In Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? Eli Siegel asks this question, which I see as central in explaining the Rhapsody:

Is there what is playful, valuably mischievous, unreined and sportive in a work of art?—and is there also what is serious, sincere, thoroughly meaningful, solidly valuable?—and do grace and sportiveness, seriousness and meaningfulness, interplay and meet everywhere…?

Ross Gorman’s Glissando

Right from the start, with that solo clarinet glissando played by Ross Gorman, there is an interplay of the “playful, valuably mischievous” and the “thoroughly meaningful.”  It gets your attention immediately—each note is played so carefully, seriously, beginning with that low-register trill which changes on its way up into a slurred chromatic scale.  That slur was actually Ross Gorman’s idea, and Gershwin loved it. Glissando means to slide from one note to another, and the clarinet is very playful here, even seems to laugh.  But as we just heard, it can also wail.

Next, the clarinet does another glissando, but instead of continuing on to the melody, that melody is now played by a high trumpet with “wah, wah” mute.  Repeating the melody shows that Gershwin wants us to take it seriously.  But he’s joined it to yet another comic sound—that trumpet.  And what follows?  The very opposite: a bit of serious, meditative low piano—the first time we’ve heard the soloist, by the way.  Then, the whole orchestra shouts enthusiastically; the piano responds with a longer solo; and the orchestra makes comic interruptions, including from the baritone sax.

I first heard this music as a young girl on Long Island.  My mother would turn on the old Zenith radio while washing the dishes, and I stood in awe, listening to it.  The way it’s both sassy and deep, sportive and profound, made me feel composed.  How much I needed to know what Eli Siegel was teaching just 40 miles away in Manhattan in Aesthetic Realism classes about the relation of art and life: that every person is trying to put opposites together and that I could learn from this very music how I wanted to be.

How a Girl on Long Island Saw Playfulness

My “playfulness” had a very different purpose than Gershwin’s music.  I could be serious as I studied music and art, but I was also wild and unreined in ways I despised myself for.  Though I smiled sweetly, inwardly, I felt hard and tough as I made fun of people and laughed at them in my mind.  I was sarcastic, especially with men.  Years later, I was to learn from Aesthetic Realism that this contempt, building myself up through scornfully diminishing others, making light of their feelings, was the cause of my feeling inwardly heavy-hearted and mean.

In one Aesthetic Realism consultation, when I spoke about my worry that I couldn’t be serious for very long—that I liked dismissing things, my consultants asked, “Do you think that desire is in everyone?”  “Yes,” I said.  “Do you think you’ve gotten a lot of importance saying, ‘I can’t stand it here, I’m leaving.’”

MN. Yes.
Consultants. Would you like to give up the occupation of being a professional door slammer?
MN. Yes. I would! I think I have gotten importance that way.
Cons. So if you see people and things as having meaning you can respect, it is harder to dismiss them and justify saying, “I’m getting out of here.”

As I learned what it means honestly to like the world and to criticize the drive in me to make fun of things and to disparage, I became more truly lighthearted and more thoughtful. In Rhapsody in Blue—the high-jinks, the playfulness, and even a usefully mocking sassiness are not only in the same universe as warm, large, tender feeling but are at one with it.

Part of the reason Rhapsody in Blue is “valuably mischievous”—to quote Mr. Siegel’s phrase—are the speed and the teasing stop-and-start quality of the solo piano part.  Is it sportive or profound?  It’s both. And more than once, there’s an unexpected dissonant blare from the orchestra that seems to criticize what came before sharply.

Let’s hear it now, and I go to a more recent recording in an orchestral arrangement also by Ferde Grofé, with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, Earl Wild on the piano.

George Gershwin said he conceived the piece on a trip to Boston:

It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is often so stimulating to a composer….I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.  And there I suddenly heard and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end….I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.

Part of what we just heard has exactly that noise and “melting pot” quality:  that dissonant “blare” on the brass, that noisy train-like sound, and that Latin-tinged rhythm.  And in a moment, we’ll reach the grand, majestic section, which I think is the most beautiful part of the Rhapsody.  Its largeness and lyricism seem to grow directly out of all the fun that came before. How Gershwin composed this is ever so fine; we hear a sound that goes out wide—yearningly—yet at the end of each phrase, as that grand arching melody reaches its longest notes, what do we hear underneath?  A jazzy countermelody on French Horn, playful and sportive. This music is saying: “It’s the same world that has both the grand and the mischievous, and both are in behalf of respecting, not diminishing, reality.”   Gershwin’s counterpoint between those two melodies resolves the conflict that practically ruined my life, between mockery and reverence, high jinks and seriousness.

After that grand melody, the music continues to search—building dramatically.  As the Rhapsody concludes, we hear the most triumphant music in the entire piece.  I’ll play this to end my paper. I want to say I’m very thankful to be studying in classes here at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and getting the richest education in the world.

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Our text in the class was Eli Siegel’s essay, “The Graceful Effort; or, The Oneness of Ease & Difficulty in Art,”— a chapter from his book The Opposites Theory. In it he says, “There must be enough obstruction, resistance, somehow in a work to make that work likable deeply…. Reality resists as it beckons,” and he speaks about true art having both “love and struggle.”

That is what we hear in large measure in this recording. Ella begins the song sweetly and deeply. Her voice has a clear, warm, lyrical quality that is lovely. I’m going to talk mainly about Louis Armstrong’s singing, but here’s a taste of how Ella Fitzgerald begins. And you’ll hear that even while she accents something graceful, there’s also a little roughness in what she does with the rhythm — sometimes jumping the beat, sometimes holding back. As the critic Henry Pleasants says in his book The Great American Popular Singers, “She has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense.” Here’s her entire solo, with Louis playing trumpet in back of her, along with the superb Oscar Peterson quartet.

Then as you just heard, Louis comes in, and there is the unmistakable sound of his voice. It’s like sunshine and cragginess, both at the same time. Isn’t that a little like ease and difficulty? My colleague, jazz pianist Alan Shapiro, has written that Louis Armstrong’s voice has the “roughness and grit of earth itself, and at the same time is so sweet, warm, tender.” When you hear Louis Armstrong, you can’t help but smile, and yet his voice is rough, it has obstruction, it isn’t just “pretty.”

The notable thing about this particular recording is how clearly you can hear the nuances of that roughness — the roughness and the feeling.  He sings in a simple way, and it sounds like the microphone was very close up to him. This allows you to hear all kinds of subtle things going on in his voice — the dips, the crags, the sweetness, even the tugs in his throat. Here is the beginning of his solo, coming in just after Ella Fitzgerald has sung.

To me, this singing has a beautiful raw quality; it’s as if you have a window into a person’s unvarnished feeling. Often, people think when something is raw it’s going to be difficult, not happy. That’s what I felt. But here the raw feeling is the same as sweetness and sincerity. In fact, I feel the sincerity of this singing is courageous, because it’s a person showing himself, not being falsely smooth, covered up.

We hear throughout this singing what Mr. Siegel said is in all true art: love and struggle. For example, you just heard the wonderful thing he does for a second on the word “key” when he says “the way you sing off key” — his voice slides down to the basement, and along the way we don’t know what key we’re in.

Now I’ll play some more of his solo and point to two other moments that are beautiful in how they put together ease and difficulty. First, the way he sings “life” so movingly in “The way you changed my life.” There’s pleasure but also some pain in the sound as he reaches for the note, and aren’t these — pain and pleasure — close to difficulty and ease? Then, toward the end of this section, when he sings the “No” on “No-o-o, they can’t take that away from me,” it’s a growl and a caress at the same time.

Are We Looking for a Oneness of Roughness & Ease?

Like many people, I preferred to stay away from things that seemed difficult. I wanted things to be easy, yet my notion of ease was wrong — because it didn’t include all the possibilities of the world, including its honest and beautiful roughness. And so, while I tried to find ease in various ways — from trying to make a neat, tidy world I controlled through having my apartment in perfect order, to taking drugs — I hardly ever felt at ease.  And though I did my best to hide it, I was often terrifically agitated.

Two months after I began to study Aesthetic Realism, because of what I was learning about my deepest desire — to like the world on an honest basis — I already felt so different that I wrote in a letter to Eli Siegel, “I feel more comfortable in my own skin.”

The goodness of this recording is in how much Louis Armstrong welcomes difficulty and makes it one with delight and ease. We hear this in his trumpet solo, at the start of which he says, “Swing it boys.”  He’s clearly enjoying that light swing rhythm of the quartet in back of him. At the same time, though he starts close to the melody, later he plays many unexpected notes, sometimes clearly dissonant ones, and with surprising, edgy rhythms.  He doesn’t play it safe — he likes the feeling of being tossed around!  And yet, he sounds so at ease, so relaxed.

Love — & What in Us Is Against It

Of course, along with Louis Armstrong’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s performances, there’s what this song is about. The person proudly says no one can take away the memories he has of the woman he cares for. There are ordinary memories, “The way you hold your knife,” and then deeper things, “the way you changed my life.”  There’s both love and struggle as he says, “We may never, never meet again on that bumpy road to love / Still I’ll always, always keep the memory of…” That’s pain and pleasure as one.

What this song is about means a lot to me. I love my dear wife,  Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, very much. I cherish the chance to be with her and talk with her and hold her in my arms, and I look forward to the many memories we’ll be making as the years go on. I feel very fortunate for the education we’re getting from Aesthetic Realism about love, which is unprecedented, logical and magnificent!

Part of my education has been learning there was something in me that was actually against being stirred up by anything or anyone not me. Once, when I was going to sing a love song, “Annie Laurie,” in a musical presentation here, I was having trouble with the depth of feeling in it and I didn’t understand why. When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, the Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, asked me:

ER: Do you like reverence or does it embarrass you? This song has grandeur and reverence.
BC: I think it embarrasses me.

And Ms. Reiss continued: “Do you think everyone is in a fight between great emotion and little emotion?” The answer, I’ve seen, is “Yes.” In my life I equated being at ease with keeping myself cool and intact.

At the time of this discussion, I was dating Meryl, and Miss Reiss asked:

ER: How much do you want Miss Nietsch to mean to you?
BC: She does mean a great deal to me and I want her to mean more.
ER: Does anything in you feel if you had a tremendous emotion that you would be a fool? You need to see there is that in you that feels, “I’m not going to be taken in by anything.” And you shouldn’t be. But one of the things a person can be taken in by is his own narrowness.

How true! What an education I was getting — and it continues. Said Ms. Reiss: “A person is being born right now. Would it be good for that person to have great feeling or little feeling?”

Louis Armstrong’s singing points to the answer to that question: that a person will never really be at ease unless he welcomes great feeling, including the honest roughness, the being shaken up, that’s in all great feeling. That principle is true about marriage, too. Through what we’ve learned from Aesthetic Realism, Meryl and I try to be good critics of each other — encouraging what is good in the other person, and saying where we think the other could be better. It’s not just smooth—as music shouldn’t be — and is sure is romantic.

I’ll end my paper the way the recording does as Ella Fitzgerald comes back in and then Louis Armstrong joins her, singing.  At first, she’s high flying and he has rough, almost guttural punctuations underneath.  They’re so different and they add to each other, need each other.  Aesthetic Realism says, “Love is proud need.”  And when he sings “The way you changed my life,” again I find it so moving. That statement surely stands for what I and so many others feel about Aesthetic Realism itself, which beautifully can change the life of every person.

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At 21, “An Essay on Criticism” made Pope famous because of the way he got so much into his tight, neat couplets.  Mr. Siegel showed that what Pope is dealing with—what makes for a good poem and for good judgment as a critic—is something we need to learn from for our lives to go well.

Eli Siegel looked at many of Pope’s lines, explaining their beauty and value.  He showed that a good critic needs to be aesthetic, to put opposites together, and we learned that central opposites in true poetry and good criticism are logic and emotion.

Mr. Siegel began by saying:

Mind happens to be geometry, and it happens to be the greatest anger. Tears come from mind, and also epigrams.  Pope felt that poetry should be correct. What that means is still to be seen. Pope felt he could talk of what is in poetry in couplets, and as he does, one feels all is well with the world.

Pope wanted to see what makes a person’s judgment good and also what interferes.  He writes about this in couplets which themselves are poetic and which people have enjoyed and been affected by for hundreds of years.  “Within the couplet of Pope,” said Mr. Siegel, “is a lot of wonder.”

Alexander Pope’s Poem, “An Essay on Criticism”

“An Essay on Criticism” begins:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offense
To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.

Pope is saying it is less dangerous to “tire our patience” by writing badly than to judge badly and therefore “mislead our sense.”  Then, he makes a comparison between how people feel about the accuracy of their  judgment, and the accuracy of their watches:

   ‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Said Mr. Siegel, “We have to believe in our judgment because our judgment is ourselves.”  Yet, he explained:

We are unsure of ourselves.  One could ask in a kind way, “What do you think of yourself? Why do you think that way?” Every person who has gone through hearing questions is stronger because of it. To have criticism of oneself is fortunate.

And he said:

The art of self-criticism is the art man has gone for. There will be people in business who will write memos and dictate things…yet an executive has a gnawing notion that the person he is, he doesn’t like.

Hearing this makes me grateful for how Aesthetic Realism sees the subject of criticism.  I am one of the people who has heard questions in consultations, and now in Aesthetic Realism classes with Ellen Reiss, and I am stronger because of them.  I learned that we are always criticizing ourselves.  But criticism today is not seen as what a person wants and needs most.  It is seen as hurtful to the self, and people are told we need someone to praise and soothe us and build our self-esteem.  Aesthetic Realism shows that the one way to like ourselves is to have this purpose in everything we do: to like the world on an honest basis and be fair to it.

What Is Good Taste?

“Criticism,” Mr. Siegel wrote in The Scientific Criticism in 1923, “is that action of mind, whose aim is to get the value of anything; and by value I mean size of power; and this power may be good or bad.”  We learned that an important aspect of criticism is something everyone wants to have—good taste.  In these next lines, Pope talks about the relation of being a true poet and having taste as a critic:

In Poets as true genius is but rare,
True taste as seldom is the Critic’s share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their light,
These born to judge, as well as those to write.

“Taste,” Mr. Siegel explained, “can be called the swift, immediate ability to value beauty.”

Eli Siegel himself was the critic to show that authentic poetry—of any style, form or century—arises from a person’s seeing reality in a way that is so honest and exact, the structure of the whole world is in the sound of the words, making for music.  And that structure is the oneness of opposites.  Commenting on opposites at the heart of Pope’s style of writing, Mr. Siegel gave this wonderful description:

The couplet here pleases definitely because of its energy and its trimness—like an evening gown that fits a girl very well, but at the same time, the fabric has texture and color.

This you can hear in the following lines, where Pope says most critics have at least the “seeds” or beginnings of the capacity for judgment:

   Yet if we look more closely, we shall find
Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind:
Nature affords at least a glimm’ring light;
The lines, tho’ touch’d but faintly, are drawn right.

Along with those “seeds of judgment,” there are interferences to good judgment in all of us, and pointing to the two biggest, Mr. Siegel said: “Our desire to love ourselves, no matter whether we deserve it or not,” and our desire to “belong to the crowd.”  Bad criticism, he showed, has to do with “ego and snobbery.”  “Being in the swing, in the trend,” he said, “has made for a lot of corruption”:

When people get more interested in what others want to hear than what a thing is—that has made for a great deal of trouble.

He then asked this important question which people haven’t known the answer to, but have worried about: “What makes judgment weaker in a person?”  The thing that makes a person’s judgment weaker, Aesthetic Realism explains, is contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”  One form contempt takes is competition, the desire to beat out other people and be above them.  Pope describes this vividly when he says of some critics:

All fools have still an itching to deride,
And fain would be upon the laughing side.

And in these later lines, he talks about how some critics turned against the important poets and critics of ancient times from whom they had learned so much:

Against the Poets their own arms they turn’d,
Sure to hate most the men from whom they learn’d.

Here Pope is describing one of the worst things in self. It is the hatred of respecting someone else, feeling humiliated because you need to learn from that person.  Eli Siegel himself was met with this ugly resentment throughout his life, and I saw studying this poem how much Pope detested that horrible, unjust emotion in people.  Pope also described, with great feeling and respect, its opposite when he writes about critics who have a beautiful purpose: “The gen’rous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire,/And taught the world reason to admire.”

In the next section of the poem, Pope describes with reverence how it is through nature that we can learn to be good critics because it is from nature that all true art arises:

Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang’d, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of Art.
Art from that fund each just supply provides,
Works without show, and without pomp presides:

Pope, Mr. Siegel explained, made clearer than anyone before him that nature “was always something to be followed.”  Yet, Mr. Siegel asked, “what does it mean to follow nature?”  And relating this to our everyday lives, he asked, “Do we act naturally?  Once you ask the question ‘Am I natural?’ it’s useful,” he said. Aesthetic Realism explains that for a person to be natural is to be sincere.  And to be sincere, we need to be like a good poem, to put opposites together such as logic and emotion, large feeling and precision.

Later, Pope describes a fight between two purposes that have been in critics:

For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Tho’ meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.

Here, Pope is saying that a critic’s desire to be witty and bright can get in the way of wanting to see something exactly.  Then, pointing to opposites a true artist puts together—letting go and restraint—Pope makes a relation to a person riding a horse, a “steed”:

Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse’s steed;
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a gen’rous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

This, Mr. Siegel explained, “brings up a big thing”:

Is it natural to express or natural to abstain?  Nature can tell you to do something with great zeal then go back from it….Where is art economy and where is it excess, overflow?  Poetry can also be seen as the making of economy dazzlingly beautiful.  The trimness of these lines is beautiful.

He said Pope’s couplets “are very tight,” and made a very surprising relation between the pleasure we get from them and from one of the most popular shows in New York: “Someone from the Bronx can be soothed by the Radio City Hall Rockettes. Pope’s couplets are a little bit like the discipline of the Rockettes.”

The large thing brought up by “The Essay On Criticism” Mr. Siegel explained is “what man wants to know most.”

Hamlet & the Desire to Know

Eli Siegel then read what he said was the “the most famous passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” which is about the desire to know.  It is from Act 1, Scene iv, when Hamlet meets the ghost of his father on the platform of the castle of Elsinore.  Asked Mr. Siegel:

What is Hamlet trying to know through the ghost?… “How does some cause I don’t know make for you, father, and armor?”

Early in the scene, when his friends try to warn Hamlet to stay away from the ghost, Hamlet says again and again, “I will follow it.”  And addressing the ghost he says:

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!–
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee;…

Hamlet shows a large desire to know when he says in some of the greatest lines of poetry:

King, Father, Royal Dane, O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher,
Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again.  What may ths mean…

Later, Hamlet asks why his father has come back in this form, “With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? / Say, why is this?”

Through this class, I saw how crucial it is for us to want to know what the world is.  If you don’t, you can be sloppy, inexact, gush, try to impress through your wit, or be scornful, grudging, snobbish and try to make less of things.

Aesthetic Realism enables people to learn what it means to be a good critic of ourselves and the world.  There is nothing more urgent for people to know, and so I conclude with these sentences which Mr. Siegel’s said at the end of the class:

If people knew how much they wanted to see what beauty is, they would use the phrase of Hamlet, “let me not burst in ignorance!”…Pope’s [couplets] are very trim, but they have beauty in them, pointing to the mystery of all existence….When people are very much affected by art, they have thoughts beyond the reach of their souls. You want to be as emotional as possible, and you also want to have judgment—to be as good a critic as possible—and don’t mind if Aesthetic Realism shows you they are the same.

The post A Class on Alexander Pope’s Poem “An Essay on Criticism” appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

The criticism of poetry implies the full enjoyment of it. I think the trying to be fair to poetry is a wonderful thing to go after. It is exceedingly necessary because poetic music is the greatest tribute to honesty.

Alfred de Musset & Poetic Music

Mr. Siegel said that after a great deal of thought on the subject, the person he felt could be most useful in showing what poetic music is, is the French poet and writer Alfred de Musset, who lived from 1810 to 1857.  In his poetry and prose, de Musset had both great feeling and precision and that combination, Mr. Siegel explained later, is what all poetic music goes for.

He discussed what he called “one of the great poems of its kind,” “À la Malibran,” about the famous 19th Century opera singer Maria Felicia Garcia Malibran, who stirred people tremendously both in Europe and America.

De Musset’s lines tell how she had a depth of feeling and sincerity at one with accuracy that made her immortal.  “She was,” Mr. Siegel said, “one of the greatest singers of any time.”  De Musset’s poem was written in October 1836, shortly after Malibran’s untimely death at the age of 24, and Mr. Siegel said, “There is no greater poem on a singer than this by de Musset.”  He read each of its 27 stanzas in French, translating literally, and also read 17 short poems—translations he had made of portions of this moving work—which he called, “Little Poems from Alfred de Musset’s ‘À La Malibran.’”

De Musset, said Mr. Siegel, “is one of those persons who can clutch at your heart and clutch at your throat….  He’s alive.” He read these lines:

Où vibre maintenant cette voix éplorée,
Cette harpe vivante attachée à ton cœur?…
Ces pleurs sur tes bras nus, quand tu chantais le Saule,
N’était–ce pas hier, pâle Desdemona?

Mr. Siegel translated these lines as two short poems with titles:

Where Is that Harp?
Where trembles now this mourned voice,
That living harp at one with your heart?

There Were Tears on Your Arms
Those tears on your naked arms, when you sang The Willow—
Were they not yesterday, pale Desdemona?

The Honesty of Maria Malibran

“We have nothing of Malibran’s voice,” commented Mr. Siegel, “we can only feel that de Musset was greatly moved hearing her sing.”

And there are these lines in which, Mr. Siegel said, “de Musset tells how Malibran is putting some notable opposites together”:

Heart of an angel and of lion, free bird in motion,
Mischievous child this evening, sainted artist tomorrow.

De Musset says other singers would pretend to have emotions, but Malibran simply couldn’t—and her honesty affected him very deeply. He speaks about her ability:

To…pour real tears on the stage,
When so many story tellers and famous artists,
A thousand times crowned, do not have any tear in their eyes…

We see de Musset’s tremendous respect for Malibran’s sincerity.  Mr. Siegel described the quality of de Musset’s poetic music in one stanza as like the Spenserian stanza—“pulsating in neatness, pulsating in opulent exact measurement.”  These are the opposites that he was showing in this class are central in all poetic music—emotion that swells, is boundless, and critical perception that is exact.

I think Mr. Siegel’s translation of another stanza conveys in English the “pulsating” that can be heard in the French:

This Makes Us Weep
What we weep rightly over your hastened tomb,
Is not divine art, nor its learned secrets:
Another will study the art you gave birth to.
It is your soul Ninette, and your naive grandeur.
It was that heart’s voice which alone comes to the heart;
Which no other, after you, will ever bring to us.

In a seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, consultant Carrie Wilson spoke of the life and art of Maria Malibran—of the intensity with which she was driven to sing, the beauty of her voice, and her tragic accident while riding fast on a horse.  In these last stanzas, which are very beautiful, we can see that Malibran wanted to love something with all of herself—so much so that despite a serious injury, in the months following, she refused to rest and continued to sing at the theatre. De Musset writes:

Yes, yes, you knew it; you knew that in this life,
Nothing is good but to love, nothing true but suffering.
Each day in your songs you felt yourself paler.
You knew the world, and the crowd, and envy.
And, in that broken body concentrating your genius,
You saw, also Malibran dying.

Die then! Your death is sweet, your task has been done.
What man down here calls genius
Is the need to love: everything besides that is empty.
And, since sooner or later human love is forgotten.
It is for a soul with grandeur and for a fortunate destiny
To leave life, as you did, in behalf of a divine love.

De Musset says Malibran gave herself utterly when she sang. This was the “divine love” he speaks of—which gives one “a soul with grandeur” and “a fortunate destiny.”  “Was there a kind of love in the technique of Malibran?”  Mr. Siegel asked, “What is the relation of love to a kind of profound accuracy?”  “This,” he continued:

is what poetic music is about.  These last two stanzas have closely to do with the title of this talk, ‘What does poetic music go for?’ Every bit of poetic music has an attitude to the world and how one should see it. The music of poetry is the oneness of the utmost criticism and the utmost love.

As Mr. Siegel spoke of how poetic music is the oneness of unbounded feeling and exactitude of perception, and as I saw how these opposites were in both Malibran’s art and de Musset’s poem about her, I was tremendously moved.  Like many people, I once thought having large emotions couldn’t be logical or accurate, and I am grateful to be learning from Aesthetic Realism how these opposites can be one in my life as I study the sincerity of poetic music. “Poetry,” wrote Mr. Siegel in an “Outline of Aesthetic Realism,” “is logic and emotion brought together so well, music ensues. Sanity is the oneness of unconfined emotion and perceptive precision.” And I want to say, Eli Siegel had that oneness of great feeling and critical exactitude all the time—he had the most beautiful relation of knowledge and feeling I have ever known.

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine on Alfred de Musset

To see further who Alfred de Musset was and what he was going for, we heard a passage from History of English Literature by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, the French critic who taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The passage is about de Musset himself and why he is so loved by the French people:

Such as he was, we love him forever: we cannot listen to another; beside him all seem cold and false….  From the heights of his doubt and despair, he saw the infinite….  He left his mark on human thought; he told the world what was man, love, truth, happiness.  He suffered, but he imagined; he fainted, but he created….  There is in the world but one work worthy of man, the production of a truth, to which we devote ourselves, and in which we believe.

“[That] is a notable passage” Mr. Siegel commented, and he said of Taine, “There was no more famous professor of 19th century France.”  He then read from The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset, various passages of de Musset’s prose—about the Duke of Wellington, Christ, baked apples, an English dandy, the quality of evanescence in life, a caricature of a man from Peking. Even in his prose, we saw how de Musset was deeply affected by things and also had critical precision. For example, he writes about a tired horse:

Have you ever stopped in rainy weather to look at a cab-horse when, in spite of the fury of the winds, this pitiful, resigned creature waits patiently at the door of a house?  A blow from the whip of his master is the one thing that can induce him to start on his jog-trot; until he feels that blow he stands perfectly still.  His head bent down, he sadly submits to the pelting of the rain that drops from the eaves; perhaps at that sight, you can not help recalling the fine racehorse with fiery eye, which can not be held back and which poises on his nimble feet like a reed even on the straw of his stall.  Are these two the same species?

De Musset also writes about a stream near Paris in a way that shows, Mr. Siegel explained, he “was interested in where things begin”:

I say, that when following the stream against its current, you never think whence comes this immense quantity of water, by what channels does it flow, what spring is its source?  Why does it start in a corner of a lonely meadow, or the summit of a steep mountain, flow, and advance like a child at first, then a man, then an old man, toward the ocean which is its death.

I’m grateful to Ellen Reiss for taking seriously how Eli Siegel explained poetry, and for her joyous, warm scholarship as she teaches The Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry class. In the discussion following the lecture, she described the state of mind of a person when that person writes a true poem:

A person feels at that time that justice to an object—justice to the world itself and how it’s made—is the same as taking care of oneself.  The person wants to be so just, the whole world gets into the sound. The universe does provide a chance of feeling that a person can be himself fully by being fair to what’s not himself.

Concluding this beautiful lecture, Mr. Siegel read a short poem of de Musset in which, he explained:

De Musset says that the world can be endured if there’s music that you can like and also a face that is beautiful.  The poem is one of de Musset’s small lyrics that seems to be like a breath. It’s called ‘Chanson.’ This is Mr. Siegel’s literal translation:

When one loses through sad occurrence
His hope and gaiety
The remedy for the sad and melancholy one
Is music and beauty.
A beautiful face can do more than an armed man.

Learning about poetic music through what Eli Siegel said about the work of Alfred de Musset was one of the greatest experiences of my life! “The music in poetry is ever so important,” he said, “because it shows that a logical statement can be musical. If a thought-out statement can be musical—what good tidings that is.”

The post What Does Poetic Music Go For? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

I care very much for this recording of Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, played with great feeling and power by Jascha Heifetz, accompanied by the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra and conducted by William Steinberg. Zigeunerweisen means “the ways of the gypsies.” What we just heard is rich with the opposites which, I believe, are central in this whole piece—assertion and yielding, pride and humility. These are opposites very big in my life as they are in everyone. How can we be proud without being arrogant?  How can we be modest without groveling? Aesthetic Realism shows art has the answer, and we can hear it in this music.

As you heard, the orchestra begins forcefully, dramatically rising fortissimo, very loud. Then it suddenly yields as Heifetz enters, playing the same melody two octaves lower, modestly yet having dramatic flourishes of his own. That violin dances all the way up the scale to a super high Eb, then instantly drops down to a low C, followed by a joyous, proud pizzicato pluck at the end. This is assertion and yielding as one!

This opening sounds almost like a gypsy improvisation. Then we get to a clear melody. The notes are aching and sweet, passionate and inquiring. Listen to how it begins:

Pride & Humility in Art

In his great essay, Art as, Yes, Humility, Eli Siegel explains:

Humility is the willingness to see things other than oneself as having meaning for oneself. This humility makes for pride; for pride, in the long run, comes from the comprehensive and accurate way one is affected by reality, the universe that is under one’s nose and is far away. The artist is more humble than is customary, because, as artist, he wants things to mean more and more to him; he wants to see more and more.

That is what we hear—there is a desire on the part of the composer Sarasate to see what a simple melody can have in it, how much feeling. And Heifetz has this purpose, too, as he yields in a very exact way to the notes this composer wrote. Heifetz was renowned for his precision, but it isn’t a cool precision: he’s passionate, proud, and plays the music with flourish.

Good Will—the Oneness of Assertion & Yielding

This music, I believe, embodies what I learned from Aesthetic Realism is crucial for the happiness of every person: the desire to have good will—”the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” That desire, I learned, is both assertive and yielding: it’s an active, conscious purpose to see what something else is, to be affected. You heard this as Heifetz played the highest note of this melody. He doesn’t blast it; he yields with piercing sweetness.

This is so different from how I was in my life. My purpose was to impress people while not being too affected myself. In fact, I thought being affected by someone was a humiliation. This made for a hurtful relation in me of assertion, followed by excessive humility. I’m grateful my attitude to the world and people was criticized through my study of Aesthetic Realism, enabling me to change.

Crucial in this change is what I learned as I began to care for Bennett Cooperman, who is now my husband. When we first started living together, I was very much affected by Bennett—his care for music and drama and his friendship and kindness to many people, and his love for the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism. I felt very much that I needed him—but I also thought I’d better assert myself and let him know I was not going to take his orders. My theme song with men had been “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”

In an Aesthetic Realism class, when I spoke about this, Ellen Reiss, the Chair of Education, asked me, “Do you think you feel, ‘I’m not going to let any man walk over me’…and then there is something else in you that wants to be very sweet, but you don’t see it as strong.”  And she also asked me: “Do you think you get very fast to feeling you’ve yielded sufficiently?” I did. “Yielding,” she explained, “needs to be felt as the same as expression.”  Yes—and I am learning more about this with every year. Studying Aesthetic Realism melted my cold, steel-like hardness to men and the world and enabled me to be increasingly, deeply affected.

And that’s what happens in this music. Right after the yearning, melting and flourishing passages—so graceful, musically—comes the celebration! Sarasate ends Zigeurnerweisen with a wild, rapid Allegro, and from what I know, this is in keeping with the musical style of the Romani people: it is how they most often like their improvisations to go: from slowness to speed. The music in this final section kicks up its heels!  Yet here, too, every note is cared for exactly and what self-expression it makes for! I think it illustrates what Mr. Siegel said in his essay, in some of the great sentences of the world: “Art, itself, is humility at one with pride. In art, the successful humility is the soul’s swellingness.”

Let’s begin with where the change occurs and listen all the way through to the brilliant, joyous conclusion!

The post Pride & Humility, Assertion & Yielding in Pablo de Sarasate’s “Ziegeunerweisen,” played by Jascha Heifetz appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism this great principle: “The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.”  And this aria puts together two opposites people are very troubled by and which I have been: assertion and yielding. Though the plot of the opera is complicated and not entirely convincing, there is something symbolically true in this aria as a man asserts his passionate desire to have a woman true to herself. She has been cold and cruel, and this night will determine his fate—whether he is to live or die. He sings quietly, “Nessun dorma, None shall sleep!”  and says, “You too, O princess, in your cold room, you watch the stars tremble with love and hope.”  His name is Calaf, and the woman is Princess Turandot.

Proudly Assertive & Yielding at the Same Time

The first thing we hear is Calaf singing assertively on a single pitch, “Nessun dorma,” but immediately Puccini asks the tenor to repeat the phrase in the deep, yielding register of his voice an octave lower. There is humility and gentleness even as this beginning melody also asserts that single note, D, eight times. While this is happening, the orchestral strings rise from their deepest register to the heights. On the word “Nessun,” the woodwinds add a mysterious chord. And as he imagines her looking at the stars, all this is marked Andante Sostenuto, “slowly sustained”—a thoughtful tempo. It’s as if Calaf is asserting: “I am the man that can have you break out of your coldness and be closer to things.” The music is not arrogant or pompous; it is both proudly assertive and yielding at the same time. I start again at the beginning and play even more of this magnificent music.

The music soars as Calaf asserts he is the man to melt her cold, hard heart. He sees something imprisoned in Turandot and believes he can be a means for her to love a person. He rises up to high A and repeats it, almost crying out. And as his melody cadences, comes to rest on the very note he began with, D, Puccini does this wonderful thing with the orchestra:  he goes from an assertive dominant chord, not to the expected tonic, but to the most yielding chord in any major key: the sub-dominant.

Puccini’s harmonies make you melt. There is tenderness at one with strength, calling forth in Pavarotti some of the most beautiful singing I’ve ever heard—passionately assertive and yielding for the same purpose. I believe Calaf stands for the principle of good will, which Aesthetic Realism defines as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.”

“Nessun Dorma” illustrates greatly what people are hoping for, what I’m hoping for in my life. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that having good will as our purpose enables us increasingly to have a good relation of assertion and yielding. I also learned that without good will, we will assert and yield in a way that is unkind and hurtful.

Assertion & Yielding in Love

While I am different from Princess Turandot, I, too, prided myself on my ability to assert myself and my opinions in a way that was often hard and inconsiderate. And I felt yielding was weak. I’m grateful for what I’ve learned about this enabling me to change, including in my marriage to Bennett Cooperman.

A pivotal time was when Bennett and I began to live together. While very happy, I also felt I was losing something. I was in tumult and spoke about it in an Aesthetic Realism class conducted by the Chair of Education, Ellen Reiss. She asked: “Do you think you are bending over backwards in having Bennett Cooperman more in your life? “Yes,” I said, and she explained:

ER. When two people come together, there is a great drama of assertion and yielding. Do you feel somewhere he’s going to annihilate your personality; you’re going to have to yield to him all over the place?
MN-C. Yes!  That is what I feel.
ER. Do you think you want, on the one hand, for Bennett Cooperman to be with you, but on the other hand, a woman who wants very much to be with a man can feel she’s going to be made into nothing in some way—the Meryl Nietsch that was will be no more! The great question is if a person means more to us, are we more or less?

I’m very glad to feel that I am more, proud to feel that through my marriage to Bennett, assertion and yielding in me are in a much better relation.

Returning to the aria: After that great outpouring of melody already so full and so rich, Puccini honors the principle of feeling more. In the second stanza of this aria, he goes even further—not only does the chorus enter from a distance taking up Calaf’s melody and standing for the wide world, but as the tenor reenters, he soars triumphantly up to the highest note of all, high B. Pavarotti sustains that note astonishingly and with all of himself. His voice is both proudly assertive and passionately yielding. And he is singing “vincero!”—“I will be victorious!” We feel it is the victory of good will, the victory of honest warmth over coldness.

I’m glad to be learning deeply from the music of Puccini and this performance of the great Luciano Pavarotti how, as the title of our seminar says: “Music Tells Us How We Want to Be!” Here is the conclusion of the aria.

The post Luciano Pavarotti Sings Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” – A Oneness of Assertion & Yielding appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Two opposites that fought in me all my life and that trouble many people are brought together in this painting: the exuberant and the sensible.  Webster’s Dictionary defines exuberant as “joyously unrestrained and enthusiastic… overflowing…lavish,” and sensible as “…containing sense, judgment, reason.”  Can we be all these things at once?  Can we be excited and reasonable at the same time?  Aesthetic Realism says we can, and that we can learn from art how to be.

In his book, Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel asks this revolutionary question, “What is it that painting—coming from the human mind—can do which the human mind itself can’t do?  A person can ask about a picture, What has it got I can’t have?”

The actual size of “Rhapsody” is over 7’ high by 5’ wide.  The first thing you see are those three big rectangles: red-orange, blue and purple.  One is horizontal, two are vertical.  Then, all around them is something looser, freer—patches, strokes and areas of orange, green, yellow, black, red and blue.  I like the roughness and energy of the brush strokes.

What Mr. Siegel asks in the first of fifteen questions in his historic publication “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?” is at the heart of this exciting painting:

Freedom and Order—Does every instance of beauty in nature and beauty as the artist presents it have something unrestricted, unexpected, uncontrolled?—and does this beautiful thing in nature or beautiful thing coming from the artist’s mind have, too, something accurate, sensible, logically justifiable, which can be called order?

The rectangles are very orderly, they are “accurate” and “sensible.”  A rectangle is a logical geometric shape—four sides, four right angles, each pair of sides parallel to the others.   Yet all around them is something “uncontrolled,” “unrestricted,” something much freer, and we feel these two things go together, complete each other, even as they are so different.  Hofmann’s painting shows we can be swept and sensible, free and accurate at once.

I Was Not Like This Painting

In my own life the way I went for being orderly and sensible was against freedom and honest exuberance.  I liked to have things around me very neat—my apartment and my desk.  But more importantly, I liked to have what went on inside of me, my emotions and feelings, manageable and orderly.  The title of this painting is “Rhapsody” and I was afraid to have feelings like that, emotions that seemed out of my control.  I thought if I got too excited I would lose all sense of myself as logical and having my feet on the ground.  But I suffered because I often felt flat and didn’t have the kinds of feelings everyone wants to have, for instance about another person, or about a work of art such as this one.

As an actor this held me back, too.  In a class for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates, Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss spoke to me about my work as an actor and asked: “Do you think in some way you could let go more?”  That question had my whole life in it, and I’m grateful to Ms. Reiss and Aesthetic Realism for what I’m learning, making it possible for me to have feelings about art, about people, that I never had before.  I’ve been learning the meaning of what Eli Siegel writes in Self and World: “Beauty is good sense.  It is hard good sense.”

What Hofmann’s painting “Rhapsody” does is completely different from the purpose I had in my everyday life.  I dulled the vibrant meaning of things which is contempt, and because of this I felt half alive.  Then I began to study Aesthetic Realism and I’ve never had that feeling of being half alive since.  What I’ve learned has changed my whole life in such a beautiful and deep way, enabling me to have large feeling, and very much for my wife, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

All art, I learned, goes for finding meaning in things, not flattening them.  I think Hans Hofmann is proud to show he is excited—his painting is not muted.  He is both accurate and free at once.

The way these two things are in this painting is more subtle than it might seem at first glance. You could think the rectangles are the logical part, and the strokes and patches are the free part.  But on closer looking, you can see that the three orderly rectangles have vaguenesses, irregularities, and freedom, too.  The red-orange one spills out of its edge at the bottom, near the middle, and blends into the roughly painted blue area below.  To the right, a blue rectangle exactly the same height as the red one is dropped and suspended in a light space.  We feel something like gravity and floating simultaneously.

Also, this blue rectangle seems as if it might have another red one in back of it—with the right side showing and just a bit of the bottom underneath.  It’s not just a single, neat rectangle, all by itself.  There is also a line of pale green at the top—this seems to both accent the edge of the blue rectangle at the top, and also lift it.

To me, the purple rectangle above is the most beautiful of all.  It seems fixed and floating at once.  Its edge is precisely defined and exact, but on the right and left sides, where purple meets green and yellow, the color shimmers a bit, there is something subtly “unrestricted, uncontrolled.”  Its singularity and its purple color give it a regal quality, but inside cool violet plays against warm violet. And at the bottom right corner, this very precise rectangle drips a little.

There are three energetic orange dabs above, and the left one meets the purple rectangle at its corner.  There, it infuses some orange into the band of color that forms a border around the purple.  So freedom and order, meeting at the right angle, make for gaiety.  Hofmann also has patches of sober color—brown and black—floating even higher than the orange dabs.  These dark colors get an exuberance from their placement high up.

In this painting where three rectangles are so predominant, there is also a lovely curved feeling, an exuberant sweep at the top.  A dark green seems to emerge from behind the brown and black patches, sweeps across and then upwards—the strokes seem lighter, the paint less thick.  It’s got something of the feeling of a wave at the beach and the spray.  A wave and rectangles—that’s how I want to be: orderly and free.

Hans Hofmann painted “Rhapsody” when he was 84.  It affected me to learn that he was a student of math and science when he was young, and he even invented a scientific measuring instrument: the electromagnetic comptometer.  Critic Erle Loran, writing of Hofmann’s work, points to exuberance and good sense.  He describes the “boldness…of his color,” the “ferocious energy” and the “daring to let go,” and yet says “there is always and inevitably a sound idea in everything he paints.”

Exuberance That Arises from Weight, Depth, Logic

The brilliance and exuberance of color in Hans Hofmann’s painting come from ideas and a state of mind that had weight and solidity.   This is not gushy emotion that is on top, exuberance that is devoid of logic and reason.  That is what I was afraid of as a person—if I was really exuberant, I thought I would be insincere and mindless.  Hofmann says no—what is bright, exuberant and on the surface arises from weight, depth, logic.

Through my study of Aesthetic Realism, the way I saw the whole world changed, enabling me to be honestly excited, stirred by things in a way I never was before.  I am both a more truly exuberant and a more sensible man.

Eli Siegel saw that a painting, a person—the entire world—has a solid structure you can count on for all time: the oneness of opposites.  Learning this frees a person to feel completely sensible at the very same moment that he’s swept by reality.  This education is true about beauty, about us, about the world—and I am so glad that people across the country are learning about it.

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