"Some melody"

Leonard Bernstein wrote a book called 'The Joy of Music' which I took out from the Kitchener Public Library and read when I was maybe 16. I did most of my reading as a teenager. In fact, at 15 I underwent a similar project to this absurdity and sat in our backyard and read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. A feat that only came in handy a couple of years later when I was talking to my first girlfriend on the phone and quoted Henry the Fifth to her, "You have witchcraft in your lips". As a grown man, I couldn't do that without giggling, so hat's off, 16 year old me.

There was no level of earnest intensity I wasn't capable of at 16. Or at 27.

Or, frankly, now, at 39.

I mean, I am listening to the complete works of Beethoven.

But back to the point: Beethoven and Bernstein.

I woke up this morning and loosely remembered a quote from Bernstein's book: "Beethoven was the greatest composer because of his ability to know what note should come next." Good stuff. Worth pursuing.

In my exhaustive Googling, I got this YouTube hit:

In order for the rest of this entry to make sense, maybe watch it now.

This video killed me on a few fronts.

First, it confirmed what I thought might happen writing this blog: one thing would lead to another in ways that tickled me.  In my previous entry, I told a little story about my grandfather Khosrow. Well, in the 'seventies and 'eighties, him and Leonard in this video could've been the same guy. It is un-fucking-canny. The sauvite, the craggy handsomeness (especially in profile), the mannerisms and gestures, the sheer unassailable confidence in what they know.

(Leonard Bernstein. Handsome!)

Second, Maximillian Schell's incredible hair and unironic decorative scarf.

Third, at 1:17 Bernstein suddenly has smoke in his left hand and Leonard wants to light that butt so bad for about a minute. It's in his other hand, it's in the middle of his mouth, it's in the corner of his mouth, that unlit smoke makes its rounds. Then I guess he remembers it's tough playing a symphonic score with a smoke in your hand and the smoke disappears. That is... until 7:08, when presto! The smoke is back! Like he pulled it from behind Maximillian's ear. But it's not just back - it's back in style: it's lit, in a long white cigarette holder.  And suddenly Schell is smoking too. But while Schell gets to puff away, we never actually see Lenny take a drag off his, which as an ex-smoker, almost made me punch my laptop in the camera hole.

Fourth, towards the end of the video, Leonard articulates the quote I was searching for. That's some serendipity. He speaks very beautifully of Beethoven's awful struggle and the perfect "inevitability" of his music.

Fifth, when Bernstein plays the 7th symphony and goes, "Some melody". Ha.

Sixth, back to my grandfather. My grandfather was never without a pack of Vantages in his shirt pocket. I can remember seeing the bulls-eye logo through the thin fabric of his dress shirts. At one point he told me he was smoking two packs a day. His voice was thoroughly smoked out. When he'd make his cassettes in our living room, he'd often sing along with the melody and sound exactly like Bernstein does at 4:30.

But, all of the above has nothing to do with the Beethoven I listened to most recently: the Romance in F, Op. 50. I listened to 2 versions: Jascha Heifetz and Itzhak Perlman. Not that I'm into doing classical music cage matches, but I preferred Heifetz's version: it was faster, sharper, less sentimental and therefore much more clear and moving.

Here's Heifetz. You can find Perlman your damn self.

However, because I'm intellectually 12, the main thing I enjoyed was that whenever the whole orchestra came in, the rhythm sounded like someone saying, "That's enough" and their friend going, "No. It's not." You'll know what I mean if you listen to it.

Is now a good time to restate that I'm not a musicologist?