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Facing the Final Curtain
What artists do when they know they are about to die
WSJ, SEPTEMBER 18, 2009, By TERRY TEACHOUT
New York
Erich Kunzel conducted the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra on Aug. 1, a month before he died of pancreatic cancer. The audience, which knew of Kunzel's illness, was by all accounts profoundly moved by his determination to perform in public one last time, and cheered him to the echo.
Such occasions are extremely rare, and masterpieces created by artists who are about to die are rarer still. To be sure, many great works of art have dealt with the subject of death—but surprisingly few of them turn out to have been created by artists who knew they were dying. "Aubade," Philip Larkin's joltingly honest poem about an old man who wakes up in the middle of the night and reflects that being brave / Lets no one off the grave, was actually written in 1977, eight years before he died.
Why are deathbed masterpieces so unusual? Mainly, I suspect, because prettified Hollywood-style deaths, in which the sudden disappearance of makeup is the only outward sign that a terminal illness has reached its denouement, are so uncommon. Movie stars live forever or die nobly, uttering famous last words and expiring with a brave little smile. None of the gory details ever seem to make it into the final cut. In real life, by contrast, most dying people can barely summon up sufficient energy to read a book, much less write one. To create a large-scale work of art under such dire circumstances is almost always beyond the power of even the most determined of artists.
Performing artists, on the other hand, occasionally manage to do the impossible, and their final battles with fate can be deeply moving. Edward G. Robinson, for instance, knew that his time was up when he filmed his death scene in "Soylent Green," which was shot just 12 days before he died. Charlton Heston, who appeared in the scene with him, described Robinson's performance as "awesome" in his 1995 autobiography, "In the Arena." "I've never heard of an actor playing a death scene in terms of his own true and imminent death," Heston wrote. No less awesome were the performances of Billy Strayhorn's "Blood Count" that the great jazz saxophonist Stan Getz gave when he was dying of cancer, one of which was filmed and can be viewed on YouTube. "Blood Count" is itself a miniature deathbed masterpiece, a dark minor-key ballad written at the very end of Strayhorn's own life, and Getz played it with a keening desperation that speaks with terrible eloquence of that which was to come.
When creative artists like Strayhorn do manage to eke out enough energy to make art in the face of death, their creations are almost always modest in scale, if not in significance. "Blood Count" is a musical vignette that speaks volumes in its four harrowing minutes. So do "Judgment Day," "Parker's Back" and "Revelation," the short stories that the 39-year-old Flannery O'Connor finished writing in the Georgia hospital room where she was battling the lupus that killed her in 1964, long before her time.
Why do these works exert so strong a hold on our imaginations? One reason is that most of us want to know what to expect at the end of our own lives, and look to art to shed light on that dark encounter. But true artists, unlike the Hollywood kind, don't always tell us what we want to hear. The 91-year-old Pablo Picasso's last self-portrait (which is owned by Tokyo's Fuji Television Gallery) is a horrible vision of decay in which a wrinkled, unshaven man stares with crossed eyes at . . . what? The viewer? His own sordid past? The grim reaper himself? No one knows, but it is hard to look upon that gaunt, fearful face without trembling.
On the other hand, some deathbed testaments offer comfort—of a sort. Dmitri Shostakovich, who spent the whole of his adult life living in the shadow of Soviet terror, had already looked long and hard into the abyss when he wrote the viola sonata on which he put the finishing touches mere days before his death in 1975. Like so many of the compositions that he produced in his later years, it blends sharp-edged anguish and slate-gray resignation to unsettling effect. But the tranquil last movement, into which Shostakovich wove enigmatic quotations from Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata, speaks of something more than mere fear of death—and it ends in a major key.
Still more comforting, even reassuring, are the floral still lifes that Édouard Manet painted in the weeks immediately preceding his death in 1883. Manet, who was dying of syphilis, was racked with pain so excruciating that he had to sit in a chair to paint these 16 gem-like studies of bouquets in glass vases. Yet "Vase of White Lilacs and Roses," which now hangs in the Dallas Museum of Art, bursts forth from the canvas with a quiet élan that speaks of the prospect of final renewal under the aspect of eternity. Perhaps it is not quite right to call "Vase of White Lilacs and Roses" hopeful, but in me, at any rate, it inspires something not altogether unlike hope.
And what about Erich Kunzel? It seems that he brought his career to an end with a medley from "The Sound of Music," followed by an audience sing-along on "God Bless America." Even from a pops-concert conductor, one might have hoped for something more edifying, but at least Kunzel sent his last audience home happy. I can think of worse ways to go out.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
