Once again it is August. Once again Julie and I are driving the fifty miles up and over Galena Summit to Sun Valley, there to sit on the lawn and listen to the evening concerts of the Sun Valley Music Festival. Once again, on the twilit drive home, we’re dodging deer, elk, antelope, and drunken sun-addled tourists driving giant pickups and SUVs and motorhomes.
We’ve seen three concerts. We have listened to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, a bunch of Tchaikovsky variations, and a complex revisioning of the Star-Spangled Banner we didn’t much care for. We’ve had three excellent picnic dinners and three adequate bottles of wine. We’ve had good conversations with friends that we haven’t seen for a while. The pandemic has damaged a lot of once-close connections, and symphony season gives us a chance for some happy repair work.
Our music appreciation lacks gravitas. Showing up on the lawn with a deli feast and wine is deeply contrapuntal to sitting in the front row in the amphitheater.
It’s been hot in the evening sun, there on the lawn outside the Sun Valley Pavilion, but breezes have kept things bearable. The music helps. Sunglasses help. A wide-brimmed hat helps. The grass still-damp from the early-morning sprinkling helps. The scenery helps.
Sun Valley is my birthplace, and although real estate prices have made it impossible for people with sensitive social consciences to live there, it has always seemed a bit like home. Both my parents worked there when I was growing up, and when I wasn’t spending my after-school time in the Ketchum Library, I was wandering the Sun Valley grounds and the hallways of the Challenger Inn and the Lodge, waiting for them to get off work.
Now, when we head to the Pavilion lawn, I walk through a friendly-ghost community. Evanescent buildings appear in my memory, and the shades of people—old then and dead now—walk paths now blocked by condos.
The fields that once surrounded the resort lose their suburban clusters and blacktop. 1956 Cadillac limousines and old bathtub-style Porsches appear at the covered entrance to the Lodge. My father drives his ski bus around the circle between the Lodge and the Inn, briefly and incongruously turning the green turf of the lawn into warm and slushy spring snow, and concert-goers into skiers carrying wooden skis with beartrap bindings. My mother appears smiling in her white nurse’s uniform, starched cap and all.
I feel lucky to have grown up in a resort town, lucky to have had such competent and hard-working parents, lucky to have been an employee kid with employee kid discounts for everything, even the hospital (birthing privileges) and, later on, the employee cafeteria. I feel lucky to have understood that the luxuries and jobs the resort provided wouldn’t have been there but for the rich people—a completely different species of animal—who had such miserable lives that they had to take a break from them and vacation in Sun Valley.
When I say I was lucky, I’m talking about having enough but not too much, the perquisites of wealth but not its awful hidden pitfalls, and exploring a delightful world in a way that its paying guests could never experience.
If you grow up in a tourist economy, your experience becomes a pastiche of other people’s leisure, and even though you don’t get that time off yourself, you get to watch and learn from a position of relative safety.
You begin to see that money doesn’t buy the freedom or authenticity that it pays for. Resort life is regimented and inauthentic—life’s usual stumbling blocks replaced by tough-to-learn sports, expensive and soon-to-be obsolete equipment, and elaborate dinner rituals—so much so that some people start seeking out the authentically inauthentic as the closest thing to real life they can experience.
A curiously solid shadow reality comes with a resort employee’s kid’s discount.
The crowds are a little thinner this year. We haven’t had to fight for a place to put our blanket and chairs. The big screen now and then shows us views of the people in the audience, and we see empty seats here and there.
It could be the heat. It could be worries about long Covid or monkeypox. It could be that when you start with geriatrics who become, over the years, geriatric-plus, a portion of them won’t make it from one symphony season to the next.
There have been signs. This year big-print programs are available, and hearing assistance hardware, and we’ve noticed a team of black-clad paramedics, complete with backpack defibrillators, lurking at the edge of the lawn.
Also, for the first time, I’ve noticed widows as an audience category. It’s caused me to look at Julie in a different light, and I’ve realized that she’s been looking at me in a different light for some time now.
I imagine her listening to music alone that we’ve listened to together, and it’s a small intimation of immortality to know that the music will endure even if I won’t. Eventually Julie won’t either, but the music’s rhythms and melodies will persist as they’ve always persisted, whether there’s anyone to listen to them or not, and maybe whether there’s anyone to play them or not.
I wouldn’t be imagining these impossible scenarios if we hadn’t witnessed the playing of George Li, the piano soloist for the Emperor Concerto. Li, who is only twenty-six years old, redefined our understanding of the word prodigy. He started playing with orchestras at age nine, played Carnegie Hall at age eleven, and performed in the White House Rose Garden at fifteen.
Watching him perform the Concerto, I started wandering into various Platonic heresies, thinking that maybe humanity was music’s way of bringing itself into being. George Li was playing as a man possessed, and what was possessing him was the same astonishing work that was possessing the rest of the orchestra, the audience from the front row all the way to the far reaches of the lawn, and Beethoven himself when he had written it.
There’s not a lot of room for human agency in this scheme of things, but there is some comfort in belonging to a species that can be turned into the instrument of concertos, nocturnes, rhapsodies, overtures, symphonies, and—what the hell—ballads, breakdowns, cheatin’ songs, and death metal. Music is greater than the human dimension. It takes up human material and does with it what it will.
Demonic possession comes up every symphony season, in a where-is-the-dancer/where is the dance way. You can pay lip service to the hours that each of the symphony musicians has put into learning an instrument, but it’s hard not to think that the end result is the instrument mastering the human, rather than the human mastering the instrument.
If this idea doesn’t frighten you a little, consider that not all entities possessing humans are as friendly as the one that grabbed on to Beethoven or George Li and wouldn’t let go. To use a contemporary example, if you can’t tell where the poet ends and the poem begins, you also can’t tell where Vladimir Putin’s soul ends and where destroyed cities begin.
Folklore has drilled into our consciousness the idea that we should be careful what we wish for, and it’s hard not to think that Putin, at some time in his damaged life, prayed, “Make me big,” thinking he might end up as Tom Hanks. But he wasn’t picky about which god he was praying to, and a really evil one found him fertile ground for its particular genius.
The depth psychologist Carl Jung postulated eternal blueprints for being that he called archetypes. Archetypes will, if you’re not careful, seize your psyche so they can act in this world. By themselves, they’re powerless, but let them inside the wheelhouse of a flesh-and-blood person, and they’ll use up the human material until it’s gone, and then go looking for somebody else.
Everyone who has taken an art class eventually becomes aware of energies who gently beckon toward the Great Artist Rabbit Hole. Lots of people obey that beckoning, even ones for whom greatness will remain forever out of reach.
I imagine that anyone who has ever played violin will approach a Stradivarius with caution, not for fear of damaging it but because the experience of playing it might turn its player into its instrument.
The first perfect fly cast, the first summiting of a mountain, the first time standing at the front of a room and feeling the glow of an audience’s attention: these moments can set futures in stone. Even if they result in fame and fortune, they shouldn’t necessarily be regarded as good luck.
Jung says the best defense against being possessed by an archetype is to be sloppily human, depressingly fallible, mortal, shambling, unlucky, and awkward. He doesn’t use those exact words, but he does note that archetypes don’t care for imperfection and will avoid it if they can.
Warding off archetypal possession is my excuse for cultivating my many imperfections, and I’m sticking with it.
The program for the second concert described Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 as “convivial.” It was, and if it seemed a bit derivative, that’s excusable, because Schubert was only nineteen when he composed it. It was a pleasant listen, but it didn’t produce the awe and occasional distress that his Unfinished Symphony generates in audiences.
People report synesthetic hallucinations—shadows descending over the orchestra—when listening to Unfinished Symphony, so it’s probably a good thing that it wasn’t on the Sun Valley program, particularly for those of us who were born there.
Schubert was a musical genius, who composed some fifteen hundred works before he died in poverty at thirty-one years of age, probably of typhus. Unfriendly or careless biographers have bought into the notion that he died of tertiary syphilis, but his late accomplishments—physical, mental, and creative—argue against it.
It does seem likely, however, that the human Schubert and the genius that possessed Schubert struggled mightily—even fatally—with each other during his short life. If you listen to the two movements of Unfinished Symphony and try to extrapolate them further, you intuit an intensity that humans cannot survive. It’s possible that Schubert failed to see his own hand in one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, because he gave it to a friend for approval, and the friend sat on it for thirty-seven years.
If you read between the lines of Wikipedia articles, Schubert was an outsider, with bad luck in friends and patrons and romance. He was five feet tall, and round, and his friends nicknamed him “Schwammerl,” which means “Little Mushroom.” He was subject to periodic depression. He fell in love with unattainable women. He drank to excess and got in trouble with the authorities for seditious rants. Much of his music remained unpublished and unperformed while he was alive.
An 1899 Klimt painting of Schubert shows him playing the piano in a drawing room, with an audience of three beautiful aristocratic women and, in shadow, a stone-faced elderly man.
Schubert’s concentration at his keyboard is reflected in a mirror. Klimt’s attention, as usual, is on the women, whose expressions and coldly glittering dresses evoke a self-contained existence that art cannot penetrate.
Last night, Julie and I attended the Symphony’s gala performance of Carmina Burana, a work that vibrates to a tremendous religious energy, if that religion celebrates carnality, intoxication, and the corrupting nature of the flesh. Its composer, Carl Orff, set the drinking songs of defrocked 13th century monks to music in 1934 in Germany, a place and a time that was vibrating to its own demonic rhythms.
Orff was arguably destroyed by his own composition. In 1942 it was performed at La Scala, in Mussolini’s Italy, as a fascist anthem.
The Nazis loved Carmina Burana. They lionized Orff and made him their national composer. Carmina Burana has been in intensive cultural rehab since 1945.
Not so Orff, whose life was forever stained by his Nazi connections and his death-dealing betrayal of a friend in the anti-Nazi White Rose Movement. Orff never again composed anything with the power of Carmina Burana, and he only escaped punishment by the Allies by telling his interrogators he had been a co-founder of White Rose. His long postwar life was marked by obsessive guilt and miserable regret and a paranoid loneliness.
He must have wondered where his music had come from, and why he had ever welcomed the life it thrust upon him. His monstrous lie remains his epitaph.
Julie and I attend the symphonies expecting to be awed, not just by the music but by the world class musicians who have had their lives commandeered by their talent.
Last night—as always—we watched and listened as their music penetrated the barrier between this world and the more real one that lies beneath. Last night was full of beauty and darkness and danger. I don’t know that the musicians and the choruses on stage were at risk, but I know they weren’t bored. Nobody was.
Schubert at the Piano by Gustav Klimt (1899)