A SONATA FOR MRS. CARDINAL

The question has often been posed - though perhaps until now no satisfactory
answer has been given - why it is that so many of the finest musical talents departed   this earth prematurely, their lives tragically incomplete, their  geniuses just beginning to blossom?  Such enigmas may lead the thoughtful person to wonder what the world would be like had, say, Mozart, lived another thirty years, or Schubert, or Shelley?  


Of all promising artists torn from us too soon, surely the most poignant case (both because he was a mere lad of twenty at the time of his death and due to the precocity of his genius) is that of Juan Crisostomo Arriaga (1806 - 1826).  The expressive beauty and perfection of form found in the highly individualized music he managed to compose in his last few years (including a symphony, a string quartet and an opera - “Los Esclavos Felices”) pale before the promise they held of a lifetime of masterpieces he did not survive to write.

Such is life, one might conclude, and shrug - or grow pensive, or shake one’s fists, or laugh with sardonic malice.  But in the case of Arriaga, such, I have found, is not life, after all.  Mystery and miracle surround the disappearance of the young muse, and it just may be that my discovery in this present case will establish a precedent for re-evaluating the supposed “premature exits” of other artists.

I have encountered, in my travels, a number of versions of what seems to be the same story at heart - a set of variations on a theme, as it were.  Some say that angels took the young man up one morning, sparing mortals a music of unbearable beauty, better suited to heavenly choirs and orchestras.    Others maintain that he fell in love with a little bird, that through the magic of this love he was transformed into a swift, red cardinal, and that his days were spent spinning love - songs, and gathering twigs and berries, while she, for her part, would squat firmly atop her precious eggs, feathers nervously ruffled, admonishing him in her little call, a single, repeated note.  

But lo! (the story continues) through the greatness of his sacrifice (descending from the kingdom of men to the fugitive existence of beasts) was she transformed in turn, and learned from him the making of melodies, long and sweet, so that their days were filled with marvelous music.  (And when at length the eggs were hatched the nest would resound with rapturous polyphony to greet the rising sun.)

It is this latter version of Arriaga’s disappearance that I subscribe to, for the simple and incontestable reason that I have spoken - or rather communicated - with the man - now bird - myself, and he has confirmed the above story, at least as regards its essential outlines.  As proof of this (otherwise hard-to-believe) experience of mine I have appended a transcription of a love-duet of Arriaga and his mate as they sang it for me.  I hasten to add that this is no “paraphrase” in the free, Lisztian manner, but a strict and faithful transposition of the bird melodies into a human medium in which I have no creative input beyond the perfunctory translation of timbre, rhythm, melody and harmony.   Of course, it is the essence, the inner meaning  of the music, that I have sought to capture, foregoing a slavish adherence to its outer form (a mere out-of-tune twittering  in any event).  And if the surface resemblance to the original may seem tenuous, I am nonetheless certain it represents what Arriaga would have written were he still in possession of fingers with which to grip his quill, and a human-sized cerebrum.  Indeed, I may as well divulge here (though the clever reader will have anticipated this) that I conceived of the transcription as an elaborate metaphor:   Behold the busy, industrious male cardinal, gathering twigs and grass, bark and feathers, with which to build his lady-love a warm and cozy nest, and read: behold the busy, industrious musicologist gathering snippets of themes and melodies as he finds them - here, a tune from Lodyzhensky, there a fragment of Brahms, and here (yes, let us not forget, even here!), the dark, distorting influence of Roofridge...

The resulting formal design of this single movement work will be of interest to the theorist; I believe  it may also furnish evidence for those inclined to view this story of the transformation of man to bird as a further metaphor indicating the escape of the artist into another dimension, or alternate universe.  A cyclic theme pervades the three sections of the sonata: the varied recurrences of this theme are dictated by the famous "progression of states," beginning with the Lyric mode, moving thence to the  Fantastic, and finally the Heroic.  (The presence of Heinrich von Ofterdingen's system of scales here is admittedly problematic in terms of the thesis presently promulgated, but a discussion about that right now would be too much, so let's not.)    One senses, strangely, an absence of dramatic thrust, as if somehow the order of sections is unimportant, as if the goal were the apprehension of everything at once.  
In that case the work (and through the work the artist) may be seen as "tending toward the place of the multiplicity of possible things..." pictured as "a luminous cavern..." (Calvino).   

This would suggest  that, in a multi - verse such as ours, each world (and each
sonata) is both prison and perfection, both paradise and purgatory.   Our life, well lived, our song, sung well, is all things at once, while only in our unending need to escape  do we find our voice.  For this everything that we hold delicately in our hands is nothing until it be one single thing, at which moment it strives to be another.

It is tempting to inquire whether the transcription that follows is sui generis, or if instead there exist other instances of what we believe to be human music, but which actually are, like the present work, secretly coded messages from alien realms.  I am inclined, if for no other reason than modesty, to suspect I am not alone, and that other musicians have been “visited”  by departed composers.  

But enough!  For my subject is not “Mozart and the Koalas” but “Arriaga y los
Pajaros”, and the joyous vitality of this proto-music, even in the present, diluted form, is testimony to the young composer’s happiness in the kingdom of his love-enchanted choosing.  (This I maintain despite the contrary viewpoint espoused by a certain raucous and belligerent bluebird who pretends to detect in the following pages an undercurrent of hidden pathos, suggesting that the bondage of love entails, for every joy, a sorrowful symmetry, intimating that Arriaga’s descent was no freely chosen sacrifice but a response  to dark karmic necessity.  Such interpretive license, in the face of obvious musical facts, I find quite irresponsible.)  I say that not only did the Spaniard teach but that he was taught, not only did he give but he was gifted - taught the holy efficacy of music’s purposes, gifted with a life of burning immediacy, like some winged, diminutive Achilles, his lifeblood poured out in a brief, melodious
scarlet flow.  Such music, such living, serves to remind us of our ancestry: before there was speech and song, before head and heart were sundered, before sense lost sonority and music became the diversion of the bored, we lived like this, sang like this, and the gods were pleased.  Oh most fortunate Arriaga!  The flowers tilt toward sunlight but know naught of their beauty.  The patience of sea-hewn stones is never, in a thousand centuries, rewarded with awareness of their cool and pleasing symmetries.  Only you, young Spaniard, can taste the cup of oblivion and live, only you are privileged to surrender to deep unconscious inspiration, and see yourself, mirror-like, in the eyes of your beloved.  

The labor of transcription is dedicated to Peter Ceniti who, it is hoped, will be lured by the specter of unfamiliar beauty from where he lurks in the shadows of childish fantasy into the clear light of day and that pellucid state of reasonableness that it symbolizes.  I shall not cease in my travels, Professor, until I have found you, and helped you come home!