Love's Lab[o]r's Lost (and Found)

Chopin's favorite violinist, a school for the blind, and other scenes from the early life of Wittgenstein's favorite contemporary composer

Labor’s face, etched in stone (Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons)

“What do words like ‘profound’ when applied to music mean?… Wittgenstein was right: music is a field wovon man nicht sprechen kann [which you can’t talk about]. He thought there were only four great composers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert; possibly Labor, a Czech who taught him and his brothers—not, I fear, an immortal—and if anyone professed a love of Wagner, he never spoke to such a person again. A little extreme, I think, but on the right lines.” -Isaiah Berlin, July 18, 1977, letter to Yehudi Menuhin, a fourth cousin to Berlin.¹

Isaiah Berlin was wrong. Wittgenstein thought there were five great composers; he forgot Brahms.²

In an October 12 post (free), I introduced you to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favorite contemporary composer who you’ve never heard of and Schoenberg’s forgotten first teacher: Josef Labor (1842-1924). If you haven’t read that first installment in my series on Labor, I encourage you to do so before reading on. Otherwise, you’ll just be wondering why the hell I’m writing about this.

Berlin hits the nail right on the head in characterizing Labor. His music was not, in fact, destined to canonical status. He was, in fact, so against the Wagnerites and the Vienna Secession that he composed like he was living in 1860, in 1920. And he was, in fact, emotionally volatile. He could hold a mad grudge, as we saw when Alma Schindler abandoned studies with him to learn under the wing of her love, Zemlinsky. He was, in an almost cringeworthy way, the Romantic ideal of the suffering, pathetic artist. His work having fallen into total obscurity, the labors of his love were indeed lost.