Polish notation

There is probably no composer, great or small, every bar of whose music is so unmistakably stamped with his personality as Chopin.  Like his prodigious and idiosyncratic piano technique, his compositions seemed to spring spontaneously from some atavistic knowledge.  His musical development was largely a process of honing and refining, a moving closer to himself.  Thus it is that his compositional trajectory is curiously reversed; over the years he worked his way back to his unmediated origins.

This explains why Chopin's music never anticipates future styles.  In this, he is sharply differentiated from other evolutionary composers who worked as part of the great musical/historical process.  Mozart, the first composer to assert his volitional rights rather than just assent in the creative process, reached out to the chromatic dissolution of Wagner, and hinted at dodecaphony.  Beethoven, the ultimate in polymorphic fecundity, foreshadowed Schumann, Tippett, and boogie-woogie.  Most lesser composers joined hands with the future, even if they touched only fleetingly.  But not Chopin. His music is like a totally isolated, personal meditation which stands outside the hurly-burly of nineteenth-century Romanticism.

Personal, certainly: the fingerprints which are to be found in his earliest Rondo in C persist right through to the last posthumous works.  But it was never truly isolated and cut-off, self-regarding art for art's sake.  Every one of Chopin's works is a dialogue; a dialogue not with people, present or absent, but with a land, with his Poland. Every work is an exile's lament.

Sometimes the almost insupportable homesickness broke out blatantly in mazurkas and polonaises, manifest testaments.  Sometimes it is only the inflections of his line's bitter-sweet cantabile, the plangent harmonies.  Sometimes it is just the omnipresent physical fact of the piano, Chopin's own instrument, his unstilled voice.  Whatever the means of expression, every work is the same work, viewed form a different angle, and the oeuvre a vast set of variations on this hidden theme. 

Perhaps more than any other country Poland deserves its Chopin.  Its lot in history has been cruel; as a reflection of the constant passage of marauding armies, it has been dubbed the doormat of Europe.  Chopin's lone and lonely voice stands outside the central tradition of Western music in the same way that his Poland became the continent's pariah.  By turning his back on fellow musicians he was better able to concentrate on his absent country, to enter into its woes, to become its ultimate poet. 

It is fitting then that his homeland should honour him with a monument which canonises this specialness, this apartness.  The Chopin Edition produced by the institute bearing his name comes printed on slightly cheap paper; its typeface looks strange.  It has that uninviting East European feel about it.  Everything contributes to the sense that Chopin belongs to another world.  This edition somehow enshrines the paradox at the heart of his music.  That is, to understand it and him, we must realise that we can never understand either unless we too are Polish, and have suffered with Poland, or unless we too have eaten the bitter bread of exile.

(4.5.86)

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

Index

The significance of theories

Practically every theory which aimed at a complete, all-embracing explanation was framed by a speaker of the German language.  Apart from the endless succession of deep and unreadable philosophers - Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and so on - there is a parallel constellation of equally eminent thinkers, each of whom chose to mine some more specialised vein of existence.  In Freud's case it was the psyche, music in Schenker's, nuclear physics in Schrödinger's, and gravity in Einstein's. Even the artists were obsessed with rigour and completeness - Goethe with his anti-Newtonian theory of light and perception, Wagner with his Gesamtkunstwerk.

This mania for order is manifest in their common language.  As well as the inflected nouns, which in themselves are hardly exceptional, there are a host of rules regarding inversion of subjects and verbs, and the placing and formation of participles.  The delight in labyrinthine sentences replete with qualifying subclauses, together with the monstrous compound words, all speak volumes about the Germanic cast of mind.

Today it is different.  The German thinkers are silent, perhaps abashed by two world wars, vaguely aware that their love of order may have lain near the root of both.  Few others essay global theories about existence.  Artists have enough problems in this post-modernist age without getting bogged down in aesthetics.  Only architects produce theories and counter-theories - probably because they get to realise so few of their designs.

This leaves the scientists.  They are certainly busy as never before.  But the impetus has changed.  Once they were engaged in a winnable battle against mysterious Mother Nature.  Then, vindication was reward enough.  No longer.  Scientists frame theories so that they can publish papers, go to conferences, win tenure.  Above all to make money.  It is hardly a coincidence that most science research is now carried out in America.

If the scientists, the standard bearers of the modern age, have proved themselves so venal, and unequal to the great task of concocting comprehensive theories, little wonder that the rest of mankind has given up completely.  Instead of fundamental explanations, all we can hope for now is significance.

And so it is that everywhere you go, the significance-mongers are at it.  Sometimes they grace themselves with grand Gallic names like semioticians or structuralists; some are analysts, some commentators, others are just pundits.  Whatever the name, their task is identical: to hunt out the rich truffle of successively more unlikely and implausible meanings in even the most footling and risible of society's detritus.

Thus we have the television critics, turning shameless soap to Shakespeare; the style-watchers who gloss every crease in the Gucci; and most insidious of all, the cynical, clever journalists.  Wittily subverting the world, they more subtly assert it.  They prefer to juggle with words rather than judge with them.  In time, theories bring forth revolutions; plucking out one of a million significances alters not a jot.

(8.2.87)

Index

The mystery of the 48

Schumann called them the Old Testament of music.  For the rest of us they remain one of those immutable monuments like the pyramids or Stonehenge: it is impossible to imagine a world in which they did not exist.  So we tend to forget that once The Well-tempered Clavier was an idea which just came to Bach.  Before that point there was nothing.

Accepting that, the formal perfection of them, the undeniable fact of their physical existence on the page makes it hard for us to imagine them coming into being.  We imagine them being born entire, Athena-like, from their creator's pen.

But it did not happen like that. Instead, we have to try and imagine Bach eating his breakfast, scolding his children, sitting wherever, creating this music.  One day he sat down and wrote a fugue or a prelude; then another; and then another.  What seems to have an ineluctability about it for us, for him was a task, intermittently pleasant perhaps, but gradually weighing upon him as he waded deeper and deeper into his self-imposed grand design.

How did he proceed? Presumably not by starting in C major and finishing in B minor.  There must have been periods when the major keys flowed from him, followed by the odd minor key work.  Did the preludes suggest themselves before or after the fugues?  Was he consciously trying out all the possibilities, rigorously working through the gamut of compositional techniques?  It seems clear that this lies at the heart of The Art of Fugue, that most personal testament to a lifelong dedication to an intricate, sometimes hermetic art.  Even The Musical Offering has this same systematic feel, though its initial inspiration was partly as the ultimate in occasional music.  It is true that the 48 were published as a set of exercises, but they go so far beyond mere pedagogy that schoolmasterly neatness will not do for an explanation.  Particularly since Bach chose to produce two sets following the same plan.

The truth is, we shall never know.  Bach belongs to an age which predates that of Artist as Man or Woman of Destiny, possessed of a Mission which informs their every act.  This Romantic notion began with Beethoven, though there are inklings of it in Mozart.  It reached its fullest expression in Wagner, who saw himself as the culmination of Western art; a Shakespeare of words, a Beethoven of music.  As such, his many letters and essays explain endlessly, and are all written for the same audience: Posterity. 

We have no such help with Bach.  He belonged to an era which regarded musicians, especially church musicians, as artisans - highly skilled, but not qualitatively different from carpenters or cobblers.  All of Bach's writings are therefore highly formalised communications; they have little of the personal because he would have considered it presumptuous for someone of his station.  Because of our ignorance we tend to endow Bach and other earlier musicians with a kind of Olympian inscrutability.  At least this means we concentrate on the music not the musician; but it does mean that miracles like the 48 remain a perfect and total mystery.

(10.10.86)

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

Index

Translations

As a child we learn language innocently.  We are surrounded by it in its entirety, and we begin by plucking out of the air magic words like “mama” which brings us what we want; powerful words like “no”, which change the course of our world; and subtle, mysterious words like “why?” which are the first steps towards deeper mastery.

As adults we are afforded no such luxury.  Learning a language is usually a chore.  Ideally we would like its effects without the need for the effort; instead we must begin at the beginning, start with the simple words and simple structures.  There is nothing unreasonable in this, but it does mean that the language is hopelessly biased for us, canted towards those first few mumbled phrases.

Unlike the child, we cannot learn neutral words like “no” and “why” alone.  The have to be accompanied by their cohorts, the nouns and verbs which make concrete a language.  Inevitably the first such names and actions that we we learn carry us to a particular corner of the linguistic landscape.  We understand the language through them, and we live longest with them, until those first phrases become like our family, something you just have to accept and live with, an inheritance of nature and nurture.

So, for example, among my many half-completed attempts to learn French, there was a course whose first few vocabularies seemed fixated on the military.  Grammatical points were illustrated by characteristics of soldiers, or the deeds of emperors.  Whether this was part of some Napoleonic legacy, I cannot say; but it has certainly tinged my view of the language.  Even today, French has something of the army and empire about it, which makes me feel that it and its speakers still long for the fin-de-siècle civilisation that died in the mud of Flanders.

My view of German has been similarly shaped by tutorial books.  One of them, quite properly, concentrated on the declensions of nouns, and required me to learn lists of various classes of them.  Because of the nature of the German language, many of these are very basic, earthy words: words like field, beak, salmon, stove, brother, maid, bride and sword – words which almost spell out a fairy tale by themselves.  This impression of Germans re-enacting timeless myths from pre-history was reinforced not only be reading another grammar set entirely in the spiky Gothic typeface, but also by an early immersion in Grimm.  Today the German scene seems to me to be populated entirely with figures out of Wagner, himself an inhabitant of a world full of dark forests, elves and curses.

Happily my first attempt at learning Greek has been rather more beneficial.  I used an old Linguaphone course, little changed since the early 1960s.  In it the characters all appeared to be perfectly groomed jet-setters, eternally buying clothes, eating out, and sightseeing. Subsequent books have tried to correct this misapprehension with dreary Athenian tales of work and politics; but I have kept faith with that deathless land of beautiful people preoccupied with the important things in life – like whether to have red mullet or gurnard, whatever that is.  It is one world that I have no desire to translate back into modern, brutal reality.

(24.12.91)

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The Golden Gate

Originally all novels were in verse.  Except that they used to be called epics: the Iliad, the Aeneid.  The introduction of writing weakened the oral tradition which lay at the root of these works, and allowed the form to be watered down by prose.  Prose was also simpler to write, and better suited to the years following the fall of the Roman Empire when civilisation itself was enfeebled and precarious.

The verse novel made a come-back in the later Middle Ages, when a new spirit of poetry was in the air.  If Dante’s Commedia is backward-looking in its inclusiveness, its attempt to explain everything and assign it its place in an ordered universe, there were many other works which were more modern, and paradoxically truer to their hidden ancient roots.  Works such as Le Roman de la Rose, all the Arthurian poetic cycles, and the new epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso.

Later still, this poetry became merely the heightened form of prose, and produced glittering Augustan gems like Pope’s Essay on Man, or Swift’s diatribes.  It took the passion of the Romantics, heirs to the medieval story-tellers in verse, to marry verse and narrative once more.  The prime examples are probably Byron’s Don Juan, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

And so the cycle goes on.  After falling into decades of neglect, the verse novel has burst upon the scene once more.  Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a tale for our times, an everyday story of yuppies in San Francisco as they battle with the tricky years of their twenties.  If nothing else, the book is a remarkable tour-de-force.  Using Pushkin’s verse form,  Seth manages to produce smooth-running lines which rarely seem short-breathed despite their unusual tetrameter length.  Equally the rhyme scheme is never obtrusive, and there are some masterly matches worthy of Byron.

And yet there is something not quite right about the enterprise.  It would be too easy to lay this at the door of Mr Seth’s English.  He wield a formidable vocabulary with an assurance that passes beyond dictionary definitions.  His dodgem skill at careering round the corners of short lines and awkward rhymes is exemplary.  The problem lies deeper, and has to do with overall pace and structure.

Certain forms require a certain breadth of approach.  It is no accident that Wagner’s operas are monster: he was attempting the largest of themes, and needed space to accommodate them.  Similarly, it is instructive to note that Byron’s Don Juan is conceived on the largest scale.  Seth’s work is not.  A lot happens – these are, after all, yuppies; many characters are introduced, and rounded sketches attempted.  But there is jut not enough space.  This problem is exacerbated by the fine but totally unbalancing sermon in chapter seven.

Having mastered the form so fluently, and writing compellingly about issues which affect even non-yuppies, Seth should have had the courage to write at the length they deserved.  In the end, the book’s worst fault is that there is not enough of it; some fault.

(27.8.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Pushkin’s “What if?”

Index

Le Nozze di Figaro (24.5.86)

Assume the worst, and that in the coming conflagration all knowledge of Italy and things Italian had been lost.  Assume also that by some freak one of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas had survived, like the fairy of Hope in Pandora’s wicked box.  From that music alone it would be possible to reconstruct the meaning and richness of the Italian language.

Or so one might think listening to one of those operas.  For aside from the generally accepted though little thought-upon profundity of those works, there is another aspect which is almost as breathtaking in its virtuosity: its use of secco recitative.  In a way it is a typically Mozartian feat of turning what is normally a liability into a glorious virtue.  And yet like so many facets of his art it is one which can be obscured by crass heavy-handedness.

Mozart’s recitative is at once totally conventional, with its regularly placed perfect cadences and its repeated notes which rise and fall with the words and inflection, and totally innovative in the musicality which is invested in it.  In many ways it straddles two worlds; both that of opera’s late Renaissance origins, where its substance was entirely recitative, in an inspired imitation of the unknowable Greek drama, and of Wagner’s fervent fusion of recitative with aria, again representing an attempt to turn back to the wellspring of dramatic art.

In the final analysis performances of the great trilogy of Mozart operas stand or fall not by the bravura of the arias, but by the sensitivity brought to bear on the secco.  This is why the re-discovery of the Drottningholm Threatre with what can only be called its Mozartian acoustic has proved such a revelation to our jaded ears.  For two centuries we have witnessed the gradual inflation of an art which is almost obsessively human in scale.  A comparable act of philistinism would be to blow up the small-scale perfection of a Vermeer to make it more readily visible.

True Mozart – that is a performance which is true to him and shows him truly – therefore demands a small-scale auditorium with voices to match.  Ideally these should be young, and totally lacking in the fuzzy accretions a thoroughly matured voice seems to gain with the years.  In this respect Kent Opera’s recent performances of Figaro in the Theatre Royal in Brighton were exemplary.  There was a company young in all respects, with a fresh cast which had reached the stage where the voices were strong enough to allow the singers to revel in their growing prowess, but not such well-worn instruments that the performance went ahead on autopilot.  The orchestra was similarly unhackneyed in its playing, and sufficiently small that you could hear all the details without constant knowing nudges from the conductor, and of a size which never forced the voices.

What emerged from such propitious conditions was a performance which was fully credible and hence deeply enjoyable.  It also allowed the potential of Andrea Loader’s stunning Cherubino to show itself – surely the beginning of a great career.  If for no other reasons than this young singer’s glorious tone, bright-eyed intelligence and lissom body – all so right for the part – Mozart would have love this production.

(27.5.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - In Mozart's Garden

Index