December 08, 2009
When I was researching the program notes for this week’s concert, I came upon a very interesting little detail about Emily Dickinson. In the last years of the poet’s life, her health slowly declined and she asked her sister Lavinia to promise to burn all of her papers when she died. Lavinia instead turned over more than 1700 poems to editor Thomas H. Johnson. If not for a broken promise, we would live in a world without the lines: “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.” Lavinia must have felt that the value of her sister’s art was more important than Emily’s wishes.
Franz Kafka—who published only a few short stories while he was alive—achieved literary fame posthumously, even though he’d apparently asked friend Max Brod to burn all of his work after his death. Some have suggested that Kafka didn’t really mean it, and had a hunch that Brod wouldn’t follow through. Thankfully, Brod saw to it that Kafka’s works not only survived, but were published.
Music too has its share of composers self-critical enough to destroy, alter, or request destruction of their work, Tchaikovsky among them. Some composers whose faculties declined from age or disease, like Schumann, had caretakers who edited or suppressed works that did not live up to previous quality. Mendelssohn held back more than two hundred works from publication, and often revised works over a period of years. The facts about Mendelssohn are especially interesting when one remembers that one of Mendelsson’s claims to fame is his revival of another composer’s unpublished and largely forgotten work.
When J.S. Bach wrote the St. Matthew Passion in the 1720s, he expected that it would be performed only in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig on Good Friday, and that’s exactly what happened. He revised the work in the following years, and the St. Matthew Passion was probably performed two or three more times before Bach’s death in 1750. In this case, Bach didn’t ask that his work be destroyed or that the St. Matthew Passion stay hidden from the public eye. But he wasn’t thinking any of that. Bach wrote music for his jobs without much thought about international fame. He thought about writing music that might get him a better job, but didn’t seek to sell his work the public. Mendelssohn revived and published the St. Matthew Passion almost eighty years after Bach’s death and it remains in the repertoire, performed every Easter by thousands of groups all around the world.
It’s chilling to think we might not have Emily Dickinson’s poems, Kafka’s novels, or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion if not for the intervention of others after the artists’ deaths. It would have been a tragedy. But if this handful of masterpieces survived, one can only imagine what beauty was lost to carelessness, self-criticism, indifference, fire, flooded basements or leaky roofs. We must celebrate the works that survived against all odds, but still consider the far greater number of artworks that have been lost. It’s difficult to mourn for something you never knew, but I’m taking a moment to do just that.