What’s in a pronoun?

From Beyond the Stave is now taking a short summer break with new postings beginning again at the end of August. In the meantime we leave you with a fascinating piece by Ian Woodfield based on his forthcoming book, Mozart's Così fan tutte: A Compositional History:

On the dust jacket of my book is reproduced a small fragment of Mozart’s handwriting: ‘Rivolgete à lui lo sguardo’, which translates as ‘Turn your gaze upon him’. With these words, Guglielmo proposes how the two sisters should pair off with their disguised lovers. It is immediately apparent that Mozart left a blank where ‘lui’ should have gone. His inability to write down the necessary pronoun is remarkable, considering that this aria comes at a critical turning point in the drama. In the end, someone else had to add it in, while in his own catalogue, he recorded a different first line altogether: ‘Rivolgete à me’.

Similar indecision is seen in the duet between Ferrando and Fiordiligi. Again, duplicity is in the air, and again Mozart was briefly unclear in his mind as to which pronouns were needed. Fiordiligi recognises that her constancy (‘la mia costanza’) is wavering, but what of Ferrando? His balancing line was changed twice: from ‘la sua costanza’ to ‘la mia costanza’ and back again. The editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe believed that this intermediate version was in fact ‘la tua costanza’.

There is a further example of pronoun fluidity in Don Giovanni, an opera in which there is generally little room for doubt as to what the characters on stage are thinking. In the final scene, in a moment of Così-like ambiguity, the feelings of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio for each other are far from clear. Mozart had once more to correct his pronouns, switching the letters ‘m’ and ‘t’. These signify the first or second person in the phrase ‘Al desio di chi m’ / t’adora’, which (in one form or another) is sung by both these lovers.

The unexplained discrepancy in the pronoun at the start of Guglielmo’s aria provided the starting point for this study, an earlier attempt at a monograph on Mozart as the would-be Engländer having failed. I began by trying to invent plausible solutions to this mystery, using imagination rather than factual evidence. These were unconvincingly elaborate, falling foul of a good principle of historical research that the simpler explanation is usually the preferable one. Yet over time I started to become aware that a better answer lay just below the surface of my consciousness, and the moment when this finally broke through was an exhilarating one: right or wrong, the idea that Mozart considered a plot structure in which each officer would seduce his own lover, was a workable hypothesis. It appealed immediately to my liking for lateral thinking. To the age-old question, should the original couples be restored at the end of the opera or not, we could now respond: perhaps they were not separated in the first place!

Starting out with a hypothesis and then seeking evidence to prove it is a risky procedure. There is a real danger that creative fiction will be the result. Yet I would not have been able to ‘deduce’ this theory from an objective collation of all the relevant data. For one thing, a theory of this kind tends to determine itself what is or is not perceived as being evidence. In retrospect, the initial question still seems a good one, and I remain convinced that the enigma of Così fan tutte is in some way connected to uncertainty over its pairings.

To complete this study, it was necessary to examine all the early Abschriften or copies. The lack of a proper philological account of these came as a complete surprise to me, and I spent a lot of time constructing one for my ‘compositional history’, as it was now called. Even in this last phase of work, questions about pronouns refused to go away. Scholars have sometimes expressed puzzlement over the word ‘noi’ (us) in the second stanza of Fiordiligi’s celebrated aria of resistance ‘Come scoglio’. Who is this other person on behalf of whom she suddenly appears to be speaking? By the time that the Vienna Court Theatre copy was being prepared, however, ‘noi’ (us) had already become ‘voi’ (you). The pronouns in the Act II duet underwent an even more drastic realignment. Were we to hear the opera in this form, we would listen, doubtless with growing amazement, as Fiordiligi expresses concern over Ferrando’s constancy, while he adopts an introspective pose, worrying about his own loyalty. Surely this must be a mistake? Or is it? Either way, the meaning of Così is bound up with the fate of its pronouns.

The irresistible Dora

Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music by John Lucas is one of the highlights of our autumn publication schedule. In this much shortened extract from Chapter 10 we learn how the conductor met soprano Dora Labbette.

On 15th December 1926 at Queen’s Hall, Beecham conducted a pioneering and revelatory performance of Handel’s Messiah, for which, instead of the unwieldy, elephantine choir traditionally thought suitable for the work in London, he used the smallish Philharmonic Choir, trained by Charles Kennedy Scott and full of fresh, talented and enthusiastic young voices. The London Symphony Orchestra’s playing was unusually surefooted, which the New Statesman’s critic, W.J. Turner, attributed to the fact that the orchestra had been playing on tour under Beecham for some weeks, and as a result ‘had got thoroughly into form and accustomed to his style’. Tempi were fleet, textures light.

The soprano soloist, Dora Labbette, was a dark-haired, down-to-earth beauty with a racy sense of humour who maintained that Beecham chose her for the event after seeing a photograph of her during a visit to her agents, Ibbs & Tillett. Born Dorothy Bella Labbett at Woodside, near Croydon, the daughter of a railway porter, she had shown a talent for singing from an early age and during the First World War had won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music, where in 1917 she crowned a series of awards by winning the Gold Medal.

Labbette’s voice was once perceptively described as being ‘of a timbre which is peculiarly individual in its charm – the clear purity of a boy soprano touched with womanly warmth and sweetness’. Beecham fell in love with the sound. He also fell in love with twenty-eight year old Labbette, and in due course began an affair with her that would last thirteen years. At the time of the Messiah Beecham was forty-seven.

Incidentally, Beecham’s performance of the Messiah was generally greeted with considerable enthusiasm: the Guardian, for example, found it ‘a welcome substitute for the ballasted, coarsened, and square-cut versions that are too often so confidently given out as the real Handel’ while the afore-mentioned Mr Turner considered it ‘one of the greatest musical achievements of a generation of concert giving in London.’ Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music will be published in September, and will include a CD of the conductor in rehearsal.

The honorary gentleman

The latest volume in our Music in Britain 1600-1900 series is Suzanne Cole's study of Thomas Tallis in the 19th century. Here the author explains how she came to her subject:

The origins of my book, Thomas Tallis and his Music in Victorian England, can be traced back to my student years at Melbourne University in the early 1980s. Although I was actually enrolled in a science degree, I also took organ lessons with Revd. Paul Harvie, an eccentric, infuriating, but inspiring Anglo-Catholic priest of the very ‘highest’ kind. After a couple of years, in the absence of suitable male candidates, Paul made me his assistant organist at the parish of Christ Church, Brunswick, and began, somewhat grudgingly (he was not known for his enlightened views on women), to initiate me into the mysteries of what he referred to on recruiting flyers for choir boys as the ‘900 year tradition’. There is much that could be criticised about Paul’s methods – I was occasionally allowed to sing with the choir, but never to robe or process, and was always referred to as an ‘honorary gentlemen’, and he was famous for flying into a rage if foolish parents allowed their child to make any noise in church. But his quixotic commitment to maintaining the English Cathedral tradition in a parish church in a working-class suburb of Melbourne was both inspiring and intriguing.

So my book is – albeit indirectly – an attempt to explore this tradition, and perhaps more importantly the romanticised myths that surround it. But it also explores the essential differences between the culture of church music and what is now the dominant secular culture of the concert hall, and the historical transition between the two. By taking a single composer and following attitudes towards him and his music over an extended period of time, I have, I hope, been able to show how attitudes have changed, how myths have developed and shifted, and how the music was made to serve the cultural and religious agendas of the day.

So why Tallis? The obvious reason is that for several centuries Tallis was the Father of English Church Music. I had thought that this definition had ceased to be relevant sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, but I recently stumbled across it on the official website of the TV series The Tudors, so the tradition lingers on. (I am at a loss though as to what this astonishingly imaginative depiction of Tallis and his poor wife Joan tells us about the reception of early music!).

And why Victorian England? Because, pace Fr Paul, most of the traditions that he was celebrating and preserving, rather than dating back 900 years, don’t extend back much further than the early to mid-nineteenth century. And of course, once I started researching I found that these traditions weren’t quite what I expected anyway.

The research for this book, which took place in intensive bursts during trips to the UK (there’s nothing like a 26-hour flight to focus the mind!), was a delight: the excitement of finding a review of a performance after hours, or even days, of trawling through newspapers; the privilege of holding the early seventeenth-century manuscript of Spem in alium. But the moment of highest excitement was without doubt finding the handbill for the 1835 Anniversary Festival of the Madrigal Society, which proved that, contrary to popular belief, Spem had not been performed that year. Someone, and I’m afraid I can’t remember who, suggested that I contact Oliver Davies, as the portraits and programs collection at the Royal College of Music might have some useful material. So in I went. Oliver, who was not a young man at the time, took me on an amazing journey through the bowels of the RCM – up stairs, round corners, down narrow corridors – all at break neck speed. If he’d abandoned me I doubt whether I would ever have found my way out again. Finally we ended up in what I remember, quite possibly incorrectly, as a tiny room high in a tower, piled from floor to ceiling with bundles of paper and boxes full of concert programs. I told him what I was interested in and he immediately dived into one of the many piles, pulled out a box and extracted a single piece of paper – the only nineteenth-century Madrigal Society program that they had. And by what I still consider to be some sort of miracle, it was the one that I needed!

I’m still not entirely sure why I have been so completely entranced by the ‘900 year tradition’, why I spent quite so many hours listening to Bernard Rose’s recording of Tomkins with the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, as an 18-year-old science student. But I hope that this book brings us some little way closer to an understanding of our collective relationship with the music of the early English church.

Suzanne Cole's book is available now. Those interested in the '900 year tradition', may be interested to look here.

Hugh Macdonald’s Obsessive Moments

We welcome Hugh Macdonald to the Eastman Studies in Music series with his entertaining and revealing book of essays, Beethoven’s Century. In it he looks at aspects of Schubert’s musical personality, the brief friendship between Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt’s abilities as a conductor…but let Professor Macdonald tell you about it:

I find that writing about music can only be driven by curiosity and the desire to get to the bottom of some teasing problem that arises from music one plays or hears or reads. This might be the ambition to cover the entire life and works of an individual, or to chart great cultural movements, but it can equally take the form of solving a small mystery, or putting an unusual aspect of a composer's work under the microscope. I once wrote a short article (never published) on a single note in Puccini's Crisantemi.

My collection Beethoven's Century contains essays that mostly arose from such obsessive moments when an idea once settled in the mind needs to be explored, expanded and expounded. Repeats, for example, was my way of checking what we are supposed to do with the repeat signs that are found in all classical instrumental music. Having played a great deal of chamber and orchestral music, I was struck by the way musicians responded to repeats, sometimes with reverence, sometimes without. Which repeats did composers write? Which did they want? Why did they drop out of favour, and when?

My essay on Comic Opera was driven by noticing that comic opera and dialogue opera were less well served in our opera houses than the heavier genres. Is it not time to correct the imbalance, I ask. The closing essay, Modernisms that Failed, attempts to question the received history of early 20th-century music, while giving a moment's attention to some of the crazier advances that seemed promising at the time, but actually led nowhere. Smell-music, colour-music, noise-music and machine-music are some of the fads that might well appeal to listeners as strongly as those of our own time.

The opening essay Beethoven's Game of Cat and Mouse pursues a path suggested by Czerny's story that he used to turn on his obsequious audiences when they became visibly moved by his playing. This is cruel behaviour, since we think we ought to be moved by his music. Beethoven teases us in all sorts of subtle ways, always leaving us in no doubt of who's in command. In this elaborate game, I argue, Beethoven is the cat and we are no more than mice. No one was more aware of his colossal stature than he was himself, as if he had already annexed the whole of the nineteenth century as his own.

Beethoven’s Century is available now from your favourite bookseller, online or otherwise.

Toccata Press

Boydell & Brewer is pleased to welcome Martin Anderson’s Toccata Press to the select band of small music book publishers whose lists we are proud to represent worldwide, alongside Plumbago and Chosen Press. Toccata has been publishing books on Anderson’s favourite neglected composers for well over a quarter of a century: here he explains what made him start the press, and what keeps him publishing.

I started Toccata Press way back in 1981, basically because I got fed up waiting for other publishers to bring out the books I wanted to read: there was nothing published in English on Enescu, nothing on Franz Schmidt or Pfitzner or a host of other important composers. At the time I was working at the Institute of Economic Affairs, watching the Editorial Director there, Arthur Seldon, turn the tide of opinion by commissioning studies offering then-unfashionable market solutions to economic problems. It dawned on me that, if the IEA could do it in economics, I could try the same thing in music, and I began to plan a series of short publications on a range of neglected composers. Matters were taken out of my hands when the composer Robert Simpson, who the previous year had resigned from the BBC in protest against its cultural agenda, got in touch to say that he had written an attack on the way the Corporation planned and ran the Proms; he had fallen out with its intended publisher, and could I find him someone else? I went to see a publisher friend, who answered my question with one of his own: Why don’t you do it? I didn’t have an answer, and so The Proms and Natural Justice was published within six weeks of my receipt of the manuscript.

I haven’t maintained that kind of rapidity, of course: my output settled down at about a book a year, not least because the short publications I had envisaged all turned out much longer. But the basic intention hasn’t changed: to fill some of the gaps in the musical literature, some of them surprising. For example, there was no full-length study of the Schubert symphonies in any language (not even German) before Toccata Press brought out Brian Newbould’s Schubert and the Symphony.

The new association with Boydell & Brewer will allow me, I hope, to increase the frequency of Toccata Press publications. There’s plenty in the pipeline. I have Volume Two of Havergal Brian on Music featuring his writings on his European and American contemporaries nearly ready for the printers, and Comrades in Art which has a subtitle of Victorian thoroughness: The Correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger, 1957-61, with Interviews, Essays and other Writings on Grainger by Ronald Stevenson will shortly be going off to the typesetter. Tully Potter's huge biography of Adolf Busch is likewise virtually ready for production, and studies of Humperdinck, Irgens-Jensen (Norway’s finest composer, Grieg notwithstanding!), the Martinů Symphonies and more are in preparation. Watch this space!

Finding Annie Drummond

Ivor Gurney might finally be receiving the recognition he deserves: Chosen Press’ Philip Lancaster is working on a complete edition of his poems with Tim Kendall; BBC Radio 3 will feature his music in their Composer of the Week series next year; and in November Pamela Blevins publishes a dual biography of the poet-composer and Marion Scott, Gurney’s greatest advocate and among the most influential and respected women of he generation. Here Pamela writes about tracing Gurney's lost love, Annie Drummond:

When I began writing about Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott, I had no idea that parts of their stories had roots in my native Massachusetts. Ivor’s lost love Annie Drummond had emigrated there in 1921 and Marion was descended from the earliest settlers in Salem, a place best known to the world for the witch hunts and trials of 1692. I’d like to say that my dogged research led me to this information but the truth is I stumbled on it more by accident than design.

The first inkling of these connections came in 1989 when I was working in the Gurney Archive in Gloucester. I came across a brief note from Drummond’s mother to Marion informing her Annie had emigrated to the United States, where she married and was living in South Natick, Massachusetts, practically in my backyard.

Once I returned home I was able to trace Annie very easily even though I only had two pieces of information: her married name and an address. All I had to do was visit the Office of Vital Statistics in Boston. Even in those days before computers, Massachusetts had a marvellous system of public records that was incredibly easy to use and efficient. Within 15 minutes I had found details of Annie’s birth, marriage and death.

At the time of her death in 1959, Annie and her husband, James McKay, were living in Wellesley, a suburb west of Boston. That information led me to Annie’s friends and neighbours and through them I was able to locate her daughter Peggy Ann in California. Soon Peggy Ann and I had the first of many conversations. She had known nothing of her mother’s relationship with Ivor Gurney but she had seen his name and wondered who he was. I had the answer.

After Annie’s death, she had found an old leather suitcase of her mother’s “most treasured possessions” hidden away in a cupboard. Among the random memories of a lifetime, Peggy Ann found two items that puzzled her: a copy of Poems of To-Day inscribed to Annie by Ivor and a copy of the score of his Western Playland, a work he had dedicated to Annie although that was not clear from the dedication which reads “To Hawthornden”, one of Gurney’s names for her. Gurney had met Annie in 1917 when he was a patient at the Edinburgh War Hospital. He fell in love with her and she seemed to share his feelings but something went wrong and the relationship failed. But Gurney never forgot Annie and continued to write poems dedicated to her along with the Western Playland. Even during his asylum years he tried to contact her; thus the letter from Annie’s mother.

Peggy Ann shared the story of her mother’s life with me and kindly sent me copies of photographs and documents relating to her mother’s past. Sadly, Annie Drummond McKay’s life was marked by tragedy and her last years bore a resemblance to Ivor Gurney’s. Shortly after her arrival in Massachusetts nearly all of her belongings were destroyed in a fire. She managed to save the book Gurney had given her along with her nursing certificates. Annie and her husband married in 1922 and had a son John in 1924. He was playing in the front garden of their home when a run-away truck crashed into the McKay’s property killing their only child. Peggy Ann was born in the early 1930s when her parents were both in their 40s.

Friends remembered Annie as a talented, “lovely-looking woman” whose artistic nature found expression in the beautiful gardens she and her husband created around their home. Both were avid birdwatchers. Her husband was the head carpenter at Wellesley College and Annie was active in her adopted community, enjoying memberships in various organisations and winning local fame for her special cakes and desserts. But then something started to go wrong. By the early 1950s, friends began to notice a dramatic change in Annie. She was becoming increasingly withdrawn and seemed to be “losing touch with reality”. The last eight years of her life were agonising for her family and friends as she slowly slipped into a world of her own. By 1958, she had taken to wandering from her home. Her condition deteriorated and her family reluctantly had her hospitalized in a facility for the mentally ill where she died on 21 May 1959.

The story of Marion Scott’s American heritage reads like a page in a history book but I will save it for another time. Let’s just say it involves wigwams, the family witch, slave trading, cinnamon, hemp, Russia, and Whistler, the artist.

Getting to know the Alwyns

Another highlight from our Autumn 2008 publishing season is a new biography of the composer, William Alwyn, by Adrian Wright. Perhaps best known now as a film composer, Alwyn’s output included five symphonies, two piano concertos, three string quartets, and several operas and ballet scores, as well as numerous songs and pieces for solo piano. Adrian Wright’s book will be a magnificent addition to our list of books on British composers, but how did he discover the music of William Alwyn? He explains in this extract from the preface to The Innumerable Dance:

I never met or knew William Alwyn. I was alerted to his music in the 1960s by the Stock Editor (a now defunct post) of Norfolk County Library, Robert Illsley. ‘Mr Illsley’, as he was known to most - and certainly by a teenage library assistant in his first job - came from Derby, and had not only an astounding knowledge of books and the people who wrote them but a catholic relish in the arts, however humble or self-important. One of the joys of turning up for work was knowing he would appear (rather like a Demon King coming up through a trapdoor) sometime during the morning and expound on subjects he thought might interest me: perhaps the most recent episode of the TV series Z Cars (he was a keen admirer of the waspish Inspector Barlow), or, a prized favourite of Mr Illsley’s, the soap opera Crossroads, in whose absurdities he delighted. His knowledge and caustic wit ranged widely over the extraordinary and the neglected, from such ridiculous authors as Amanda McKittrick Ros and the novelists employed by Messrs Mills and Boon (he loved to read extracts from the closing passages of their publications), to the less well known British composers of the twentieth century. It was then that I heard of William Alwyn, and my first thanks must go to the late Mr Illsley, whose dress always comprised a suit, trilby and Gannex raincoat, but whose appreciation of art was always worthy of serious attention.

It was much later, in the 1990s, when I rediscovered, or perhaps began to appreciate for the first time, Alwyn’s music, through the long series of his work recorded by Chandos Records. The booklets to the CDs often included a photograph of the composer’s widow Mary, apparently Margaret Rutherford-like in sensible blouse, homely cardigan, plaid skirt and (out of sight in the picture) almost certainly sturdy brogues. She was seen smiling helpfully up at the conductor on his podium. It was now that I began to listen to Alwyn’s music and discover the breadth and ambition of his work. I had left it too late to meet the composer, but eventually I sent a letter for Mary Alwyn to Chandos which led to an invitation to visit her at Lark Rise, the Alwyns’ home at Blythburgh, a half an hour journey from my home just outside Norwich. It was probably at our first meeting that I told her I was some sort of writer, having already written a biography of the novelist L. P. Hartley, and from that moment she suggested I should write the life of her husband. An easy prey to flattery, I was elated, and hadn’t this book fallen into my lap just as my other biographies had, as if there was something fateful about my association with the subjects I wrote of?

I cannot recall now how long it took me to realise that being Mary’s anointed biographer had its problems. Mary was not only extraordinarily strong-minded but revered William and everything he had ever produced – music, poetry, librettos, essays, translations and paintings. It was some months before I finally agreed I would write it, but I was already aware that behind me stood a small army of prospective biographers who had one way and another fallen into disfavour, usually when she suspected a whiff of even the most tentative criticism of Alwyn. Some of these would-be biographers hovered still on the fringes of Mary’s life. At every visit to Lark Rise and to the nursing homes where she spent her last years I was quizzed; how was the book coming along? The progress was snail-like, for I knew that any attempt at a meaningful biography was impossible during Mary’s lifetime. I was aware by now that the story was a complicated one with three leading characters, and that a proper understanding of Alwyn’s personal life was crucial to any appreciation of his career.

Further excerpts from this new biography will appear over the coming months. The Innumerable Dance will be published by the Boydell Press in September.