Beethoven got Gandhi, Rolland & Mirabehn together

June 21 is world music day

My long rides from work to home in the evenings often compel me to listen to music on my cellphone. Unlike most of my co-commuters in the bus, who have earbuds perennially plugged into their ears, I don’t normally listen to music, preferring to read news features on Flipboard, or read a book. But when I’m running low on data, I occasionally switch over to music, and often the music is either Indian or western classical.

I’m not an expert at either, nor an aficionado, but I can claim to have an appreciative ear for both, and enjoy the music.

I’ve noticed that unlike reading, which always leads to thinking and occasionally to aggravation, listening to music is soothing, it calms the nerves.

The two collections that I frequently listen to are Western Classical – Top 50, and Voices of India – Bhimsen Joshi. Both CDs bought many years ago in India, then transferred to my laptop, and now on my cellphone.

The Western Classical – Top 50 has some of the most beloved compositions known to music lovers across the world, and includes, among others, such perennial favourites as:

• Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major);
• Vivaldi’s The Four Season Spring (Part 1);
• Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, ‘Fate’: Allegro con brio;  
• Carl Orff’s Carmina burana i o fortuna;
• Bach’s Suite for Orchestra No. 2 in b minor for flute and string bwv 1067 vii badinerie;
• Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet sui; and
• Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.

My favourite, of course, is Carl Orff’s Carmina burana fortuna. Although I don't comprehend a word of what is being sung, I can never tire listening to it; and unlike most of the compositions in the collection, this one is relatively new, from the last century.

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This version has the minimalist lyrics of the classic,
and that perhaps makes it more interesting

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I recalled reading of how Beethoven brought together Mahatma Gandhi, Romain Rolland, and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade). In his book Music of the Spinning Wheel, Sudheendra Kulkarni narrates the encounter between Rolland and the Mahatma:

“I played him the Andante from the Fifth Symphony, and, on Gandhi’s request, returned to the piano and played Gluck’s Elysian Fields from Orfeo, the first orchestral piece and the flute melody,” writes Rolland.

Kulkarni says, “Since Gandhi never showed much interest in Western classical music, we can ask ourselves the question: Why did he expressly ask Rolland to play him Beethoven?” There are many answers to this question, Kulkarni says, and then adds: “…there is another, more important, reason behind Gandhi’s request to Rolland to play Beethoven for him. That reason was Mirabehn.”

What follows is a fascinating narration of a little known history:

“Strange though it may seem, Beethoven had played a pivotal role in bringing Madeleine Slade to Gandhi. She fell in love with Beethoven’s music when, at age of fifteen, she first heard a composition by him, Sonata Opus 31 No. 2 She writes in her autobiography, The Spirit’s Pilgrimage, that her whole being was stirred by it; she played it over and over again…She learnt French so that she could read about Beethoven’s life in Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe (the 10 volume novel that got him the Literature Nobel)…”

Upon meeting Rolland, she was advised her that “the only living person worthy of the sort of veneration you have felt for Beethoven is Mahatma Gandhi.” Of course, Madeleine had never heard of the Mahatma. Then, after she had read Rolland’s book on the Mahatma (which he had written without having met him), she decided to visit India.

Kulkarni writes, “(Rolland)…had been himself craving deeply for many years to receive Gandhi in Villeneuve and to let him experience Beethoven’s sublime music. In a letter to Mirabehn on 25 April 1927 (that is, four years before Gandhi came to meet Rolland), he had written” “If Gandhi knew him (Beethoven), he would have recognized in him our European Mahatma, our strongest mediator between the life of the senses and eternal Life. And he would bless this music which perhaps, for us, is the highest form of prayer, a permanent communion with the Divinity.”

“Earlier, too, in his letter to Mahadev Desai on 24 February 1924, Rolland had described Beethoven as ‘our European Mahatma’ who ‘sings in his Ode to Joy; Let us – millions of human beings – embrace each other.’”

Some more reflections on a Saturday afternoon…I

There is a serious concern among many in India that Narendra Modi may become the next Prime Minister. This concerns stems primarily because of his unapologetic advocacy of the Hindutva ideology and his resolute refusal to apologize (or be remorseful) for the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

The media was abuzz all of last week as some of the biggest names of India’s business world gathered together to shower encomiums on him for his “spectacular achievements,” with the Congress spokesperson reminding the world that the German corporate sector shared a similar fascination for Hitler in the 1930s, and while doing so conveniently forgetting the party’s instrumentality in at least two equally gruesome massacres in the past.

The social media was fervently discussing ‘isms’. A particularly interesting debate involved capitalism and how the “capital class” in India by endorsing Modi is encouraging communalism.

The ideologies that espoused class struggle became obsolete because they fell short of two fundamentals requirements of human life – freedom and development.

The proponents of the ideologies claim that they remain relevant even today and protest that it was the practice of these ideals that subverted freedom and failed to deliver the promise of development.

Perhaps, they are not wrong.

Individual freedom is at the heart of this debate, and was at the basis of the differences between two eminent French writers Andre Gide (1869-1951) and Roman Rolland (1866-1944).

Both supported communism – Gide briefly and Rolland during his lifetime.

Rolland is known in India because of his association with Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, and because Swami Vivekananda’s interpretation of the Vedanta influenced him. Along with Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi, Rolland was a firm believer in non-violent non-cooperation.

Rolland was an early advocate of the Soviet Union and its form of communism. He remained a lifelong supporter (surprisingly) even of Joseph Stalin.

It may said in his defense – if it is necessary – that the worst excesses of Stalinism remained concealed until Rolland’s death, and the West took note of the autocratic intolerance of the Soviet state only after the Second World War ended. 

On the other hand, Gide supported Soviet Communism for a brief period but rejected it after a visit to Soviet Union in 1937.

Frederick John Harris’s Andre Gide and Romain Rolland Two Men Divided details the differences between these two French writers over many issues including the most crucial one – the interpretation of what constitutes art.

The book also discusses the different interpretation they gave to the role of the individual and individual morality in a society, and how the communist ideology as practised in the then Soviet Union dealt with this crucial question.

Harris notes, “…both believed that the communist revolution would necessarily achieve harmony and the general well-being of humanity, for this was mankind’s destiny and its truth. Both recognized the value and the necessity of liberty in a well-developed society, and both knew before going to Russia that Soviet society would not in all respects live up to their own personal aspirations. Rolland, however, returned convinced just as he was before his departure, that despite all, Soviet Russia was on the right track; Andre Gide returned with the impression that the Soviet experiment had derailed somewhere along the line.”

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Some more reflections...II

Continued from the post above...

Rolland went to Russia in 1935 on invitation of Maxim Gorky and upon his return to France wrote that while his body had returned, his spirit was still in Russia. Harris observes, “He was contemptuous of the Western press, which he accused of not appreciating the greatness of what was happening inside Russia.”

Gide visited Russia in 1936 and a day after his arrival (17-June) Maxim Gorky died. In November 1936 he published Retour de l’ URSS and bluntly stated: 

“Three years ago I declared my admiration and my love for the USSR…if I was mistaken at first, the best thing is to recognize my error as soon as possible; for I am responsible here for those the error leads on. No conceit is valid in this case; and besides I have very little. There are some important things than the USSR: humanity, its destiny, its culture.”

The following passage explains Gide’s aversion for the many ways in which communism throttled individualism:

“When I write that I am unwilling to recognize as essentially irreconcilable a “properly understood” communism and a “properly understood” individualism, I mean such as I understood them myself. I must therefore explain how I understand them. It is certain that I do not see an equalitarian communism, or at least that I see equality of conditions only at the outset; that for each person it would imply merely equal chances but in not a uniformity of qualities, a standardization that I consider at one and the same time impossible and hardly desirable, for the individual as well as for the mass. And, likewise, an internationalization of economic interests would not imply the suppression and ignoring of racial or geographical peculiarities, the happily irreducible differences among cultures and traditions. The very diversity of the players makes the wealth and beauty of the symphony, and wishing that all the instruments, brasses, violins, oboes, or clarinets, produced the same sound would be as absurd as to think that each instrument would play better if it broke away from the ensemble of the orchestra and ceased following the measure.”

Eventually, individualism triumphed over the collective in the war between communism and capitalism. Even if democracy and capitalism may have emerged as the only acceptable political and economic models in the present century, the struggle to redefine them continues. The gathering storm over the political and economic rights of the indigenous people is a good example of this struggle as is the Occupy Movement.  

Today even the most die hard proponents of the capitalist way agree that there is a dire need to modify it to make it work justly. And the proponents of individualism are unable to explain the growing rise of individual violence (read Ashish Nandy’s analysis of how individualism has contributed to a violent society: Shadows of New Violence).

An aside: I bought the book many years – actually decades ago – from Bombay's Smoker's Corner. The book tangentially talks about the thriving art and literary community in Paris in the 1920 and 1930s (no, not of the expatriate writers and artists who became famous subsequently and beautifully depicted in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris) but of the French and European writers – Rolland and Gide, and also Paul Valery, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephan Zweig and Emile Verhaeren.

Gide & Rolland: Two Men Divided

Smokers Corner in Mumbai is an unusual bookshop. I don’t remember when I visited the place last. Many years ago. 

But a couple of decades back, I was a regular visitor. It offered a good bargain, and very unusual books. Books difficult to find elsewhere.

One of the books that I bought from there was Andre Gide and Romain Rolland – Two Men Divided by Frederick Harris.  

I was familiar with both Gide and Rolland, but had not read their writings. I haven’t even today. Rolland is much admired among a particular set of Indian history aficionados because of his biography of the Mahatma. 

Gide was a major Marxist intellectual.

Both are Nobel Prize winners for Literature. Rolland in 1915 and Gide in 1947. 

Rolland's book came to our house via a rather strange route. Meghnad had managed to get the book from N.J. Lakdawala. Lakdawala was the father of my father’s colleague at his workplace, and the entire 

Lakdawala library came to us for reasons which I’m not familiar with. But it had incredible books. The six-volume history of World War II by Winston Churchill, for instance.

Gide's books came from Meghnad's uncle Prabodhchandra (Nanu-kaka; more about him a little later). Gide was a regular Marxist and a staunch supporter of Soviet Russia for a considerably long time.

Nearly two decades after Communism’s comprehensive failure, I often wonder what was it about this tendentious philosophy that so fascinated the French intellectual giants of the mid 20th century (1930-1970). Rolland, Gide, Sartre are names we are all familiar with.

Both Rolland and Gide were proud of their Marxist leanings, but developed differences in the manner in which the Soviet Union curbed personal freedom. 

Harris’s book is an interesting account of the differences between them over this and other issues.

The thing about these giants of the last century was the erudition with which they expressed their views, and the civilized manner in which they engaged in a debate over differences. 

Rolland and Gandhi correspondence is legendary, as is the correspondence between Tagore and Gandhi. Rolland's and Gide's differences are also of a similar nature. 

We are in an age when leaders seem so diminished in comparison. Obama’s articulation seems so refreshing and all together old-worldly.