Jehovah, so the ancient Hebrews tell us, took six days to create the earth, divvying up the tasks one day at a time. On the first day he created light; on the second, the firmament of heaven. On the third he did two things, actually, separate the water from the land and create plant life. On the fourth he created the sun, moon and the stars, which was useful, I suppose, because he had to have someplace to put the light which he created on the first day. On the fifth day he created marine life and birds and don’t you believe for a minute that the birds evolved from dinosaurs - t’wouldn’t be biblically correct. And finally, on the sixth day, he created land animals like koala bears and kangaroos, as well as man and woman.
The Greek word for this whole business is Hexameron, or more precisely, Ἡ Ἑξαήμερος Δημιουργία - the “hexameron demiurge,” a fairly obscure way of referring to the six days of creation, if you ask me. But I’m neither a theologian nor a biblical scholar, so I’m moving on here.
This kind of turned the number six into a magic number, you might say, and the ancients played it up big time. Saint Basil, the purported inventor of the soup kitchen (i.e., a real Christian, not a “swear-on-the-Bible-or-die-you-heathen” make-believe one) wrote a sermon for each of six days, others followed suit and voilà we have a literary genre known as “hexameral literature.” Many of the early greats contributed to this genre, including Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and the thirteenth century saint, Robert Grosseteste, whose name does not derive from the English “gross testes” but from the French for “fathead,” in case you were wondering. But I digress.
Hurrying on now, we turn to this marvelous lady named Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso, born to privilege in the 19th Century in time to throw her weight behind the formation of the Italian state, even though she was so timid that she would often burst into tears if you looked at her directly - did I mention she was an Italian princess? One of the many things she did with her big bucks was to arrange a competition in 1837 to see who was the best piano player in the world, with proceeds to go to the poor. The contest came down pretty much to Franz Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg.
Cristina persuaded Liszt to see what he could do to jazz up a march for the occasion, the one from the opera I Puritani by Bellini. Liszt collared several of his musical friends, namely Chopin, Czerny, Henri Herz, Johann Peter Pixis, and his rival Sigismond to contribute to the piece, each writing a variation on the march theme, the one that goes dum-dum-de-dum-dum dum-de-dum (you’ll know right away what I’m referring to when you listen to it). He wrote the intro and the second variation himself, as well as the bang-up finale. If you can’t find thirty minutes to listen to the whole thing, at least have a go at that incredible finale. Not written for ordinary human fingers.
I find the question “What kind of music do you like” a strange one. Doesn’t everybody like all kinds of music? I can’t imagine just giving a single answer. Music is for all occasions and for all moods, and there are times when it’s up there with sex, food and drink, just because. For no reason at all other than why not? I may not be able to go as far as Igor Levit does when he equates music with life, but I’m pretty close.
Sometimes you want a lovely melody, music for the head, music for the heart, something to make you to get up and go, something to calm you down. When you come across a virtuoso performer like Igor Levit, you’ve got everything. He can bring you to tears with the old and familiar, like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. And he can knock your socks off when he demonstrates that he is, in fact, a modern-day Franz Liszt when it comes to technical fireworks. Up there with the greats when it comes to making you believe there must be a machine doing all this. Like when you watch Olympic athletes and say to yourself, “That’s not humanly possible.”
Levit has brought me back to Beethoven, as I’ve said before, after years of thinking he’s basically a bore. I think the problem has largely been I haven’t found many of the performances I’ve heard all that inspiring. Levit inspires. He’s got it. He brings you into his performances like nobody I’ve heard in ages. I know there are lots and lots of splendid performers. I’ve mentioned my fondness for Marta Argerich and for Yuja Wang. (Listen to Yuja perform Prokofiev’s Toccata when you get a chance.)
But after nearly overdosing on Beethoven with all of Levit’s Hauskonzerte recently, I came across his performance of that Hexameron piece Liszt wrote for Christina. The show-off piece where those wonderful 19th century musical geniuses outdid each other. What fun. What absolute fun. It’s like watching kids play and marveling at their creativity. Only it’s watching geniuses at play, moving from razzmatazz to whimsical fantasy. It’s the whimsy, most of the time, that grabs me. You can see that these guys really enjoyed their musical lives, had fun with it.
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