At this point the matter of personal taste cannot be held off any longer. All artistic activity entails a response which differs from person to person. However, this does not mean that everyone's response is right, nor that everyone's response should be allowed to count. Now, this is not to forbid people from having erroneous responses, nor to deny them the pleasure their error may afford. But I think we really have to insist on the idea that there are some absolute standards in artistic production, and that the ability to recognise these standards is not instantly and stridently to be equated with snobbery or elitism. So then: some art is poor, and its defects can be itemised – and vice versa.
One objection that I can see here is that there are surely no absolute standards of artistic production, because art will always change to reflect the age in which it occurs and so standards cannot possibly be constant. Furthermore, the standards of the age of first production and those of the age of actual interpretation may be out of sympathy. Under these circumstances, one age could write another one off as 'sub-standard' when in fact the issue was more one of mutual incomprehension. As a neo-Elizabethan, I get rather a lot out of Georgian poetry, but if I'd been a Victorian, I most likely would have rejected large swathes of it. The answer is to make a distinction between matters of style and matters of craftsmanship. One can appreciate something as being not to ones taste and yet equally perceive that it is well-designed and made (though this judgement can take an effort). As such, I do not claim that the poems I selected below are irresistible and will not require that you like them. I do insist, however, that they are well made.
A second objection is that I am being a crashing bore. Why shouldn't I just read Wilhelm Mueller, or ignore him, and stop writing dreary essays about him? This kind of argument has a very funny model in Larkin's essay 'The Pleasure Principle', but it is precisely this kind of can't-be-arsed attitude which, applied en gros, fosters spiritual and intellectual delinquency. And in any case, balls.
Rhyme is poetry’s most distinctive feature and it comes in the varieties good and bad. In general, good rhyme keeps the poem moving; bad rhyme brings it to a halt. This does not mean that good rhyme cannot be trenchant or insistent. The villanelle is one of the most effective poetic structures; its recurrent patterns can become beautifully hypnotic. In the case of poems treating nostalgic subjects, the emotional impact of a villanelle is unsurpassable. Comic verse, meanwhile, frequently relies on a thumping rhyme for its effect, as witness the limerick. But there is always movement. In the limerick, the scheme (aided by the dactylic metre) takes us inexorably towards the punchline; in the villanelle, the patterns constantly draw us forwards and backwards at once. In poor poetry, by contrast, the progress is bumpy and tedious, the rhyming couplets reached in the manner of a fat commuter ascending the topmost emergency steps at Covent Garden underground station. It is this wheezing ‘on the road/I met a toad’ stuff that characterises most amateur bereavement poems and makes them so thoroughly dire. The real problem, however, lies deeper. Where rhyme is poor, more often than not, it has got in the way of the poem and asserted itself as a prior requirement to the expression of sentiment or feeling.
In both Ozymandias and Wandrers Nachtlied, rhyme is present, but discreetly. In Ozymandias, the scheme is irregular and never settles, subtly deferring the brain’s culturally-acquired need for the cadence and leaving us airborne. We open with ABAB – land/stone/sand/frown, though the half-rhymed B instantly leads us on to seek something more. What we get is an extra A rhyme (command) which deliberately weakens the opening quatrain and syntactically leads us straight over into a new CDC (read/things/fed). This quatrain, however, is interrupted by a new E rhyme, appear. The D-pair is resolved in the next line on ‘Kings’, and then we finish with EFEF, though of course there was an earlier E so this concluding quatrain is in fact not a concluding quatrain. Throughout the poem, the rhyming patterns are further confused by incidences of the various end-rhymes throughout the line – ‘stand’ in line 3, ‘sneer’ in line 5, ‘sands’ in line 14. As previously mentioned, frequent enjambement further softens the rhyming shapes by speeding us over the rhyme-point to seek the sense of the next line. At no point does the rhyme interfere with our interest in the traveller’s tale – in fact, at first reading, it is quite inconspicuous.
In Wandrers Nachtlied, the rhyme scheme is more regular: ABAB followed by CDDC. Again, however, rhyme is subordinate to the overarching poetic statement. The answering B rhyme on ‘Du’ carries us over into the new C rhyme on ‘Hauch’ and it is here that there is a semi-colon and a pause. The new statement is DDC – though the DD is not self-interested as the second D on ‘balde’ again carries us through to the final statement.
In many of Mueller’s poems, rhyme shoulders itself downstage. Consider the opening poem of Die Winterreise.
Fremd bin ich eingezogen,
Fremd zieh' ich wieder aus.
Der Mai war mir gewogen
Mit manchem Blumenstrauß.
Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe,
Die Mutter gar von Eh', -
Nun ist die Welt so trübe,
Der Weg gehüllt in Schnee.
Ich kann zu meiner Reisen
Nicht wählen mit der Zeit,
Muß selbst den Weg mir weisen
In dieser Dunkelheit.
Es zieht ein Mondenschatten
Als mein Gefährte mit,
Und auf den weißen Matten
Such' ich des Wildes Tritt.
The scheme and the syntactic parcelling are reliable and our brain is soon hurrying us on through the lines to the rhymes to satisfy itself. At this juncture, it is of course possible to argue that the regularity of the scheme is a deliberate device to symbolise the wanderer’s heavy tread and fatigue. I personally think that this interpretation is generous and prejudiced by an awareness of Schubert’s music. It is beyond doubt that Schubert has picked up on Mueller’s rhyme scheme and produced a song which emphasises its heaviness to dramatic and psychological effect, but I think the credit here for genius goes to Schubert and not to Mueller. More on this later.
The task of poetry, aided by rhyme and other devices, is described by Larkin in a more useful part of his aforementioned essay. In ‘The Pleasure Principle’ he says that the writing of a poem:
…consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.
Or paraphrased by Byron:
And feeling in a poet is the source / of others’ feeling.
(Don Juan III, 87)
‘The Strange Case’ accomplishes Larkin’s three stages. Ondaatje successfully sets off in me a simulation of the event, and of the mixed emotions of randiness, embarrassment, amusement and intrigue that the protagonist experiences. The same emotions could be elicited by a cruder anecdotal account at a drinking session in a bar. In a bar, however, somebody would inevitably feel the need to project a conclusion onto events and would almost certainly insinuate (or state outright) that the protagonist should clearly have got in there cos she’d have loved it. The poem, unresolved, is thus more innocent and even tender (with the dog as a comic pendant [ha ha]). More importantly, however, it faithfully represents the circumstances of the original incident, in which the protagonist was left as the sole human occupant of his vehicle, without macho male company to supply innuendo or insinuation, wondering whether in fact he clearly should or could have got in there and not quite daring to come to a conclusion one way or the other. Of course, the concept does not have to be straightforwardly visual. Wanderers Nachtlied does not paint a specific scene; the vocabulary is generic and conjures up a vague aggregate of any number of Caspar-David-Friedrichs-on-an-off-day. But what is transmitted is the soothing quality of the voice that says “balde / ruhest du auch”, and the quiet nature of the world around it. The poem successfully generates a small sacrosanct space into which we project our own individual longings for peace and quiet and other things, and thus recreates the space, whether real or imagined, that must have originally inspired the poet.
Very rarely, if ever, is there a sense that Mueller's poems spring from a sincere emotional source. They are pretty and neat enough, reading and rhyming in a satisfactory and satisfying way, but the words seem to stand in the way of an experience rather than transmitting one, and as such they fall short of poetry. It would be bullying to apply Housman's en masse verdict on English poetry of the eighteenth century to poor solitary Wilhelm, but it is substantially relevant:
It was in truth at once pompous and poverty-stricken. It had a very limited, because supposedly choice, vocabulary, and was consequently [p. 23] unequal to the multitude and refinement of its duties. It could not describe natural objects with sensitive fidelity to nature; it could not express human feelings with a variety and delicacy answering to their own. A thick, stiff, unaccommodating medium was interposed between the writer and his work. And this deadening of language had a consequence beyond its own sphere: its effect worked inward, and deadened perception. That which could no longer be described was no longer noticed.
_ Ozymandias (Shelley)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
The Strange Case (Michael Ondaatje)
My dog's assumed my alter ego.
Has taken over – walks the house
phallus hanging wealthy and raw
in front of guests, nuzzling head up skirts
while I direct my mandarin mood.
Last week driving the babysitter home.
She, unaware dog sat in the dark back seat,
talked on about the kids' behaviour.
On Huron Street the dog leaned forward
and licked her ear.
The car going 40 miles an hour
she seemed more amazed at my driving ability
than my indiscretion.
It was only the dog I said.
Oh she said.
Me interpreting her reply all the way home.
Wandrers Nachtlied II (Goethe)
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh',
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
_ What is a good poem? What makes a good setting of a poem good? Can a good song arise despite a bad poem; can a bad song spoil a good poem? Singers are familiar with these questions but, I think, rarely if ever undertake to consider them seriously. Usually, they must be prevented by the necessity of getting the song memorised and trained into the voice for performance. Once the performance is over, another performance and associated learning period arise and so the song slips into the background as something good or bad which either “must be performed again” or which will hopefully never be re-encountered. Still, I very rarely hear singers express judgements on poems. The working routine just described explains this reticence up to a point, but I do not think it is enough. More generally, I think that there exists amongst singers a vague sense that poetry is not our expertise and that, as such, we have no right to criticise it. This sense, superficially respectful, is in turn actually a sub-sentiment of a national suspicion of artistic and intellectual activity which is of good pedigree and well-documented. For a particularly beautiful expression of it, here is the gentleman John Dennis writing in 1706.
What must those Strangers say, when they behold Englishmen applaud an Italian for Singing, or a Frenchman for Dancing, and the very Moment afterwards explode an Englishman for the very same things? What must they say, unless they have Candour enough to interpret it this way, that an Englishman is deservedly scorned by Englishmen, when he descends so far beneath himself, as to Sing or to Dance in publick, because by doing so he practises Arts which Nature has bestowed upon effeminate Nations, but denied to him, as below the Dignity of his country, and the Majesty of the British Genius.
It is likely that a majority of the British population, if polled today, would agree that opera, and indeed most artistic-intellectual activity, is indeed still to be considered as fit only for frog and eye-tie jessies, or maybe at a push Liberal Democrats. Poetry, frequently the most private and personal of all the arts, would almost certainly be viewed with the most suspicion. What British social gathering's deepest fear is not the coughing proclamation by one of their number that he or she has composed a few lines? Glances are exchanged, wine is gulped in preparation and hands grip the arms of chairs more tightly, it is like passengers on a trans-Atlantic flight who have just been informed by the pilot that there is a spot of turbulence ahead, ladies and gentlemen. The only instance in which poetry is publicly tolerated in Britain today is at bereavements, and the standard there is of such a miserably low level that tears are a well-nigh inevitable, if ironic, consequence. Nobody cares though, because nobody has the necessary apparatus of discernment. It is a poem, people will tell you, so-and-so is desperately sad, of course you can understand they wanted to do something, they can't play the guitar and so a poem it had to be. This species of philistinism, which turns a blind eye to dross, is possibly even more offensive than that which spurns quality. Singers, as members of the jessie tribe, have no right to adopt Majestic British postures, but we do, just as we take out cable TV subscription packages and order kitchen refurbishments which we cannot afford but which our friends in regular jobs can. It all helps to sustain us in our protest that an artistic career is something which unfairly ambushed us at an inattentive and vulnerable stage of our life and that we could be just as good a hedge fund manager as our friend Goldsporsche is if only we didn't have so many gigs with the Gabs.
I would like to start the fightback with what is to my mind the unremarkable assertion that Wilhelm Müller, the man whose works have been set into two of the greatest monuments of the Lieder genre which in turn supply some of the most important yardsticks by which any serious artist, aspiring or established, is measured, is a rotten poet. If uttered in a song class at the Royal Academy of Music, or over apple crumble at Wigmore Hall, this statement would probably result in a ruck. Suitably suppressed, the bloodied apostate would be taken to some appropriate office and berated in jehovoid terms by the highest-available official. Once again, we are dealing with a species of philistinism. Because Müller is the poet set by Franz Schubert, because his poems supply the lyrics for some exceptionally beautiful songs, the average British vocal studies student and concert-goer will capitulate. But this is to state that the tag is a guarantee. No-one familiar with Premier League football would accept this. There is not a club that has not paid useless millions (oh the number of CDs of Dresden baroque they could have financed!) for a glossily-trailered pup who has subsequently failed to deliver on a pennyworth of his price. Well then, just as we do not accept that the fact that Manchester United have given a Rajah's ISA for him means he can kick, so we should not accept that the fact that Schubert has set him means he can write. And so we are back at the beginning. What is a good poem?
4. European Baroque Academy (Bach Mass in B Minor), Sept-Oct
We performed Bach's Mass in B Minor 12 times in early Autumn, one-to-a-part, two-to-a-hotel-room. In many ways, the experience was so large as to defy reduction; when asked by French TV to specify something that I had learned during the course, I could only manage a GCSE er. I'm still not sure what I learned, exactly. Musically, I was always down with the fact that the Mass is incredible; I'd always been happy with the reduced-forces idea. I suppose one thing I learned from Sigiswald Kuijken is that musicianship does not have to mean showmanship. The concerts varied; some good, some not so. The final show at Avignon, however, really was GOTY standard, with applause breaking out, incredibly, before the final note had finished.
5. Ledders (Bach St Matthew Passion, Amersham Festival), 9th April
Iain Ledingham is a Royal Academy of Music institution, devoted to his students. Everyone in the building will agree that he wins Ledingham Of The Year annually against all-comers in the phonebook. He is overdue a commendation in the Queen's lists (I mean it), and if the R.A.M. doesn't award him the Bach Prize once he's finished leading their Cantata cycle at what I privately reckon works out at about £2/hour, I am going to go round and do something unspeakable on the front steps. From the start, Iain has given his students opportunities to develop by booking them as soloists for his choral society and festival engagements. Among many students given such chances this year, I got to tackle my first St Matthew Passion as Evangelist. It was an unforgettable experience and I thank him whole-heartedly for it. The moment of pure terror I experienced when a fragment of interval hob-nob (Guy Fawkes Biscuit Of The Year) suddenly detached itself from my oral cavity to join the air-stream just before "und ging heraus" will hopefully abide un-equalled.
6. La Nuova Musica (Schein/Gesualdo/Allegri, Snape), April 23rd
I work with David Bates on a sometimes hourly basis as LNM's producer. DB is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs I can imagine, utterly devoted to the success and development of his creation. LNM has had an extraordinary year, signing a record deal with harmonia mundi USA, setting up some really superb performance fixtures for 2012 and beyond, and developing new organisational strength. So much of my time with David is spent talking about utterly unmusical things, frequently Microsoft or Apple-mediated, that it is doubly refreshing to join the ensemble as a singer and be reminded of his musical excellence and single-mindedness. This Easter performance was memorable for a really LNM take on Allegri's Miserere, with top Cs and ornaments all day from Ali Hill - and shudder-a-bar fun in the Gesualdo, who I'm sure would have liked Terry Gilliam films if he'd had the chance to see them.
There's quite a few things on my mind at the moment, but this is the time of year for round-ups and accolades. So here are my GOTYs (Gigs Of The Year). Looking at them, it strikes me that many of them are characterised by artistic and promotional endeavour. As a young musician, it's easy to set your sights solely on winning prestigious competitions, Young Artist placements, etc - that is, to align yourself with and define yourself by reputations which are already there. But the more rewarding thing is to create the new story - to define your own success and achievements for yourself. So many of the colleagues listed below have done just that, and I doff my tinkly-belled festive cap to them. As everyone's favourite fireside pornographer Anais Nin put it, "life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage". And so, in order of recollection:
1. William Vann (London English Song Festival), March- April
Are you a London-based accompanist? Are you paying the News of the World to hack Roger Vignoles' medical records to find out whether he might die soon so that you can actually get a Lieder gig? Shame on you. Do what Will Vann did and found your own festival with your own network of musicians. He opened up a new venue - Camden's super Forge - as a reputable Art Song-otheque in the process, and hit it with an uncompromisingly carefully-selected set of programmes. In total, he deployed 12 artists across five concerts featuring over 25 composers. If you combine all those numbers, you may even get the total number of pints consumed by all participants of that wonderful Italian lager they've got on tap there, the name of which I've forgotten, but which goes up there as joint Beer of the Year (BOTY), along with Deuchars IPA.
2. Christopher White (Mahler Centenary Concert, R.A.M.), 18th May
Are you a London-based etc etc etc. Chris deservedly earned a mention from Alex Ross for providing London's only official on-the-day centenary tribute to Gustav Mahler. And I'm willing to bet that no-one worldwide put more individual effort in than he did. Every single one of Mahler's songs was performed in four concerts throughout the day, all in the R.A.M.'s David Josefowitz Recital Hall. Not only that, but they were supported by Chris' commentaries, spoken and written, which were quite at Graham Johnson level. Did I mention that he played brilliantly too? All in all, his achievement was only equalled by that of the R.A.M.'s academic department, which managed not to attend a single note. Faineant Academic Recluses of The Year (FARTY).
3. Academy of Ancient Music (Witches and Devils, London & Cambridge), 31st October, 1st November
I love working for the AAM. If they wanted to rest on their laurels, they have a barn-full of them. But they're just not interested in that. No group I'm involved with works the multifarious task of being a front-line professional ensemble so hard or well. There's the programming, the rotating artistic leadership, the collaborations, the outreach, the access and education, the opening-up of new audiences and venues. You could call me a sycophant, or you could just belt up and be grateful for the fact that this country's home to such a great organisation. The 'Witches and Devils' programme this Autumn was, for me, pure AAM. The user-friendly hallowe'en badge was not an excuse for a naff concert, but a considered embarkation point on a truly unusual and entertaining traverse of the Baroque's fascination with the occult and kooky, much of it really captivatingly sung by soprano Rebecca Bottone. It introduced me to Charpentier's 'Medea' in the process, which, despite manifold and multiple opposition, triumphs as French Baroque Musical Tragedy Performed At Baroque Pitch Of The Year (FBMTPABPOTY).
I tried to sustain the Euro-life. But, as with all processes of grief, acceptance eventually follows denial. So I've ditched the beach wear (not so good for Thornton Heath, though I reckon I could work up a tan if I stood by the Morley's chip fryer for long enough), stopped pretending that I only drink espresso, darling, and put myself back on train-delay-beating Pint'o'ccino, the two-handled variety. England! with all thy faults I love thee still. But there’s no danger of melancholy. For one thing, there’s simply too much to be getting on with. With my producer’s hat on, there’s three Messiahs to make highways straight for – two by La Nuova Musica and one, a daring two-to-a-parter, by Solomon’s Knot. David Bates and I shot a brief video at Christchurch Spitalfields this afternoon for the former, which I’m looking forward to seeing in (hopefully heavily-) edited form. Then there’s Julian Forbes, tenor, to take care of. Auditions are happening round about now for Le Jardin des Voix, the Academy of Aix-en-Provence, the Steans Music Institute at Ravinia and a number of UK-based opera companies. And there’s plenty of Handel to work up: not just Messiah, but also Acis and Galatea next week; I’ve also bought the scores of Judas Maccabeus and Let God Arise in order to do some advance reconnaissance for performances next year. It’s a funny time of year in which a lot of the singing you do isn’t really for show – auditions aren’t performances so much as demonstrations of capacity. Think of it as being like giving a handyman’s quote. “Arcan dooyer mod'rut passagework ferthat, frowinna coupla Beeflats, though inear, I woodenwanterbee puttin'in mushmorevanan A. Cash upfwront would be nice, no cheques ifphewcan‘elp it, fanks. Tea? Luvvly.” The circumstances are often adverse: tough times of day, uninspiring locations. But this autumn’s auditions are next summer’s job, next year’s Lisbon beach, next years’ Collegio Ghislieri. !Ayme! Dear Ghislieri. But, really, there’s no danger of melancholy. I’ve got Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy on the go . If you haven’t read at least a few pages of this Stuart self-help manual, I urge you to do so. Discover the malign properties of beans, cabbage and ‘Venus omitted’. Learn the nine orders of devils, and their ruling princes. Acquire any number of pretentious Latin tags, perfect for a gently enigmatic blog-conclusion. See you in December. Ave atque cave.
Friday 14th October - concert no.10, Opéra de VichySunday 16th October - concert no. 11, Opéra d'Avignon At the end, it seemed, everything moved so much faster. We arrived in Vichy by night on the 13th, tired and cramped, but veterans of the sensations. The next day, we struggled for references to explain and describe the town’s air of genteel defeat. There were no children, only elderly convalescents there to combat weight with daily spa treatments and nightly menus diététiques. Marie and I went to one of the spas one morning, early. It was like heaven’s porch, bright white and almost silent, the heavy steel lifts moved up and down noiselessly as if on water columns. A staircase spiralled up the atrium on a tubular structure that looked like a spine. In the pools and saunas, the large patients were not relaxing, did not have their eyes closed in pleasure, but were looking hard straight ahead into a blank distance, waiting for a calorie to go, thinking of the Last Diet. Sorry luv, life’s orf. On the 14th, the opera was huge and sprawling, and there was no sign of its company which had yet to arrive for the new season. There were several floors of dressing rooms above ours, lights off. Perhaps ghosts walked; at the bottom of the staircase, a plaque bore the names of company war dead, including, surprisingly, a Mme. In the evening, there was a huge audience, which somehow didn’t make any sense because we’d only seen about a hundred people in the whole town all day long. We speculated that they had been extracted from cryo-fridges, packed in tweeds, herringbones and dull polyesters, and vanned in. On the 15th, we took our final bus-ride to Avignon. The final events had been piling up for a while: the final flight, the final motorway service-station meal, the final Missa/Symbolum/Sanctus for our various singer-shifts. This one was significant and suddenly, as we crossed the Rhone into Avignon, we all got demob-happy and started punching each other with water-bottles and giddy-jumping. It sort of stayed like that all the way towards the final concert, it was right that there was a vast carousel parked directly in front of the opera house. They’d told us to be fearful of this place’s acoustic, apparently the 15th or 16th Ambronay Academy nearly took the decision to scupper the ship here after the first rehearsal. Actually, it wasn’t so bad, in fact, it demanded the least effort of any building we’d ever sung in. The concert was wonderful, even though I was only on stage for the last twenty-five minutes as part of Shift Sanctus. For the final Dona Nobis Pacem, exceptionally, all thirteen singers stood up to sing, and balls to bad luck. The audience seemed again like they’d been specially delivered, but this time from a depot specialising in enthusiasm, because for the first time this tour, they started clapping the moment we stopped. Then, when we gave them Dona Nobis one more time as an encore, they started clapping before we’d finished. Things continued made-to-order. It was all hugs and kisses and tears and real emotion backstage, we’d all worked undeniably so hard and now it was over, and even better, there was a party to go to at the Hotel Europa, a hum-dinger with wine sloshing everywhere and dinky canapés and rich and polite and slightly ignorant audience members asking me if I was a bass and Gabriel if he was a castratro. Gabriel told them a lot of things about the distribution of tessitura with particular reference to the time of Charpentier but me, you could have called me Maureen, I’d have been down with that, that night. I’ll pass over the party in the Irish Bar that happened afterwards. Authors in the old days knew very well that certain things were best left with the veil drawn over them. And I think they did that not out of prudery, but because they knew well that the unspoken and the untold are the most exciting and vivid things of all. So let me be a bugger and madden you by saying that, yes, that party was great and we all, without exception, danced, drank and played a blinder. I’m writing this in an orange-papered hotel room in the centre of Avignon, finishing up. It's Tuesday evening, everyone's long gone and I'm enjoying the second of two days of holiday. It is half-past-eight. Time to go for dinner. I’ll get a steak and a wine somewhere on the Place de l’Horloge. And I’ll think, I guess, about people, faces and voices, places, times, journeys. I’ll try and make some links, try to draw things together into a combined image. I won’t succeed. But actually, the world makes sense of things for you if you just wait for it to explain. Already, I have found four things which are helping me to understand what has happened. Firstly, that invitation to go right back to the beginning and sing in Pavia on Friday. I’ll be taking a taxi, train and plane at exactly the same times I took them on September 14th. Secondly, I found a copy of Stendhal’s Chroniques Italiennes here in an Avignon bookshop, the author who I had in mind the night before I left. Thirdly, a copy of a Klemperer / New Philharmonia Orchestra recording of the Mass in B Minor. I’m listening to it right now. There’s hundreds of singers and players per part, the tempi are colossal, the Commendatore should be entering any minute by the sounds of it, Nicolai Gedda’s singing the Benedictus in about five hours’ time at the present rate. It’s sort of hideous to listen to after this last month, but it’s also, funnily, the thing which tells me most about what, musically, we’ve spent the last month doing. And the final thing is a piece of poetry. It’s by Goethe. Normally the moment I hear or see myself mentioning Goethe I instantly rebuke myself for unforgivable pretentiousness. But his poem came to mind in a sublime fashion this time, honestly, and when I looked it up, I discovered that it was the right answer to all those questions that will assail my head in the restaurant. Here it is, Dauer im Wechsel. (And for non-German speakers, a translation is here: http://colecizj.easyvserver.com/pgvc5209.htm). Hielte diesen frühen Segen, Ach, nur eine Stunde fest! Aber vollen Blütenregen Schüttelt schon der laue West. Soll ich mich des Grünen freuen, Dem ich Schatten erst verdankt? Bald wird Sturm auch das zerstreuen, Wenn es falb im Herbst geschwankt. Willst du nach den Früchten greifen, Eilig nimm dein Teil davon! Diese fangen an zu reifen, Und die andern keimen schon; Gleich mit jedem Regengusse Ändert sich dein holdes Tal, Ach, und in demselben Flusse Schwimmst du nicht zum Zweitenmal. Du nun selbst! Was felsenfeste Sich vor dir hervorgetan, Mauern siehst du, siehst Paläste Stets mit andern Augen an. Weggeschwunden ist die Lippe, Die im Kusse sonst genas, Jener Fuß, der an der Klippe Sich mit Gemsenfreche maß. Jene Hand, die gern und milde Sich bewegte, wohlzutun, Das gegliederte Gebilde, Alles ist ein andres nun. Und was sich an jener Stelle Nun mit deinem Namen nennt, Kam herbei wie eine Welle, Und so eilt's zum Element. Laß den Anfang mit dem Ende Sich in eins zusammenzieh'n! Schneller als die Gegenstände Selber dich vorüberflieh'n. Danke, daß die Gunst der Musen Unvergängliches verheißt: Den Gehalt in deinem Busen Und die Form in deinem Geist.
Monday 10th October – concert no. 8, Église Saint-Roch, Paris Wednesday 12th October – concert no.9, Bélem Cultural Centre, Lisbon The journeys are overlapping and nowhere really makes sense any more, the mind never has enough time to shrieve itself of its skin of claustrophobia and boredom and stretch out and feel and smell and know the new place. Since we are modern travellers, and all the moving is done by engines and jets and conveyor belts, the journey itself brings no sense of accomplishment either, we stand in tonight's lobby and wait truculently for our keys. Yes, we are becoming sarcastic in our attitude towards place. Bach’s B Minor Mass is always there to turn us once more into creators and do-ers, but I think we know that any world in which the only reality and sense of self is achieved for a two and a half hours in every forty-eight, on a stage, beheld by hundreds, playing baroque music, is not entirely correct. It is still marvellous and it still fascinates, but it seems to be taking on the status of a hard-core drug. Kyrie – here we are! Sentience! Dona nobis pacem. Thank you and good night. Where's my suitcase? But some experiences are strong enough and reality returns, even if it does not seem like it can be entirely trustworthy: Let me sing you a song of the Portuguese sea. But I can’t, I’m too bewildered. How can it be that I am in this warm water, twenty-five or more degrees of heat gripping my skin, and it is October 11th? Only two days ago I was in Paris, the shop windows were full of big trench coats, detective coats, fat-knit scarves, a day before I was in Antwerp and the flagstones were slick with rain, there was wind and chill in the air. And now I am mildly tipsy from terrible but icy white wine, sated with not especially good but olive oil-slicked cod and new potatoes, and I am in the sea, and it is October 11th. It is bizarre, it is a freak occurrence, we must have dropped through a hole in the space-time continuum, maybe this is where the neutrinos come on tangential holidays before arriving at their destinations ahead of schedule. I am in the sea off the Portuguese coast. The sun is hot on my shoulders and I am warm through to my bones, I am dancing in the sea-water, being dandled backwards and forwards by the sea in October, in Antwerp it is raining and in England it is blowing holes in wedding marquees overnight and people are swarming a bride with umbrellas and here. There is no wind. The sun is heavy and bold. It is October 11th and I am in the sea off Portugal. Now it is October 13th and I am in Vichy and the windows are full of scarves again. An email in my inbox contains an invitation to return to Pavia next week, after a day's turnaround in London, for a concert project with Giulio Prandi and Ghislieri Musica. After a month of all this travelling, in which practically no place has any meaning , in which distance is meaningless, why should Pavia not be home? I shall go to Pavia next week.
Fri 7th October - Toulouse – Paris CDG and then a bus up the long NE French corridor towards Belgium. This is the time-hallowed merchant corridor, long lorries growl into the night. I buy Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow at CDG and read half of it en route. What an author. It’s the honesty that I like, and the fact that the precocity is still there, he’s still thrusting off the page at you in TPW just like he did in Rachel Papers, in fact it’s fascinating to compare them, RP written about a young man by a man still young and in the situation, TPW written about a young man by an older man who thiss time is also present as a mysterious mediator. Still the wonderful ability to be bang-on funny about the silly stuff too. A short conclusive paragraph about a fart is almost the funniest thing I’ve read all year. The bus driver is a cretin. He gets lost upon arrival, we circle Antwerp for forty minutes before he homes in. Fury, utter fury. For several people, Antwerp is a city of meeting other halves, there are girlfriends waiting at the bar for Nico and Bruno looking just splendid.
Sat 8th October – concert no. 7, Centre AMUZ, Antwerp
Welcome to rainy Belgium. Welcome to the land of beer. And people drawn with thicker lines, they’re charcoal and pastel portraits and not fine pencil sketches like the Italians. And the diet is drawn thicker too. In the land of rain, people take refuge in warm pubs and restaurants and they eat and drink big meat pieces with hefty sauces, they have thick newspapers with them to read and only occasionally do they look up at the window which is beaded and running with raindrops, there is no great big blue to sit and contemplate like there was in Italy. Baczinsky and I head to a place recommended by the waiter at a café, Zeppo’s, Baczinsky orders mussels and I get a green curry, we both order frites on the side. It arrives quickly and in wonderful quantity, it is a prince of curry.
Back in Mellor, my dear friends Angus and Sarah are getting married. The same rain and wind which are falling here are falling there too, a strong gust tore a hole in the wedding marquee last night according to an email I get from Mum passing on news from Sarah’s mother Karen. I call best man Jimbob from my hotel room and have a shouted conversation with Fung, briefly. He says that Sarah looks gorgeous and that he’s married. I tell him I love him and Sarah, this guy has been my honorary big brother for years. One of the first things I did when I first came to London was to see a piss-poor production “Gadaffi” at ENO with Sarah and my mate Jonny. Gadaffi is now deposed and Sarah is married. Time. Time. Always time.
After tonight’s concert, for the first time, a party at the venue. I have six Trippel beers, which makes even the locals sit up and take notice.
Sun 9th October - On the coach, why not start trying to order some thoughts about contemporary trends in Baroque music? It’s either that or listen to Bruno trying to put some gloss on his obsession with Parisian prostitutes through tenuous references to their frequent appearance in posh Portuguese literature of the 19th century.
My first idea was that there are two emergent trends in Baroque music performance at present, and I gave them the categories of Baroque Sexy and Baroque Buff. In the Baroque Sexy category I placed William Christie and Emmanuelle Haim and the Toronto company Opera Atelier, artists who as far as I can tell from their recorded offerings and marketing place emphasis on the looks of the performers, everything has to be beautiful and toned, bums in tights put bums on seats. Their performances remind me of the ground floor of grand department stores, these women who are so damned SERIOUS about beauty. I hasten to add the fact that I am a great admirer of the results. In Baroque Buff I placed Benoit Haller, Richard Egarr and Leonardo Garcia Alarcon, all men who are themselves physically big in one way or another and who impose that physical presence on their performance. Watch Haller conducting Schuetz Psalms on YouTube and he pumps his arms like a koto drummer, Richard Egarr has conspicuous arms too, biggies like a Romanian deadlifter and he sets about the harpsichord like Duke Ellington would have done, Alarcon I’ve never seen but all the pictures on the CDs I’ve got tell me he’s of the same school, plus he puts percussion into everything willy-nilly to get it thumping, he puts it into motets by Peter Phillips for chrissakes, the results are absolutely gloriously inauthentic. But these categories are lazy things, the kind of thing just about forgivable if you’re a journalist writing for an airplane magazine. The more you try to shoehorn people in to them, the more you have to accept that they just don’t fit. But it is true that there is a development afoot. My mate Tim and I came across some of its outlines as we did a comparative listening day a month or more ago to a whole slew of Saints Johns Passions. We decided to begin with John Eliot Gardiner as representing the threshold of the old vs new, and also as being the recording that we still felt to be the modern benchmark when we were at university.
What surprised us was how little of the ‘new’ JEG seemed to represent, or perhaps better to say how much we’d both expect to be at the point shown in JEG’s recording within 5 minutes of a rehearsal for any pro group in London now. Not in terms of quality and finished product, I just mean phrasing, texture, etc. The next thing that surprised us was the almost total lack of vocal impact from the soloists. Only AR-J and Cornelius Hauptmann sound like adults with voices redolent of experience. Everyone else is lamb-white and soft-handed, superannuated choral scholars of course, never experienced anything worse than a wait in an airport (but oh the injustice!). In particular, Stephen Varcoe’s Jesus sounds almost ridiculously young and featureless. At a subsequent stage we listened to Benoit Haller and co. From the first entry we instantly heard an ensemble of differentiated adults with individual wobbles and tones, not a choir. Almost every singer has personality and brings it to bear. This, I think, is the development. Our generation of baroque musicians is impatient with baroque music and has a need to do something with it. Part of the reason for this is that the previous generation has recorded pretty much everything it did and this generation has listened to much of it many many times. So we can’t be satisfied with just another account because we’re humans of the 21st century and that means we have to put our personal mark on things, even if it turns out that a million other people share our personal mark. And that is what you have in Christie, Haim, Egarr, many of my present friends and colleagues. The official line is that they want to get to the heart of the baroque, that they want to let its inner genius speak. In fact, they want the baroque music to access their own hearts and to unlock it and to let their own inner genius speak, because they sense, on some level, that contemporary culture does not provide adequate material for their hearts to be unlocked and for their souls to speak. All of us performing baroque music, and renaissance music, are making use of the superior emotional registers of a time pre-facebook, pre booty-calls, pre everything online, pre twenty-four hour Tesco, to nourish our selves and our emotional fields to turn them into long-grass commons running with cow-parsley, nettles, docks, daisies, bluebells, treed with cherry, larch, oak, apple, to overgrow the long fairways of the 21st century mind.
5th October – the first flight, Milan-Toulouse. Airports are magnets for human stupidity, it must be the imminent encounter with the impossible airborne habitat that makes people foolish. Someone has brought a suitcase weighing 30 kilos, and only here and now in the airport do they look at it as an object has to be transported and transportable, the requirement that it be this and not a small wardrobe is a phenomenon to them which the airport has revealed like some dastardly cackling magician. So there are tears and a lot of waiting, but finally we are up in the sky and it is marvellously clear. The pilot puts the nose down fifty miles past Marseille and we are in Toulouse.
6th October - concert no.6, Cathédrale de Toulouse
Toulouse is posh and yummy-mummyish. Everything is being calibrated for smart city living, the entire Rue Alsace-Lorraine is being pedestrianized. Lots of boutiques, the wall of cocoa vapour which comes from one shop knocks me sideways and then yanks me indoors. I buy two packets of gorgeous-looking fragments to supplement our dinner.
Once again, I get my strongest feeling of the scene and the change of scene upon entering the church. This is a tall Gothic vault, kindred with buildings in Paris and York and Roskilde. There is less decoration but vast structural ambition, this building’s architects were of the same mind as their Northern European Victorian successors who decorated minimally but made the sheer scale of the project in itself the thing of beauty, Forth Bridge, Titanic, Menai Bridge, Stockport Viaduct. – the arches are colossal, the roof so high, and the organ surprises you when you turn around, it is apparently fixed to the wall on nothing more than a small stone lintel. It looks like a vast moth. I know that it stretches its limbs after dark when no-one is there, that a giant insect foot unlimbers from its casement and silently extends its segments down the wall.
Only slightly less implausible is the sudden appearance in front of me after the rehearsal of William Whitehead, who subsequently reveals over the course of tea nearby that he has owned a flat here for years. Normally William and I only see each other in the oak-bound vestry at Lincoln’s Inn, polystyrene beakers in hand. Now we are on the Cathedral place in Toulouse toting proper china bruv and this is clearly much more how the two of us were supposed to roll. William’s friend Clement arrives, he is preparing for the aggregation, the interview process for PhD candidates. His topic is English Literature and we hear about his development of fascination (lat origin fascinum, fallus) as a tool for literary analysis, with especial regard to E M Forster’s “Maurice”, a book which EMF was apparently compelled to write by the psychological-physical stimulus of a meeting with Edward Carpenter. It is wonderful to be taken round this playground of ideas which have nothing to do with Bach. On the subject of books, I have to start getting callous about the continued transport of finished paperbacks. Tomorrow morning before leaving Toulouse I will sacrifice John Le Carré The Looking-Glass War and Doris Lessing The Fifth Child to the Hotel Ibis chamber-maid. Unusually for Carrie, not convinced, feel like someone must have told him to throw some shapes à la Fleming/ Forsyth because the scenes in which they train Leiser up are self-conscious. The opening sequence is brilliant though. It's my first encounter with Lessing, I’m impressed. Her writing is unpretentious (unlike Le C.) and calm. The book is jolly odd and at the time of writing its effect is still percolating through my head.
Tonight I am back to singing the Missa. But there is a premiere in that for the first time we are performing at the west end facing east, and we get the best view. The festival has thrown some sexy money at the lighting department and the high alter is bathed in a Draculanian purple, a perfect setting for the Organ-Moth to clank about in.
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