Not sure why, but this evening I walked the neighborhood with Franz Schmidt’s symphony #4 playing on my iPod, and ached for the missing people in my life.   And for loneliness I suppose.  Schmidt is said to have composed the piece after his daughter died suddenly.  I’ve never heard music that expresses that wounded pit inside, that shock of…not grief exactly…but loss, like the first two movements of that symphony.  It’s brutal.  Until lately the Zuban Mehta rendering of it, with the Vienna Philharmonic was my favored version, but I’ve not been able to locate a digital version.  I got a digital version today conducted by Franz Wesler-Möst, with the London Philharmonic that is just as powerful. 

This work is one of three dark symphonies in my library, but the other two are dark in a different way.  One is Shostakovich’s 8th, which is said to have been composed by Shostakovich, in part while in Stalingrad during the Nazi siege of the city.  The other is Vaughan-Williams’ 6th, composed during and immediately after WWII.  The Shostakovich piece is a brutal representation of war, that opens with a brooding creeping darkness which builds to a  harrowing climax, punctuated by moments of bellicose militarism, then fades into more brooding.  A giddy fascist goose stepping scherzo follows, and then the set piece of the entire symphony: a relentless rushing sweep of war across the land, like an insane machine crushing everything in its path.  Then the symphony fades into a bottomless sense of grief, punctuated by this little light-hearted dancing tune that almost seems like a giddy madness.  It ends in desolation.  The Vaughan-Williams piece opens with a whirlwind and then settles into a bellicose, dancing, almost jazzy contempt, like a fascist thug skipping gleefully across the landscape, and then the whirlwind returns and fades, and for a moment, for one brief moment, the music breaks like a last fading beam of beautiful sunlight into an achingly heartfelt and lovely melody, that rises majestically…and then breaks apart into a brooding brutal dread, then into another giddy bellicose whirlwind, and then into a barren pit of loss that lasts the rest of the symphony.  But the darkness in these two pieces is of a world that is collapsing around you as you watch.  The Schmidt piece is a personal, private loss of the soul.  The wound is internal, devastating, and yet the world around you goes on.

Why I got into the Schmidt piece this evening I’m not sure, other then going through several bins of old family photo albums recently (I was trying to track down a photo of my paternal great-grandmother who the family says was native American…but I am still unable to prove that conclusively…) brought back to me for a little while, all the people in my life I’ve loved, who are gone now…and perhaps too, the boy I once was, and thoughts of the life he could have had, had he lived in a different time. 

[Edited a tad…]