Nearly as much as New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day rankles me. I resent the Hallmark cards and the convenience store chocolates and the commerce-driven peer pressure. I feel much more at home with Mieczyslaw Karlowicz.
Karlowicz was born in 1876. By all accounts one of the gloomiest of composers, his outlook and philosophy might well be described as pessimism leavened with pantheism. In Karlowicz’s melancholy world, all love is unfulfilled or doomed; all existence leads to tragedy and destruction. In high romantic fashion, he contemplated suicide. The only place he seemed to find solace was in his beloved Tatras. He once noted, “Atop a high mountain, I become one with the surrounding space. I cease to feel individual. I can feel the mighty, everlasting breath of eternal being.”
It is perhaps a kind of poetic justice that a life spent cultivating suicidal despair, and raising it to a level of high art, would be cut short, when Karlowicz was killed in an avalanche in 1909, aged only 32 years – a most fitting end for this pantheist with fatalistic tendencies.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we hear one of the six symphonic poems upon which Karlowicz’s reputation, in large part, is based. “Stanislaw and Anna Oswiecim,” inspired by a painting of Stanislaw Bergmann, evokes a tale of forbidden love between brother and sister, ending in inevitable tragedy.
We’ll follow that with what has been cited as the most performed concerto of the 20th century. Yet, despite its multiple recordings, it is still far from being universally recognized in the West. “The Butterfly Lovers,” for violin and orchestra, is based on an ancient Chinese tale, about the young daughter of a rich landlord, who disguises herself as a boy in order to get an education. Her secret is discovered by a classmate. The two fall in love. However, the girl’s parents have promised her in marriage to a wealthy man. The lovelorn boy dies of grief. On the day of her wedding, the girl passes the boy’s tomb, which opens to receive her. She hurls herself inside, and the lovers emerge as butterflies fluttering freely in the air. The tale has been described as a Chinese “Romeo and Juliet.”
The concerto was an enormous success at its premiere, in 1959. However, due to the vagaries of totalitarianism, the work was reviled during the Cultural Revolution, condemned for its western influences and evocations of feudal China. Within five years, everyone associated with the work was in prison. The music was branded “bourgeois,” and the composers publicly accused of crimes worse than murder. One of the creators, Gang Chen, spent two years in prison, then several more years under house arrest at the Shanghai Conservatory, with manual labor in the mornings and self-criticism sessions in the afternoons. The soloist in the concerto’s first performance, Zhanhao He, is given co-credit for the work’s composition.
It was after the Cultural Revolution that “The Butterfly Lovers” really took flight (if you’ll pardon the expression). It has been called the “Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto of the East.”
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of musical expressions of doomed love, this week – “Valentines, Nay!” – this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
PHOTO: “Stanislaw Oswiecim at the Body of Anna Oswiecimowna” (1888) by Stanislaw Bergmann
