The theme and variations versus the symphony: on love
[NOTE: First published here in June of 2006.]
I try to do about three miles of brisk walking every day for exercise. On rainy or snowy days, I’m off to the gym and its treadmill, which feels like–well, like being on a treadmill. But on beautiful days or even halfway decent days, I prefer to be outside.
I live in a beautiful area, and there are a wide variety of choices for walking. But, somehow, I almost always end up at the same place: a park by the ocean. It’s convenient, only a two-minute drive from my house. I know exactly what route to follow to get in my requisite three miles. It has just the right combination of flats and hills, sun and shade, dogs and owners, parents and children. Part of the walk lies in a wooded area, but most of it is open and within sight of the water, some cliffs and crashing waves, and even a couple of lighthouses. The sort of thing people journey to New England for from all over the world.
So, how could I ever ask for anything more?
And yet, to walk along essentially the same route, day in and day out, for several years? Doesn’t it get boring?
Well, every now and then I guess it does get boring–like almost anything can, even dessert. But mostly it’s not boring at all, even though it’s the same walk and the same scene. Because, like that proverbial river that one never steps in twice, it’s somehow ever-changing.
Some of this is due to variations in light and weather. When the sun is out, the place is transformed from the landscape when the sky is overcast. The wind whips the waves on a turbulent day, which is different entirely from a calm sea. The dogs change, although not so much as the weather; the canines and their owners are nothing if not creatures of habit. The babies get older. The seasons work their magic, especially the brilliant falls.
So yes, it’s the same park and the same ocean. But it’s never really the same. And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.
And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.
It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.
I’ll let author Milan Kundera take over on the subject now, since he was actually my inspiration in the first place (from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Here he is describing his musicologist father who, during the last ten years of his life, had lost the ability to speak:
Throughout the ten years of his illness, Papa worked on a big book about Beethoven’s sonatas. He probably wrote a little better than he spoke, but even while writing he had more and more trouble finding words, and finally his text had become incomprehensible, consisting of nonexistent words.
He called me into his room one day. Open on the piano was the variations movement of the Opus 111 sonata. “Look,” he said, pointing to the music (he could no longer play the piano). And again, “Look,” and then, after a prolonged effort, he succeeded in saying, “Now I know!” and kept trying to explain something important to me, but his entire message consisted of unintelligible words, and seeing that I did not understand him, he looked at me in surprise and said, “That’s strange.”
I know of course what he wanted to talk about, because it was a question he had been asking himself for a long time. Variation form was Beethoven’s favorite toward the end of his life. At first glance, it seems the most superficial of forms, a simple showcase of musical technique, work better suited to a lacemaker than to a Beethoven. But Beethoven made it a sovereign form (for the first time in the history of music), inscribing in it his most beautiful meditations.
Yes, all that is well known. But Papa wanted to know how it should be understood. Why exactly choose variations? What meaning is hidden behind it?
That is why he called me into his room, pointed to the music, and said, “Now I know!”
And, somehow, Kundera the son finally understood (or thought he understood; the father wasn’t telling) what his father meant:
I am going to try to explain it with a comparison. A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into the other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world hidden in all things.
…Variation form is the form in which the concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.
The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the marvelous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves further and further away from the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope.
Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack that other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach….
It is not surprising that in his later years variations become the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well…that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.
. . . the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes. And I submit that love is like that, too. . . [cites Kundera] . . . [and] that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.
Well, to move from the musical form of theme and variation to the literary form of the sonnet, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 seems to fit the kind of love you had with Gerard:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Sixteen measures of music; fourteen lines of iambic pentameter– both the German composer and the English poet contain multitudes– like the relationship you had (and still have, as you’ll find) with Gerard.
Neo,
The sublime music reference reminded me that, a few years ago, Gerard didn’t like us commenters to use the term “awesome” —because few things really are.
I wrote that I immediately thought of something awesome. That the chemicals and physics in the vast Hubble photos he had posted were the same chemicals and physics in the small handful of my brain that let me remember every stanza of the poetry I had composed in 1963, over 50 years before my comment. “It’s awesome,” I wrote.
He replied that it was, indeed.
And now I’d like to add, Gerard = Awesome.
For the same reason.
Neo quoting Kundera again: Variation form is the form in which the concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter.
Given Neo’s many lessons in dance appreciation for her readers outside the field of ballet, I’m posting here a link to American Ballet Theatre’s 1978 performance of George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, with Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov as the soloists. The music is the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 rather than Beethoven, but the theme-and-variations form shines through because Balanchine did not want elaborate staging or a story line to distract from the dancers’ movements.
The present video is derived from a VHS tape, so is not as clear as a remastered version might be, but still showcases a performance by two dancers at the height of their powers. It wouldn’t surprise me that Neo saw a live performance of Theme and Variations in NYC in the late 1970s.
(Note: The ballet itself ends around 21:30 in the video, the remaining 13 minutes being a live interview with Gelsey Kirkland.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgCareuuxK4&t=368s&ab_channel=baja0270
How are you?
Speaking of “theme and variations”, looks like it’s time once again for the CDC to redefine another “technical concept”, in this case the admittedly complex, difficult and entirely counter-intuitive “original date”….
“FDA Quietly Changes End Date For Study Of Heart Inflammation After Pfizer COVID Vaccination”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/fda-quietly-changes-end-date-study-heart-inflammation-after-pfizer-covid-vaccination
Opening graf:
“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has changed the end date for a key study on post-vaccination heart inflammation without notifying the public….”
(Gosh, is there anything they can’t redefine??!)
Sorry about your loss.
The worst thing to do, and many do it, is to walk, run, or jog along a significantly used roadway for a long distance.
It’s often easier to do that, but it’s a Really Bad Idea. There is a greater prevalence of auto emissions in the area right around a heavily used roadway, namely Carbon Monoxide, Nitrous Oxide and Sulfur Dioxide (IIRC, those are the three main chemicals). Add to this your elevated breathing rate from the exercise, and it is comparable to smoking cigarettes.
You’re far better off picking a park, as Neo does, or a self-contained neighborhood, or a wilderness area with jogging paths.
BTW, another suggestion I myself would make is to take up Disc Golf. As with normal golf, you walk a heck of a lot around the course, but it’s pretty close to free, costing, at a minimum, one-time single 10 buck disc (once you get into it you’ll likely have as many as 2-5 — some peeps get pretty fanatical and have entire bags of them. And yes, you’ll have to replace it if you lose it in a water hole or obnoxious neighbor yard). Many areas have a number of different locations for the activity.
Do you have any near you? Easy to check:
https://www.pdga.com/course-directory
Simon & Garfunkel wrote many emotional, not-love but melancholy filled songs of beauty and harmony; and poignancy.
We have a bit of snow in Bratislava, so Hazy Shade of Winter is on my mind – but it is no longer “the springtime of my life”. Last night drinking, not vodka and lime, just gin & tonic & lime (kinda close).
Bookends, both the song and album, carry that theme of aging, with variations, and Old Friends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTFtz5hwO3w
“how terribly strange to be seventy”.
pretty good bootleg live 2009 in Japan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WutoU2WJa7w
My sincere condolences to you, Neo – and to all who’ve lost loved ones.
S&G reached for various kinds of melancholy and their harmonies seemed to fit. I wonder if they could have run up a cheerful, happy song and made a major change in their sound to fit it.
One of their albums–in the days when the LP gave you maybe fourteen inches by the same to tell a story on the cover–had the two of them in their, iirc, regulation pea jackets and pointy-toed urban rock/folk boots on what seems to be an empty subway platform. The title was “Wednesday Morning; Three A. M.”
Hemingway said three in the morning is the dark night of there soul. There’s been, possibly forever, an unofficial military truism–not sure it’s in any manual–that three in the morning’s the best time to put in a surprise attack.
Anyway, you didn’t get up grinning from that album. I liked it but I wonder what the attraction was.
I’m confident Neo will not be swallowed by whatever attraction grief has for itself, besides the loss of the object of the grief. But not easy.
Simon and Garfunkle wrote “Feelin Groovy.”
Little known fact: Simon also wrote “Red Rubber Ball”, one of the most upbeat breakup songs ever.
neo. I remember “Feelin’ Groovy”. I had a number of their albums I played often during a difficult time. Problem, for me, with “Groovy” is that not a single thing suggested or named as “fun” struck me as fun.
“kickin’ down the cobblestone….” Looking for fun….. Might have meant more at other times but seemed both not particularly interesting and….given my situation at the time, indicated no situational awareness.
He has no goal. No objective. He’s doing nothing to achieve…what? Passively waiting for something agreeable to happen while….the disagreeable is out of town for the day?
From the outside, I see the song, as I might if I tried to be in somebody else’s shoes. But at the time, did not grok.