Married to Beethoven

This coming Sunday my on-and-off opportunities to play the organ at the Episcopal church Jeanne and I attend will come to what appears to be an end. A new music minister has been hired, and the organist/choirmaster emeritus and I, who have been sharing duties all summer, will get to sit in the back and critique the new guy like Statler and Waldorf in The Muppet Show. I am reminded of a post from about a year ago in which I found out which of the great composers I might have been.

My boyhood heroes were two men I have never seen grouped together for any reason. Carl Yastrzemski and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Carl Yastrzemski, the all-star left fielder of my beloved Boston Red Sox, was a shining example of a pearl in the midst of swine. The Red Sox of my youth were horrible, perpetually finishing ninth out of the ten American League teams, exceeded in ineptitude only by the lowly Washington Senators. But Yastrzemski was poetry in motion both at the plate and in the field, swatting home runs at will and patrolling Fenway’s left field under the shadow of the Green Monster with the grace and precision of a ballet star. Baseball was the only team sport I was ever marginally good at, and I wanted to be Carl Yastrzemski (even though I played first base).

But I wanted to be Mozart even more. I was raised on classical music, beginning serious study of piano at age five, adding the violin at age eight. Wolfgang was a child prodigy of cosmic proportions, performing for European royalty at age five along with his older sister and under the watchful eye of his father Leopold, a guy who knew a cash cow when he saw one. Mozart was composing original pieces at age five and had a full symphony under his belt by age eleven. I was the best single-digits-in-years old pianist I knew, loved everything about it, planned to be a concert pianist all the way through high school—why not be the next Mozart? Hell, I figured, put a wig and a silk suit on me and I’d even look like Mozart. He was born in 1756 and I was born in 1956—the stars were obviously aligned. My older sibling, of course, was not interested in being a second-fiddle to my first chair virtuoso, and my father was too busy saving souls as a Baptist minister to take me on tour, but one can dream!

Mozart’s abilities both as a performer and composer are legendary. His productivity was astounding, writing every sort of music imaginable at the drop of a hat. His composing speed was accelerated because he apparently never wrote rough drafts—he wrote his compositions down as if taking dictation from on high—“Amadeus” (loved of God) indeed. All of these Mozartean features were on spectacular display in the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman (predictably, one of my top five all time favorite movies). The film also fictionalized some of the darker features of Mozart: his workaholism, alcoholism, philandering, petulance, childishness, insecurities, inability to manage money, and overall immaturity. Not a great role model, but I still wanted to be Mozart until I passed age ten and had yet to go on tour or write a symphony.

My love of and preference for classical music over all other sorts has been the foundations of my aesthetic sensibilities as an adult. So my attention was grabbed when a colleague on campus, the chair of our music department, posted a personality test on Facebook that, in six easy questions, promised to identify which one of the giants in the vast pantheon of great classical composers the test-taker is most like.

Classical composer personality test: Which one are you??

I’ve always been a sucker for personality tests, starting with Myers-Briggs, so I couldn’t help myself. The questions were painless but thought-provoking—I had never really considered, for instance, whether my favorite Star Trek character is Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Bones or Chekhov (what about Scotty and Uhura??). After less than a minute, I received my personality test result. I am Johann Sebastian Bach.

Despite my juvenile desire to be Mozart, I am perfectly content with being Bach. I am listening to Bach on Spotify as I write. Although “Greatest Ever . . .” pronouncements are always iffy and radically subjective, my award for Greatest Classical Composer Ever would go to J. S. Bach, with Mozart and Beethoven tied for a close second; he occupies the same lofty status in classical music as Shakespeare in literature and Newton in science. Bach was a staple of my piano training—working my way through “The Well-Tempered Clavier” during my early years laid the technical foundation for a hopefully broad and deep repertoire to come. There are many aspects of Bach’s life that I do not share—his twenty children, for instance—but how could someone not be pleased to be informed, even by a stupid internet personality test, that he shares something in common with a genius who wrote some of the most spectacular music ever? Consider, for instance, the “Sanctus” from Bach’s Mass in B minor, a piece that my great friend and colleague Rodney Delasanta once declared to be “the most glorious six minutes of music ever written.”

So I am thrilled to be Bach, although his other-worldly creative abilities transcend run-of-the-mill mortals. Of greater interest, however, was the description in the test results of why I am Johann Sebastian Bach included in my personality test results, of great interest because the description is eerily accurate:

You are Johann Sebastian Bach. The smartest person you know, you don’t suffer incompetence easily and are more than willing to tackle difficult projects yourself rather than trust them to others. Highly intellectual, you crave order, discipline and structure – let’s be honest, you probably have your picture next to “perfectionist” in the dictionary. Unfortunately, your brilliance is likely to go largely unappreciated by those around you, and you’re going to have to wait for future generations to recognize your genius.

I know, of course, that I am not the smartest person I know—given what I do for a living, I am very seldom a candidate for smartest person in the room, unless I am at a Tea Party rally or the only person in the room. It’s the next two sentences that ring true. In the vernacular, I definitely do not suffer fools gladly, particularly when I am the fool in question. And from the time I first entered school, I have always been loath to study with others, to participate in group work, or to trust that anyone can do anything better than I can by myself. In my various stints as an administrator in charge of any number of people, I struggled mightily to  learn how to delegate and trust others. I became marginally able to delegate only after it become apparent that I cannot do everything required to run a program with 80+ faculty and 1700+ students by myself. At least in my working life I do indeed crave discipline, order and structure—although this does not always infiltrate my life away from work. I fully understand why Bach had to be so focused, structured and anal in his professional life—at any given time he had at least a dozen kids waiting for him at home. I have two dachshunds and a Boston Terrier waiting for me, who are capable of disordering one’s reality as effectively as any number of children.

Although he was well-known as a choirmaster and organist during his lifetime, Bach’s brilliance as a composer did not become widely known until the 19^th century, the century after his death, when great musicians and composers such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Mendelssohn began performing and promoting Bach’s work. He lived a life such as that described by George Eliot at the conclusion of Middlemarch, “who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” As I reflected months ago in this blog, that’s not a bad way to live.

Unvisited Tombs

When I returned home on the day of finding out that I am Bach, I told Jeanne about the personality test, including the comments of a number of people on Facebook who had taken the test and were reporting the results. “I’m the only Bach so far, but there have been a number of Mozarts and Tchaikovskys, with a smattering of Brahms,” I said. “So far, no Beethovens. That’s a good thing, given that he was totally nuts.” Jeanne does not live and breathe classical music; accordingly she did not particularly care which classical music giant she is. It took some cajoling to get her to take the test; I even had to help her with the Star Trek question, as she is not a fan of that either (how is this possible?). But in short order we had the results. I am married to Beethoven.