The Murder of Music
With the Death of Brahms
by Mindy Pechenuk
June 2015
“Mankind is a unique species! There is nothing like it, there’s no animal that’s like it. There’s no animal which produces mankind. Mankind is a unique phenomenon. And the characteristic of mankind is creativity! And therefore, what you want to do in life, you want to accompany your life with things like great music. Because they perpetuate your existence by perpetuating what you’re capable of doing for mankind.
“That’s why you want to do a good performance, because immortality is looking at you—and raising questions. Here we’re talking now about music, but the point is that’s what the reason of music is. The meaning is not based on music; it’s based on the soul of mankind.”
—Lyndon LaRouche, May 10, 2015
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The Twentieth Century was a century of cultural, scientific, political destruction, and this was as deliberate as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. It was as deliberate as the election of the Bush family, and Barack Obama. It was as deliberate as World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, the Iraq war, and today the threat of thermonuclear war. This was the conscious aim of the British Empire, their Wall Street allies, and others, as they drove to carry out their hideous policy of killing off the human species. The most deadly tool they had was to eradicate the knowability of the human mind as the driving force in the universe.
Therefore, the purpose of this discussion, is to locate for you, the reader, the fight that took place in the sacred domain of Classical music before you were born, or in some cases during your lifetime. It is not too late to destroy this evil, to find the beauty in the true creative human mind, and the real love, passion, and mission that we all share for the benefit of future generations to come. Unto the stage of history we now travel—only to come out of this with a new, and heightened understanding, so that we are to succeed in creating a new alliance of nations through real classical beauty and science—it is possible and necessary!
Turn of a Dark Age
Let us step back from the Twentieth Century, into the latter half of the Nineteenth Century where the battle between Zeus and Prometheus was still an upfront fight. The last Classical musical Promethean was Johannes Brahms, and all that was needed by the British Empire (et al.) was Brahms’ death in 1897 to unleash horrors upon humanity. However, the stage was set before Brahms’ death. For us today, like Brahms, the mission to create new relations among nations, to bring about a human creative world, is a continuous battle for the soul and mind of mankind. This was the same passionate mission which inspired Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, the Schumanns, and Brahms, to transform mankind from the grip of one of the most evil Zeusians of music, Franz Liszt, and his ally Richard Wagner.
 Franz Liszt (1811-1886), with Richard Wagner, were the leading musical adversaries of Brahms and Giuseppe Verdi—and of creative reason in music—during the second half of the 19th Century. |
By the end of the Nineteenth Century, the British Empire was desperate to stop what was progressing against their control of the world; they needed a new war, and a dark age. The Empire acted, and the world dramatically changed—the 1890 ouster of Bismark as chancellor of Germany-the necessary step to set the stage for World War I; and the 1890 assassination of the President of France Sadi Carnot, which unleashed both a political and musical hell from the worst quarters of France, and in Vienna under the influence of the British Empire crowd. Only to follow with the Dreyfus Affair, which was crucial, not only for the political destruction of Europe and the world, but also the cultural destruction. All of this was done to stop what Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, McKinley, and others had set into motion throughout the world.
Johannes Brahms, the last of the musical geniuses alive, set the standard for all humanity—all of his other friends were dead, and he carried with him the responsibility, passion, love for future generations, to know (not to just understand) what is it that makes us human. Once he had died, the standard-bearer was no longer there, and within three years of his death—hell was let loose with the Twentieth Century. But, much to the dismay of the British Empire and Wall Street, there were individuals, who rose to the occasion from the destruction of the Twentieth Century—Lyndon LaRouche, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Norbert Brainin, Albert Einstein, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Max Planck.
Now, we are in the final months of that fight!
Brahms’ Mind, Liszt’s Fingers
Brahms was both a true patriot of his country, Germany,1 and a universal citizen of the world. He was a close friend of Chancellor Bismarck, It was known that Brahms’ library contained Bismarck’s letters and speeches, some of which he carried with him on trips. He openly spoke of Bismarck, and the need for German unity, which he would celebrate in his musical compositions.
There is a famous moment when his young student Gustav Jenner enlisted in his regiment, and Brahms is on record saying to Jenner: “I cannot say how I envy you. If I were only as young as you are I should go with you at once, but that too I missed.”2
Brahms’ library was rich with every aspect of Classical life from Schiller, Lessing, Goethe, Aeschylus, Homer, Sophocles. “His contact with pioneers of medical science kept him abreast of the latest developments. His close friendships with Billroth and Engelmann account for his owning a copy of Billroth’s Surgical Letters and Engelmann’s Experiments on the Microscopic Changes in Muscle Contraction: indeed, he would observe, along with the students, Billroth’s pioneering surgery at the University Hospital in Vienna. The worlds of scientific invention earned his attention as well, and he was interested in the introduction of electricity in Vienna and the development of the Edison system.”3
Without Franz Liszt, and his ally Richard Wagner, the destruction of the Twentieth Century would not have been possible. The long fingers of Liszt reached across the centuries, into both the United States and Europe. It was the spinoffs of Liszt that helped to shape the Twentieth Century destruction, with the aid of others yet to come. The eulogy that Liszt wrote upon the death of his loyal ally Napoleon III speaks for itself:
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“Magnanimous heart, all encompassing mind, practical, gentle, and generous character—and sinister fate! A hamstrung and garroted Caesar—but moved by a breath of the divine Caesar, ideal personification of the earthly empire!. . . I believed sincerely . . . that Napoleon’s government was the most suited to the needs and progress of our times. He gave great examples, and accomplished or attempted great deeds. . . . However terrible it was, his final disaster does not erase them! When justice comes—France will bring back his coffin to place it in glory next to that of Napoleon I, in the Church of the Invalides!. . . the Emperor filled his life with the constant exercise of those most synonymous sovereign virtues: charity, goodness, liberality, generosity, magnificence, munificence. . . . his gratitude to those who had done him some favor. . . . I try to imitate him himself, blessing his memory and praying for him to the God of mercies who has made nations capable of healing.”4
This eulogy was no spur-of-the-moment action. Franz Liszt was close to Napoleon and his circles for many years. Liszt would not only visit Napoleon, but Liszt’s son-in-law, Émile Ollivier, was an aide to Napoleon whom Liszt would confer with for political objectives. Let there be no misunderstanding—Franz “Zeus” Liszt was a political operative of the British Empire—and his music speaks to this directly.5 Liszt and his side-agent of influence Richard Wagner, deployed every moment to destroy the true spirit and passion of the creative nature of man.
The battle of the late Nineteenth Century was clear to Brahms, and the circle of his collaborators, and for them, the epistemological and political battle was one. As Liszt and Wagner through their music created a degenerate, pessimistic mankind—pissing on all the great minds that came before; i.e., J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schiller, Leibniz, Kepler—Brahms and the Schumanns created the optimistic creative mankind, with the passion and love for the future. According to Brahms’ good friend George Henschel:6
. . . “a volume of the ‘Forty-Eight’ was invariably open on the piano of his apartment. When Henschel noticed it, Brahms commented, ‘With this I rinse my mouth every morning.’ And when Brahms sat down to play to others, it was invariably the ‘Forty-Eight’7 that came to mind. . . .”
Brahms, like those in his circle of friends, and Beethoven and Mozart before, returned to the master J.S. Bach. Brahms et al. were driven by the science of the human mind—by the creative spirit of lawful “universal principles,” by the creation of truth as expressed in metaphor. In this case, let Brahm’s student Florence May speak to this:
“His interpretation of Bach was always unconventional and quite unfettered by traditional theory, and he certainly did not share the opinion, which has had many distinguished adherents, that Bach’s music should be performed in a simply flowing style. In the movements of the Suites he liked variety of tone and touch, as well as a certain elasticity of ‘tempo’. His playing of many of the preludes and some of the fugues was a revelation of exquisite poems, and he performed them not only with graduated shadings but with marked contrasts of tone, effect. Each note of Bach’s passages and figures contributed, in the hands of Brahms, to form melody which was instinct with feeling of some kind or other. It might be deep pathos or light-hearted playfulness and jollity; impulsive energy or soft and tender grace’ but sentiment (as distinct from sentimentality) was always there: monotony never. ‘Quite tender and quite soft’ was his frequent admonition to me, whilst in another place he required the utmost impetuosity.
“Brahms particularly loved Bach’s suspensions. ‘It is here that it must sound,’ he would say, pointing to the tied note and insisting, whilst not allowing me to force the preparation, that the latter should be so struck as to give the fullest possible effect to the dissonance. ‘How am I to make this sound?’ I asked him of a few bars of a subject lying for the third, fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand, which he wished brought out clearly, but in a very soft tone. ‘You must think particularly of the fingers with which you play it, and by and by it will come out,’ he answered.”8
On the other hand, Franz Liszt showed his clearly his hatred for mankind, and was notorious for pounding so hard on the piano, that he was constantly breaking strings, and would often need a second piano during his performances!
The assassination of President Sadi Carnot of France, contrary to popular myth, was not just carried out by a bunch of anarchists. This was deployed by the British Empire, as was the Dreyfus Affair, as was the dismissal of Chancellor Bismarck of Germany. France now became the center for musical pessimism; anything created by J.S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms was written out of history. Springing up everywhere in Paris was the insanity of Berlioz, Satie, Ravel, Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, D’Indy, Princess Polignac (nee Winnaretta Singer of the Singer Sewing Machine Family). Why do I say insanity? Because their music has left the domain of human creativity. They are the successors of the insanity of Franz Liszt and this Zeusian school.
Franz Liszt created a cult around him whether at his shrine in Weimar, in Paris, or wherever he went. His sidekick Wagner, and the Bayreuth orgies of his operas, provided a central place for this network of early fascists to reside. By 1888-1896 Debussy, Bernard Shaw to Maurice Barres would come together at Bayreuth. The working relationship between Debussy and Barres continued in the 1900s.
Ask yourself, what happens when you destroy truth and universal principles? Since J.S. Bach’s creation of the Well-Tempered Bel Canto art of musical composition, the standard was set for music. J.S. Bach lived in the domain of Plato, Cusa, Kepler, and Leibniz. Bach created through his compositions a living “future of the future.”
Ideas for Bach, like those who developed these universal principles—i.e., Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Clara and Robert Schumann, and Brahms—were not contained in the notes, or fixed intervals or harmonic relations. The principle of metaphor was their domain—in which you could only know truth through the paradoxes they created, in their mind and soul, to yours. If you try to literally play or sing the notes on the page, you will have become the “practical man” that the Empire wants you to be—a good slave to kill yourself, and all of humanity. For Bach et al., they were continuing to create new universal harmonies, from the one in their mind. The future was their guide, taking your mind and soul to higher resolutions throughout their compositions. This was not true for Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Berlioz, Strauss, Satie, Ravel, Debussy, Fauré, Saint-Saëns, and those who came after them. For them there is no future, no longer an understanding of the immortality of our mankind—reaching to create breakthroughs to develop a higher power of mankind in the universe—no universal principles, no hypothesis. All they are left with is a smelly pessimism and a feeling of failure—and what we have in today’s culture is the bottom of this pit.
Vienna was no different. In fact, Vienna was Brahms’ last battleground, where he lived out the remaining years of his life, and was in direct battle with Wagner (died 1883), Liszt (died 1886), Mahler, Bruckner, Freud, and Boltzmann.
Battling for America
The British Empire had its long-term mission in mind to destroy all of humanity, and between the 1890s and the early Twentieth Century, they had declared musical/cultural warfare on the United States. One route into the United States was through New York, the secondary route was through Boston.
Both Liszt and Brahms deployed their forces to the New World (the United States). It was Leopold Damrosch (1832-85), a longtime friend of Liszt and Wagner, who arrived with his family in New York City (1871) and founded the Oratorio Society in 1873, the New York Symphony Society (1878), and also conducted at the Metropolitan Opera. Leopold’s son Walter made his conducting debut at the Metropolitan Opera (1885) conducting Wagner’s “Tannhauser.” After his father’s death, Walter took over both the Oratorio Society and the New York Symphony, and formed the Damrosch Opera Company(1894), from whose platforms he played a critical role in destroying the minds of mankind.
The extraordinary role carried out by the “godsons” of Franz Liszt—Walter Damrosch, and his brother Frank—was crucial in shaping the destruction of the Twentieth Century. While Walter Damrosch was instrumental in the trans-Atlantic operations, Frank Damrosch helped dominate the minds of the young generations of upcoming artists, and I would add, the population as a whole, in the United States. He was responsible for helping to establish the “Institute of Musical Art” in New York, which was later became known as “Juillard School of Music,” while his sister Clara Damrosch, and her husband David Mannes established the “Mannes College, The New School of Music” in 1916 in Manhattan. The education of American culture was clearly dominated to destroy the United States. World War I not only took the physical life of many throughout the world, but, it also took the cultural mind and soul and replaced it with the “practical” man!
Comes the Congress of Cultural Freedom
Now we arrive at the pit of the Twentieth Century: 1900-1927 (from the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900 to the Solvay Conference in 1927). The British Empire and Wall Street forces declared war on the human mind/soul and nation state. Hilbert and Bertrand Russell created the practical mathematical mind at the International Congress of Mathematicians. (see article in this issue). The same operation was being carried out in music. The flood gates were open, and what entered became total reductionism, anarchy in the music world. In April of 1900, Paris is the home of the Universal Exposition, where there was an exhibition to carry out the same destruction in music: as in the case of Ernest Boulanger (the father of Nadia Boulanger, whom you will come to know soon) who “had been invited to have the score of one of his choral works displayed . . . in an exhibit devoted to French contemporary musicians at the Universal Exposition of 1900.”9
Now the deed was done, and the monster had been unleashed. Brahms had only been dead three years and the musical scene was already dominated by the likes of the Damrosch Family, the Boulanger Family, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Princess Polignac, Cocteau, Schoenberg.10
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By 1910 (only 13 years after Brahms’ death) Stravinsky had scribbled on paper “The Firebird” (1910), “Petrushka” (1911) and “Le Sacre du Printemps”—“The Rite of Spring” (1913). What an assault against humanity is Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”—a ballet based on a ritual human sacrifice. What does that say about the immortality special to humankind. Compare that to Brahm’s composing his “Vier Ernste Gesange” (“Four Serious Songs”) After the stroke of his dear friend Clara Schumann. Brahms through the four songs developed the beauty and truth on what it is to be human—ending with the fourth song based on Saint Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13, “If I have not agape, I am nothing.”
How far away is Stravinsky from the video games, and violence which today’s culture calls “entertainment?”
The defenders of Stravinsky were a clique which included Debussy-who became very close to Stravinsky. Debussy wrote to Stravinsky in November 1913 from Paris: “Our reading at the piano of Le Sacre du Printemps is always in my mind. It haunts me like a beautiful dream, and I try in vain to reinvoke the terrific impression. That is why I wait for the stage performance like a greedy child impatient for promised sweets.”11
Let us be clear—Debussy is not a “child”; his musical intention is completely destructive, and at its roots destroys the universal principle that J.S. Bach had created with the Well-Tempered Bel Canto compositions.
For the great geniuses of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the subject of every scientific discovery or musical composition, was the universal nature of man. For Debussy, Nadia Boulanger, and the musicians in France around the “Action-Française,” there was a different view of man. For this I will let Debussy himself speak from March of 1915: “For many years now I have been saying the same thing: that we have been unfaithful to the musical traditions of our race for more than a century and a half. . . . Since Rameau, we have no purely French tradition. . . . Today when the virtues of our race are being exalted, the victory should give our artists a sense of purity and remind them of the nobility of French blood.”
And again, Debussy in a letter to Stravinsky in October 1915: “It will be necessary to cleanse the world of this bad seed. It will be necessary to kill the microbe of false grandeur, or organized ugliness, which we have not perceived as simply beings of weakness. . . . You are assuredly one of those who could victoriously combat the other gasses that are just as lethal as the other, and against which we had not masks.”12
[Box: Schizophrenia or Sanity]
This tradition of fascist identity was ramped at the time. In the case of Nadia Boulanger, the “goddess” of music, she was known for her beliefs that “Jews were members of another race, however, and she tried to avoid having ‘too many’ in her classes at any one time.”13
With that introduction to Nadia Boulanger, a few words must be said. She is someone who is known very well in the institutions of music, but not to the general public. Almost every musician, young and old, traveled to study, to sit at her feet, and worship at her altar. I was introduced to Nadia, when I was in undergraduate school at Queens College in NYC. Unfortunately my music theory professor, Leo Kraft, was one of her students, and he, like many others, continued the disaster called American Music which started after World War I.
The British Empire and Wall Street didn’t wait for the end of World War I to escalate their cultural warfare—on April 6, 1917, in the midst of World War I, Walter Damrosch became the first president of the newly founded American Friends of Musicians in France. With the aid of the British Empire and Wall Street, the end to nation-states and scientific progress was unfolding.
Today, while we are in such a critical period in Germany where the trio of Foreign Minister Steinmeier and former Chancellors Schmidt and Schroeder can reverse what the current Chancellor Merkel is doing, and re-establish Germany’s relationship to working with Russia, therefore avoiding thermonuclear war, most people do not see this, because of the destruction of Classical thinking at the turn of the Twentieth Century. But, Lyndon LaRouche does not only see it, but acts on the solution. Why? Because Lyndon LaRouche is a Promethean!
This project to destroy the minds of both America and Europe coming out of World War I was, as today, financed with the blood money of Wall Street and the British Empire. Some of the key financiers and activist were Harry Harkness Flagler (his family is the fascist Standard Oil Company), John D. Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts, Henry C. Frick, Mrs. William Astor Chanler, and Mrs. George Montgomery Tuttle.14
The conditions to carry out cultural warfare were now in place, and with the Armistice signed, and World War I over, the beginning of World War II was put in place. It was Walter Damrosch and General Pershing that immediately organized the “French High Command” to set up a school for the training of “American bandmasters” and by the “summer of 1919, it was in full operation in Chaumont, under the direction of Francis Casadesus.” The next step was taken by Damrosch and Nadia Boulanger, to set up a permanent school for teaching Americans music—this became known as Fountainbleau (the American Conservatory in Fountainbleau, France).
The school had its first official class in 1921. It is at that moment in 1921 that Nadia began Wednesday Salon meetings at her house. Here the students gathered at her altar and were brainwashed in the “anal” practical, formal analysis of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and Brahms. By the end of sessions you were convinced there are no Universal Principles, only particulars, chords, structures—the human mind was destroyed. At the same time Nadia would encourage all the “new music of the Twentieth Century”—Stravinsky, Valery, Fauré were some among the establishment in Paris who would attend the Wednesday sessions.
Nadia’s “American Students,” starting with Aaron Copland in 1921, were the predominant voices heard in the United States along with Virgil Thompson, Elliot Carter, Roy Harris, Walter Piston (whose text book on harmony is used to brainwash many generations of music students), and Roger Sessions, just to name a few. Late in his life, Lenard Bernstein went to meet “the goddess” Nadia for her approval! It is no accident that Nadia Boulanger, like her other associates at “Action-Français,” share the same view of mankind as Debussy, Barres, Liszt, Wagner, and Monteverdi.15
Boulanger vs. Furtwängler in America
Finally in 1924, plans emerged to bring Nadia to the United States. Once again she was sponsored by Walter Damrosch, and his New York Symphony Society, of which none other than Harry Harkness Flagler was the president. Nadia’s concert tour started with a first performance in New York with Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony, and, then went to Boston, for a performance with the Boston Symphony under the baton of Koussevitzky.
For Nadia’s first entrance formally into America, neither Beethoven nor Brahms is played; instead Nadia deploys her former student Aaron Copland to write a special composition for her for Organ and Orchestra. Copland joined the faculty of the New School in New York in about 1927.
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At the time Nadia was to give her opening concert in New York, on January 11, 1925 featuring the premier of Copeland’s “Symphony for Organ and Orchestra,” she was met with a great surprise. The great genius Wilhelm Furtwängler arrived for the first time in New York, and was to give his first concert in New York with the New York Philharmonic. It was only days after Furtwängler conducted the New York Philharmonic that Stravinsky was there to conduct an all-Stravinsky concert with the Philharmonic. So, here we find the battle ground from Liszt through to the Damrosch family, and others, inviting all the degenerates to conduct, or perform with the New York Symphony Society, and the New York Philharmonic: From Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel, Toscanini, George Gershwin, and many more.
By 1928, one year after the 1927 Solvay Conference where Einstein was attacked, the New York Symphony and the New York Philharmonic merged into The Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra of New York, Inc.; Clarence MacKay, Chairman and Harry Harkness Flagler, President. At the end of 1928 Gershwin (one of Nadia’s students at Foutainbleau) gave the world premier of his “American in Paris,” with Walter Damrosch conducting.
Let the ‘Trumpets Sound’
In the midst of the insanity of the Twentieth Century, the voice of “immortality” was heard as Furtwängler did two more tours of the United States, ending his last performance with Brahms’ Requiem. Furtwängler and Brahms “sounded the trumpet” to Americans to wake up and leave the bestial world behind, and find their souls in the beauty of development—in the principles of Hamilton and the preamble of our Constitution. This was the last tour of America by Furtwängler, who was never allowed in the the United States again.
The British Empire and Wall Street went after Furtwängler, and branded him a Nazi, because he stayed in his country during World War II, and conducted the concerts he hoped would help his fellow man. Furtwängler had to go through the hideous process of de-Nazification. Instead, the real card-carrying Nazi conductor Herbert Von Karajan was given free rein everywhere. His performances of Beethoven, Brahms and all their friends, makes these great minds unknowable to anyone who listens. Along with Von Karajan came Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, and then the pervert Leonard Bernstein taking the reins of the New York Philharmonic.
A similar fight took place in Boston at the same time. As noted earlier, Brahms’ friend George Herschel goes to the Boston Symphony in 1888, followed by the great Arthur Nikisch (1893-1895) who played a big role in Furtwängler’s development. After that the Boston Symphony, like New York, falls into the hands of the degenerates such as Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky (1924-1949).
The stage was now set for the British Empire, Wall Street, and others to unleash the next phase of their cultural attack: the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” and Hollywood—the place where Stravinsky, Nabokov, Schoenberg, the Huxleys and their satanic crew wound up in America. I will leave that discussion for another time.
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There is one more turning point in Twentieth Century history that must not be overlooked—the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Lyndon LaRouche was the only person to forecast this happening in his Kempinski Hotel press conference in 1988. I find once again that irony is the purveyor of “truth.” It was in 1989 that Leonard Bernstein went to London to perform his “Candide,” which is taken from Voltaire’s “Candide,” an attack on the Gottfried Leibniz from whom the preamble of our U.S. Constitution comes -“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Leibniz played a crucial role in the lives of Benjamin Franklin, Lyndon LaRouche, Einstein, and those of us who have come to discover him today. I will let Bernstein speak for himself, as he addressed his audience in the concert hall of London, in 1989 :
“His (Voltaire’s) masterpiece was a tough, skinny little novella called Candide, which inspired the playwright Lillian Hellman and me to have a bash at it musically. Voltaire’s book was actually entitled Candide, or Optimism, it being a viciously satirical attack on a prevalent philosophical system known as Optimism, which was based on the rather indigestible writing of a certain Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and popularized by our own, beloved Alexander Pope, for example in this great line form his “ Essay on Man”: ‘One truth is clear-whatever is, is right.’
“Now, according to Leibniz, whose ideas Pope was lyricizing, if we believe in a Creator, then he must be a good Creator, and the greatest of all possible creators, and therefore could have created only The Best of All Possible Worlds. In other words: ‘Everything that is, is right.’ Granted that in this world the innocent are mindlessly slaughtered and that crime goes mostly unpunished, that there is disease and death and poverty. But if we could only see the whole picture, the divine and universal plan, then we would understand that whatever happens is for the best. Thus spake Leibniz. Naturally Voltaire found this idea absurd every day of his life, but particularly on that day in 17 55 when all of Lisbon, Portugal exploded in an earthquake, and uncountable numbers of people were drowned, crushed, burned alive, exterminated. Now if Leibniz was right, as said Voltaire, then God is just playfully spraying his flit gun and down go a million mosquitoes, at random, haphazardly. . .”
To answer this I will let our dear friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart speak, as he did in a letter to his father on July 3, 1778 from Paris: “Now I have a piece of news for you which you may have heard already, namely, that that godless arch-rascal Voltaire has pegged out like a dog, like a beast! That is his reward! “
More Chapters To Be Written
To you the reader: While there is much more to say on the matter, what I have presented to you is one chapter of what happened in the Twentieth Century to Classical music. For now, take your lessons from the battle that was waged before most of you were born; or, for those who were born in the Twentieth Century, I hope this gives you a handle on what happened to your mind, soul, nation, world and the universe. The potential of the works and lives of Plato, Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, Riemann, Einstein, Vernadsky, Planck, J.S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and those who did break through in the Twentieth Century like Furtwängler, Norbert Brainin, Lyndon LaRouche (of whom the great first violinist of the Amadeus String Quartet said, “Lyndon LaRouche is the greatest musician alive today”) would have us already directing the development of mankind with new generations of symphonies, and string quartets.
Do not let this moment pass: Think, and act in the spirit of truth for the “future of the future” and let us bring about today the greatest victory mankind has ever achieved—and bring our United States, with Germany leading the way in Europe, into the New Just World which is now awaiting us with the development of the BRICS (another mission created by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, and our movement).
Footnotes
1. Contrary to popular opinion today, music, science, art, drama, and nation-building are a unity.
2. Musgrave, Michael. A Brahms Reader, Sheridan Books, Michigan, 200, p. 175.
3. Ibid., pp. 172-173.
4. Letter 148 from Liszt to Agnes Klindworth.
5. Compare Mozart’s “Ave Verum” with Liszt’s “Ave Verum”. Think about what the difference implies about the nature of Prometheus versus Zeus. There is much to say on this matter, but for our purposes here I will leave that for another discussion.
6. Henschel was both a well-known baritone and a conductor who would later conduct the Boston Symphony.
7. J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
8. Brahms Reader, pp. 127-128.
9. Rosenstiel, Léonie. Nadia Boulanger, A Life in Music, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1982, p. 40.
10. The current popular argument that Schoenberg was different than Stravinsky, is like arguing that Hitler and Mussolini were different. Schoenberg’s “12 tone row system,” which is pure mathematical reductionism, is in the end no different than the neurotic pounding of anarchist rhythms, and screeching noises of Stravinksy.
11. Stravinsky, Vera. Stravinsky In Pictures and Documents, Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1978, p. 90.
12. Both letters quoted from Jane F. Fulcher, The Composer As Intellectual, Music and Ideology in France, 1914-1940.
13. Rosenstiel, op. cit., p. 198.
14. Rosenstiel, op. cit., p. 136.
15. Nadia was part of a project to revive Monteverdi, who was the leader of the art of reductionism in the late 1500s into the 1600s against Plato, Socrates, da Vinci, Cusa, and Kepler.
On Musical Tuning
From Bach through Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Shubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Verdi the tuning of music was at C=256. This was not arbitrary. It is not a metrical figure, but rather is a physical space-time development of the human mind. It is tied to the question of poetry, metaphor, the harmonics of the universe. What was done by the British Empire and Wall Street to both raise the official tuning to A=440—which was done by Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister—and to destroy composition through Stravinsky, Debussy, Schoenberg, has led to the creation of the practical and irrational man, a world without a knowable truth.
—Mindy Pechenuk
Schizophrenia or Sanity
“One no longer feels dominated by the phrase, the literal meaning of the words. Cast in an immutable mold which adequately expresses their value, they do not require any further commentary. The text thus becomes purely phonetic material for the composer. He can dissect it at will and concentrate all his attention on its primary constituent element—that is to say, on the syllable.”
—Stravinsky, from his autobiography
“Furtwängler’s performance is a very clinically crucial thing. Everything about that is total suspension. And the suspension is totally controlled. When you hear, experience, the Furtwängler version (Schubert 9th Symphony, Furtwängler/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra) and you hear it in reasonable concern, you do not hear it in sections.
“You have a kind of religious experience, which starts out, in a sense, instructing you morally, at an opening. And then it goes through—like the second movement—it goes in a certain way which is almost magical. And most people, as conductors, couldn’t do it. They butcher it, with rhythmic routines. They don’t see where the progress is, in the process of movement. They don’t see the daring explosion, which is effected by Furtwangler’s direction, at that point. And then the finale, the effect of that—Boom! Boom! This is charged! This is Schubert!. . .
“Take the case of the Schubert Ninth Symphony. That performance under his direction is a unified piece which contains no separations in the process of delivering the composition. And anyone who does divide it into parts is making an ass of themselves. Because the idea is that you are captured by a transition from one phase to another phase. It’s a phase-relationship. It’s not a composition of parts of the composition; it’s a process of a progressive process. And Schubert, of course, did that!”
—Lyndon LaRouche, May 10, 2015
Music Is Immortal
“I live neither in the past nor in the future. I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in lucidity.”
—Stravinsky from his Autobiography
“The beauty is creativity, per se. It’s also the measure of what creativity is. So you take any composition—it’s a sacred business. If you really want to do it, you’re attempting a sacred work. And it’s a sense of man’s immortality. Even people, when they die, if they live well, they can contribute a memory of beauty, and that’s rarely done these days.
“Now we’re in one of the greatest periods, the most emotional part of human history that ever existed. We exist on the brink of the threat of the immediate destruction of the human species by the forces that dominate mankind today. Where do you find the passion that will inform you to take the actions which will save mankind from the destruction which is being brought by mankind on himself, on society? That’s music. That’s art. It’s the sense of immortality, that those people who have died did not die in vain. But what they had decided to do is to commit themselves to the future of mankind.
“The beauty of mankind’s existence always lies beyond mankind himself. We are able to become the instruments of unleashing the beauty of mankind. Every great composer and every musical performer works on that basis. If they don’t do it, they’re crap-artists. And I’ve known a lot of crap-artists.”
—Lyndon LaRouche May 10, 2015 dialogue with associates after an informal evening of music.
