Brief Devotion and a Brief Masterclass

Today I woke up at 10 a.m. The church bells were ringing and I felt like going to church. So I got dressed and went to the one at the Winterfeldplatz; and, though, when I arrived, the service was over and the residual congregation was chatting outside the door, I went into the church as unobtrusively as I could and read a portion of the baptismal service.

At around noon I went to a master class with a Prof. Klaus Hellwig in the Kammersaal at the UdK (Fasanenstraße). So I took the U-Bahn there, starting Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Schuß von der Kanzel along the way (Aristotle's Poetics have been returned to the bookshelf as part of our great book rearrangement). When I arrived, A. I. was playing the first movement of Schumann's sonata in f# minor -- as she had at the last piano masterclass I attended. She played "schön" again, in a coherent interpretation that was fine in its way, tasteful and fluent and sympathetic, but not that nuanced. The professor (whose appearance vaguely reminded me of Bill Gates) pointed out where phrases should be played like a "question and answer," where she was playing optimistically instead of restlessly with a hint of stubbornness, where she was emphasizing the wrong note, etc. What he evidently wanted to attain was a well-rounded understanding of the piece, on its various levels -- technical, structural, and emotional --, using the details of Schumann's score as a guide. For this purpose he also read out a poem by Justinus Kerner, which Schumann had used for an earlier song "For Anna"; that song, if I remember correctly, included a motif that came up in this sonata. The verse was about a dying soldier who remembers his beloved, and the scenario did come to mind again when the student continued playing the sonata after that. One remark of the professor's that also stuck with me is that, with Schumann, emotions are rarely or never unmixed. So, to take as an example the end of the sonata, there is melancholy but also hope.

Either way, I was thinking that Prof. Hellwig's approach to music must resemble the one of my great-aunt, who was a piano teacher too. With him I don't know how he would handle freer interpretations of music (in the style of Casals, let's say); but his detailed corrections and his grasp of the intellectual (cross-disciplinary, too, one might say) dimensions of music were agreeable and, as I said, reminiscent of Aunt N.

At home again, I spent time doing J.'s homework with him. It was for Spanish again. He had to write a set of questions that he would ask an imaginary buddy to answer about an imaginary trip to Latin America. Then he had to write a set of answers to the same questions that his imaginary buddy would ask him. This is one of the stupidest assignments I've ever heard of. If it had been done in class, in partners, it would have made sense. But as a homework assignment it doesn't make any sense. Instead of writing one whole dialogue, the student has to write two halves of two dialogues. Anyway, by the end poor J. was deeply tired and I was highly disgruntled. Then I translated notes on the olive tree into German for Ge. That was a good learning experience, too; even if I don't dream of Plato's Republic, I can dream of Spanish past participles and Oleo europaea statistics now.

P.S.: To provide an update on my mutineer story, I've written an outline of the plot now. Also, I came across George Farquhar's play The Beaux-Stratagem on gutenberg.org today; it was first performed in 1707, but the language seems very modern (or the nineteenth-century editor had updated it), and I made careful notes on it that should help me establish the setting of my story. It also reminded me that I should pick up my French Revolution research again.