A few years ago I entered a huge record store in Los Angeles and found the entire area occupied by music that didn’t seem from this world. Floating in that swamp of beauty that was completely unknown to me, I approached almost on tiptoe to the clerk in charge of feeding the music in the environment and asked him with my soul in a thread what record that was, so similar, no doubt, to the ones that were heard Sundays in heaven. Was The creation, by Haydn. The revelation was a coup de grace for me, because from a very young age, when music became something as essential to my life as food itself, I had tried to erase Haydn from my thoughts for a reason that none of my music-loving friends I wanted to forgive myself: I considered him one of the few musicians who spread bad luck. The other – who has not yet been able to prove the opposite to me – is Héctor Berlioz. This superstition is so deep-rooted that the most terrifying trip I have ever made by plane was one from Barcelona to New York, in a jumbo jet whose music program featured Harold in Italy, by Berlioz. I didn’t know the piece, of course, because the bad shadow of the great French musician began to worry me long before I heard anything of his. In reality, it didn’t start with his music, but with the image I formed of him when I first saw the famous cartoon in which he appears conducting an orchestra, among whose instruments is a war cannon. The idea perhaps came to the caricaturist because of the cataclysmic sound that Berlioz wanted to give to his orchestra through the not always effective resource of increasing the number of instruments, to the extreme that for the execution of his Requiem four additional brass orchestras are needed. The mere sight of that drawing instilled in me such terror for the music of Berlioz, who is, without a doubt, one of the great creators of all time, as witnessed by so many writers who know very well what they are saying.
Not knowing him, I got carried away by the fragrant melody that I found in the headphones during that flight to New York, and only when it ended did I find out from the announcer that it was Harold in Italy. I had listened to it in its entirety, and, moreover, with great delight, and from that moment on I could no longer listen to music, but rather remained attentive to the changes in the slightest noises of the plane, in its least planned movements, and I even reviewed by heart the instructions in the event of accidents in the ocean, instructions that we have heard so many times from flight attendants without paying the slightest attention to them. Everything seemed to indicate that Berlioz’s curse had been averted, since the sky was infinitely clear and the enormous ship seemed suspended in the air like a magnificent earthen hotel. However, as we approached New York, the commander announced that weather conditions did not permit immediate landing, and we were to circle over the city until it was possible. The truth is that we circled for three hours – in addition to the seven we had already flown from Barcelona – and then landed in Boston to refuel, and circled around New York again for another four hours. We weren’t the only ones, of course: through the window we saw the other planes waiting their turn to get off, and we wondered what subtle chance depended on the fact that we didn’t all trip over like a colossal domino. I had no doubt that we owed that inconceivable setback to Berlioz’s spell, and the only thing I wondered as we continued spinning in the sky was whether the bad shadow wouldn’t be so intense as to prevent us from landing safely.
Haydn’s superstition, on the other hand, came from knowing him quite well. I admired and still love his chamber music, but it seemed to me that his penchant for certain tricks that had nothing to do with his art could not be beneficial. He could not bear that in the middle of a symphony he ordered a timpani blow that thundered like a cannon shot just to wake up the sleeping audience, that he had made another symphony to be played with children’s toy instruments, and that to remind him of his prince The painful economic situation of its musicians would have made another symphony in which the performers extinguished the candle on their music stands and withdrew one after another from the scene, until the orchestra was exhausted and the room in darkness. Those things that at today’s age seem like simple jokes, to which an artist of Haydn’s stature has every right, seemed unbearable in his youth. To put it with a Venezuelan term of the highest expressiveness, they seemed like terrifying things. That is to say: because they were so ugly, they carried bad luck with them, like peacock feathers in vases, like eating tripe in a glass or making love with stockings on. The fact is that the chance discovery of the oratorio The creation It razed my superstition against Haydn to the roots, among other things, by the way, because beauty in its highest expressions is the most effective spell against bad luck.
In any case, these primary tendencies tend to manifest themselves in all media and professions, and what interests me most is not to talk about them, but about the relationships that music lovers maintain with established composers. A friend whose most astonishing quality is that he detests Mozart has said without a tremor in his voice: “Mozart does not exist, because when he is bad it is better to listen to Haydn, and when he is good it is better to listen to Beethoven.” There are those who do not want to hear about Rachmaninof because he seems corny to them – and worst of all: a late corny – and on the other hand there are other very respectable fans who consider him one of the greats. Among other very fair reasons, because his sensitivity is very few centimeters away from tropical boleros, among whose fans we include many of the writers – good and bad – from this side of the world and part of the other.
For many years, Latin machismo had repudiated Chopin with the inevitable argument that his was music for queers. Apart from the fact that there is no proof that queers have worse taste than those who are not, today there do not seem to be many who dare to deny that Chopin is one of the greatest musicians of all time. So much so that his greatness is recognized despite the deplorable orchestration – to say the least – of his two piano concertos. Beethoven, with his inexhaustible creativity, would undoubtedly have been in these times one of the most requested authors to make music for films in Hollywood. However, I know a very intelligent and serious lady who disowned him forever when she found out that he smelled so bad that at his concerts you had to have a very, very good stomach to occupy the front row. Brahms – who in my opinion is one of the greatest – deserves even more respect for having been a pianist in a brothel in Hamburg. I have a friend, a Béla Bartók fan, who almost killed someone when he said that his first violin concerto – which now happens to be number two – was actually a concerto for cat and orchestra. Ernest Chausson, for his part, arouses a very deep tenderness, not only because of the lyricism of his music, but because of the sad fact that he was killed by a bicycle.
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