...the 80th anniversary of the UK premiere of the Schumann Violin Concerto, given by our own Jelly d'Arányi with Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Queen's Hall, London. If I remember right, the second half contained the UK premiere of Sibelius 5. As this event forms the climax and final chapter of my Ghost VariationsI really should have flagged it up on the day, especially as I had been intending to do so for months on end.
Fortunately, the Royal Northern Sinfonia did notice, and planned ahead, and got Alina Ibragimova to come up and play it, and Radio 3 noticed too and broadcast the concert, so it is now, happily, available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer, here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09r7vb0
The full history involved a surprise "spirit message" ostensibly from Schumann; a hunt - by the Swedish Minister in London - through the music libraries of Berlin; a propaganda exercise by the Nazis, who wanted the Schumann concerto to replace the banned Mendelssohn in their people's affections; a reworking of the piece because it didn't, er, quite fit the bill - mostly assigned, unbeknownst to the authorities, to Hindemith; the intervention of Yehudi Menuhin, the young Jewish American violin superstar to whom the publishers from Nazi Germany sent a photostat of the manuscript; and a scandal when the story of the "spirit messages" broke just weeks before Jelly was supposed to give the London premiere, which was then delayed for about four months, though mostly because the Nazis kept changing the date of the German premiere... The saga took some disentangling, but much of it is in Ghost Variations.
...which is not a "romantic story", as one lady I met at a party fondly imagined, but is about the rise of facsism and a warning from history. Eighty years ago does not seem such a long time, being easily within living memory. Several years after the performance, the Queen's Hall was flattened in the Blitz. Tovey died in 1939, as did Jelly's brother-in-law. Myra Hess became a national heroine. Things change. Things can change fast when balance is lost. This was the edge of madness - for Schumann, for Jelly, for the world itself - and we shouldn't forget, because we may be at another edge of madness now.
David Le Page, Viv McLean and I are also doing a Ghost Variations concert this week, the nearest thing we have to an anniversary performance: it will be under the auspices of the Leicester International Music Festival which runs a series of lunchtime concerts year round. It's at the Victorian Art Gallery, New Walk Museum, Leicester, on Thursday 22 February, 1pm. The programme has been adapted for a one-hour format and includes some pieces new to our programme, not least by Gluck and Elgar. We do hope you'll come along if you're in the area. More details here.
Having recently experienced from the inside just what it is like to create an opera (it's rather like building the world's largest cruise-ship), I've been thinking about The Ones That Got Away. The operas that were never written. The operas that composers longed to write, but were never able to because they couldn't get the copyright or couldn't get the commissions or died before they could even begin. Here are a few of the works that might have graced our stages, but don't.
Goethe, painting by Tischbein
1. FAUST, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Goethe loved Mozart's music and stated that he would be the ideal composer to transform his Faust into an opera. Other composers were a bit too modern for his taste. The first inklings of Faust were published as Faust - A Fragment, in 1790. Mozart died before any prospect of it could become even a bit viable. Don Giovanni is probably the closest approximation...
2. WAITING FOR GODOT, by Pierre Boulez. The late French composer and conductor was widely rumoured to be planning an opera on Beckett's masterpiece, and I asked him about it in 2012. Indeed, the frail 87-year-old confirmed, he would love to write it if he were granted long enough on earth. Sadly, he wasn't.
3. Unnamed (I think) opera on a story by Ivan TURGENEV, by Johannes Brahms. In Baden-Baden,
Brahms was introduced to the Russian author by Pauline Viardot, the singer with whom Turgenev was obsessed for most of his life. Much socialising took place in the beautiful German spa town, Viardot's home, where she had a little theatre in the back garden, and Turgenev drafted a libretto for the composer. Unfortunately Brahms never set it. It told the story of a 40-something man who fell in love with a young 20-something woman, and it's possible Brahms took it a bit personally, since he had been pursuing his beloved Clara Schumann's daughter Julie about that time. Julie married a young man of her own vintage, but died tragically of tuberculosis soon afterwards; in her memory, Brahms wrote the Alto Rhapsody for Viardot to sing.
4. THE VICTORS, by Richard Wagner. It was going to be an opera on the life of the Buddha and Wagner sketched some ideas for it. But then he realised he had already written his Buddhist opera and it was Parsifal...
Fauré's sketch of Verlaine
5. THE BUDDHA. Again. This time, words by Paul Verlaine, music by Gabriel Fauré. The Princesse de Polignac, one of Fauré's most important patrons, wanted to bring the poet and composer together to create an opera and Fauré set about tracking Verlaine down. He found him in hospital, succumbing to alcoholism. They talked about making an opera on the life of the Buddha. Fauré sketched him. But Verlaine's commitment to his drink proved stronger than his drive to write a libretto. In the end Fauré played the organ at his funeral. Nevertheless, he set Verlaine's poetry in some of his finest songs, including the Cinq Mélodies de Venise and La bonne chanson.
6. HIAWATHA, by Antonín Dvorák. When Dvorák went to America to run the New York Conservatory of Music, he was charged (by its sponsor, Jeannette Thurber) with the task of inventing a national style of music for the nation. Researching possibilities, he became fascinated by Negro Spirituals and likewise by the story of Hiawatha, in the poem by Henry W. Longfellow. He aimed to turn the poem into an opera and sketched some material for it. For some reason the board of the conservatory had to approve his libretto. And they didn't approve it. And this stopped him from writing the thing. Some of the music ended up in his Symphony No.9, in which form it is now ubiquitously famous.
7. REBECCA, by Roxanna Panufnik, libretto by muggins, based on Daphne du Maurier. A few years ago we tried for but couldn't get the stage rights, which had been recently awarded to a musical. It was a little bit heartbreaking. Never mind... we ended up creating Silver Birch instead. We have plenty more ideas, and you know where to find us.
'Poldowski'
8. SILENCE, by Poldowski. Unlike the others on this list, this 'symphonic opera' was both written and published (in New York sometime around 1920). So where is it? 'Poldowski' was the pseudonym of Irène Régine Wieniawska, daughter of the violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski; after her marriage she was Lady Dean Paul. Her music is simply fabulous. Its non-existence today has nothing to do with its lack of creation.
9. DEIRDRE, by Arnold Bax, on an Irish story by WB Yeats. Fascinating stuff, this, sketched in part yet never fully realised. Read all about it here.
10. OSSIANE, by Marie Jaëll. A disciple of Liszt and a devoted pianist and composer, Jaëll was a 19th-century French musician unlucky enough to be born in an era when living for your art wasn't an accepted life approach for a young woman. She managed to do so anyway, though she seems to have suffered psychologically, and her music can be, to judge from what I've heard, a bit patchy. Still, this opera would be fascinating. It was written - but only extracts survive. The amazing Palazzetto Bru Zane has devoted a recording and accompanying book to some of her other works. More about her from the brilliant Song of the Lark blog here.
And last, but by no means least, the excellent Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, faced with new opera seasons in the US that look chiefly like Same Old with Some Stars, has tweeted her own ideal opera season: all of them splendid operas that happen to have been composed by women. Here it is, and hear hear to it all!
I'm on an editorial job at the moment that is leaving me no time even to think, much less blog, so I have invited our informal Youth Correspondent, Jack Pepper (composer, writer, broadcaster, 18) to offer another guest post. Here is his view on why we classical audiences could enjoy being a little bit more demonstrative in responding to the music... or even face the music and dance. JD
Love the
Magic
Jack Pepper
In a 2017 interview discussing the reasons for his success, André
Rieu argued that “love and authenticity” are sometimes “hard to find in other
classical concerts”. Perhaps it’s not that love and authenticity are lacking in
other concerts, but they are instead less clearly evident. Rieu may have
identified a problem….
André Rieu's Maastricht concert (2015).
Photo from ClassicFM.com
Love and authenticity are hardly difficult to come by
amongst classical musicians. The very nature of practising – working for hours
at the same pages, and returning again and again – makes it ludicrous to
suggest that most musicians in this field lack love and authenticity. They are
most likely in this career out of
love, because only the very top few percent make bucket-loads of money.
However, Rieu may be correct in implying that love and authenticity are not
always as bombastically displayed in other concerts in comparison to his own;
where Rieu rightly displays his affection for the music through smiles, elegant
gestures and bright costumes, other instrumentalists go for a simpler touch.
They don’t aim so much for a ‘look’ or a ‘brand’, instead using the music alone
as their image. Think of Haitink’s restrained gestures on the podium, or the
control of Brendel at the piano. Rieu is a showman, and clearly loves the music
he plays, but so do all the other performers who may be less flamboyant. But is
there is a problem with this? Does a lack of flamboyance suggest a lack of love
for the music?
Of course not.We all
react to art in different ways – just think of the last time you cried at a
movie, or, if this doesn’t apply to you, the last time you scoffed at someone
for doing so – and the same applies to performers. But Rieu’s comment does
raise an interesting question about listeners:
are we too serious, too high-minded, too restrained about the music we hold
dear?
At a rock concert, we might see headbanging. At a hip hop
concert, we might see mosh pits. At a world music festival, we might see
dancing. It seems all of the various genres of music involve audience
participation at one point or another in a concert, and yet what does classical
music have as an equivalent? Audience members often get frustrated by coughs
and sneezes, actively discouraging any sound or movement from anyone other than
the instrumentalists on stage. It says a lot about our attitudes to the genre
that we consider the Last Night of the Proms raucous; in any other context, an
audience clapping, cheering and waving some flags would be considered at best
the norm, at worst rather sober.
There is nothing wrong about this, since – as
I previously argued – we all react to music in different ways, and surely this
applies to different genres too. If we want classical concerts to be known for
focus and intent, there is nothing wrong with that. However, my concern is that
this tradition of audience restraint in classical concerts in reality stifles our
individual reactions to the music. Instead of being a tradition of focus and
intent, it seems more a tradition of restricting the joy we feel deep down when
we hear a great piece of music. By sensing some unspoken concert code of
conduct, we are reluctant to react to the music we love in ways that feel
genuine and spontaneous to us. Silence is not the natural way to react to powerful music.
Rieu’s comment focuses on classical performers where perhaps
it would be better focused on the listeners themselves. Whilst all such
listeners undoubtedly love the music presented, it would often be hard to tell
by appearances alone. Why should someone be reprimanded for clapping after a
rousing first movement, if the infectiousness of the music drove them to do so?
Why should someone be sneered at for moving in their chair at the buoyant
rhythms of a scherzo? More radical still, why can’t we have concerts where
people can move, dance, cheer, clap and sing?
I’m not advocating a return to the 18th-century,
where audiences attending an opera were often present for anything but the
opera itself. But classical music seems to me to have lost its sense of
celebration – celebrating the greatest music ever written – and with it, its
sense of fun. Why should we restrict audience participation to one night of a
concert season?! In previous centuries, there would have been chamber music for
such intimate expressions of individuality and togetherness, but we live in a
time when it would be considered unusual to gather round a piano as a family
and sing a favourite song. Nor do many couples attend a dance, an event that
previously offered the opportunity to express our reactions to music
spontaneously and without judgement. The larger scale concerts have become, for
many of us, our most intimate form of music-making, and yet this has not
translated to the way we react to the music we hear at classical recitals.
It could be argued that heartfelt cries of joy would be
distracting in a classical concert, and that pieces require focus and silence
in order to be fully appreciated. Why not react with a dance or a shriek at
home to a recording, where nobody else can be distracted from the music? Such
an attitude feels oppressive. Music is meant to be a universal language, and a
language that touches a deeper part of our subconscious than anything else.
Why, then, must we force ourselves to be so serious when listening to it?
Rieu is wrong to suggest other musicians lack love and
authenticity. Listeners equally harbour an abundance of love and authenticity
for the music they enjoy. The question lies with whether we show it. I don’t
advocate applauding or crying for the sake of reacting, but I strongly believe
that the first time we listened to such a piece of music, we would have reacted
this way. The unspoken code of conduct – of quiet, rigidity and unobtrusiveness
– has conditioned us to stay silent. Music is designed to provoke emotions,
response and new thoughts, and whilst we undoubtedly revere a work, are we
truthfully reacting to it at all if
we sit in a concert as rigid as a corpse? Marilyn Manson described music as
“the strongest form of magic”. It’s time that we were open to the way we feel
about the music we so love, to celebrate it. It’s time that we feel free to
show the magic that makes us listen.
Last November I was lucky enough to be in the audience at Cadogan Hall when a brief yet desperately haunting sliver of film was shown for the first time: the only known cinematic images of the pianist Dinu Lipatti. He died at the age of 33 and remains to this day a figure attracting reverence and longing amongst pianophiles and more. Orlando Murrin - best known as a journalist and former editor of BBC Good Food, to which I used to subscribe assiduously - is behind this discovery and presented it before a concert in which Alexandra Dariescu played Lipatti's gorgeous, neoclassical, Bachy-Stravinskyish Concertino. He has written us a guest post about his continuing hunt for material - and an ongoing quest to convince publishers and film-makers of the worth of a book or documentary. Enjoy! JD
In
the footsteps of Dinu Lipatti
By Orlando Murrin
From a private album of Madeleine Lipatti.
On the back, in her hand: "Où? Je ne sais plus mais nous étions heureux - - " Credit: Collection Mme Cathérine Nurock-Foëx
A
couple of years ago I found myself with some time on my hands, and decided I
would devote it to researching a musician who has fascinated me all my life -
the Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti.
I
can remember the exact moment my interest was triggered, at the barbaric
boarding school in the West Country to which I was sent at the age of 13.
Sunday evenings were cheered up - as much as they could be - by club and
society meetings, held in the masters’ houses. A couple of times a term, the ‘Gramophone
Society’ would gather and listen to records, and in the gaps between symphonies
and string quartets, we would ask stupid questions. What is the hardest
piece of music in the world? (‘Islamey’, apparently - though it could just
have been the most virtuosic piece the music master had on vinyl.) Who’s the
best pianist ever? ‘Liszt. After him, a Romanian who died young, called
Dinu Lipatti.’
I
should explain at this point that unlike most contributors to this august blog,
I am not a professional music writer, critic or musicologist, and although I
used to supplement my meagre income as a magazine sub-editor by playing the
piano in restaurants, I am not even a professional musician. I love classical
music, however, as much as anyone, and over decades of listening, remain
convinced that - at least about Lipatti - I was told right.
Of
course, Lipatti’s death at the age of just 33 - the last seven years under the
curse of a terrible illness - means his legacy is pretty slender. When I first
collected his records, there were about three hours of music; more have come to
light over the years - including crackly bootlegs from concerts - and now there
are about six. The most extraordinary remains the Last Recital, a performance
of unearthly beauty recorded live in Besançon just three months before the
pianist’s death: unable to finish the programme, which he played with unearthly
beauty, his eyes set on the middle distance as if gazing into the hereafter, he
staggered off stage, only to return a few minutes later to play for the final
time his signature encore, ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’.
So
what makes his playing so special? For a start, his impeccable phrasing,
glowing sonority and absolute technical mastery. His dazzling range of tonal
colour and innate, unostentatious rubato. The ‘momentum’ he gives to his
performance, as he drives the listener through whatever musical structure he is
presenting. If there is a Wigmore Hall in the skies, I feel Bach, Schubert and
Chopin would choose Lipatti to perform their compositions, rather than Richter
or Horowitz. His delivery is immaculate, discreet and seamless, as if he is
clothing the music in the most expensive of Savile Row suits.
As
a performer, Lipatti had something else, which we have to imagine for
ourselves: charisma. There was something of the Valentino about this small,
intense young man, with his exotic, brooding good looks, and who played the
piano with ‘steel fingers in velvet gloves’. From the outset, audiences (and
critics) went wild for him, and his concert appearances (mainly restricted to
Switzerland, as illness took its inexorable hold) began to attract an almost
religious fanaticism.
A rare photo of Lipatti taken only days before his death, with a nurse. Credit: Collection Mme Cathérine Nurock-Foëx
Another
area of fascination is his life story, which is so melodramatic it is
surprising it hasn’t been made into a film. Among the myriad elements are…
•his privileged background, scion of a wealthy family
in the Golden Age of Romania
•a ruthlessly ambitious mother, who dragged the family
off to Paris so her son could study with Cortot
•the misfiring of his career, at the outbreak of the
Second World War, and ill-judged propaganda tours of Germany and the Axis
territories
•his headlong love affair with a married beauty nine
years his senior (a princess, no less) and subsequent ‘elopement’ to Switzerland
•their hand-to-mouth existence in Geneva, and
the onset of a terrible mystery illness (finally diagnosed as Hodgkin’s
Lymphoma)
•the ruin and humiliation of Lipatti’s family back in
Romania, and his mother’s ill-fated attempt to visit him (caught smuggling
jewellery in her underwear and thrown into jail at the Romanian border)
•his glorious remission in 1950 (thanks to cortisone,
flown from the USA at vast expense by well-wishers) and that testament to his
courage and spirit, the Last Recital (arguably the most famous concert of the
20th century)
•his posthumous ‘stardom’ and phenomenal record sales,
which enriched his widow but could not prevent…
•her descent into depression and drink, and eventual
death 33 years later, surrounded by ’millions’ of cats and enmired in the ‘Chopin
Concerto Scandal’, in which she had misidentified one of her late husband’s
recordings.
The plaque on the Lipattis' home street in Geneva. It was
put up last year, funded through the generosity of Lipatti's doctor's
daughter, who has set up a foundation in their joint
names to finance medical research into leukaemia.
Readers
will not be surprised that once I started probing into this colourful tale, I
could not stop. I found myself striking up surprising new friendships, way
beyond my normal sphere (some might say, out of my normal league…). With
warm-hearted pianist and Lipatti fan Alberto Portugheis, who studied with
Lipatti’s widow. With Lipatti’s meticulous, gracious-mannered biographer,
Grigore Barguaunu, in Paris. With the patient, wise Christian Mitetelu and his
violinist wife Ioana Raluca Voicu, who guided me through the finer points of
Romania’s otherwise baffling political history.With the disarmingly personable historic recordings expert Mark Ainley,
in Vancouver, who recently discovered 15 minutes of Lipatti playing Scarlatti
and Brahms, and believes there is more out there yet.
I
also started to make discoveries of my own. During a study trip to Bucharest, I
found the Lipatti family home in danger of demolition and launched a campaign
to try and save it (so far, successful). I tracked down 27 seconds of cine film
showing Lipatti at a garden party in Lucerne in 1947 - the only footage in
existence - and premiered it at last November’s Lipatti centenary concert at
Cadogan Hall. Since then, I travelled to Geneva and unearthed two major hauls
of unpublished papers and photographs, including intimate love letters and
diaries. (I don’t blush easily but some are really intimate.)
The
question I am now faced with is what to do with this wealth of new material. So
far I have written an article about Lipatti for the Daily Telegraph (‘Is
this the Greatest Pianist of the 20th Century?’) and championed him for an
episode of ‘Great Lives’ on BBC Radio 4. I have enough research for a new
biography, except that I have been reliably informed that it would not be
published, because the subject matter is ‘too esoteric’. My current hope is to
interest a documentary film producer in the project, using the cine film
footage as a peg, and interspersing the story with interviews of some of the
compelling figures that make up his cult following today. There is a ‘peg’, too
- the 70th anniversary of the Last Recital (and Lipatti’s death) falls in 2020.
Whatever
the end result, the time I have spent with Lipatti, his story and - of course -
his legendary recordings, has been among the most enriching of my life. Those
Sunday evenings at boarding school were not wasted.
•If readers would like to get in touch with me
regarding anything Lipatti, please feel free via orlando.murrin@gmail.com. Particularly if
you happen to have in your attic the lost recording of Lipatti playing
Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, broadcast by the Third Programme at 9.30pm on 20
April 1948…
•The newly discovered recordings of Lipatti playing
Scarlatti and Brahms are due to be released imminently by Marston Records
(though they’ve been saying that for months)
I should have expected to love Philip Glass's Satyagraha, yet I've steered away from attending it for years. A meditative opera of enormous sincerity and compassion about one of the 20th century's giant humanitarian figures? With a production at ENO by Improbable and Phelim McDermott that has propelled it to top classic status? What's not to love? Still it was only the other night I saw it for the first time at English National Opera - and came out wondering, dazed, where it had been all my life. It's left me musing on a great many things, some personal, some musicological, some about Glass himself.
So here is a long post from a Satyagraha novice...
Toby Spence as Gandhi. Photo (c) Donald Cooper, ENO
Satyagraha has one of the longest synopses I've come across in an opera programme. It's spread across eight pages, including a couple of photos and a lot of translated text - for this is a work that ENO - whose mission statement is to perform opera in English - gives entirely in Sanskrit with no surtitles (the production does include some select translations, projected onto the set). The programme provides the story, the history, the context. You wouldn't guess it otherwise.
This production melds perfectly with the music, unfurling in slow motion with moments of extraordinary magic. A woman will suddenly become airborne, mirroring the moon, as if it's the most natural thing in the world, or giant puppets of the warriors and gods of Hindu legend seem to acquire a life of their own, or strange, shimmering things are done with what looks like long strands of giant sellotape.
The pace of change and the degree of imagination on stage matches that of the music, which casts its sonorous and translucent spells with subtlety, at long, slow, steady length, the evolution and the eventual contrast located deep within the structures. Glass has said before now that the composer closest to his heart is Schubert, and one is occasionally put in mind of the moment in Der Doppelgänger at which, having set up a repetitive, pitch-dark harmonic world, Schubert inserts a rise of one semitone that can shatter your heart with a single note.
It's rare to see an opera in which a production suits the composition to quite such an intimate degree. As for the storytelling, we were advised by those in the know to read every word of the programme beforehand, but didn't get round to it, so depended on the show to do its own job, and at times it does. Gandhi's actions in 19th/20th-century South Africa, his leadership of peaceful resistance in the face of vast injustice, is reflected with moments of specificity, watched over in turn by the unmistakable figures of Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore and finally, from the future, Martin Luther King. Gandhi's white-clad followers burn their identity cards. His associates are led away by armoured police. He, morphing from business-suited lawyer to isolated holy man in white robe, treats everything with equanimity.
But the music itself does not give us the story. Essentially, Satyagraha is a setting of texts from the Bhagavad Gita, apportioned to certain voices according to the story outline, but telling precious little of it in itself. And that is absolutely fine, because in certain ways Satyagraha is a natural successor to Parsifal. The wide, deep horizon unfurling in a timespan of its own. The journey to wisdom through compassion. The promise of spiritually enlightened leadership. The reminder, to a delusion-blinded audience, that spiritual truths and the goodness of which humanity is capable can only be reached when we discard materialism and ego. Wagner wanted to write a Buddhist opera, but apparently cut his efforts short when he realised he'd already done it in Parsifal.
Andri Björn-Robertsson as Krishna. Photo (c) Donald Cooper ENO
This is the point at which the spiritual, the political, the artistic and the historical blend and balance - in Wagner implicitly, in Glass explicitly. Satyagraha offers a message for today, delivered through words from an eastern scripture written earlier than 400 BC.
Many years ago, back in the 1990s when I was a very green twenty-something, I became briefly involved in a system of yoga and meditation that was, possibly, one step short of a cult. There were ashrams in many different countries, a guru, festivals, traditions, fabulous Indian vegetarian food, texts, lectures, courses, "intensives" - at which your kundalini spiritual energy would be awakened - and, not least, all-night chants. I'd never have expected to be got by such a thing, and it's hard, looking back, to comprehend exactly how it happened - though I know it was something to do with a conversation at the Salzburg Festival, of all places, around 1991. To cut a long story short, I spent three years happily immersed in the heightened sensitivity and intuition that results from deep meditation and unshakeable faith...while my life fell to pieces around my ears.
I gave it all up in 1995 when I realised that it held none of the answers I wanted. You can keep chanting - kali durga namo namah, om jaya jaya etc - but if you lose three members of your family to cancer in quick succession, your partners dump you for not paying them enough attention and your bosses take advantage of your distraction to bleed your work capacity dry for two quid an hour, you actually need to get your feet back on the ground and deal with it. Besides, some things in life, notably triple bereavements, simply don't have answers. Soon after that, an exposé of the organisation in The New Yorker proved an eye-opener, and I stopped going.
The important thing, however, is that there were good things too. In particular, the memory of the space within the mind that's opened out by meditation has never quite left me. It is one of the better, more mysterious, more creative and most beautiful spheres available to human beings that doesn't involve going to a mountaintop or the sea. It's within us at all times, waiting for us to access it. And it has immense benefits to offer us when we do. Twenty minutes into Satyagraha and I'm back in that self-same space.
And I wonder: is this, perhaps, where our "minimalism" comes from? There's nothing minimal about a three and a half hour opera, by the way. It's massive (and it could perhaps shed 15-20 minutes without losing much import). But the musical idea that has been saddled with the term "minimalism" - the repetition of cells and phrases that slowly evolve and change - what's behind that? Is it the chants of eastern mysticism, those long, spirit-awakening chants that we used to sing? A typical chant is, for example, two eight-bar phrases (with words in Sanskrit). And it repeats and repeats, for as long as necessary. Gradually it speeds up. Usually there's a music group at the front - a tanpura providing the background drone, some tabla, perhaps some tiny clinking cymbals - and the music leader determines the pace and the intensity as the chant goes along. This can last fifteen minutes, two hours, all night, three days.
You mightn't want to stay in the London Coliseum for three days. But the principle of the chant, though much less sophisticated, is possibly not entirely far removed from Glass's opera. The sound of Glass has become ubiquitous in the modern world, its impact on film scores, TV, pop music and contemporary classical alike being immeasurable. If it all originates in spiritual chant, how utterly ironic that it's become the soundtrack to a deluded, polarised, divided, cruel, uber-materialistic world so lacking in the compassion and equanimity that Satyagraha extols.
Glass. Photo from http://philipglass.com/gallery/
A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to secure an interview with Philip Glass (you can read the original result in the Independent if you can find it, but the new-look site seems not to have preserved this precious moment; fortunately I've also written a longer account at Primephonic here). I loved talking to him because he was such a genuine musician, so down to earth - real musicians are utterly practical people. To him, yoga is not an optional extra: it is part of that down-to-earthness. It keeps him in shape mentally and physically, he suggests, and it will enable him to continue working into his nineties if he wants to - he was, at the time of the interview, an extremely youthful 77. His book Words Without Music is fabulous, a portrait of his times and his journey through their exceptional, collaborative, enriching, enlightening creativities. (My goodness, how sorry I am that I missed the Sixties.)
As I can't find my Independent article, I've just nipped back to the original interview transcript to snaffle a few comments from Glass about Satyagraha and the background to how he wrote it. It was, incidentally, his "breakthrough" work. I asked how influenced his music was by the world of eastern mysticism. "The connection is right in the music itself," he said...
"Satyagraha was the piece that took me into
making a living. But it started off slowly and even the year before I had no
idea that later on I would not be working at a day job. In fact I’d been
living off of music for six months before it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a
day job in six months. I remember it very clearly – my cab licence came up for
renewal and I renewed it. I had no confidence that I would be able to make a
living. But I didn’t use it and three years later when it came up for renewal
again I didn’t renew it. That tells you where I was at!...
"I went to India a lot of times
and as well as studying with a lot of yoga teachers I was an assistant to Ravi
Shankar – he was an important part of my music world, and there were lessons I
learned from him – not through him, but the movie he was working on…. His teacher
was there and gave me lessons just because I was there. I origianlly went to
India for two reasons. I went to study Gandhism and that was an important
motivation – I spent at least 10 years going back and forth and meeting people
who knew him and going to places he’d lived. My opera method is a total
immersion in a subject, without even considering what the structure and
content will be for a while – I had no idea what I’d do with the Gandhi material, I was working on it from 1971 on and I didn’t write the piece until about
10 years later and during that period I went there six or eight times...
"I did another big piece about Ramakrishna. People
don’t look at it that way, but I know what I’ve done, people don’t know that,
but if you look at that, there are songs based on a Tibetan yogi. If you just look at the
libretto for my Fifth Symphony, there are 34 texts from [nearly as many] traditions. So in some ways
it’s gone into the music directly, either because it’s about the person or
their texts I’ve used. So if you say has it had an influence – well, I’ve used the
material! It’s not an influence, it’s an actual usage! Satyagraha couldn’t have
been written without that. I had a detailed and as intimate [exploration], given that Gandhi died
in 1947, I was working on it 20 years after he died and I was able to meet in a
bar with people he knew, I was able to visit places he'd lived, and I made a
point of going to every location. When you look at the opera, I
don’t think anyone could have written that opera who hadn’t had a very in-depth
acquaintance with it all. There are some wonderful books by people who knew him and lived with him and worked with him… So is there a connection? The connection
is right in the music itself."
You'd think, given my own little spell immersed in eastern mysticism, that I'd be a natural Glass-head. Yet I shied away from going to Satyagraha for years. The only other piece I avoided to nearly the same degree was the Ring cycle (though I did see that for the first time in my mid twenties). You'll know, if you're a regular at JDCMB, how often I curse received opinion. And have I not been as prone to received opinion as anyone else? Well, of course. That's how I've learned how lousy and insidious the syndrome is. The bald fact is that prejudice against stuff puts other people off. If you're aware that many of your friends and colleagues avoid certain kinds of music because either it bores them silly or they just don't get it, you're less likely to venture to "get it" yourself. I run with excitement to Reich and Adams, have done for years, but less so to Glass, because I thought I'd heard so much of it that I knew what it was about. But I didn't.
So there's a moral to this long weekend read for you. Never make uninformed choices. Investigate thoroughly. Understand what you're doing and thinking and saying. Never take someone else's opinion for your own. Go and hear that piece of music that scares you a bit, and only then make up your own mind, once you've been immersed in it, preferably in live performance.
And do go and see Satyagraha. It's on through this month at ENO. Toby Spence sings a bright, pure-toned Gandhi, the chorus is glorious and Glass expert Karen Kamensek conducts. Book here.
