Starbucks and Old Vienna

The latest edition of Boosey and Hawkes’ trade newsletter, Quarternotes, contains a fascinating short interview with Viennese composer, Kurt Schwertsik. Asked why he favours the fleeting, everyday ‘music in the air,’ Schwertsik replies:

When I was searching for a basic strategy as an artist, John Cage was very important to me. He described how you could listen to everyday sounds – in the street, in nature, in conversations. I agree with Cage that we are people that live in the air…At Darmstadt I liked his Zen-inspired spiritual view…he reinvigorated my interest in the Dada movement.

Schwertsik is also one of the interviewees in Peter Dickinson’s acclaimed, CageTalk. There he describes his encounters with Cage at Darmstadt more fully:

He gave three lectures, including the “Lecture on Nothing” where he has those beautiful pauses. And he gave another lecture during which he lit cigarettes. Each one was somehow handled differently – smoked once, twice, not at all, or smoked to the butt.

Schwertsik goes on to describe Cage’s use of the I Ching in composing Music for Piano:

People were very upset. I remember Ligeti asking him if he would use chance operations and then select something that pleased him. He mentioned Kurt Schwitters, who used to look at the landscape through a little frame and then say, “Oh look, this is typical Schwitters!” He thought Cage might have been involved in an objet trouvé venture, which was not true – obviously.

Schwertsik was ostracized by Darmstadt as, under Cage's influence, he moved towards Dada:

I believe the function of art is to denounce seriousness. It should be fun. There’s a halo of awe around modern music. You achieve more if you’re not serious.

Hence, perhaps, the title of his 2007 composition for trumpet and orchestra, Divertimento Macchiato. “After the premiere,” he explains in Quarternotes, “my wife Christa suggested adding Macchiato to the title and this seemed perfect to me, as it captured an ironic image of modern so-called ‘designer coffee’ – more Starbucks than Old Vienna.”

Perhaps too it is fittingly Schwertsikian that he is incorrectly described as deceased in the second edition of Grove.

Divertimento Macchiato can be heard as part of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Scottish tour in April 2009, and his latest work, a ballet entitled Kafka Amerika, will be premiered in Linz in the autumn. CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage, edited by Peter Dickinson, is available from all good booksellers.

Songs of Protest in East Germany

On an Overgrown Path mentions the Lincoln Center concert of Music from the Other Germany which took place earlier this week. One should not forget that there was also a tradition of popular protest song in the German Democratic Republic, a theme explored by David Robb’s edited collection, Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s.

In the GDR the political song was not the commercial industry it was in the West, but nonetheless enjoyed a similar popularity due to its ambiguous position as either treasured revolutionary heritage or forbidden fruit in a climate of censorship. Indeed it was such a controversial force that the expatriation of the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976 caused a political scandal that many deem to have heralded the beginning of the end of the GDR.

After the euphoria of the Aufbau years, it is clear - at least from the 1970s onwards - that the theme of the stagnation and the betrayal of the revolutionary tradition takes precedence. This is continually stressed in the work of critical Liedermacher such as Biermann and Karls Enkel. Both of these take the theme of the Spanish Civil War - an event that had inspired the most utopian of political songs - to express their preoccupations with the GDR’s failure to progress toward utopia.

My own favourite among the West Germans is Konstantin Wecker. As Annette Blühdorn writes in her chapter, Wecker was never bound to Marxist philosophy, belonging somewhere between the idealism of the 1968 movement and postmodernism. Wecker believes in progress and sees songs as a means of enlightenment, but is sceptical of theories and of the ability of songs to change society. Rather he advocates a general form of resistance against ideological control and social conformity. This is evident in songs dealing with witch hunts against Andersdenkenden and songs written from the perspectives of social outsiders. In the last two decades he has supported the anti-globalization and the peace movement, his song “Sage Nein!” voicing his opposition to American military involvement in Iraq.

David Robb’s rather unusual first-hand experience performing semi-professionally in the GDR folk scene in the 1980s enables him to provide an insider’s view of the contradictions political singers encountered there. While his own chapter on the GDR examines literary and musical developments from the late 1970s onwards, it also describes the dilemma of many singers having to conform with a system in order to attain a public platform from which to criticize it. Robb offers a case study of the group Karls Enkel and its struggle to maintain artistic and political autonomy in the face of pressure from the notorious Stasi secret police.

Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s is published in hardcover by Camden House and may be ordered from all good booksellers.

Berkeley and Berners

Peter Dickinson, biographer of Berkeley and Berners, compares their aristocratic muses in this piece written for the Lennox Berkeley Society Journal. He and the Society have kindly allowed us to reproduce the piece here:

In The Music of Lennox Berkeley I mentioned that Berkeley had told me that he was introduced to his principal publisher, J. and W. Chester, by Berners. Berkeley thought it was ‘probably in 1933’ that he went to dinner at Berners’ London house, 3 Halkin Street, SW1. Nadia Boulanger was there too, and it is likely that Berkeley, who idolised her, was invited as her most significant British student. Berners would have known Boulanger from his visits to Paris, when he met all the composers grouped as Les Six in the early 1920s.

France was important to both composers. Berners’ scores were published with French titles and his opera Le Carosse du Saint Sacrement was produced in Paris in 1924 – so far not in England. Poulenc admired the opera, and became good friends with Berkeley when the younger English composer arrived in Paris in 1926. Twenty years later Berkeley dedicated his Five [de le Mare] Songs to Poulenc and his friend and collaborator, the baritone Pierre Bernac; following Poulenc’s death he set Apollinaire’s Automne in his memory and in 1978 he orchestrated Poulenc’s Flute Sonata.

Twenty years older than Berkeley, Berners had very little formal musical tuition, but, like Berkeley, he came to maturity abroad. After leaving Eton early, he spent time in France and Germany preparing for the diplomatic service. (His memoirs, The Chateau de Résenlieu and Dresden, dealing with the years around 1900, tell this early part of his life story in inimitable fashion.) After that he studied in Paris and elsewhere on the Continent, but failed to obtain a Foreign Office post until he went to Constantinople in 1911. Two years later, in Rome, he started composing seriously, under the spell of the Italian Futurists and composers such as Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero. Stravinsky was a personal friend and held Berners’ music in high regard. Berners also knew Diaghilev, whose designers Michel Larionov and Natalia Gontcharowa illustrated some of his sheet music published, at his own expense, by Chester around 1920.

Berkeley was first published by Chester in 1934 (Sonata No 2 for violin and piano; Polka, Op 5) but, unlike Berners, he then had several other publishers – Boosey & Hawkes, Schott and OUP – before becoming exclusive to Chester after 1940. The light blue covers to his sheet music – not the dark blue that might be expected for an Oxford man – were a Berkeley trademark for many years.

But what of their music? Berners had an obsession with waltzes, and Berkeley too has examples in the last movement of the Sonatina for violin and piano, Op 17; the second movement of the Concerto for Two Pianos, Op 30; and the late Palm Court Waltz, Op 81. But waltzes are nothing like as pervasive in Berkeley as in the Berners ballet scores or the earlier Valses Bourgeoises for piano duet. Berkeley would have known of Berners as a British modernist in the 1920s who, like him, turned his back on the British musical scene by living and working abroad.

Both composers were affected by Stravinsky. The works dating from the period of The Rite of Spring form the basis of Berners’ earliest avant-garde style, and Berkeley’s Paris reports for the Monthly Musical Record indicate how much he himself admired Stravinsky’s neo-classical works, especially the Symphony of Psalms.

Berners, however, diversified his creative life in the 1930s by painting and writing memoirs and novels. Berkeley, in his few articles and reviews, wrote stylishly, but, unlike Berners, he was a composer pur sang. In later life he told me he didn’t want to stop composing because he didn’t know what else he could do!

Knowing of Berkeley’s ancestry, reviewers have often used the term ‘aristocratic’ to describe his music. If by this they mean ‘fastidious’ and ‘poised’ – like the music of Mozart –then fair enough. Berners’ work was similarly ‘aristocratic’ in that he approached everything he did with dedication, and with what Lord David Cecil has called a ‘graceful, easy understated accomplishment’. Additionally, both composers wrote film scores.

But finally the comparison breaks down. Berkeley was modest to the point of self-effacement, while Berners defined himself with a high degree of eccentricity, and relished celebrity. Even more crucially, the spiritual dimension so central to Berkeley and his work was missing in Berners, who thought religion was simply a talent he didn’t possess. These are differences more profound than the patrician breeding they shared - Berners as a real peer, and Berkeley who just missed it.

Discovering Ivor

When I first became aware of Ivor Gurney in 1983, I never thought that one day I would write his biography. At the time I was only interested in him because he had been part of Gerald Finzi’s life. In 1982 I had founded the Finzi Society of America to promote wider interest in Finzi’s music and life there. The following year I wrote a brief article about Gurney and Finzi for my newsletter. I didn’t think much more about Gurney after that. To me he was little more than a footnote and Marion Scott was like a leaf on the wind, seen one minute then blown away and forgotten!

In 1984 I attended the Summer Weekend of English Music, a Finzi event held at Oxford, where I met Joy Finzi for the first time. Over dinner one night, my life was about to change in ways I could not imagine. Joy had read my article and started talking about Gurney and his family without any prompting from me. She told me about the work she and Gerald had done to preserve Gurney’s legacy and a little about some of the people involved. I don’t remember the details because they faded into the background when she launched into a description of the tailor’s shop run by Gurney’s brother Ronald in Gloucester. With her artist’s eye for detail and her poet’s sensibility for atmosphere, she described how the opening and closing of the door sent a breeze into the shop’s dark interior that lifted the corners of bolts of cloth giving them the illusion of ‘bats fluttering about’. It was an image I would never forget.

After our first meeting, Joy and I corresponded regularly and I would see her when I visited England. Inevitably she would turn to Gurney in her letters and in conversation. We never discussed Finzi. Was I being directed to look more deeply at Gurney, I began to wonder?

I decided that perhaps there was more to him than I realised so I re-read Michael Hurd’s biography, bought P.J. Kavanagh’s excellent edition of Gurney’s poetry, found a few recordings (LPs in those days) and enjoyed getting to know Gurney better.

When I was in England in 1988, Joy insisted on taking me on her own tour of ‘Gurney Country’. We set off on a dismal wet and windy September morning, coincidently the thirty-second anniversary of Gerald Finzi's death. As we headed west the rain stopped, leaving the landscape cloaked in a lingering white mist. I could see only hints of what lay in the shrouded distances. When we neared Gloucestershire, the sun broke through almost as if on cue. With Joy as my guide, I saw for the first time Ivor Gurney's Gloucestershire: the Cotswolds, Birdlip Hill, the city of Gloucester with its cathedral so central to Gurney's early life, and finally at the end of the day, the Parish Church of St. Matthew at Twigworth where Joy, tired by now, sent me off alone in search of Gurney's grave in the overgrown cemetery. I remember well the abandonment and neglect that then pervaded the church building, bordering on eerie with its cold stone façade and unkempt grounds. I felt unsettled. It was not a place of comfort.

Outside the church grounds I saw sheep grazing in a field and beyond that the pale blue line of the Cotswolds. Then I turned and saw May Hill with its distinctive cap of trees and I felt that Gurney was at least lying between the hills he loved. The grave itself was overgrown with grass and weeds, the marker pitted and covered with lichen. It was not what Marion Scott had in mind when she wrote to Gerald Finzi that ‘there is something tranquillising now in the thought of him lying at peace in Twigworth Churchyard’ in ‘an oak coffin lined with elm and cushioned with white satin’, after a burial that ‘befitted a poet’.

Joy Finzi's tour had come to a bittersweet climax. When we reached the motorway, rainbows began arching over the landscape. Sometimes we seemed to drive into them. They were all around us. Marion Scott, a metaphysician, would have interpreted them as a ‘sign’. Maybe they were, I don’t know, but by the time we returned to Joy’s home, I knew that Ivor Gurney was going to be in my life for a long time. - Pamela Blevins

Pamela Blevins' dual biography of Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott is available now from all good booksellers - you can read an extract here. For more information about Gerald Finzi, read Diana McVeagh's acclaimed biography and visit this website. The Clock of the Years, compiled and edited by Rolf Jordan, is an anthology of writings by and about Gerald and Joy Finzi.

Our books of the year

2008 has been an unforgettable year for new music books from the Boydell Press and the University of Rochester Press. To close this year’s posts on From Beyond the Stave we’d like to remind you of some of them and also some of the authors’ posts. You can win a free copy of one of these magnificent titles by answering a blog-related question (see below).

As the champagne corks pop around the world for his 100th birthday, we are pleased to publish Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents by Felix Meyer and Anne C Shreffler, in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation. "Lavishly illustrated, handsomely documented and superbly annotated," as the Financial Times pointed out, it is "for committed Carterites, the only acceptable Christmas present." The composer's own Collected Essays are also available again in paperback. One of the great interpreters of Carter's works for piano is Charles Rosen, whose work as a pianist and man of letters is the focus of a new collection of essays, Variations on the Canon, edited by Robert Curry, David Gable and Robert L Marshall.

Anyone with a serious interest in British music will want the fourth volume of Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten covering the years 1952-7, now published by the Boydell Press in association with the Britten-Pears Foundation. The three editors, led this time by Philip Reed, have produced another highly acclaimed volume: "Magnificent," said the Spectator, "the annotation continues to be quite superb - meticulous, imaginative, and illuminating". Similarly praised was Christopher Grogan's Imogen Holst: A Life in Music ("Magnificent" the Gramophone, "Excellent" TLS), published in 2007 but an excellent companion volume to the Britten Letters.

"I think Stravinsky was right to point to Berners as being one of the best English composers of the century. He didn't produce a lot of work but what he did produce was remarkable," is composer Gavin Bryars' view of the eccentric earl. Peter Dickinson's entertaining and illuminating collection of interviews with people who knew Lord Berners sheds new light on his life as a composer, painter and writer. Just published is Adrian Wright's biography of William Alwyn, The Innumerable Dance, the first full biography of a composer best known for his film music. Another neglected British composer is the subject of an acclaimed study by Leo Black, Edmund Rubbra: Symphonist. "Stylishly written and invitingly presented," said the Musical Times. Equally stylish is Pamela Blevins' double life of Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty. With the publication of this compelling book these two important figures in twentieth century British cultural life are finally receiving the attention they deserve.

Opera lovers will want to read Wagner and Venice, an engagingly written study by John W Barker, which looks at what Venice meant to the composer and how it, in turn, viewed him. Wagnerian travellers will also be interested in Richard Wagner's Zurich by Chris Walton which was published to great acclaim in 2007. However if Mozart is more to your taste, Ian Woodfield's study of Mozart's Così fan tutte will offer unique insights into the compositional history of this great work. Opera in Britain in the early part of the twentieth century owes a great deal to Thomas Beecham, who is the subject of a recent and highly-praised biography by John Lucas. "Brilliant," said the Gramophone; "engaging and erudite," offered Opera magazine; "thorough, exhaustive and often highly amusing," added Classical Music.

Early music enthusiasts and scholars will want to read Lorenzo Candelaria's Rosary Cantoral, a study of the rare and beautifully decorated Latin plainchant manuscript produced in Spain around 1500. It is strange to think that in the 1800s "Spem in alium" was not greatly admired, a fact we learn in Suzanne Cole's Thomas Tallis and his Music in Victorian England which comes highly recommended by Peter Phillips in the latest issue of the Musical Times. Susan Boynton and Eric Rice are the editors of a fascinating collection on Young Choristers 650-1700, the first full-length consideration of the role played by young singers over this extended period.

If the music of the 19th and 20th centuries is more to your taste, you'll enjoy Hugh Macdonald's collection of essays, Beethoven's Century, which range widely, mirroring the author's breadth and depth of interests. One area covered is French music, which is also the subject of a book edited by Barbara Kelly, French Music, Culture, and National Identity 1870-1939 which received four stars in a recent issue of BBC Music magazine. Hugh Macdonald is also one of the contributors to Peter Bloom's Berlioz : Scenes from the Life and Work. "Readers," Philip Borg-Wheeler wrote in Classical Music, "will derive great pleasure from this admirably produced collection." Beyond The Art of Finger Dexterity is the title of David Gramit's collection of essays on the multi-faceted Carl Czerny, which was praised by the Musical Times for its "usefulness, originality, [and] interest" as well as being "a good read."

These last titles were published in the Eastman Studies in Music series from the University of Rochester Press, who this year also published books on analyzing atonal music, music and mathematics (the Eastman Series' 50th title), musical phrasing in the eighteenth century and music of the Moravian church. Perhaps our most unusual book was a much-needed translation of Japanese composer Minoru Miki's classic Composing for Japanese Instruments which included two CDs.

To win one of the above simply consider the following question, the answer to which may be found in a previous posting on this blog: which Wagner “treasure” did Chris Walton discover after lunch with the daughter of a Swiss composer? If you know the answer, send it by e-mail to Michael Richards on mrichards[at]boydell[dot]co[dot]uk before January 15th 2009. I’ll contact the winner about which book you’d like and where to send it.

From Beyond the Stave will be back in early January. Until then may we wish you a very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year from all at Boydell & Brewer and the University of Rochester Press.

Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter!

To celebrate Elliott Carter’s 100th birthday, we have published – in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation - Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait by Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler. Here Professor Shreffler relates how the book took shape:

No one who has ever visited the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel will ever forget the stunning view of the Rhine from the reading room windows. Nestled away in a corner of one of Basel's most picturesque town squares, across from the 900-year old cathedral, the building houses not medieval manuscripts, as the surroundings suggest, but rather the largest private collection of documents relating to 20th and 21st-century music in the world: Stravinsky, Webern, Bartok, and Boulez are only a few of the more than 100 collections.

I remember very well how one day in 1988, my attention was diverted from that seriously distracting view of the river and the Webern manuscripts I was studying by the sight of the enormous table in the adjoining room covered with boxes. "That's Elliott Carter," Felix Meyer, then a curator and now Director of the Paul Sacher Foundation, explained. Since then material has continued to flow from New York City to Basel, as works are completed and closets cleaned out. While there is still Carter material in the Library of Congress and other libraries, the bulk of his music manuscripts and correspondence is in the Paul Sacher Foundation, where in the twenty years since the collection arrived it has been carefully catalogued and preserved in the Foundation's vast, climate controlled, three-story deep underground safe.

The decision to publish some of this material with extensive commentary in honor of the composer's centennial was an easy one. We both love Carter's music and relished the chance to steep ourselves in it. The hard part was choosing from roughly 10,000 letters, thousands of pages of sketches, and dozens of lecture texts, articles and photographs in the archives, almost all of it previously unpublished. It was also difficult to select which works we wanted to include, especially since Carter has become quite prolific in his later years (his works list is at 128 and counting…). The logistics of a transatlantic collaboration between Boston and Basel were easily overcome with the help of email, phone calls, and a few international flights. We ultimately decided to present a portrait of the composer within the musical life of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, and hope in particular to have chosen texts that illuminate his situation as an American composer in the world.

To accompany Carter throughout his almost century-long existence is to experience vicariously the ups and downs of American music in the twentieth century. We trace his tentative beginnings in the 1920s and '30s, his steady rise to fame, his efforts to establish institutions of new music in the US, and his artistic friendships with some of the leading musicians of the last hundred years. Carter generously shared his memories and his time during our visits to his Greenwich Village apartment; the weeklong Carter festival at Tanglewood this past summer brought us all together again.

Carter, hale, hearty, and as productive as ever, will turn 100 on December 11. When Felix and I started working on this book, our ages taken together added up to that number exactly. Now, about a year and a half later – relieved that we will in fact meet this very hard deadline! – we have surpassed him with a collective age of 102, and look forward to celebrating his 101st, 102nd and many subsequent birthdays after that - but with glasses of champagne, not new books.

Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents is available now from all good booksellers. In the Financial Times, Andrew Clark, has already called it “lavishly illustrated, handsomely documented and superbly annotated” and “for committed Carterites, the only acceptable Christmas present”. Congratulations, Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler, and congratulations too, Elliott Carter.

The Lion roars for Wagner

In a week when the flood waters threatened Venice more dramatically than at any time during the past two decades, here is John W Barker, author of Wagner and Venice, on the composer's relationship to that great city:

The Lion of St. Mark, eternal symbol of Venice, has witnessed a lot over the centuries, good and bad, and even since the fall of the Serene Republic in 1797. All the tourists might not think so, but the Lion has had some fun even since then. He has actually taken a shine to some of the many foreigners who visit. One in particular, a funny chap named Richard Wagner.

Short and stubby, with an ego at least double-sized. And opinionated! But, you know, a genius, too. A great composer, and lots more. The Lion first got to know some of Wagner's music when the Municipal Band played a few arrangements. Then the Lion heard some of Wagner's full operas. The Lion loves opera -
after all, his city of Venice almost invented it as a form of public entertainment in the sixteenth century, and built the first permanent theaters for it.

Sure, the Lion didn't like Wagner himself too much at first. The guy came to Venice the first time in 1858 and spent some months there. Gloomy fellow, keeping to himself, not caring that the Lion had an Austrian muzzle at the time. But during that stay, Wagner composed the middle act of what the Lion was informed was one of the greatest of all operas. Though German, of course. Wagner came back for five more visits, eventually bringing with him his new wife, Cosima - now there was one tough lady! - and their children. At first they were just passing through, but the Lion was pleased to see that Wagner quickly came to love the Lagoon City. Cosima dragged her husband to art galleries, and they walked and gondola-ed about, while Wagner spouted his endless pontifications. Venice really got to Wagner, the Lion noticed. And Wagner even rented the facilities of the glorious Fenice Theater and Music Conservatory to conduct his major student work, one of those Germanic symphonies.

But then, on that last visit, Wagner suddenly died, in that grand old Palazzo Vendramin where he and his family were lodging. The Lion by then had recognized what a truly famous and important chap this Wagner was, and wanted to keep his body in Venice, or at least make a big splashy send-off to his remains. Well, the composer's corpse was quietly taken back to Germany for burial, but soon the Lion realized that Wagner had nevertheless left something of himself and his art to Venice. Just two months after the composer died, a visiting German company gave a fully staged production of that cycle of four operas, The Ring of the Niebelungen, at the Lion's beloved Fenice - honoring the theater and the city with the first such show of it anywhere in Italy. OK, in German, but what a blast! The Lion was now a true Wagnerian convert. And what fun to watch the circus as all the critics decided what Wagner's music meant for Italian music and how it affected Italian opera-lovers!

It didn’t stop there. That Municipal Band really took up the composer's cause in the city. Its leader, that brave little Sicilian with the Neapolitan name, Calascione, who had conducted for Wagner and had won his respect, became a real booster - giving concerts right under the Lion's twitching nose in the Piazza San Marco. Pretty soon, there was an annual commemoration on the day of Wagner's death. Those went on for decades, and that famous American lady in Paris, the Princesse de Polignac, even chipped in some cash to support those events. But the Lion wanted still more. Under his inspiration, some of the foreign residents in the city arranged to have a fine bust of Wagner set up in the Public Gardens. The Lion had to allow good Italians to set up an adjacent bust of Verdi, the following year, to satisfy national honor. So the Lion found in that daring egotist, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and some of his foreign friends, just the ones to create and set up a memorial plaque on the Canal wall of the Palazzo Vendramin, as a final riposte. Other markers, too. A plaque at the Lavena Café where Wagner liked to take his kids for sweets. And a marker outside the street entrance to the Vendramin. No other foreigner has acquired as many monuments and markers in Venice as has Wagner.

Of course, there were slights along the way. That silly strutter, Mussolini, and that evil dictator, Hitler, first met in Venice, and they never bothered to pay the slightest attention to the Wagner associations of Venice and the Vendramin. By now, however, the Lion has won over Venetians and Italians to appreciate Wagner's music. There is even a Wagner Association in the city, and although the Vendramin is now a part-year gambling casino, that Association has turned the room were Wagner died into a museum.

Yes, the Lion honors many other composers, like Gabrieli and Monteverdi and Vivaldi. But Wagner is special. Venice has stolen some of him from the Germans and made him a naturalized Venetian.

The Lion is still there, proud and undaunted, an unashamed Wagnerite. And Wagner himself is still there, too, a permanent part of Venice's mystique.

John W Barker's superbly evocative Wagner and Venice is available now from all good booksellers.