‘Que la musique sonne’

There are few composers - at least among those who lived beyond their three score years and ten - whose musical output can be contained on two CDs. Edgard Varèse, whose work is celebrated over three evenings at the Southbank Centre this weekend, completed and published a relatively modest amount of music, but his influence on the work of a wide range of musicians continues - 45 years after his death.

Anyone captivated by the range of Varèse’s music - whether through the Southbank or Sage, Gateshead, celebrations or Riccardo Chailly’s award-winning recordings - should investigate Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary edited by the Paul Sacher Foundation’s Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann. ‘No-one interested in this composer, or indeed the 20th century modernist adventure as a whole, should be without [this book],’ wrote Bayan Northcott in BBC Music Magazine in 2006.

Exquisitely illustrated with material from the Varèse archive, the book contains essays by a range of contributors. There are, of course, pieces on the major compositions, alongside others on the lost early works - destroyed in a Berlin warehouse fire; the influence of jazz on his work (it is said that Charlie Parker begged Varèse to teach him composition); the truth about that mythical phone call from a teenage Frank Zappa; his influence on American music; the Whitney connection and his New York patrons; even the art collection of Varèse and his wife, Louise.

One of the most thrilling pieces is ‘Converging Lives: Sixteen Years with Varèse’ by his pupil, assistant and music executor, Chou Wen-Chung. In 1937, Chou was a refugee at 14,

Somehow, despite the chaos and the smell of death around me, I learned of Ravel’s passing, and it dawned upon me that not all composers were dead historical figures. Transfixed by the idea that there were actually ‘living’ composers, I resolved to be one myself.

Some years later, having studied music at the New England Conservatory, Chou found himself in New York, searching for a teacher. He met Colin McPhee who told him, ‘Varèse is your choice,’ but warned him ‘Varèse is a volcano. His music consists of explosion after explosion…you must resist him or you will be buried.’

Varèse telephoned and invited me for a visit. When he asked to see my music, I was embarrassed to show him the first movement of Landscapes (1949)…In this piece I had tried to let fragments of ancient Chinese melodies drift across the sonic space of a western orchestra without conforming to western concepts of musical structure. So I could hardly believe it when I heard him say, ‘Come next week at the same time.’ Wondering how I could afford his tuition, I hesitated. He exploded, offended that I thought he was offering to teach me for money. He then explained how he had benefited from Debussy, Busoni and Romain Rolland without paying ‘a sou’. All he wanted was for me to ‘pass on the heritage’. Then he added with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘but perhaps you will find me a big old Chinese gong someday?’ He did not have to wait for long. In his later years, he was often shown in photos playing the enormous tam-tam I gave him. After his death, Louise gave me his favourite Chinese gong which he had bought on the street in Paris at about the time he finished Ionisation. This exchange of a tam-tam for a gong must have some symbolic meaning.

Chou goes on to describe how he came to edit Varèse’s work after his death, including a definitive version of Amériques for Chailly. ‘His art rests on a delicate balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian, or logical construct and metaphorical suffering,’ he claims. ‘While I would spare no effort collecting information regarding Varèse’s intentions, planning and sketches, I would also attempt to examine every issue from his viewpoint emotionally as well as rationally.’

The book ends with a series of statements from other composers, including Pierre Boulez (‘Was he ever tempted to imagine that he was born too late in a world too young?’), Elliott Carter (‘After his death he was played much more frequently and with greater care. How he would have been cheered by this!’), Dieter Schnebel (‘I can still picture him, fifty-five years [after encountering him at Darmstadt] as if he were standing before me.’), Peter Eötvös - who collaborated with Frank Zappa, shortly before the latter’s death, on some as yet unreleased recordings, and others.

Anyone within reach of London or Gateshead this weekend should treat themselves to the music of Varèse, a pioneer who remains unique, and this superb book. How many other composers have influenced jazz musicians, composers such as Birtwistle and Schnittke, and rock musicians from OMD to Can to jazz-rock combo Chicago?

Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, edited by Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann, is published by the Boydell Press in association with the Paul Sacher Foundation. There is a limited quantity of this lavishly-produced volume left, and further reprints are unlikely. More information about the Southbank concerts may be found here.

A very European American composer

In this final extract from Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered the interviewee is the pianist, John Browning (1933-2003). Browning premiered Barber’s Pulitzer prize-winning Piano Concerto in 1962 and had chalked up almost 150 performances by 1969. Browning’s relationship with the composer was warm and collaborative, as this fascinating interview - conducted in New York City in 1981 - reveals:

JB Sam and I met in 1956. I was making my debut with Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, and his Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance was being premiered. And then Schirmer’s commissioned the Piano Concerto and Sam called me and said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ and I said, ‘Of course. I would be very honored.’ I didn’t get the last movement until about ten days before the premiere, so I was practicing about fifteen hours a day trying to get it memorized because it’s frightfully difficult.

PD What discussions did you have with Sam Barber about the kind of music it might be? Did he come to you with sketches?

JB Sam had a very interesting way of writing for artists. He would have any of us for whom he was writing a work come up to the country house at Mt. Kisco and play through everything we knew for three, four, or five days. Mr. Horowitz did it, Miss Price did it, I did it. And he would get a feel of what he thought our strong points were. For example, Horowitz taught him a tremendous amount about the sostenuto pedal, the middle pedal, and he began to use that a great deal. I brought up things my teacher Rosina Lhévinne had told me about flutter pedals and dividing runs two octaves apart instead of one, which makes a much bigger sound. So, in a way, we all contributed in our fashion to ideas he then went with. For example, he ended the first draft of the first movement pianissimo, and both Mr. Leinsdorf and I, in hearing it, thought: 'Maybe we could suggest that it might end fortissimo so the slow movement would come out of nowhere.' And Sam was always wonderful in that way; he always listened to the performer, and if he hadn’t wanted to change it he wouldn’t have, but he thought 'it’s a good idea,' so he did.

PD Were there other places like that?

JB There were some passages in the last movement that were almost unplayable, particularly at the tempo that it goes. And I said: 'Sam, I just cannot seem to get through them. Can’t we do short cuts? I think it will be just as effective.' And he said: 'Let’s take it over to Mr. Horowitz. If he says it can’t be done, then it can’t be done.' And we took it over. Mr. Horowitz said: 'Sam, I’m afraid John is right. It cannot be played at that tempo.' [laughs]

PD He’s sometimes described as a conservative composer. What kind of a composer does that make him?

JB I think, perhaps like a good performer, a good composer wants a work to succeed—just as we try to make the performance of a work as successful as possible. Now, there have been composers whom we have called 'ivory tower' composers who, it seemed to us, were not writing with the public in mind—people like John Cage. I think in the case of Barber and certainly Britten, these were men who cannot be viewed as contemporary; they must be viewed as we would view Bach or Rachmaninov, who was certainly not a twentieth-century composer. It doesn’t matter when he wrote. It just doesn’t matter. The music is of its own genre. And I think Sam is very much the same way. Certainly, there were contemporary things, but I think Sam achieved a rather eclectic sound—he sounds actually less American than, say, Copland. And yet it was Nadia Boulanger who taught Copland and many other Americans, but Sam never worked with Madame Boulanger.

PD Does it matter that he doesn’t seem to be American—or perhaps he does to you?

JB I think that in some of the early works like Knoxville, where the poetry was very clearly American, then the sound was more so. As he went on I think the later works became far more Scriabin-ish, far more into a kind of European sound, not that wide-open spaced sound we think of as being American.

PD What is the Barber sound?

JB I think the one thing that stands out is the absolutely superb mastery of counterpoint. Really, Sam was a contrapuntal composer. When one looks at the fugue of the sonata, I do not know of another piano fugue as successful since the Brahms Handel Variations or as well written. He studied Bach every day, and he was so comfortable in these forms that they were a natural language. One had the feeling that he was every bit as comfortable with a four-part fugue as Bach was, that he could have written it down like a good crossword puzzle, in ink! That kind of security. I think later on particularly the harmonies were very turn of the century—very Russian almost—but with functional basses. As I say, Sam was perfectly capable of writing twelve tone or dissonance if he wanted to. He always said, “I never want to get trapped in a form or a method.”

PD What sort of a person was he?

JB He was a very complicated man. He had a very dry wit. He could be very aloof and very snobbish; he could also be very 'old shoe' and very comfortable. He loved to have prominent friends very well placed, but he did not use them in a bad way at all. Of course, he and Gian Carlo Menotti had a long association for well over thirty years. I think Sam could be very difficult, at the same time very loyal: he was wonderful to me, he was wonderful to Miss Price. He stood by his artists, if that makes sense. He was an extremely intellectual man; he read constantly; he was fluent in German, French, Italian, Spanish—absolutely fluent. He was truly a very cultivated man. He, in a sense I think, almost thought of himself as more European, oddly enough, because he had lived a great deal in Europe, with the house in Santa Cristina in the Dolomites. He loved Europe, the boat trips of the old days, the European atmosphere. He was a man who became increasingly irritated by the square, modern buildings. He would have been much happier in a nineteenth-century house.

The complete interview with John Browning - as well as others with the likes of Copland, William Schuman, Leontyne Price and Barber himself - can be found in Samuel Barber Remembered, published by the University of Rochester Press.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love

Barry Emslie's new study of Wagner's intellectual and creative wellsprings goes to the heart of the matter. Focusing on the centrality of love to the Wagnerian project, he shows how its obverse, hate - and specifically racial hate - is also ineluctably integral to the composer's Weltanschauung. Here, Barry Emslie outlines the central theme of this provocative new title:

Oh no, not another one! For while the world needs many things and no doubt many books, it surely doesn't need another book on Wagner. Well I have no option but to maintain that it does, or, at the very least, that it needs mine. This is an outrageously arrogant position but it is rather forced on the writer. All that work, all that time, if it ends up as a printed and published object pushed – oh so modestly pushed – under the noses of the public, just doesn't wash if the modesty is real. Surely this a discrepancy that Wagner forces on the author. For it is his dubious spirit that keeps the publications glut at just slightly below the tsunami but well above the justifiably sensible level. The ironic result is that the scribbler, no matter how self-effacing, is compelled into a form of special pleading which, in its own way, is no less egotistical than the megalomaniac posturings of the Master himself.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love had its origins – as far as one can be specific on the matter – in an article I wrote for the Wagner Journal (Wagner: Race, Nation, Culture Vol. 2 No. 1). This paid as much attention to Wagner's polemical writings as it did to his music dramas, though it had little to say on more general German historical and cultural themes. It led to the book in two ways. Firstly there seemed in retrospect to be a bad fit between content and form. I felt that I had tried to pour a quart bottle into a pint jug. Much that was there needed to be filled-out, developed and placed in a more ambitious and far-reaching context. But the second consideration was yet more important. In reading Wagner's anti-semitic and Germanophile writings I became convinced that the natural and customary horror they evoked was misplaced, or, better said, that it was the product of a mis-recognition of what was really motivating him. For his anti-semitism is not significant simply because – or even chiefly because – it is obnoxious. Of much greater importance is that the idea of the Jews and Jewishness underpins his wider Weltanschauung. Consequently his positive notions of race, nation and culture take meaning from a Jewish antipode, chiefly because that antipode is dependent on a notion of “lovelessness”. I was convinced that this alternative, negative paradigm was essential to the productive development of Wagner's theoretical essays and his operatic practice, and that in its own way it was a key factor in the development of his ideas on redemption, on sexual liberation, and on what it means to belong to the German Volk. Far from muddying the waters it seduced me further into believing that I could interrelate the whole panoply of Wagner's intellectual and artistic strivings. In short it made the proposed book yet more ambitious: it was now going to cover a great deal of messy terrain without getting bogged down or entangled in contradictions. And it was all going to be done unproblematically under the rubric of love. Chance would be a fine thing!

Nonetheless, the element of hubris has remained. For while I would not claim that the book is the riddle of Wagner solved and that it – as used to be said of Marxism – knows itself to be the solution, it is not coy in laying out its far-reaching and comprehensive interpretation. Even so, everyone is aware that all pretension as to final answers in matters of this sort is folly. Worse than folly; it is unproductive. So there must be a contradiction at work here as well, in that one takes a big approach while accepting that no comprehensive interpretation can ever deliver in the manner that one wants. In the end even a grand theory purporting to get a handle on Wagner's music dramas, his polemical essays and to deal with them both in the impossibly broader contexts of German culture and history, can only vindicate itself in as much as it suggests new resolutions and opens up new areas of doubt and debate.

Which rather means that Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love won't be, can't be, and certainly shouldn't be, the last word. Therefore one contributes to the potential tsunami in two ways. Firstly as drop in the ocean, and secondly, as an incitement to others. As Thomas Mann said “Wagner and no end...” At least not yet, anyway.

Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love is published by the Boydell Press and available from your favourite music bookseller.

Artist Unknown

A friend tells me that she’s just bought the Beethoven piano trios on CD, so naturally I ask, ‘Who’s playing them?’ ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘No idea. I’m afraid I didn’t look at the names of the players.’ Why do people seem to think the performer is irrelevant?

A relative of mine recently confessed that although he was becoming quite familiar with the classics of the piano trio repertoire, he doubted whether he would be ever able to discern any difference between performances of those works by different groups. When I express dismay, he says, ‘But surely there can’t be much difference between top-level musicians playing the same works. Aren’t you all aiming at the same result?’ By that I suppose he meant that all musicians are trying to arrive at a perfect realisation of that holy text, the musical score. But there’s another way of looking at it, one expressed beautifully by musicologist Christopher Small when he pointed out that one might as well turn this perception on its head and consider that it’s the job of composers to give musicians something to play. At the end of the day, you can’t hear music unless it is played, and it is the character of the playing which most impacts on listeners at the moment of performance. Personally, I wouldn’t put the performance above the score in order of importance, but I do think the performance is crucial. Well, I would think so, wouldn’t I? But as well as knowing that a good piece can be ruined by a bad performance, and that a bad piece can be greatly enhanced by a good performance, I also truly believe that a great performance can bring a good piece to a new level.

I remember hearing Italian soprano Cecilia Bartoli in a programme of rather trivial Italian arias of the baroque and classical periods. Any thought of the music’s triviality was however completely driven away by the energy and commitment she gave to it, performing it as though she thought it was utterly fascinating. I remember thinking that it was an object lesson in how to perform second-rate music, and in fact I’ve learned from her example.

But even music of the finest quality can reveal new aspects of itself and even become transcendent in a fabulous performance. My husband Bob still remembers his awe on hearing Carlos Kleiber conduct Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden in the 1970s. It’s an opera he’d previously heard in fine performances with other singers and other conductors. However, in Kleiber’s hands the opera suddenly struck him as a miracle of expressive coherence in a wholly unexpected way. Even though he knew the music very well, he was so gripped by the performance that he remained glued to his seat long after the performance had ended, unwilling to break the atmosphere. Later on, he heard that Bernard Haitink had attended the same performance with a fellow conductor and had said to his companion, ‘Well, that was the finest evening in the opera house that you or I will ever experience.’ Yet what remained for Bob was not the sensation of Kleiber’s personality but the conviction that Verdi’s Otello was even better than he had realised. When he could bear to listen to it again, performed by other people in later years, the effect was not the same. He realised that the alchemy at Covent Garden had been created by music brought to boiling point by particular musicians.

Of course, this kind of experience is not confined to music. How many schoolchildren, bored and irritated by having to study Shakespeare, conclude that there’s nothing in it for them until one day they get the opportunity to see a really good performance of one of his plays, when all of a sudden a door is kicked open in their minds.

This is an extract from Out of Silence by Susan Tomes, scheduled for publication later this month. It is a diary of a year in her life as a performer. Taking as its inspiration Schumann's remark that ‘I am affected by everything that goes on in the world, and I think it all over in my own way’, it aims to show how a working musician mulls over and draws energy from the events of everyday life.

Janáček, the Old Avant-Gardist

Leos Janáček is increasingly recognised as one of the major operatic masters of the early twentieth century. In an intriguing new book, Derek Katz challenges prevailing views of the composer’s relationship to Slavic culture and demonstrates that the operas are deeply indebted to various existing traditions. The first chapter , ‘Finding a Context’, looks at Janáček’s work from a number of viewpoints, including the one in this short extract:

One of the final chapters of Miloš Štědroň’s 1998 study Leoš Janáček and Music of the 20th Century is entitled “Young Conservative—to Old Avant-Gardist?!?” Despite the intriguing punctuation, at the end of this chapter Štědroň did indeed conclude that Janáček grew into an avant-gardist and declared that Janáček’s music of the 1920s is one of the most radical manifestations of European music from the first three decades of the century. This view of Janáček’s career as culminating in an avant-garde, or modernist, period is a widespread formulation with a long history. In a 1983 essay, Milan Kundera wrote of Janáček, “A solitary conservative figure in his youth, he has become an innovator in his old age.” Kundera described Janáček’s late works as “audacious” and suggested that he must be heard in the company of composers thirty and forty years younger, like Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Krenek, and Schoenberg. Similarly, the opening narration of Jaromil Jireš’s 1986 documentary film about Janáček declared that “Leoš Janáček was born deep in the mid-nineteenth century. His music belongs wholly to the avant-garde of the twentieth century. Although he was thirty years older than Bartók or Stravinsky . . . Janáček’s works rank amongst the most progressive of modern European music.”

In particular, the idea that Janáček was somehow generationally displaced can be traced back to the composer’s lifetime. In an enthusiastic 1925 essay, Erwin Schulhoff, almost exactly forty years younger than Janáček, wrote that as “astounding as it may seem, the septuagenarian Janáček belongs to the latest generation of composers, whose struggle he has also fought.” Hanns Eisler also noted Janáček’s late fecundity, remarking after a 1927 performance of the Sinfonietta that Janáček was “entirely unique amongst current bourgeois composers” and “still astoundingly full of creative strength as an old man.” In September 1926, Janáček travelled to Venice to hear a performance of his first string quartet at the annual International Society for Contemporary Music festival. Other living composers whose works were performed at the festival included Roussel, Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg, Ravel, Malipiero, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, Ladislav Vycpálek, Louis Gruenberg, Ibert, Honegger, and Hindemith. These twelve composers, although a heterogeneous group in most ways, shared at least one trait: all were younger than Janáček. In fact, most were significantly younger, with only Roussel and Vaughan Williams within twenty years of his age. Put another way, their average age was forty-four in 1926, while Janáček had turned seventy-two in July of that year.

Another, rather more idiosyncratic, tribute came from Henry Cowell, who visited Brno and lectured at the Club of Moravian Composers in 1926. Apparently the meeting with Janáček was a success, for in August 1927 Cowell invited Janáček to be an honorary member of The New Music Society of California. The letter of invitation, although addressed to “Mr. Janarchek,” does describe him as “without doubt one of the very greatest of living composers, without reservations.” Cowell had already collected Bartók, Bliss, Malipiero, Hába, Krenek, Schnabel, Berg, Casella, and Milhaud as honorary members; all were at least a quarter-century Janáček’s juniors.

The image of Janáček as an aged modernist has become firmly entrenched in standard music history texts. John Tyrrell’s entry for Janácek in The New Grove Turn of the Century Masters, for instance, asserts that Janácek’s late works belong “in sound and spirit with the music of the younger generation around him.” Similar judgments can be found in many standard surveys. Jim Samson, in The Late Romantic Era, describes Janáček’s musical style as “a radical new language” and “strikingly original,” while Donald Jay Grout calls Janáček “individual” and “exceptional” in his A Short History of Opera. More recently, Richard Taruskin titled his section on Janáček in The Oxford History of Western Music “The Oldest Twentieth-Century Composer” and points out that “his music is more often (and more tellingly) compared with that of Debussy, Stravinsky, or Bartók” than with that of Mahler or Richard Strauss.

Janáček Beyond the Borders by Derek Katz is published by the University of Rochester Press and available from your local music specialist bookseller.

On the trail of Samuel Barber

As we approach the centenary of Samuel Barber’s birth and the publication of Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute we are pleased to post the following account of Dickinson’s meetings with Barber’s friends and colleagues. The interviews, versions of which form the core of this new book, took place in 1981 for a BBC documentary on the composer.

For some years I had been hoping that Samuel Barber would be able to visit Keele University, where I had started the Music Department and its Centre for American Music programme in 1974. Copland and Carter had already been; I had met Cage and Thomson in London; but Barber proved more elusive. Finally I learnt that he was too ill to travel and we had to be content with honouring him at the University with a performance of the Violin Concerto and two performances of the Piano Sonata.

Barber has always been low in personal profile compared with Copland, but his music is just as regularly played throughout the world. I was curious about the success of a composer who hardly seemed American at all, had very little obvious originality in his work, and was often regarded as old-fashioned. So when the BBC invited me to put together a Radio 3 documentary with Arthur Johnson as producer, I looked forward to going on the trail of Samuel Barber. The series of interviews we were given forms the basis of my book Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute.

To start with, Barber was fortunate all his life. His father was a respected doctor in West Chester, Pennsylvania; his aunt Louise Homer was an internationally known opera singer; and her husband Sydney Homer was an accomplished composer of songs and an influential adviser to Barber at all stages. The family lived near enough to Philadelphia for him to become one of the first students at the new Curtis Institute, founded and liberally endowed by Mary Louise Curtis Bok in 1924.

At the age of nine Barber wrote a note to his mother warning her that he was meant to be a composer and not an athlete. At Curtis, though, he was a triple major – in composition, piano and voice. He was always a good pianist and has recorded his Hermit Songs with Leontyne Price. As a singer, he recorded Dover Beach in 1935 and did some professional singing. However, as a result of prizes, awards, friends and family, he was able to concentrate on composing.

It was at Curtis that Barber met Gian Carlo Menotti. Eighteen himself, he was asked to look after the gifted seventeen-year-old from Italy who couldn’t speak English. Menotti has described the beginning of a friendship that lasted over forty years:

'Sam was the very first friend I made in America. I had learnt that he was the idol of the Curtis Institute. He too studied composition with Scalero, but also piano with Isabelle Vengerova and voice with Emilio de Gogorza. He was considered a genius in all three courses. Not only was Sam enormously gifted, but he was very handsome and very intelligent.'

Obviously Menotti was going to be an essential source in every way so Arthur Johnson and I arranged to visit him at his country estate Yester House, some thirty miles outside Edinburgh. Menotti was as charming as ever and, even though he was surrounded by French TV making a film for his seventieth birthday, he gave us about two hours, all preserved on tape. It soon became obvious how much Menotti and Barber had in common. Both came into contact early on with strong musical traditions and, unlike many an enfant terrible of twentieth-century music, they accepted them as they found them. In both careers they achieved popular appeal but, as time went on, some critical disdain came their way. All the same, both could afford, in the words of Liberace, to “cry all the way to the bank.”

After visiting Menotti, our interviews were based in New York – a mixture of composer colleagues, performers, friends, publishers and critics. Composers of very different temperaments from Barber, such as Copland, Schuman and Thomson, found much to admire in his work, and performers with whom he had worked closely were devoted to him.

It was May, which I remembered as fairly warm in New York, but for two days it rained constantly. On one of those wet days we visited Copland at his house, Rock Hill, Peekskill, New York (now Copland House, the centre for American creative arts) situated in dense woodland an hour by train from New York City. Copland recalled the inter-war years as times when he was a modernist getting all the brickbats, but Sam Barber was a conservative. Time has ironed all that out and the difference doesn’t matter. Virgil Thomson, at the age of eighty-five, was less easy to communicate with than Copland because of his deafness. Most of the interview involved shouting but his mind was as acute as ever. He characterized Barber as a composer for “high middle-brow taste”, like Rachmaninov, and began by talking about money. Charles Turner told us that Thomson had a habit of going up to Barber at parties and saying: “You’re the most successful composer alive!” Barber, with a retiring, melancholic and rather private nature did not always enjoy this.

Another composer we met was William Schuman, whose centenary also falls in 2010, who wrote much of his music whilst holding down important jobs including the Presidency of the Juilliard School of Music and then of the Lincoln Center. I asked Schuman what Barber’s style consisted of. He admitted that he once heard the Cello Concerto on the car radio without realizing it was by Barber and insisted this was not important and would not have mattered in previous centuries. The main thing is that the music is “perfectly made” – like Brahms.

This brought us to discuss the appeal of the Adagio for Strings, the one work everybody – dead or alive – knows by Barber. Dead, because it has been widely used as a funeral elegy ever since the death of President Roosevelt in 1945. Even Leontyne Price, who didn’t know about this, said she wanted it played at her own funeral. The universality of the emotions conveyed in the work is incontestable. Exactly what those emotions are is impossible to pin down. Virgil Thomson, provocative as ever, alleged the piece was a “detailed love-scene.”

Barber wrote for some of the greatest performers of the period. Unfortunately Horowitz, who had a crucial role in the Piano Sonata, was not well enough to see us but we met John Browning, for whom Barber wrote his Piano Concerto in 1962.

He stressed that Barber wrote for the public, much as a performer plays to the audience and aims to communicate. He mentioned some ways in which Barber would take account of the performer when a new piece was still rough. For example, the end of the first movement of the Piano Concerto became loud, not soft, at Browning’s instigation.

We met Leontyne Price, one of the finest singers of her generation, at her apartment in Greenwich Village. Barber wrote his Hermit Songs for her and they gave the premiere together. She sang Cleopatra in Barber’s second grand opera, Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned for the opening of the new Met at Lincoln Center in 1966. In her interview she confirms, with plenty of amusing detail, that the occasion was wrong for Barber’s music – and so was Zefirelli’s production. Although there were palpable mishaps and the work got savaged by the critics, Price insisted that she had never been in a flop in her life and she and Barber were very moved by the revised version put on by the Juilliard School in 1974.

Other people we interviewed make it possible to explore the sources of Barber’s music, the nature of its appeal and its historical position. The historian H. Wiley Hitchcock finds Barber a safe, careful composer working within limits, and very lucky in his opportunities. Barber himself agreed about his luck - “I was very lucky always.” Others compared Barber to Bach in writing old-fashioned music of high quality. A comparison with Benjamin Britten is sometimes made but it looks as if they never met. There is some common ground between Barber and William Walton. Both were strongly attracted to Italy and the music of both continues to reach an audience.

Barber never courted publicity, so he gave very few interviews. There are three in this book and the one with Allan Kozinn dates from the last year of Barber’s life. He asked Barber why he had not responded to the various currents of modern music and Barber replied:

'Ah, I was waiting for this. Why haven’t I changed? Why should I? There’s no reason music should be difficult for the audience to understand is there? Not that I necessarily address the audience when I compose, or for that matter, the players. Or posterity. I write for the present and I write for myself. I think that most music that is really good will be appreciated by the audience ultimately.'

Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute will be published in March. Two CDs of Dickinson's own works have recently been issued by Naxos. Coming next, the late John Browning on the piano concerto and working with Barber.

Inner Voices

Some years ago we published an account of life on the road with a chamber music ensemble: Beyond the Notes. Pianist Susan Tomes’ diary of her time with Domus and the beginnings of the Florestan Trio captured the imagination of music lovers and critics alike, and remains essential reading for young musicians taking their first steps in the classical music business. Next month the Boydell Press will publish a new book by the same author, Out of Silence. Taking as its inspiration Schumann's remark that 'I am affected by everything that goes on in the world, and I think it all over in my own way', it aims to show how a working musician mulls over and draws energy from the events of everyday life.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be posting some short extracts from Out of Silence, beginning with this piece about inner voices in music, specifically in chamber music:

After many years of being an amateur wind player, my brother-in-law has given up the French horn and has taken up the viola instead. He feels that playing the horn is getting too strenuous for his lips. I asked him whether he didn’t feel this was his opportunity to grab the limelight and take up the violin instead, to have the experience of playing the top line? Or the double bass, to see what it’s like at the bottom? He says that having played the French horn for years in wind quintets and orchestras, he finds he has become attached to the role of being a middle voice, and wants to continue in this persona, so he is naturally drawn to the viola. Just as he sees the horn as the mediator of the brass section, he sees the viola as the voice of reason in the strings, rarely getting to sing a glamorous aria, but playing a very important stabilising role. He identifies with this role. We agree that an interest in inner voices is one which marks out a certain kind of musician. There’s often so much focus on the leading voice, the top line, the melody instrument, the solo part, and so on, but just as much if not more meaning emanates from the middle voices, often not sufficiently heard or understood. Thank goodness there are people who feel genuinely drawn to playing those middle parts, who see themselves as the binding agent, like eggs in a cake mixture.

There’s something in common with the chamber musician here, though a love of inner voices doesn’t quite sum up the chamber musician’s passion. For us, it’s a little more complicated than that. Chamber players love the diversity of roles they have to play, sometimes being the leader, sometimes a companion, sometimes a supporter or a commentator. They love to find out when they are meant to surge forward, when to step into the limelight, when to comment from the wings, when to contradict, and when to offer another, perhaps more persuasive point of view. They understand that it is a process of layering, and that they must be prepared to explore all the layers. I don’t know whether such people are drawn to chamber music because they are open-minded and naturally good listeners, or whether they acquire a tolerant approach along the way, but one thing’s for sure: you won’t get much out of chamber music unless you genuinely have a live-and-let-live attitude. If you’re convinced your own part is the most important all the time, you’d be better off sticking to solo concertos. In chamber music, even the naturally more dominant instruments, such as the piano (or should I say, even the naturally more dominant instrumentalists, like pianists) still have to weave their way in and out of the plot. Chamber music at its best is a vision of the ideal society, where people converse, exchange and are sensitive to one another, respecting one another’s territories. It seems to me good preparation for life in a free society.

Out of Silence by Susan Tomes will be published by the Boydell Press next month.