By the time you read these words, Elliott Carter — save for a wry ‘act of God’ — will have passed his 100th birthday, in full productive spate as he enters a second century. As Stephen Pettitt remarked (Arts, 29 November), every new Carter work appeared to be summatory; but there’s always been more. And further surprises: What Next?, the title of the first foray into opera (at the age of 90), has come to stand for everyone’s expectant attitude.
Perhaps most surprising of all in the late spate (nine new works last year, 11 this, the so-far high tide of an acceleration consistent since the mid-Eighties), is the virtual absence of any music sounding ‘old’ or ‘late’. One thinks of Fauré, Strauss, Vaughan Williams: distillation, strangeness, retrospect, farewell. One recent Carter score alone seems like the product of a very old man, a song-cycle on Wallace Stevens entitled In the Distances of Sleep, composed in 2006. Some passages of reflective amplitude betoken long, long experience, and one song goes beyond, into a region of bare austerity unique in this composer whose norm is fantastical busyness, accompanying the soprano simply with a single line passed among the strings from infinitely high to the bottom of the double basses.
However, the generality down recent decades can raise doubts amid the admiring astonishment. An irregular pattern alternates attractive/colourful/relatively accessible with rebarbative/featureless/fairly repellant, with an overall tendency towards dryness, aridity, abstraction, which on a bad day suggests sterility despite the unflagging vitality. One can miss the sense of Inner Necessity, that sine qua non without which fluency can degenerate into note-spinning.
In Carter’s earliest music, the now so distant pieces of the mid-Thirties to late Forties that include two ballets and a symphony, the model was mainstream all-American vernacular — confident, brassy, consciously up-front with New Deal optimism.
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