Vile Travesties

Forty years ago when I had just moved again to San Francisco, I heard playing one afternoon on an F.M. radio classical music station something called a "concertino" by "Giambattista Pergolesi." I was ravished by it. I wrote down the name of the piece and the composer and walked immediately to a discount record store south of Market (I was living then just north of Market in a seedy hotel in the Tenderloin) and special-ordered it. In a couple of weeks it had arrived: a L'Oiseau-Lyre recording (vinyl, of course, as records were in those days), from Paris via New York, of all four of "Pergolesi's" concertini. And they were all as ravishingly beautiful as the small sample I'd heard had led me to expect that they would be. Of Course they weren't really written by Pergolesi: Nobody knew who the composer of them was. An anonymous Dutch nobleman, c. 1740 was the best guess. But that didn't matter to me, because they were beautiful; better actually than any real Pergolesi I ever heard (I'm not that fond of la Serva Padrona, or of the Stabat Mater, supposedly the real Pergolesi's best stuff--). I listened to them over and over until, as records did then, they wore out. But by then I had memorized them--every note. After that occasionally I'd check them out of a music library, or hear them played on the radio again--for all their anonymity, they're not that obscure--and I never, ever found them less beautiful on reacquaintance. Until one day, moved by I know not what snob impulse, I sat down to listen to Igor Stravinsky's the Rake's Progress. I think I had heard that the Rake's Progress was "neo-classical," and I thought that must be "neo-classical" as in Louis XVI furniture, or Paul Revere silver, or Prokofiev's "classical" symphony. But what it was was my old favourite pseudo-Pergolesi concertini, "modernized," jazzed-up, full of smart-ass dissonance and abrasive percussion: Stravinsky, with unspeakable cowardice and envious hatred for the kind of beauty he himself (unlike Prokofiev) couldn't begin actually to create, had taken these exquisite relics of a time when it didn't matter whose music it was, so long as it was beautiful and gave delight--and shit on them, and wiped his ass with them; broke their necks and stuck wires in them.

Much the same may be said about Carl Orff's brutal, contemptuously inappropriate setting of goliardic poetry: Who would think, listening to this percussive neo-primitivism, that some of the world's most delicate, spring-like poetry is concealed beneath it?

Not that Little Igor, with his Sacre du Printemps (the "malicious child who will destroy music," as Debussy had foretold), had not already given Spring a bloody/shitty, Jungian/Freudian, pseudo-primitive wallop--muddying the very World's Renewal at its source, leaving not a lot, in truth, for Schoenberg and his clones to do; though, of course, what manner of villainy they could think to do, they did.