Protest at Powell: Brahms' German Requiem comes home

reason.com

Political controversy isn't something that pops up often in connection with the St. Louis Symphony, but last Saturday a brief and well-organized protest just before the second half of an all-Brahms program gained national attention—and made the #Brahms and #Requiem hashtags trending items on Twitter.

For those of you who somehow missed it, here, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch web site, is what happened at the Saturday, October 4th, concert by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus just after intermission, as guest conductor Markus Stenz prepared to lead the orchestra and chorus in Brahms' "German Requiem":

The orchestra and chorus were preparing to perform Johannes Brahms' Requiem just after intermission when two audience members in the middle aisle on the main floor began singing "Which Side are You On?" - an organized labor tune with origins in the infamous 1931 Harlan, Kentucky coal strike.

They soon were joined, in harmony, by other protesters, who stood at seats in various locations on the main floor and in the balcony.

The protesters then unfurled three hand-painted banners and hung them from the Dress Circle boxes. One banner listed the birth and death date of Brown, who was shot by Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9.

The five-minute interruption was met with a smattering of applause from some audience members, as well as members of the orchestra and chorus. Others simply watched as the orchestra remained silent.

The protest ended quietly as participants left voluntarily, chanting, "Black lives matter." Conductor Markus Stenz resumed the concert shortly thereafter.

You can see a video of the event on YouTube, courtesy of the St. Louis American.

Reactions afterwards varied, largely breaking along the racial and political lines that you might expect. Those who were convinced that Brown was the victim of police violence approved, those who were equally convinced that he was (as one concert-goer was overheard o say) "a thug" were outraged. For me, though, the most appropriate response came from Post-Dispatch music critic Sarah Bryan Miller in her review of the concert, where she simply noted that the "next words heard were sung from the stage, 'Selig sind, die da Leid tragen,' in Martin Luther's translation of the words of Jesus: 'Blest are they that mourn.'"

Brahms in 1853

What would Brahms have made of this? Speculation is dangerous, but it's worth noting that Brahms, an agnostic, made a great point of removing many of the explicitly Christian elements of the classic requiem mass. In fact, as teacher and essayist Nancy Thuleen writes in her article on the "German Requiem," Brahms "was heard to insist that his Requiem was intended for all humanity, despite (or indeed because of) its title; its innate themes of melancholy and consolation are applicable to any number of occasions." Including, perhaps, the occasion of mourning for a life lost.

As SLSO Chorus director Amy Kaiser points out in the concert's program notes, the "German Requiem" is "all about comfort for the living. People consider it a healing piece. There's no Dies irae. There is the sound of the last trumpet, but it's joyful, not fearful. A victory over death."

As I have noted previously, I'm one of the (apparently) small number of people in the world who still isn't sure what happened on the street in Ferguson, Missouri, back in August. But a young man is dead before his time, and if you're going to publicly mourn that event, doing it in company with Brahms isn't the worst idea in the world. It's a shame, though, that the protesters didn't feel they could stay for the rest of the concert; Brahms' music might have had a chance to demonstrate those healing powers of which Ms. Kaiser spoke. Heaven only knows, we could all use some of that these days.

Gateway to Rashomon

Toshiro Mifune and Masayuki Mori
in "Rashomon"

Share on Google+

One man is dead.  Another admits to wielding the weapon that killed him.  On that, everybody agrees—but not on anything else.  What led up to the killing and how it all went down?  That's all lost in a confusing and contradictory mix of eyewitness testimony and personal agendas.

Is this a description of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri (a suburb of St. Louis just a few miles north of where I'm sitting as I write this), on August 9th, 2014?  Well, yeah.  But it's also an accurate description of the plot of Akira Kurosawa's cinema classic "Rashomon" from 1950. 

The film takes its title from the great Rashomon gate of the ancient cities of Nara of Kyoto where the action takes place.  Taking shelter from the rain under the gate, a woodcutter, a priest, and a commoner share their tales of the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife by a bandit a few days before.  As each one recounts his version of testimony given to the court, which includes the testimony of the wife, the bandit, and even (via a medium) the dead samurai, it becomes clear that everyone has a slightly different version of the events, and that most of them place their respective narrators in the best light.  By the end of the movie it's still not clear "where the truth lies" (as they sing in "Hair") or even whether a real crime occurred at all.

Sound familiar?

William Shatner, Howard Da Silva,
and Edward G. Robinson in
"The Outrage"

"Rashomon" has been tremendously influential.  There have been numerous stage adaptations, mostly notably a 1959 version by Fay and Michael Kanin that ran for six months in New York with Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom in the leads.  Martin Ritt turned it into the 1964 Western "The Outrage," with a script by the Kanins and an all-star cast that included Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson, Howard Da Silva, and William Shatner.  Argentine composer Alejandro Viñao even made it the basis for a 1996 opera. 

The greatness and popularity of "Rashomon" rests, in part, on the universality of its story.  The wide variability of eyewitness testimony is a recognized phenomenon in law enforcement and in psychology, for example, and the conceit of the unreliable narrator has been a central  part of fiction for centuries.  The novel "An Instance of the Fingerpost" by British author Iain Pears makes an especially ingenious use of the idea. 

We're all unreliable narrators to dome degree because human perception does not operate like an electronic recording; the moment input from our eyes or ears hits our brain, our experience and expectations modify it.  As Richards J. Heuer, Jr. noted in the 1999 paper "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" (written for the CIA), "perception is demonstrably an active rather than a passive process; it constructs rather than records 'reality.' Perception implies understanding as well as awareness.  It is a process of inference in which people construct their own version of reality on the basis of information provided through the five senses."

So the next time you see or hear somebody tell you he or she knows exactly what happened in Ferguson on August 9th, consider the lessons of "Rashomon."  "It's human to lie," notes the Commoner at one point. "Most of the time we can't even be honest with ourselves…  We all want to forget something, so we tell stories. It's easier that way." 

It's possible that, as the official inquiries sift through the mass of contradictory evidence, we may eventually get to the truth—or at least a part of it.  But there are no guarantees.  Life and art imitate each other far more often than many of us realize.