It is only nowadays that the people who want to attend meetings, make decisions, and command are the ones who are doing badly with their own work. And these bums, finally getting their administrative posts, use all their power to stifle talented music and bury it, while promoting their own worthless works.
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It was just the reverse with Glazunov, he wasn't seeking profit for himself. He gave away his salary as director and professor to needy students. No one will ever be able to tally the number of his famous letters of recommendation. They gave people work, bread, sometimes saved lives.
I want what I am remembering now to be taken very seriously, for I am talking about a complex psychological and ethical problem which not many bother to think about. In such letters Glazunov did write what he really thought about the person quite often and praised the person with justification. But even more frequently-much more sohe helped people out of compassion. Many turned to him for help, often total strangers. They were in need and were oppressed by life, and he quickly took on the cares of each victim. Glazunov listened to their pleas by the hour, tried to understand their situation. And he did more than sign letters of request, he went to the big shots to plead their cases. Glazunov felt that no real harm would come to great and holy Art if some singer without a voice, the mother of children and without a husband, was given a job in the chorus of an operetta company.
Every Jewish musician knew that Glazunov would make the rounds to get him permission to live in Petersburg. Glazunov never asked the poor violinist to play for him, he felt firmly that everyone had the right to live wherever he pleased and art would not suffer as a result.
Glazunov didn't get on a soapbox or pretend to feel holy righteous wrath about this. He didn't demonstrate his high principles when it came to small and pathetic people. He saved this for more important people and more important incidents. In the long run, all things in life can be separated into the important and the unimportant. You must be principled when it comes to the important things and not when it comes to the unimportant. That may be the key to living.
Glazunov was sometimes childish, and sometimes he was very wise.
He taught me a lot. I've thought about it a great deal and perhaps all of life goes toward finding out what is important in it and what isn't.
It's tragic, but it's so.
I don't remember where I read an ancient prayer that goes, "Lord, grant me the strength to change what can be changed. Lord, grant me the strength to bear what can't be changed. And Lord, grant me the wisdom to know the difference."
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Sometimes I love that prayer and sometimes I hate it. Life is ending for me and I have neither the strength nor the wisdom.
It's easy to ask for this and that, but you don't get it, even though you knock and bow as much as you can. You can't have it and that's that. You might get a medal or an order, or a pretty diploma. Recently I got a degree in America, in Evanston. I asked the dean what privileges or rights the diploma gave me. He gave me a witty answer: the diploma and twenty-five cents will buy me a ride on the bus.
I like honorary degrees, they're quite decorative and they look good on the wall. They're made of fine paper. I've noticed a curious thing: the smaller the country, the better the paper and the bigger the diploma. Sometimes, when I look at them all, I think that I've been given my allotment of wisdom. But that happens rarely. It happens when I finish a work, and then I feel that all the problems are solved and that I've answered all the questions-in music, naturally. But even that's a great deal. And now let people hear the music, and then they'll see what they have to do and how to separate the important from the unimportant.
But most often I think about the fact that none of this has helpedwith or without the prayers. What I really want is a peaceful life, and a happy one. I remember old man Glazunov, that big, wise child. He spent his entire life thinking that he could separate the important from the unimportant. And he thought that the universe was created rationally. But at the end of his life, I think he began doubting it. Glazunov sincerely believed that the work to which he had devoted all his strength-Russian musical culture, the Conservatory-was doomed.
That was his tragedy.
All values were confused, criteria obliterated. Glazunov ended up in Paris, where he was respected, but not, I think, much loved. He continued composing, not really knowing for whom and for what he was writing. I can't imagine anything more horrible than that. That's the end. But Glazunov was wrong. He had been given the wisdom and he had correctly separated the important from the unimportant, and his work turned out to be "fresh and strong."
When I was young, I enjoyed laughing at Glazunov-it was easy.
At fifteen I was much more mature than Glazunov, a revered old man.
The future belonged to me, not him. Everything that changed was 1 69
changing in my favor, not his. Music was changing, tastes were changing. All Glazunov could do was grumble offendedly.
But now I see how complicated it all really was. Now I suspect that there was eternal conflict in Glazunov's soul, a story typical of the Russian intelligentsia, of all of us. Glazunov was always tormented by the awareness of the injustice of his personal well-being. He was visited by many people who had been treated unfairly by life and, he tried to help them; in turn even more came to him. But he couldn't help them all. He wasn't a miracle worker after all, none of us is, and that is a source of constant torment. Glazunov was also pestered by an enormous number of composers, who sent their work to him from all over Russia.
When they just send you music, it's not so bad, I know that from my own experience. You can glance through a score rather quickly, particularly if you see right off that it's hopeless. Of course, if you want to experience the music fully, you must sight-read it in the amount of time that it would take to perform, that's the only way to derive real satisfaction from reading it. But that's a method to be used only with good music. It's torture to "listen" with your eyes to bad music. You just glance through it. But what do you do when a talentless composer comes and plays his music from beginning to end?
The very worst is when the composer is neither a charlatan nor a scoundrel, but a diligent person with little talent. In those cases you listen and think, What can I possibly say to him? The music is written conscientiously, the composer did everything that he could, it's just that he can do very little. You might say he can do almost nothing. He was taught to write notes grammatically at the Conservatory, and that is all he can do. Yet such composers are often quite nice and often quite needy.
Well, what do you do with them ? Tell the nice man that he's written a woeful work? Why, he won't even understand what's so wrong with his beloved child. After all, everything seems in order. It's pointless to try to explain, and if you do explain-a long, stubborn, and dull venture-and he does understand, then what? This person still can't do any better, you can't jump over your forehead, as they say.