It's a small world

Some creative artists work only on the grandest scale.  Proust's novels, Mahler's symphonies, the paintings of Veronese; it is hard to imagine anything small-scale from their makers.  Some artists, on the other hand, are content with tiny, jewelled statements, and eschew the grand or dramatic: Hilliard's miniatures, Giles Farnaby's virginal pieces, the polished fragments of Herrick's lyrics.  Of course many of the greatest artists have spanned the entire range.  Mozart could write the hugely ambitious Don Giovanni as well as miraculous miniatures like the Adagio in B minor, K540; Michelangelo produced the Sistine chapel, and St Peter's, together with scores of drawings, each a wonder; and Shakespeare wrote his raw, towering plays alongside the chiselled perfection of his sonnets.

But there is a further category of artistic production which seems to transcend any of these classes. It involves those works which, while on a very restricted scale, seem to be part of a larger world. They are like pieces of a huge, never to be finished jigsaw puzzle, shards from a greater design.

Typically these works are numerous, and will be produced throughout the creative life of an artist who keeps on returning to them, obsessively almost.  They are like some intimate record or diary of an inner life, and the urge to create them cannot be denied: it is a necessary catharsis.  Sometimes they form the entire output of their creator, sometimes they run in parallel.  But in all cases the achievement represented by the whole is greater than a mere sum of the parts.

Bach's organ chorales preludes are a good example.  They clearly do not supersede his hundreds of other masterpieces; and yet they were a part of his output which was especially dear and personal to him.  He was a church organist; they were practical.  He was a devout Christian; each is a heartfelt affirmation of his faith.  Their very quantity afforded him the opportunity of further systematisations of his musical technique, just as he had done in the Well-tempered Clavier, The Art of Fugue and in many other works.  Each one is a unique sound world, a tiny, perfect miniature which is in no way a mere easy bagatelle. Together, they embrace practically every aspect of Bach's art and his deepest feelings. 

In contrast, the songs of Hugo Wolf do not stand alongside another body of more public works.  Apart from the odd exception, the hundreds of songs represent not just an expression of the innermost man, they are all we have.  And yet, again, they are in no important sense small or marginal.  Like the Bach preludes, their mood is infinitely varied; within their narrow ambit they run the gamut of human emotions.

There is something uniquely special in this form of creation.  By-products of its economy can be either density or clarity.  Never overblown, it is ideally suited to the expression of the most intimate and subtle ideas.  And the cumulative effect of tens or even hundreds of these works is a richness, completeness and variety which even the grandest of operas or novels or frescoes cannot match.  Small, in this case, is not only beautiful, but bountiful too.

(30.7.87)

See also Moody Sonnets - Bach, And Chopin’s Hands

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