Robin Holloway

Robin Holloway on the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic There was no space in my report last month, on a first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, for what was in retrospect its most exciting quart d’heure, a privileged informal investigation of the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic. This, I was kindly permitted to explore one afternoon.

The first-ever visit of this ardent Wagnerite to his festival at Bayreuth coincides exactly with my 20th anniversary of contributing this column to The Spectator. How satisfying to combine them! Whatever reservations, the experience of seeing all seven mature music dramas within nine days in Wagner’s own theatre was pretty mindblowing. I’ll begin by setting the scene. Arriving by rail, the initial aspect of the little town is somewhat humdrum — an impression later dispelled as one grows familiar with layout and feel.

One had confidently anticipated (‘The sex is better than ever!’ he burbled in excited undertone when I last met him a few years ago at a York University concert) that Wilfrid Mellers would make his centenary. His death this May at only 94 doesn’t sadden, however, so much as joyfully recall the wacky life force that invigorated and enhanced writing on music in this country (so often lacklustre) for some six decades. Since his death I’ve reread his half of the co-authored Man and his Music (1962 — even back then Wilfrid would surely wish to instate Woman into this title!). It covers the Classical style, Romantics early middle and late, and the 20th century up to his favourites: Tippett and Britten.

Since the recent death of Karlheinz Stockhausen, his compatriot Helmut Lachenmann, 73 this year, has inherited the Emperor’s mantle of grandiose invisiblity. I’m pitching it with provocative unfairness! Yet the struggle to extract gold from their mass of water or rock is beset with legitimate reservations that cannot be begged: Stockhausen the visionary charlatan–genius, Lachenmann the poet of exiguity — both present enormous problems to the would-be believer. In Madrid last week for completely different events, I chanced upon the Spanish première of Lachenmann’s Little Match Girl, a theatre-piece after Hans Christian Andersen, in a revised version, given without staging to open a brief season of avant-garde opera.

Robin Holloway on César Franck Once so sure in the pantheon, esteemed by composers and critical taste, beloved by players and audiences, César Franck appears nowadays to be almost universally reviled. Of the late handful of indubitable masterpieces, only the Violin Sonata still enjoys the affection, admiration and performances previously accorded the Piano Quintet, the Symphony, the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra, and the two sizable cycles for piano alone. Organists still adhere to the Chorales and other sticky products of this master of the instrument, the sole composer since Bach to give it a genuine œuvre, till joined by his successor Messaien.

Nothing is sacred or unchanging. One of Radio Three’s most reliable sources of musical pleasure, the weekly Saturday opera relay from the Metropolitan in New York, has recently rendered itself all but unbearable. Not in performance standards, which continue a norm of decency and are at best superlative — casting just about the best money can buy, distinguished conducting, wonderful orchestra — but by a surrounding framework of ‘presentation’ so Philistine, vulgar, moronic, as to nullify, even destroy, the essence of what the whole effort purports to convey. I’ve dipped into most of the current season’s repertoire and been so put off as not to survive the course complete; and heard two operas from start to finish.

It’s the best book about one of the greatest composers. I’ve devoted odd moments of this autumn and winter to absorbed intake of Hermann Abert’s Mozart and am lost in admiration for its achievement, simultaneous with renewed wonder and delight at the achievements of its subject. Though regrettable that this classic (it finally appeared in German between 1919 and 1921) has had to wait till now for a complete translation, there are compensating gains. Notably in the comprehensive updating, via hundreds of footnotes incorporating almost 90 years’ worth of further discoveries, biographical and textual.

It’s been commonplace ever since the widespread dissemination of sound recording, followed by the rapid growth of broadcasting, to deplore ‘the appalling popularity of music’: its inevitable debasement, when available so easily, into something ordinary rather than special, repeatable rather than unique, cursory rather than concentrated, disposable rather than sacral.

‘Where were you when they crucified the Lord?’; when news of Waterloo was brought, or the Mutiny, or the Charge of the Light Brigade, or the death of Victoria? Thence into living memory and universal communications — when Edward VIII announced his abdication; when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with ‘peace in our time’; when VE, then VJ, were proclaimed; when the Suez débâcle shocked the nation; when JFK’s assassination shook the world. All these except the last are before my memory begins to go beyond feeding the ducks and collecting civic clocks (anything from the high street jewellers to Big Ben himself).

Positively oceanic was the season’s principal novelty. It was not a new commission; rather, the rediscovery 440 years after its composition of the Mass in 40 parts by Alessandro Striggio, whose final Agnus Dei rises to a staggering 60, which ought to leave Tallis’s celebrated Motet (whose inspiration is reckoned to originate here) pale and gasping in comparison. Which is to hint already at disappointment. In the event (17 July) it was Striggio who paled.

Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city, revealing in one what the shocked pedestrian discovers slowly on foot: the huge proportion of the centre flattened for ghastly car parks, more devastating in their seeming permanence than the recent flooding, of which little trace remained on my four-day visit, so rapid and efficient the cleaning-up. By my third day, domestic tap water was declared safe to drink, restaurants and pubs were operating normally, and the millions of plastic bottles had served their purpose. Most efficient of all was the rescue of this year’s Three Choirs Festival, every event in place (with some changed venues) according to plan.

In idle mood — perhaps prompted by the news of terrible further flooding — I’ve just listened for the first time in many years to Peter Grimes. In idle mood — perhaps prompted by the news of terrible further flooding — I’ve just listened for the first time in many years to Peter Grimes. Idleness scarcely survives the excitement that involves the listener from the opening bar. It’s difficult to understand Britten’s later disclaimer to a young admirer embarked on his own first opera — ‘but Grimes is full of howlers!’ — for everything now, 60-plus years after, has long since seemed so absolutely right. These six decades have consolidated the work as a permanent cornerstone.

Scripts like sheep, marks dancing out of the ears; but amidst the academic year’s most frazzling fortnight there have been five successive events in Cambridge of pure ecstasy — pleasure more spiritual than carnal — chaste, severe, poised to ‘bring all Heaven before your eyes’. Thanks to collegiate generosity, the viol-consort Fretwork, finest of its kind, has enjoyed a term’s residency at Sidney Sussex, and just crowned it with evensongs in four other college chapels, each with its distinctive choir, style, building, acoustic, dipping a toe into the sea of 17th-century church music that uses this four-, five-, six-voiced ensemble to support the singers, and adding a rich selection of purely instrumental fantasias to open and close the five services.

The newly available recording of the 1955 Bayreuth ‘Ring’ Unlike my fearless and indefatigable colleague, I visit the opera with reluctance, expecting the worst and usually finding it. The almost universal betrayal in recent decades of this most complex of genres by hideous design and perverted production is never so sheerly ghastly as with the works of Wagner: among these the Ring offers the widest scope for traduction. I love and revere this colossal yet human monument so deeply (whatever passing moments of reservation or resentment) that witnessing its trials by mockery, malignity, ineptitude, inadequacy, tears a fibre from the brain like a six-lane motorway over a sacred landscape or a shocking demolition in a fine city centre. Why suffer so?

Every eager collector of books and scores has their special searcher, primed to keep an eye open for long out-of-print rarities at reasonable prices. Mine, like Jesus’ blood, ‘never failed me yet’. Her latest triumph is to have procured a copy of Ernest Chausson’s opera Le roi Arthus, posthumously produced in 1903, four years after his death at 44; never yet staged in this country, though there was a memorable concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago. I’d been on the lookout for the music for ages, and its eventual arrival brought down from the shelf the fraying tape of a previous recording dating back to 1987, to listen again to a work of rare nobility.

‘Made in Heaven’: the contrasts and complements linking Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky in two-way reciprocality form a felicitous marriage of true minds perfect for the week of wall-to-wall broadcasting on Radio Three covering (sometimes more than once) every note the two Russian masters composed.

A couple of Christmases ago I recommended in this column an exceedingly unfestive offering: Torsten Rasch’s song cycle/symphony Mein Herz brennt with its lacerating mix of heavy-metal pop and late romantic/early modern orchestral intensity, whose music wholly transcended the callow protest of its lyrics in unforgettable excoriation. This year, something at the opposite end of the expressive gamut: something charged with those rarest of qualities in the contemporary arts — joy, exuberance, happiness, delight, celebration, ecstasy; and all these without anything cheap or dumbed-out into puerility. To achieve such wide-eyed freshness without reneging upon a sophisticated modernist idiom and technique is already a paradox, and Julian Anderson’s music turns it into a triumph.