NEVER ALONE
by Galen Guengerich
April 28, 2002
Ten days ago, my wife Holly and I attended a performance at Carnegie Hall of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, performed by violinist Christian Tetzlaff and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with Roger Norrington on the podium. It could well have been a ho-hum evening: big-time violinist, war-horse concerto, orchestra known for competently playing the standards. But the performance was anything but ho-hum. As Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times noted in his review, the young Tetzlaff is one of the most brilliant and inquisitive artists of the new generation, best known for playing Twentieth Century masterpieces and contemporary works. His challenge, Tommasini noted, was to make the Tchaikovsky concerto "sound like the audacious contemporary music it was when new without resorting to interpretive gimmickry."
It was a challenge to which Tetzlaff responded brilliantly. He played with an astonishing boldness and insistence, as though he were taking the music personally, as though there were something important at stake for him and for all of us who were listening. As Tommasini put it, Tetzlaff "drove the music dangerously when intensity was called for…In the final movement he took off at such a pace that you feared he would soon burn out. But the combination of wildness and clarity was thrilling. There was nothing slick or safe about the performance."
Perhaps that is because there was nothing slick or safe about the life of the man who wrote the music. Tchaikovsky composed his Violin Concerto in the 1870s when he was in his mid-thirties, during what his biographer calls "The Crisis Years." The crisis was a real one: he was in dire straits financially, and his teaching responsibilities at the conservatory had diverted time and energy from his first love, composing. The centerpiece of the crisis, however, was Tchaikovsky’s catastrophic marriage to Antonia Milyukova, a step he had taken in the hope of stopping speculation about his homosexuality. The composer and his bride had scarcely started on their honeymoon, however, before he recognized the folly of his action. In torment, he ran away to Switzerland. There, in the company of the violinist Anton Kotek, his close friend and possibly his lover, Tchaikovsky sketched out the entire Violin Concerto in just eleven days.
No wonder the concerto contains an intense combination of dangerous wildness and crystalline clarity. Somehow, at Carnegie Hall the other evening, Christian Tetzlaff found a way to set the spirit of Tchaikovsky’s music free. Sitting there listening, I wondered how Tetzlaff is able to accomplish something that almost no one else can. It is not simply that he can play the notes. Many professional violinists can get the fingering and bowing right. Nor is it that Tetzlaff has become wise with age, or that his violin is a centuries-old Stradivarius that makes almost anyone sound like a real violinist. Tetzlaff is about the age of my younger brother, and his violin was built sometime in the past few years by a 35-year-old German violinmaker named Stefan-Peter Grenier.
What accounts for the beauty and power of the music Tetzlaff played? The answer is no one thing alone. The music was not the individual notes alone, nor the years of diligent practice by Tetzlaff, nor the talent with which he was born, nor the skill and artistry of his violinmaker. The music was not the ebb and flow of Tchaikovsky’s despair and elation, nor the bold and imaginative conducting by Roger Norrington, nor the vigorous musical support by the St. Luke’s Orchestra. The music was not any of these elements alone, but the way they were connected to each other on that Thursday night in Carnegie Hall. Take any one of them away–those particular notes, the skill of those players, the talent of that composer, the acoustics of that hall, the expectation of that audience–and the music changes, because it emerges from no one of these elements alone, but from all of them together.
In other words, the relationships among the notes on a page make a song. What makes music is the relationship between the song and our experience. I wish to suggest this morning that this principle is true not just of music, but of all aspects of life, without exception. You can tell what something is–whether a note, a tune, or a person–not by looking at it in isolation from everything else, but by looking at how it is related to everything else.
This has not been the usual approach over the centuries to understanding what things are. Take the subject of human beings, for example. We are extraordinarily complex creatures, you and I. We are both body and mind, both flesh and spirit. We think and we act. We love and we make love. The relation between mind and body has intrigued our ancestors for millennia. It led, naturally, to much deliberation about what the world must be like for human beings as we know them to exist at all. In the past, some people–Plato and most Christian thinkers, for example–have argued that the basic nature of things is spiritual, that the important and lasting part of a human being is the soul, and that matter is, in the end, only a temporary creation of a divine, cosmic mind. Others, such as Aristotle and most scientists, were dissatisfied with this understanding and maintained that the basic nature of things is material, that everything is finally matter, and that what we call mind and spirit are merely a particular type of interaction between substances.
Why does it matter who is right, you may ask? It matters because how we live depends on what we believe is most important in life, most valuable. If I believe that only my mind is the true and lasting part of me, I will live quite differently than if I believe only my body matters. The one approach could lead me to starve in the desert waiting for enlightenment, the other to a ceaseless quest for physical gratification. Neither approach seems ultimately satisfying, however. Each tries to separate the essence of life from everything else, but what we are left with is essentially nothing. We need a third way.
Music enables us to see a way of understanding life based not on who we are apart from everything else, but on how we are related to everything else. The fact is that we are both body and spirit; who I am has something to do with the body I have and the mind I have. But I cannot be reduced to either a particular cluster of cells or a particular set of thoughts alone.
Rather, I am a unique collection of experiences that involve both my mind and my body, but also other people and the world around me. Part of what constitutes me is that I was born on a dairy farm in Delaware, grew up in south Arkansas, and went to a Mennonite High School in Lancaster, PA. My father was a Mennonite minister, my niece died of a brain tumor at age eleven, my daughter Zoe’s mother and I are divorced, and Zoe lives with Holly and me half of the time. I came to All Souls eight years ago, Zoe was dedicated on this chancel, and Holly and I were married here. These experiences, and countless others besides, make me who I am–not in the way a potter applies steady pressure to shape a bowl, but in the way flour, butter, sugar and other ingredients go together to make a cake. Put another way, if you take away all the experiences I have had–the experience of having a mind and living in a body, of existing in a world and relating to other people–what remains apart from these relationships might be something, but it would not be me. I am made up of, or constituted by, those relationships.
That does not mean that these relationships–whether to our bodies or minds or our physical surroundings or other people–are always positive or constructive or nurturing. Sometimes these relationships are indifferent to our well-being or even difficult or destructive. This is why our physical health matters, and our emotional well-being and spiritual wholeness. Architecture matters too–the physical environments in which we spend our days–as does the quality of our friends. Over time, these ingredients make us who we are, just as the relationships among the notes and the players and the composer make the music what it is.
In the deepest possible sense, we never stand alone; we never stand wholly apart from everything else. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, our lives are wholly enmeshed in the people and world around us. That is not just true of human beings, it is true of everything, without exception–from music to molecules. On its own, nothing can even exist. This is a principle as fundamental as the law of gravity: nothing stands alone.
What this means is that we should pay less attention to who we are apart from the people and world around us, and more attention to who we are in relation to them. Over the long run, these relationships prove decisive. They make us who we are. Music demonstrates this elemental fact almost without parallel. Tonight’s 25th Anniversary concert of Musica Viva, for example, will feature, among other wonderful works, the Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra by Dmitri Shostakovich, a Russian composer who was born in 1906 and died in 1975. Shostakovich experienced firsthand the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin. Amid the Great Terror and the Second World War, he struggled to find a voice for his music that would escape the brutal artistic oppression by Stalin’s Communist regime. The struggle had not completely ended in 1957 when Shostakovich wrote his second piano concerto, but a thaw had come with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchyov and hope was again in the air. This counterpoint of control and exuberance suffuses the concerto.
Our pianist will be Jeanette Miklem, who knows this music well–in both respects. Jeanette is a superb pianist, of course, but her resonance with Concerto No. 2 extends beyond the notes. Jeanette is from Zimbabwe, a nation that has been a prosperous and democratic symbol of hope for Africa. But Robert Mugabe, aided by the indifference of the West, has defied the results of the last election, kept himself in power by military force, and begun systematically to eliminate those who resist him. To their credit, those who oppose Mugabe’s tyranny have refused to arm themselves and foment a civil war. Unfortunately, unless Mugabe is forced to cede power, Zimbabwe will soon be another tragic ending to a familiar colonial story.
In the face of this looming horror, uncertain whether she and her husband will be forced to flee their home and their country with their lives and little else, Jeanette has come to perform–what else?–Shostakovich. Through the music, the tendrils of time and history that bind us to each other will again be revealed. Sometimes life is hard, and we struggle against the winter of our pain and sadness. Other times, the sun shines in springtime on a world made new. In either case, the music demonstrates our connections to each other and reminds us that we are never alone.
That is a message we all need to hear. Over the past several weeks, a number of you have spoken with me about difficulties facing you and those you love. Some of your situations are heartbreakingly sad. The one thing I have been able to say in response to your grief and pain is this: you are not alone. Our journey through life is sometimes wonderful and sometimes painful, but we will never walk alone. I am not being sentimental, nor am I merely describing how a religious community operates. This is the way the world works. This is how things are. As music proclaims, you will never walk alone.