26 Andover | Spring 2013

On cOurse

A film of the Metropolitan Opera’s latest version of Parsifal is playing in a Graves classroom occupied by 15 attentive students. Their two teachers have already briefed them well on the ancient Germanic story with its Wagnerian elements that appealed to—and very likely heavily influenced—a young Adolf Hitler. They are deep into the motifs—the suffering of Amfortas, the seductress Kundry, edging toward the compassion and redemption that finally gives way to resolution at the end.

“Did you hear that?” Chris Walter asks, eyes wide. “And there it is again!” A few students nod. “Dee-dee-dum. What is that? What’s the connection between Parsifal and PA? It’s a trick question,” he teases. Quizzical looks abound. “It’s called the Parsifal Chime! Hear it in the bass? Da-da-da-dum. It’s the Bell Tower chimes!” The moment is punctuated by laughter.

Walter attempts to connect students on a personal level to the deep meanings and motivations behind Wagner’s famous opera. And to set it in the context of the times, the 1930s as Hitler was amassing power, he has a substantive partner. In this inventive collaboration called Out of Tune: Music and the State in the Twentieth Century, music and

history are parsed and conjoined by instructors who share passions for both, a country of origin, and 21 years of friendship as part of the Andover faculty. Marcelle Doheny, instructor in history and social science and classically trained oboeist, has taught world and European history for all of those 21 years. Walter came in 1977 as a French and German teacher, and

then went off for a master’s degree in music before returning to the music department, where, aside from his teaching and conducting, he served as chair of the department from 1995 to 2001 and has been director of performance since 2007.

The idea for the course was hatched over lunch five years ago, born of a mutual desire to increase the comingling of history, politics, and music studies. But how to narrow the focus? They settled on classical music in the 20th century (Doheny believes this timeframe is insufficiently studied, and Walter senses that few students have had much exposure to classical music of this period) just as New Yorker writer Alex Ross published his book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. “It crystallized it all for us,” Doheny says. They would look at Strauss, Wagner, and Hitler, Shostakovich and Stalin, Copeland and McCarthy for starters. Toward the end they would look at the deprivations imposed by the Cultural Revolution in China.

Madmen&

Maestros:So ”Out of Tune“

Music 485/History-Social Science 485 by Sally V. Holm

Gil

Talb

ot

27Andover | Spring 2013

The key element would be questions. How did the politics of the time influence a composer? How reflective of the culture is the music of its time? How do we discern sarcasm in a composer’s work? How do you create irony in music? What forbidden emotions or realities are imbedded in a work? Questions that have no definitive answers, but that ask students to ponder deeper meanings and come to their own informed interpretations of art. Doheny and Walter agreed that only seniors and uppers would be able to enroll. “It’s all too sophisticated, too ambiguous for 9th- and 10th- graders,” Doheny says. “They have to be mature enough to tolerate uncertainty.”

Uncertainty dominates the classroom throughout the discussion of Shostakovich and the angst that held Soviet Russia in its grip in Stalin’s time. Doheny sets the stage: an atmosphere of fear, rampant paranoia in the arts brought on by Stalin’s ruthless purges of anyone who deviated from the party line, the promotion of a “classless society” marked by a mirage of happy workers bringing industrialization to the economy, the crushing of Formalism and the rise of Soviet Realism. Enter Dmitri Shostakovich. Walter describes him: a prodigy and product of the intellectual elite who tended toward dissonance and abstraction in his music until a disastrous review in Pravda of his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District marked him as a target for Stalin’s wrath. Change or die.

Shostakovich was certainly no fool. His 5th Symphony, written in 1937, had to be seen as a monument to

Soviet Realism. It resurrects his career. Walter plays a video of a rendition by the San Francisco Symphony, interjecting throughout: “This symphony expressed all that Shostakovich had endured, yet Stalin accepted it. How was that possible? Was the composer being sarcastic? What imbedded emotions can you hear?” He points out a brief thematic reference from Bizet’s Carmen—a prime example of a “code” in the music. He draws their attention to the strings’ subtle echo of the choral music of the Russian Orthodox religion. An elegy to Stalin’s victims, among whom were Shostakovich’s relatives and friends? Is the composer taking a huge risk? Remember, Doheny chimes in, “communism is an atheist creed. Religion was completely forbidden in that era.” At the time, students are told, the audience cried.

The students are assigned to listen to a movement of the 5th Symphony in its entirety before the next class. But Walter, in his enthusiasm, cannot help himself. He skips to the end of the second movement, explaining about the “dead ends” Shostakovich has crafted into the music that reflect the composer’s hopelessness and frustration. “But then, listen to how he finishes,” he implores them. The harp’s “ghostly notes” lead into the strings’ “last benedic-tion,” full of religious overtones, winding down to what sounds suspiciously “like a haunting amen.” And so it does.

The class is silent. No one stirs for a moment, lost in thought about what becomes of music in a time so out of tune.