Juan Arriaga (1806-1826).
I have been thinking a lot about luck in the past few weeks, and this is something you do when you get older and you start to look at the things you’ve done and not done with your life.
People don’t like to admit it, but luck and chance often have much more to do with the trajectory of your life than any amount of hard work or laying about you do. I’m not advocating that everyone snooze until good luck comes his or her way, just noting that life isn’t really fair, and that while work is the only way to make the most of whatever talent you’ve been given, sometimes there’s nothing you can do about being dealt a crummy hand.
This occurred to me the other day as I listened to a symphony by Juan Arriaga that came over the radio. If there ever was a sadder case of a great talent being cut off just as it was about to take off, I’m not aware of it. Arriaga was a composer from Basque country, and he died at 19 of tuberculosis (or some other lung infection), a week shy of his 20th birthday, in 1826.
In the short time he lived, he wrote three fine string quartets, that lovely symphony (in D) and works for the stage. He was singularly blessed in his exceptional talent, and yet he was dismayingly unlucky in coming down with TB so young in a pre-penicillin age. His music seems to have established itself more firmly in the repertoire in recent years, especially among string quartet players, so his ultimate legacy is a positive one, if one shadowed by tragedy.
Or poor Vasily Kalinnikov (1866-1901), the Russian composer (at right) who died at 34 of TB, having lived for most of his life in wretched poverty. Tchaikovsky thought highly of him, and his two symphonies are wonderful pieces, much better to my ears than the Borodin symphonies, which get more frequent play. But he couldn’t catch a break, lacking the money to study in Moscow, and was forced to relocate to the Crimea for his TB and give up a theater directorship.
There are other tragic bits of luck like this throughout classical music history: Maria Malibran falling off her horse; Enrique Granados delaying his trip back home from the U.S. and ending up on a ship that was torpedoed; Ernest Chausson losing control of his bicycle. I have been listening, too, in recent days to the String Quartet of Alberic Magnard (picking up the record after hearing the Ysaye Quartet in a beautiful concert in Palm Beach), a fascinating, somewhat mysterious work.
Magnard was defending his house in France in September 1914 from the invading German army by taking out his shotgun and letting fly at the cursed Boches. One of the soldiers was killed, and his fellow soldiers retaliated by firing back and setting Magnard’s house on fire, which he did not survive.
I don’t know that any of this amounts to anything more than scattered late-night thoughts, but it’s somehow comforting to know that you really can try your best and it might not matter because luck might be against you. And I say that’s comforting because it allows you to just create, whatever the consequences.
What remains is the work, and that’s what matters more than anything else.
Here’s a performance of the Third String Quartet of Arriaga, played by the Quiroga Quartet, on YouTube. A lovely work, well-played.
