game, some gift givers are opting for a more traditional present this year: a subscription to the print magazine The Week.

The magazine, which includes a roundup of news, has been so successful at persuading its subscribers to give the magazine to friends and relatives that gift subscriptions have become a major driver of its total circulation.

In fact, 110,000 subscribers bought 165,000 subscriptions in 2014, said the magazine’s spokeswoman, Renee Rossi. That is more than a quarter of the magazine’s total circulation of 579,291, according to data tracked by the Alliance for Audited Media.

Ms. Rossi said the magazine has increased its number of gift subscriptions 35 percent during the last five years while it raised its subscription price 30 percent. And gift subscriptions, which cost from $40 to $60, have helped the magazine’s overall circulation growth, which has increased 12 percent, to 579,291 this year from 515,066 in 2010.

Sara O’Connor, executive vice president for The Week’s consumer marketing, said the magazine had aggressively tried to “make our subscribers our advocates” through gift subscriptions. She says The Week tries to get subscribers to give the magazine for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation as well as the holidays.

Enthusiasts include Tina Brown, the journalist and magazine editor, whose husband Harry Evans was involved with the early introduction of the United States edition of The Week. She was preparing on Friday to order six gift subscriptions for friends in Delhi, where she is preparing for her Women in the World conference.

“I often give The Week at Christmas because it’s sort of brain sex,” Ms. Brown said. “It’s sort of snack-size cerebral entertainment. I’ve given it to media friends. I’ve given it to overseas friends. I’ve given it to expatriate friends. I’ve given it to family.”

It is not just the media elite who are keeping subscription numbers strong. Ed Hartman, a retired financial planner from Moraga, Calif., said he and his wife give their daughters and their families a subscription every year for the holidays. They have also given trial subscriptions to three neighbors, who have since become subscribers. Mr. Hartman does not subscribe to any other magazines or newspapers.

“It at least lets us know what is going on in the world,” he said.

It is also the kind of gift that seems to fit the political views of a range of relatives. Julie Marsili, an advertising executive from Troy, Mich., plans this holiday to give the subscription to her sister, parents and in-laws despite their varied political views.

“It’s a requested gift now,” Ms. Marsili said. “They show so many different perspectives and points

A Report on a New Biography of Beethoven

A Splendid New Book on Beethoven

By Warren Boroson

Mozart, someone said, wrote music like an angel.

“But Beethoven,” commented a young man whose opinion I respect, “is…God.”

    Now, I don’t believe for a minute that Beethoven separated the heavens from the earth or fashioned a woman from Adam’s rib or parted the Red Sea at just the right time, but I, too, am frankly in awe of him. No one wrote music more thrilling, more exciting, more beautiful.

     As for Beethoven versus Shakespeare as the greatest artist ever,  I listen to a lot more Beethoven than I read Shakespeare--including the sonnets.

   When the car radio is playing something by Beethoven and I’ve arrived at my destination, I hesitate to switch off the ignition and leave.

    I love that episode in a recent Beethoven biography: A winter’s day dawns in Boston and it’s not quite as frigid and snowy, so someone opens a window and – to celebrate — and plays the Ninth Symphony at full blast.

    And I think that E.M. Forster was wrong: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and not his Fifth is “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated the human ear.”

      Franz Liszt once said, of Chopin, that he came from another planet. So did Beethoven — although a very different planet from Chopin’s. (I love Chopin, too.)

    Every year, WQXR holds its Classical Countdown, asking listeners to vote for their favorite pieces of music. I always check the ratings, to make sure that Beethoven dominates the top ten — and that his Ninth symphony is Number One. Just to make sure that God’s in His heaven and all’s right in the world.

    A new biography of Beethoven – Beethoven: Triumph and Tragedy by Jan Swafford -- is just the ticket for a cold, listless winter day. A pleasure to read, informative as all get-out. The author seems to know almost everything worth knowing about Beethoven the man as well as Beethoven the composer. Example: Where is the ear trumpet that Beethoven, going deaf, used? Answer:  Missing.

       Some notes from this marvelous book:

He wasn’t good at arithmetic. “…if he needed to multiply 62 by 50, he did it by writing 62 in a column 50 times and adding it up.”

His favorite opera: Mozart’s Magic Flute. He called his hated sister-in-law the evil Queen of the Night; he called his rather despicable friend Anton Schindler “Papageno”-- after the foolish birdcatcher in Magic Flute. (Schindler wrote the first major Beethoven biography, “a work of the most remarkable mendacity….”)

He knew his worth as a composer. “He appeared to be devoid of doubts about himself.”

He was an angry man. Among other objects of his anger: Vienna, where he lived for many years. “From the Emperor to the bootblack, all the Viennese are worthless.” He also had unkind words for Jews and for Italians – typical of people at the time. (Chopin also had unkind words about Jews.) Writes the author: “…in the end, there is no indication that Beethoven had any more animus toward Jews than he had to the aristocracy,  to the Viennese, to much of the rest of humanity.”

B. denied learning anything from Haydn, his teacher for a while, but he “emerged a far more sophisticated composer.” Haydn himself would refer to Beethoven as “the Great Mogul”—the Big Shot.

Around 1793, a musician ran into a leading pianist of the day, Gelinek, preparing to take part in a piano duel. His opponent was a young foreigner. “I’ll fix him” said Gelinek. The next day the two met again. “The young fellow must be in league with the devil,” griped Gelinek. “I never heard anybody play like that! … I assure you I’ve never heard even Mozart improvise so admirably. Then he played some of his own compositions, which are marvelous — and he manages difficulties and effects at the keyboard that we never even dreamed of.”

   His listener asked: “What’s his name?”

  “He’s a small, ugly, swarthy young fellow and seems to have a willful dispositiion. His name is Beethoven.”

A man who had heard Bach play said that Beethoven sounded exactly like him.

Eventually Beethoven came to believe that Handel was the greatest composer — his only superior. The greatest living composer? After himself, Cherubini.

Aristocrats treated Beethoven more or less like an equal. They mistakenly assumed that the “van” in his name indicated he came from a noble background. It didn’t.

While counterpoint gave him trouble, he had a special genius for improvisation. Once he improvised for a friend, who lamented that such beautiful music should now be lost forever. “You are mistaken,” said Beethoven, who then played the entire improvisation again, note for note

In 1796, an Italian violinist published an interpretation of the musical keys. C major was “a grandiose, military key, fit to display grand events, serious, majestic.” C minor was “a tragic key,” to display deaths of heroes, for example. D minor was “extremely melancholy and gloomy,” while B flat major was “tender, soft, sweet, effeminate”; E flat major, “a heroic key, extremely majestic, grave and serious…”; A major, “laughing and cheerful.” Whether B. actually studied these descriptions, writes Swafford, they are close to the way he tended to interpret these keys.

For a while he studied with Salieri – who famously did not poison Mozart.  Salieri severely criticized one of B.’s exercises. Later, Salieri complained to B. that he couldn’t get the tune out of his head. “Then, Herr von Salieri,” said Beethoven, “it can’t have been so utterly bad.”

He idolized Goethe –  Goethe reportdly enjoyed B’s music for Egmont. And Shakespeare, someone else said, was “his idol.”

Rodolphe Kreutzer was a violinist whom B. had come to admire, and B. dedicated his A major sonata to him. He didn’t know that Kreutzer didn’t like B’s music and apparently never performed “the work that made his name immortal.” (He told Berlioz that he found the sonata “unintelligible.”)

The third symphony, the Eroica, was originally to be called Bonaparte. When B. learned that Napoleon had made himself emperor, furious, he took the title page of his symphony and tore it up.

While it took a long time for many masterpieces, even those of Beethoven, to be recognized, the third symphony was relatively quickly appreciated. In 1807, a fashionable magazine called it “the greatest, most original, most artistic, and, at the same time, most interesting of all symphonies.” B. himself, before writing his Ninth, said the Third was his favorite symphony.

He was for liberty and fraternity, but not for equality. “Vox populi, vox dei,” he said. “I never believed it.”

He wanted to write a 10^th symphony, with no chorus. To create a “new gravitational force,” whatever that meant.

He also wanted to write music for Goethe’s Faust.

When he wrote his opera, Fidelio, censorship was all over the place. There were to be no religious or current political themes. The military had to be treated with respect. A man and a woman could not leave the stage together without a chaperone. Certain words—freedom, equality—were problematic. Not surprisingly, at first the opera was banned. But after minor changes and some string-pulling, the performance went ahead.

B. himself was unhappy with the title, Fidelio, because he preferred Leonora—the actual name of the heroine.

Sometimes the great Beethoven tossed off some  musical monstrosities. One day he heard someone playing one of his hasty compositions. Who wrote that? he asked. Told he was responsible, he said, “Such nonsense by me? Oh, Beethoven what an ass you are!”

(Critics also belittle his “Wellington’s Victory.”)

He wasn’t conventionally religious. Haydn thought he was an atheist; he himself once said that Jesus was only a poor human being and a Jew.

Who was the first critic to truly appreciate Beethoven? None other than Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, about whom the opera Tales of Hoffmann was written.

Who was Beethoven’s so-called Immortal Beloved? The author indicates that we may never know the answer

A performance of his Missa solemnis was so bad that “Here could be at least one day in his life when Beethoven was lucky to be deaf.”

Mozart is alleged to have loathed the flute. Beethoven himself wrote: “I cannot bring myself to write for the flute, as this instrument is too limited and imperfect.”

The Fifth Symphony, like the Third, was revolutionary. One composer, who had taught Berlioz, was so excited and upset at the symphony’s conclusion “that when he tried to put on his hat, he could not find his head.”

B. accomplished a miracle during the years 1800-1808. He wrote six symphonies and the Choral Fantasy, four concertos, 11 piano sonatas, nine string quartets, an opera, a mass, a collection of overtures, a variety of immortal chamber music, and “a stream of other works….” Lamented another astonishing musical genius, Franz Schubert, “Who can do anything after Beethoven?”

So, what is the author’s verdict on Beethoven the human being? “Beneath the paranoid, misantrhopic, often unbearable surface, Beethoven was among the most generous of men.”

After his death, souvenir hunters cut off all of the hair on his head. (After Haydn died, his head was detached from his body and spirited off by phrenologists who wanted to study his skull.)

Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he wrote of his growing deafness, was eventually owned by the soprano Jenny Lind.

A suitable epigraph: “He understood people little and liked them less, yet he lived and worked and exhausted himself to exalt humanity.”

An unanswered question: What helps account for B.’s genius? One tentative answer: His life was so utterly miserable – unrequited love affairs, painful illnesses, scrounging for money, fights with friends and relatives – that he buried himself in his one certain source of pleasure and praise: writing music. And, as he boasted, he was known all over Europe. (Of course, I, too, have had unrequited love affairs, painful illnesses, etc., and have never amounted to anything. Go figure.)

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