Art for the Sake of Art

My first experience with theatre was as a child with my parents and sisters at the Broadway production of Man of La Mancha. Children's concerts led by Maestro Leonard Bernstein came next and when Jesus Christ Superstar appeared, I excitedly followed the era's period works like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Godspell, Hair, and more.

Many people are compelled to defend the arts as adjuncts to “reading, writing and ‘rithmetic”, valuing them solely for developing vocabulary, critical and abstract thinking, or simply improving math scores akin to the?Mozart Effect.

While these values are genuine, they are at best secondary. We affirm rather that the arts possess their own profound intrinsic values that enrich the human condition with beauty, laughter, piety, joy, sadness, reflection, insight, hope and nature's wonders, just as they provide unique venues for sharing human expression--mysteriously providing means to share one's thoughts and imagination through more accessible ways like music, dance, literature, visual art, drama and film---after all, while intuitive and possessing innate?Gestalten?that helps us make sense of what we see and hear, we are not mind readers. It's as 19th century poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire espoused, "L'art pour l'art", or as you've seen in MGM's motto, "Ars gratis artis". Whether it's Wolfgang A. Mozart imagining music and writing it down for musicians to perform and audiences to experience and enjoy, or Andrew Lloyd Webber putting to paper his afternoon reveries about a musical production entitled "Phantom of the Opera", we concur with?René Magritte?that?“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”

As a young man, mini score in hand, I sat in the audience at Carnegie Hall crammed in the low budget undergrad favorite top balcony seats, knees pressed awkwardly against the staircase top,?eagerly awaiting the?Adagio?opening bassoon solo of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's?Symphony No. 6 in B minor (1893), to be performed by the Chicago Symphony. What a night! Superb acoustics and sold-out concert, 5/4 meter in vogue nearly a century before Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”, binoculars to see who was whispering on the stage, and Carnegie Deli on 7th Avenue preparing hot pastrami, onion rings, cheesecake, babka and knishes for the musicians and concert patrons who gather there after the concert. While some of the most distinctive, beautiful, and memorable musical themes drifted throughout the opening of the work later to be brilliantly restated in the?Andante come Prima, it was during the?Finale, Lamentoso-Andante, that I noticed fellow audience members musically overwhelmed, subjugated to gently weep and nod in affirmation. Others bowed heads, silent and motionless. My own experience, sensations, and observations of the emotive pathos and expressive depths of the music that evening transcended any initial naive expectations I possessed. It was a deeply moving, almost spiritual experience.

Adding to the work’s irony, provenance, and mystery, Tchaikovsky died just a few days after conducting its St. Petersburg premiere. At the time, 19th-century music critic and Moscow Conservatory professor Nikolay Kashkin deemed it logical "to interpret the overwhelming energy of the third movement and abysmal sorrow of the Finale in the broader light of a national or historical significance, rather than to narrow them to the expression of an individual experience. If the last movement is intended to be predictive, it is surely of things faster and issues more fatal than are contained in a mere personal apprehension of death. It speaks, rather, of a?lamentation large et sufferance inconnue, and seems to set the seal of finality of all human hopes. Even if we eliminate the purely subjective interest, this autumnal inspiration of Tchaikovsky’s, in which we hear the ground whirl of the perished leaves of hope, still remains the most profoundly stirring of his works."

Back to my Carnegie Hall experience--the Chicago Symphony concert that evening was fabulous, superb brass and marvelous strings. Conductor Sir George Solti was in his element as he commanded the mighty orchestra. I imagined what it must have been like on Carnegie Hall's?Opening Night, when Walter Damrosch led the New York Symphony Orchestra and the Oratorio Society in performing?“America”, Beethoven’s?Leonore?Overture No. 3, and the?New York premiere of Berlioz’s?Te Deum.?

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was here that evening, in person, in Carnegie Hall when?he?conducted his “Marche solennelle”, May 5, 1891.