Songs Without Sorrow

Songs Without Sorrow is a selected collection of recent writings by Cao Liqun, a classical music critic and former editor-in-chief of the magazine Philharmonic, organized into three sections—"Listening," "Looking," and "Traveling"—like the three movements of a sonata. "Listening" takes listening as its entry point: from Shostakovich's Eighth and Sixth Symphonies to his late string quartets, the author discusses both musical structure and the composer's bitter confession that "most of my symphonies are tombstones"; he writes of what concerts were like before Liszt, of Clara Schumann's compositional talent overshadowed by her husband's brilliance, of why the sarabande fascinates composers, and of the voids left by the deaths of conductors such as Abbado and Jansons. "Looking" turns its gaze from recordings to the stage and to people and events: the opera adaptation of Camel Xiangzi, whose first and second halves seem like two different works; the people and events of Butterfly Lovers that must not be forgotten over sixty years; the disappointment of the San Francisco Opera's Dream of the Red Chamber; the fervor of Wang Xilin's Quartet; and figures such as Yo-Yo Ma, Glenn Gould, Yin Chengzong, and Gu Shengying—together weaving a network of intertextuality among music, literature, painting, and history. "Traveling" moves from sound to space: Pina Bausch's stage, Mahler's summer by the Attersee, Van Gogh in Arles, the former residence of Abing, and the ruins of ancient Roman theaters are all sites where the author, through walking, listens to music anew. The three sections converge on music yet are not limited to it; the prose is deep and somber, and amid the tragic fates of many artists it repeatedly confirms music's power to transcend grief—"without sorrow" does not mean without sadness, but that after sorrow one can still sing.