Budapest Saturday

June 7, 2014

Walked to the Kodaly in the morning taking 10 minutes off my time. The weather was perfect. The city is so clean it looks like it’s just been built. Was re-acquainted with Honorah and Dahlan, and met the Lucio Ivaldi, the composer, and the director whose name escapes me, and, most importantly, the wonderful chorus, only a few of whom are old enough to be high school graduates. Because of the Kodaly method they are able to sightsing very difficult passages (which is most of Color) without use of the piano. It was very impressive. They don’t spend so much energy on sound quality as they do on accuracy– sometimes it was a bit strident–but maybe that will come with the second rehearsal. Apparently we’re doing the work here because many other groups turned it down for being too difficult. There are two composers, the vanished Foisson and the present Ivaldi, and there were passages (let’s blame them on Foisson) of needless and point-making difficulty. You can hear when a composer is addressing some ancient criticism from his composition teacher, acutely recalled and still rankling. I will never again be caught whoring to tonalism!. But–and here was the surprise–there are passages of the most annihilating beauty. I wept during “White.” Contemporary composers tend to bury beauty under dissonant overlay, so as not to be seen falling for that sort of thing, but sometimes the beauty can still be discerned. I like Lucio. I get along well with living composers. He has the softest and most gentle Italian speaking voice. I didn’t know which passages were his and which were Foisson’s, so I asked before I complimented too fulsomely. My own poetry seemed beautiful to me. I wept not only for the music, but for the sad fate of my creations, which wander in the wilderness and I don’t know why. By there, where they seemed the work of an alien, they lived, and I was happy.

Not much for me to do, actually. The words are finished, and though I corrected a few pronunciations (No, there is no “v” sound at the end of “know”), the Hungarian accents are so thick that one can discern only every few words anyway. I had no idea what they were singing unless I looked at the page. “Th” as in “the” is impossible for the Hungarian tongue. One shrugs. One hopes libretti are distributed. I have considered the gap between words and music in the past, how I can write a script in an evening which will be the composer’s agony for six months, and the performers’ after that. Part of it is that modern composers work too hard. I bet even Beethoven sometimes said, “Oh! That was pretty; let’s go with that.” When there weren’t matters of performance to be addressed, there were matters of recording, which is what happened at lunch, with our slim, tall, excellent English-speaking recording engineer. It is all very complicated, and part of the reason why I preemptively (before I knew how complicated it would be) chose a medium where you set it down, make sure it’s right, get out of the way.

The evening was bad. Nothing is worse than sitting in a happy square in Budapest having excellent wine and thinking how your life came to nothing. Sad over the direction life took without my seeing it coming, and with no conceivable way of knowing to do it differently. Forever fighting the unseen and Omnipotent adversary. One stands on a bridge in the middle of the Danube and lets out a scream of rage, because one had been right and had been defeated by sheer Power. Then one steps aside for the bikers.

Time to soak my legs in the hottest water I can stand. Time to let the noises from the street mingle with my dreams.