Chopin and I (Third Movement)
1.
It has to be one of the most familiar pieces of music ever written. Astrophysicists, Albanian sheepherders, nonagenarians, nine-year-olds—everyone knows it, can hum along to its plodding
dum dum da dum
dum da dum da dum da dum
We hear it played in commercials, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and funeral processions of kings and presidents. But I don’t understand it. What was Chopin thinking?
“Marche Funèbre,” Sonata no. 2, op. 35, 3rd movement
I certainly don’t question the dum dum da dum bit. We don’t need the title to know it’s a funeral dirge, each dum hammering one more nail in the coffin. Or, rather, it’s a glacial march, mourners moving reluctantly, haltingly forward, each step bringing them closer to their beloved’s tomb, or pyre, or hole in the ground, gone, gone forever.
I watched JFK’s funeral procession on the tube in black and white, November, 1963. Tired of the Royals, though (will Netflix ever finish off The Crown?), I skipped the one for Queen Elizabeth II. More vivid than either in my mind’s eye, I see cute little Mark Lester leading a black-crèpe-draped, horse-drawn hearse down a sooty London street in Oliver. Did they play “Marche Funèbre” to accompany him? I don’t recall, but I’d put my money on it. The funeral processions I’ve participated in, though, all involved a line of cars, lights on, caravanning down city streets as drivers (in the old days) slowed to the curb to let us pass or (today) whipped around us, glaring or flipping us off or, mostly, fiddling with cell phones. I’ve never seen a funeral procession on foot in real life—and certainly none on horseback.
Wait, though. That march, that cadence, it does ring a bell. Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” me capped and gowned shuffling solemnly forward, stutter-step at a time? Close, but not that.
Ah, I have it. September, 1969. Pvt. Dennis Vannatta, fresh out of MP school, arrives for his first posting at West Point in time for the brilliant fall colors adorning the banks of the Hudson but, alas, too late for Woodstock, only a few miles away.
I heard some great stories about what transpired there, a few of them possibly true. Our cadre, though, had more serious issues on their minds. Anti-war demonstrations were firing up around the county, and rumors had it that hordes of radicals were about to descend upon the United States Military Academy shouting incendiary passages from Howl and “On Civil Disobedience” and otherwise wreaking havoc. It was up to us MPs to maintain order. We were to remain especially vigilant in the face of coeds from Vassar, just up the road in Poughkeepsie, intent on seducing us away from our duty. We were all, needless to say, anxious to have our mettle tested if face of such a threat.
To brush up on our riot-control technique, one morning we were assembled on the 57th MP parking lot with our M-14s, bayonets (in scabbards) fixed. We formed in ranks, shoulder pressed to shoulder, rifles slanted forward butt against hip, bayonet point directed right at the hypothetical nose of the would-be rioter. Then we began to move slowly, inexorably forward: left half-step followed by right brought up alongside left, left half-step followed by right . . . etc. etc. Each step was planted firmly, boot-soles scuffing the blacktop.
SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff . . .
How could any hirsute draft-dodger stand to our onfall? Oh yes, this was serious stuff.
Not!
There are no wisecrackers like Army wisecrackers. At this distance of more than a half a century, I don’t remember any specific jokes, but I do remember that we laughed a lot to the mounting fury of our platoon sergeants, and I do remember that no joke measured up to the supreme gesture of my pal Ken Watson, who SCUFF-scuffed his way across the parking lot with a condom affixed to his bayonet. Make love, not war.
Ken would always keep a condom or three handy for when he scored with one of the coeds at Ladycliff College in Highland Falls, just beyond the main gate at West Point. We’d go to the bars in search of said coeds, and there they’d usually be. We’d sit eyeing them, Ken rehearsing his foolproof seduction strategy. We’d sit, stare, talk—to each other. He never worked up the courage to actually talk to a coed. Ken Watson, nineteen years old, from Blue Mound, Iowa, away from home for the first time. Great guy. I loved him. A few months after arriving at West Point, I was “levied out,” as they called it, to West Germany, and a month after that, Ken was levied out to Vietnam, where he drove his jeep over a landmine and came home in pieces. I still miss him, still laugh thinking of that condom-adorned bayonet, still think that
SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff SCUFF-scuff . . .
is the saddest damn thing, my own personal funeral march.
*
It may seem an associational stretch to tie Chopin to Vietnam, but he, too, had war on his mind. Chopin was inspired to write “Marche Funèbre” after the Polish uprising against Russia in 1830. An aside: the wording of the previous sentence gave me trouble, and I’m still not satisfied with “inspired by.” “To commemorate” was considered but rejected. “To celebrate”? No. “To honor”? Huh uh. “In recognition of”? Meh.
My problem is that I don’t know what Chopin felt, and my efforts to imagine it get mixed up with my own feelings about Vietnam. Chopin himself was not an insurrectionist. He wrote Sonata no. 2 from the safety of Paris, having left Poland shortly before violence broke out, and in fact never saw his homeland again. As for me, I read about the carnage in Vietnam in The Stars and Stripes while quaffing primo beer at my duty station in Germany, when not heading to Paris and the like on three-day passes. I was damn glad I wasn’t “in country.” I also felt a tiny bit guilty. Today, an old man, I feel more than a tiny bit . . . well, not guilty, exactly. But I feel that I missed out on something that my brothers-in-arms experienced with an intensity that I can only imagine. I didn’t fight; I didn’t have the courage to abandon everything and escape to Sweden; I went to the Black Forest and drank Parkbrau out of spring-top bottles.
But what did Chopin feel?
2.
We need to return to the music itself.
Here, my perplexity only deepens because that famous dum dum da dum is only the first of three motifs recurring throughout the third movement. The other two aren’t funereal at all.
After the dum dum da dum is repeated, with variations, a few times, the score suddenly shifts from minor key to major, and we rise, we soar.
It’s as if funereally plodding Mark Lester suddenly began to pirouette down that grim London street scattering rose petals, the black-caparisoned horse, too, hearse-freed, lifting its knees in time to the swelling music, proudly prancing. Hm. I did in fact see something like this—now what is that movie?—cavalry-mounted horses dancing in rank as if auditioning for a martial Folies Bergère. Ah, I have it: Oh! What a Lovely War, the cavalry training for a war that no longer needed cavalry, one in which they’d dismount and rise rank on rank out of the trenches to be mown down in their millions.
I can’t seem to get away from war, which surely does a disservice to that soaring major-key motif where something is affirmed. Was Chopin celebrating a Poland of the past, that aristocratic Poland that once lorded it over the barbaric Russians? Or was he envisioning a wished-for Poland, free, and Warsaw the Paris of central Europe? What did Chopin affirm? Not just Poland but something for all of us, surely.
I think of my father-in-law, a callow lad of little education and no means emerging from Jersey City to marry the woman of his dreams and found a construction company in Queens, eventually owning condos in Florida and apartment houses within surf-sound of Rockaway Beach. But it wasn’t his material accomplishments that cause me to think of him as one of the very few great men I’ve known; no, it was his generosity, goodness, humanity.
A six-foot-five giant of a man, he died hard, broken, so crippled by arthritis and age that he couldn’t even push himself in his wheelchair, each breath an effort, an agony. From half a continent away, my wife and I kept a deathwatch via cellphone, both dreading and hoping for the call that would inevitably come. Then my sister-in-law called to say that a priest had administered the last rites. The end was near. The next morning a text came, advising us to check the attached video. And there he was, sitting as upright as he could manage, grimacing from the pain, the effort to leave us all with a model of courage, of affirmation; there was Big John Kimball, singing.
Well, I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside
Down by the riverside, down by the riverside
I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside
Ain’t gonna study war no more
You can see him on YouTube in the A&E documentary, The Hooligan Navy, where he and other rejects from regular service (flat feet for him) sailed into the stormy waters of the Atlantic in wooden boats (couldn’t be detected by radar) in search of German submarines. It was during the war that he met lovely Marie Marksamer at a USO in Rockaway, married her, and afterwards went into the construction business with a pal he met in the service. A Coast Guard honor guard accompanied him to his grave. Big John would not have wanted Chopin’s funeral dirge played, but I think he, a life-affirmer to the end, would have approved of the major-key motif.
I just cannot seem to get away from war, though. Was Uncle Ted in the military? Not that I know of. Why do I think of him, anyway? Maybe I’ll find out as I write this.
As a child I was fascinated by Uncle Ted as only one who hasn’t decided what color sheep he’s going to be can be fascinated by the black sheep of the family. My relatives on both sides of the family were country folk and Baptist, but my mother’s side were back country folk and hard-shell Baptist. Most of them never got out of those Ozark hollows where they barely scraped by on hard-scrabble farms. Uncle Ted, my mother’s brother, left and never looked back.
He would come to visit, though, and when he did, oh, he was something! He’d burst into the house dancing and singing, activities not enthusiastically embraced in our staunchly Baptist household. While my mother scowled and my father, never failing in courtesy even to Uncle Ted, tried to look amused, I would throw myself into his arms, and he’d sling me about the room in a wild waltz.
I recall one night our singing at the top of our lungs,
She’ll be riding that old red rooster when she comes,
When she comes!
And when they tried to correct us, we sang,
We will kill six white horses when she comes,
When she comes!
I laughed so hard I had a coughing fit and nearly vomited. My mother yanked me out of Uncle Ted’s arms and then grabbed him by the lapels of his wool coat, which smelled to me of January and cigarette smoke, and pressed her nose right up to his lips. I thought she was going to kiss him.
Then: “Get out! I won’t have this in my home, Ted. Get out!”
She dragged him to the front door and pushed him out into the winter night. (Later, my sister, seven years my senior, explained to me that Uncle Ted had been drinking. “Drinking what?” I asked.)
I haven’t mentioned Aunt Beat, Uncle Ted’s wife. Typical. She tended to get ignored, all attention drawn to her pyrotechnic husband. What did she do that night? Did she leave with her banished spouse? Or remain inside with us—and if she did so, did Uncle Ted wait for her out in the cold? I think she cried, but maybe I’m just imagining what I think a woman in her position probably would have done.
The grim details were never discussed in my presence, but even as a child I knew that he led her a hard life. Why else was she rarely mentioned without the obligatory “poor Beat”? Indeed, although I could hardly believe the calumny, until my sister laughingly disabused me of the notion, I thought she was called Aunt Beat because Uncle Ted beat her. Poor Aunt Beatrice.
I could have told you only two things for sure about Aunt Beat back then: that she smiled a lot and that she was a “good church lady.” (This was before the time of Dana Carvey and Saturday Night Live.) To us, a good church lady was a woman who, beyond whatever home life she might have had, lived of and for and pretty much in the church. A church lady would help out in the nursery, serve breakfast to bereaved families before funerals, clean up after Easter communion—whatever was needed. I never saw Aunt Beat actually do any of these things—she and Uncle Ted lived in Warsaw, then Fulton, then Jeff City—but I didn’t have to. We all knew what a good church lady did.
It was the smile that seems more meaningful in retrospect. She suffered much with Uncle Ted, who was a “real rounder”—which back then I guessed had something to do with basketball—but that perpetual smile she wore as she sat almost invisible at family reunions was not a long-suffering smile. It was the smile of a woman who knew that something, eventually, was coming to her. I think the thing for which she patiently waited was that second motif in Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.”
But first, the funeral had to come. I was in college when Uncle Ted died. I wasn’t much concerned with aunts and uncles by then and didn’t go to his funeral, don’t remember what he died of, probably didn’t give a thought to Aunt Beat. I saw her a year or two later at a Christmas reunion. I was on the cusp of losing my 2-S student deferment and was more concerned about getting drafted than the fact that Aunt Beat had brought a man with her, one George Oakley. Still, Aunt Beat and a man!
The scandal came later. I learned about it in bits and pieces over the next few years. Evidently, that first time George had been introduced to everyone simply as “a friend.” Then they were more than just friends: romance was in the air. Then they were married, followed not long afterward by George’s death. Aunt Beat inherited everything—quite a chunk, in fact, because George owned a string of auto parts stores. A lawsuit followed, initiated by George’s children from his first marriage. Entertaining stuff. But then the real shocker. George’s first wife did not die, leaving him eligible again, until after the George-Aunt Beat romance was in full swing! Ohmygod! There’d never been anything like it in the histories of the Vannatta-Stadler families. “I can’t believe I let that woman [i.e., Aunt Beat] into my house! They slept in our house!” my mother wailed.
Aunt Beat bought a condo in Naples, Florida, and died some years later. I picture her walking on the beach. Maybe she thinks for a moment of her life with Uncle Ted.
Dum dum de dum . . .
But then she thinks of what came next, and here comes that little smile as Chopin shifts to a major key, and Aunt Beat begins to dance!
3.
Land sakes, as they say in these parts, how on earth did I get to this point, following Aunt Beat as she waltzes down the beach in Naples, Florida? I don’t know if her condo was near the beach. I don’t even know if she liked the beach. Maybe, like me, she hated the feel of sand anywhere on her body, hated to sweat under a beating sun, sweat mixed with salt from the drying seawater. Ugh.
I can blame it on Chopin, though, the way he’s messed with me with his loopy “Marche Funèbre.” If only it were a simple binary dirge-vs.-major-key crescendo, death vs. life, I could handle that. After the major-key motif, however, Chopin shifts again to, well, what, exactly? My two years of grade-school band (playing an asthmatic alto sax) did not prepare me to discuss in technical terms what Chopin does at this point. The score does not pound nails into coffin; it does not soar with the angels; it becomes instead gentle, lilting, tender. It could almost be a lullaby.
Chopin never had children. Indeed, it’s difficult to picture the Chopin of Hollywood and cable-TV legend, or even the Chopin of sober biographic reality, as having children. Maybe he did try to picture it, though. He wrote his “Marche Funèbre” a little more than halfway through his thirty-nine years. Maybe he was looking forward to a life of myth-busting conventionality with a wife turning the pages of the score as he played piano and toddlers played at his feet. Or, alternately, maybe he saw the rest of his life as it would truly be—fame, affairs, a slow death from consumption, leaving no progeny—and his lullaby was a nod to what he’d never have. All I know for sure is that I hear children in that third motif, children playing among the tombstones.
Aunt Beat and Uncle Ted never had children, either. My strict Baptist parents did, unaccountably, have children, among them, of course, moi. My wife and I have two children. My daughter has cats; my son has three sons. I shall now regale you with several pages of cute anecdotes about my grandsons.
Well, no, I’ll spare you that. But I can’t ignore thoughts of children that arise naturally (or mysteriously?) under the influence of “Marche Funèbre.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, those thoughts never stray far from death.
No prospect terrifies a parent more than the death of a child. I’ve been fortunate in knowing no one closer to me than a fairly distant acquaintance to suffer that calamity. But I thought about the possibility every single time one of my children fell sick. I’d be surprised if other parents didn’t share that same experience. A friend, for instance, told me that the first time he saw his son’s blood (a cut finger), he was staggered by the realization that his son would one day die. And I’m sure he prayed, as every parent prays, Please God, let that day not come until after I’m gone. The likelihood that the vast majority of us parents will get our wish in that regard is cold comfort indeed because, now or later, come that day will.
It is, one might say, simply nature’s way. Another friend of mine offered a variation on this when my son was born. “Well, there’s one for you,” he said. I asked him what he meant. He said my son had come to take my place. The son comes into the world; the father, his purpose fulfilled, moves out of it.
Nature as zero-sum game—no doubt true, if rather chilling for us superfluous fathers. More to the point, true or not, it doesn’t evoke what I feel in Chopin’s lullaby.
Maybe this. Just this morning I had coffee with a former student of mine whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. He caught me up on what he’d been doing, and I him, and then I turned the conversation to what he, the most voracious reader among my hundreds of English majors, had been reading. Well, he said, he didn’t have much time for reading. He was busy with this and that, but mostly he was enjoying time with his four-year-old daughter, a Down’s syndrome child.
To say that I have a fondness for little children is to indulge in understatement. If I see a little child from a block away, my heart does Arabesques. A negative side to that impulse, though, is that I so want nothing but good things for children that the thought of a handicapped child is enough to make me go into convulsions of pity. In this case, I managed to control myself because I saw that my student didn’t want pity for his child. He wanted me to see her as he did: a unique being who experiences the world as a place ever new and wondrous.
I tried to share in his joy, I really did, but my friend’s child is “special” in more than one sense. She’s statistically rare. My grandson James, five years old, is more representative of the childhood most of us experience. Not long ago, a propos of nothing, James asked me, “Grandpa, do you think you’ll live to be a hundred, or will you pass away first?” He wasn’t at all worried about it; he was just curious. His dad (my son) laughed when I told him about it. “James doesn’t really understand the finality of death,” he said. But how wonderful! To live in the world in which the one unquestionable constant is that all living things die and yet not be battered into despair by the inevitability, not even affected by it, hell, not even aware of it.
Or does that just make James another version of the Down child? But there’s a difference—and it’s a very poignant difference, I think. James carries within him the seed of the old man he’ll become, an old man who can almost remember what it was to see the world as a child, like a melody heard long ago that he strains to hear again.
*
But where does this leave us with Chopin?
Maybe we should “read” the “Marche Funèbre” as a musical equivalent of Alejo Carpentier’s story, “Journey Back to the Source,” which begins with a dying old man and then moves ever backward through prime of life to childhood and eventually to the womb. Yes, Chopin does begin with the death dirge, then follows it with the major-key motif (prime of life?), and follows that with his “lullaby.” But here we run into a problem because the movement doesn’t end there. The dirge returns, followed by the major-key motif, followed by etc. etc. Maybe Chopin was reaching for a certain Nietzschesque “eternal return,” everything passing only to return; or maybe some sort of Buddhist . . .
Ah hell, I don’t know. And maybe Chopin didn’t either. Maybe he was just following the music wherever it led him, just as I’ve followed his “Marche Funèbre” to some strange places indeed.
Wait, though. I keep ignoring the fact that “Marche Funèbre” is just one part of a greater whole, the Sonata no. 2. If I remember correctly from my sophomore Music Appreciation class, sonatas have three movements and frequently end in a coda. So, I’ll find Sonata no. 2, listen to the whole blamed thing, and follow wherever it leads me. The prospect is a little daunting, somehow, but even more exciting. Think of it, at my age, to be excited.
Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.
