Round Stones

When the Japanese pianist, Noriko Ogawa, read Out of Silence by Susan Tomes, she was so impressed she decided to translate it into her own language. Earlier this week, the two pianists came together to discuss the challenges of translating a book like this into Japanese (the various nuances of ‘practice’ in Japanese, did Susan Tomes write in a woman’s voice or a man’s voice, and so on). Their meeting was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on their Women’s Hour programme. Here, by way of a reminder, is one of Noriko Ogawa’s favourite pieces from the book. Perhaps it is a cliché to suggest that the Zen calm of this extract appealed to her.

Back in the days when I used to play for the string masterclasses at Prussia Cove, I developed the habit of going for a walk along the beach by myself after the classes to dispel the tensions of the day. My job was to play the piano for the violinists, viola players or cellists who were having a lesson. The lessons took place in front of a roomful of other gifted students and visiting teachers from all over the world, so the atmosphere was always intense and the stakes high. I wasn’t having a lesson myself, but this didn’t stop certain teachers from including me in their personal criticisms and tantrums, and I sometimes needed to remind myself afterwards that there were things in life other than music.

I walked slowly along the beach, looking for interesting stones. My method was not to look for anything consciously, but just sweep the beach with my gaze and let the stones call to me. I took them back to my room and kept them on the windowsill as talismans, though I usually liberated them back to the beach before I went home. As I walked on the beach, waiting for ‘interesting’ ones to present themselves, I realised that I was always drawn to stones which were smooth and round. This may not be most people’s idea of interesting stones, but it’s mine. I am fascinated by the thought of the multiple forces of wind and water which have to work on a rough piece of rock for years and years to convert it into something smooth and round. Such tremendous forces from so many different directions: what are the chances of them making something round? Far easier to imagine how the clash of asymmetrical forces could produce jagged, dramatic shapes with attention-seeking personalities. There were plenty of those theatrical stones on the beach, but I passed by on another track. I see the round stones as survivors of a long process of buffeting. They hold more secrets.

Out of Silence by Susan Tomes is available from all good booksellers. Her earlier book, Beyond the Notes, largely concerning her time with Domus, remains in print. Both are published by the Boydell Press.

“. . . a vision of eternity”

As an organist, writes John R Near, I cannot remember a time when I did not know the name Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937), but little did I know what lay beyond that name and the ubiquitous organ Toccata—a work so famous that it virtually is the music of the organ to many who may not even know the composer’s name. I have always loved playing Widor’s organ music; I think of it not so much as music for the organ as music of the organ. It rises organically from the instrument as if born of a loving parent. For Widor, the soaring tone of the organ was a “sound singing eternity to the stars.” He once told his pupil Albert Schweitzer, “Organ playing is the manifestation of a will filled with a vision of eternity.”

Why wouldn’t I want to explore more fully the organ music of a composer with such a lofty notion of our chosen instrument? When I began my doctoral dissertation at Boston University in 1982, that was precisely my goal—nothing more. Then I began the research. I was soon overwhelmed to discover that Widor was not at all just an organist and organ composer, but rather a mainstream musician who composed in nearly every genre, and who had been a sort of cultural ambassador for France. It became clear to me that it would do Widor a grave injustice if I considered him only from the single aspect of his career as an organist, albeit legendary. I had to write a biography—a “life and works.” What began as an academic project soon became a labor of love. In hindsight, I clearly arrived at precisely the right moment, as no one was yet much interested in Widor.

Completed in July 1984, my dissertation became the first full-scale posthumous biography of Widor in any language. Although it encompassed his entire work, it naturally highlighted his career as an organist and organ composer, and I felt certain that if there were to be a resurgence of interest in Widor’s music, it would be through the organ works. I decided I had to continue my research, and the study of Widor became a kind of mission. I had become quite aware that the composition and publication history of Widor’s organ works was knotty at best, and that a critical edition of the ten organ symphonies was sorely needed. I put that as a priority, but I had no idea how complex the puzzle would be. It required ten years, 1987–97, to research and to publish my edition with A-R Editions.

Just when I thought I might start this biography in earnest, it was proposed that the Philadelphia Orchestra would perform Widor’s Symphony in G Minor for Organ and Orchestra in 2002, but with the stipulation that it had to be published. They had last performed the work from manuscript copies in 1919! The biography had to be put off as I undertook the research to publish a critical edition of the Symphony, again with A-R Editions. In retrospect, I can see how the twenty intervening years between my dissertation and the beginning of the present book only prepared me better to reach the summit of this biographical Everest.

I have always thought it surprising that there were only a couple of fairly extended biographical studies of Widor during his lifetime. Although I had my doctoral research to build on, I was forced to mine original source materials, almost entirely in French. Over two decades, I collected a great deal of new material that I had not yet fully digested—countless letters, reviews, articles, news clippings, and a cache of material in the possession of Widor’s grandniece, whom I found in 1988. Perhaps the most extraordinary of the treasures that tumbled out of her huge armoire, was the 103-page manuscript of Widor’s “Souvenirs autobiographiques” that he was dictating in his ninety-first year. It required several visits to her home over a period of years to plumb the depths of those holdings as well as the memories of family members who as youngsters had known “Uncle Charles.”

Born during the reign of Louis-Philippe, Widor endured more transitions in French government, wars, crises, and changes in the social fabric than perhaps any other musician. In this biography I have wanted as much as possible to let him tell his own story, either through his prolific writings or the recollections of friends, students, and admirers. His descriptions of backdoor intrigues in Conservatory politics, bureaucratic infightings, professional jealousies, and survival during the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars propel his life’s story with historical relevance, passion, insight, and wit. In addition, critical reviews have been drawn upon liberally, as they were an invaluable resource for piecing together the composite picture of Widor’s lengthy professional career and the critical reception of his works. Most of this material appears in English translation for the first time.

In Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata, the reader may be astounded to discover a musician of amazingly diverse accomplishments: organist, composer, Paris Conservatory professor, member of the Institute of France, leader in the French Bach revival, co-founder and first director of the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, journalist, conductor, music editor, scholar, correspondent, inspired visionary, and man of deep culture. Widor was well connected in social and professional circles; he seems to have known nearly everyone who counted. Living to become an icon in French music and his country’s cultural emissary, Widor also reigned for sixty-four years over the largest instrument in France at the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice where the elite of society, musicians, artists, litterateurs, scientists, politicians, and nobility flocked to his organ gallery. Far from being cloistered in that organ gallery, however, Widor is seen in this biography as a man of mainstream intellectual and artistic achievement.

Adolphe Boschot, Widor’s successor as perpetual secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts wrote: “By his ever-generous narratives, he taught us to direct our attention not to the shadows, but rather toward the bright side of things—not to the inevitable pettinesses of men or the disillusions that events sometimes carry, but rather toward the beautiful works and the good deeds that enrich our intellectual and moral heritage.” Through his talent, indefatigable industry, and humanity, Widor left a wealth of beautiful works and the example of a life lived with grace and rich in good deeds. In his final days he reminisced, “I have had a beautiful life.” For what he left us, we are the lucky ones.

Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata by John R Near is available now from the University of Rochester Press or your favourite bookseller. It includes the most complete listing ever compiled of Widor's oeuvre.

Beecham's Salome

Thomas Beecham had intended that his first Covent Garden season should open in February 1910 with what was bound to be a sure-fire sensation, the British premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome. There was a problem, however. The Lord Chamberlain's office, responsible for stage censorship in Britain since 1737, refused to grant it a performing license. Oscar Wilde's play of the same name, on which Strauss's libretto was based, had been similarly banned twenty-eight years earlier, on the grounds that it portrayed on stage the New Testament figure of St John the Baptist, and the current Lord Chamberlain (Earl Spencer, great-grandfather of Princess Diana) was not prepared to change his mind on the matter. Beecham opened his season with Elektra instead, but continued to do battle over Salome with the Lord Chamberlain who, nine months later, at last gave in, but at a price.

The Baptist was to be allowed back into the opera, though he was to be called, not Jokanaan or John, but ‘a Prophet’, while in the final scene the executioner was to hand Salome a blood-stained sword, rather than the saint’s head on a silver charger. Salome’s hymn to the head was to be bowdlerised and all Biblical allusions in the text eliminated. The action was to be moved from Judea to Greece and the Five Jews were to become Five Learned Men. For the sake of getting Salome produced in London at last, Strauss accepted the changes.

The opera was licensed on 1 December, one week before the opening. Tickets for its opening night sold out within eighty-five minutes of the box-office opening, and before long touts were offering seats at more than double their face value. During the final dress rehearsal Salome, the lissom Finnish soprano Aïno Ackté, found that the ‘blood’ dripping from the sword was staining her fingers and, using ‘some very drastic words in French’, wiped it off on the cloak of the nearest supernumerary. It was not a problem she had encountered in Germany, where she had held the charger bearing the head.

Beecham stopped the rehearsal and in the hope of finding a solution ordered one of his staff to make an urgent telephone call to the Lord Chamberlain's office. After a long wait the shirt-sleeved stage manager rushed to the front of the stage and knelt before Beecham, who was waiting in the orchestra pit. ‘We can use a tray instead of a sword’, he shouted, ‘so long as there is no head on it.’ The news was greeted with cheers. Comedy had finally turned into farce.

Beecham was tireless. The dress rehearsal took place in the afternoon. In the morning he had taken a three-hour rehearsal for his first concert for the Philharmonic Society, which he conducted that same evening at Queen’s Hall. The concert came at an awkward moment, but he had postponed it once already, and for the sake of future relations with the society he could hardly delay it again. It was not the only concert he conducted during the final week of Salome rehearsals.

Three nights earlier he had conducted a programme of Wagner excerpts with his orchestra at the Opera House; and on the evening before that had given a concert of eighteenth-century operatic music at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, at which Maggie Teyte sang arias by Méhul, Grétry, Paisiello, Isouard, Monsigny and Dalayrac. Teyte claimed to friends that she had an affair with Beecham, but, if true, it seems it was a brief one.

Not surprisingly, given the enormous amount of pre-publicity it had received, the first night of Salome on 8 December was a succès fou, though several reviewers found the opera less musically satisfying than Elektra (Ernest Newman took the opposite view.) The Lord Chamberlain’s office came in for a good deal of criticism. ‘Truly the ways of the Censorship are past finding out’, wrote the Times critic, who wondered how anybody in the audience could possibly have been expected to miss ‘the very striking coincidences’ between the fate of the Prophet and that of John the Baptist. ‘Of what avail was it’, asked the Sunday Times, ‘that Salome had to say “Ich will dir folgen” [“I want to follow you”] instead of “Ich will deinen Mund küssen” [“I want to kiss your mouth”], when she expressed by every fibre of her being the very abandon of amorous desire?’

In the heat of the performance some of the textual alterations were forgotten by the singers, though if these were noticed by the members of the Lord Chamberlain’s staff who were present, none of them mentioned it. Either they did not speak German or they chose to adopt a diplomatic silence.

By all accounts Ackté’s performance in the title-role was remarkable. She expressed emotion ‘not only by glance and gesture, but by sensuous curve of bodily movement’, said one critic, who added that although the music was ‘rather exacting’ for her (recordings suggest that the top of her voice was not her strongest point), she sang ‘skilfully’ and with ‘rare expressiveness’. It was noted with approval that, contrary to the practice in Germany, she performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ herself, rather than handing over the task to a double. Less appreciated was the silver tray, which, though it lacked a head, was filled with ‘gore’. Ackté found it ‘inartistic and rather revolting’ and, after the sixth of the ten performances, asked if it could not be covered with a cloth, so that ‘people may imagine what they want’. Company manager Archibald Archdeacon passed on Ackté’s request to the Lord Chamberlain's Comptroller, who replied that ‘Lord Spencer says “yes”, the tray can be covered with a cloth, only care must be taken not to build up a great heap in it which would look suggestive.’

So great was the ridicule poured on the Lord Chamberlain’s office for its part in the Salome affair that many imagined it could not be long before it was relieved of its licensing duties, but another fifty-eight years and two world wars were to pass before stage censorship in Britain, along with the Lord Chamberlain’s role in it, was finally abolished in 1968.

This post is adapted from Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, the acclaimed biography of Britain’s greatest conductor by John Lucas. It has been reissued in paperback to coincide with the 50th anniversary in March 2011 of Beecham’s death. ‘This is the best biography of a musician I have read for a very long time,’ said the International Record Review of the hardcover, while Classical Music claimed that this ‘thorough, exhaustive and often highly amusing biography will...re-establish Beecham as one of the foremost musical personalities of the last hundred years.’ The book is available now in paperback from all good booksellers.

On Music and Beauty by Markand Thakar

Part 1: A Visitor from Outer Space, Confused

Art is a vehicle for self-knowledge. Whoa, that’s heavy. With apologies, yes.

I sometimes imagine a discussion with a visitor from outer space.

Space Alien: What did you do last night?
Human Person: I went to a big box.
There were about 1500 people there. They turned off the lights, and in a corner
of the box some people made noise.
SA: EEW! How long did you have to do
this?
HP: It took about two hours, and I wanted to do it.
SA: So they
must have paid you well?
HP: Actually, I paid a handsome sum.
SA:
(scratching its left nose) Hmmm. I have just one question.
HP: Yes...
SA: Why?

Why indeed!

I have never seen myself. Don’t get too smug — you’ve never seen yourself either. I’ve seen my face in a mirror, I’ve seen photographs of my face, I’ve seen my lower extremities, the backs of my lower legs, parts of my arms. I’ve never seen my back, my rear end, or parts of my arms. I’ve never seen the essence of my physical presence to the world: my eyes, my mouth, my nose, my ears.

My understanding of who I am is limited to the absence of what I am not. I know that I am not the table, the computer, the window, those trees. I am not the glass or the flowers. I am not the air or the smells. I am not the omelet, nor am I the taste of the omelet. I am not the death of my friend, nor am I the sadness. I am not the joke nor am I the humor. That thing that is missing from all the things I am not — that’s who I am. So the more defined, more present, more vivid to me are the things I am not, the better I understand my own being.

Ordinary understanding — or consciousness — is a three-part process: subject—mode of consciousness—object. If I see the Tower of London, I am the subject, the tower is the object, and seeing is the mode of consciousness. If I remember the tower, I am the subject, the tower is the object, and remembering is the mode of consciousness. If I imagine the tower, I am the subject, the tower is the object, and imagining is the mode of consciousness.

So here’s one answer to the “Why?”: we consume art because it helps to define us to ourselves. I read a novel; it has meaning for me to the extent that I relate the events in it to my own experiences of the world, it makes them more vivid, it heightens my awareness of the world external to me, and it brings my own essence into better relief. I see an opera or a play, or a Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can, I connect deeply with the loves, the losses, the joy, the sadness, the soup, and I have a more pronounced understanding of my loves, my losses, my joy and sadness, my soup. The external world is more vividly limned, what that world is not is in greater relief, and the “what-it-is-not” — me — is better defined.

Ah but visual art — and music — can do something else, something different, something — yes — BETTER!


Part 2: When is a Tree not a Tree?

When is a tree not a tree? Or, more precisely, in observing a tree, when am I not observing the tree?

Some 25 years ago I lived in an apartment in a rural area. Outside the apartment was a tree, a large one, with many branches. I saw the tree as I was coming and going, every day for two years. It was a tree. One day, though, leaving the apartment, I glanced up, and observed that tree. It was beautiful, and I was struck by it. And I was left with this nagging question: what was different about the tree when it provided an experience of beauty from when it was just there as part of my general observation of the world around me?

Kudos to you, honored reader, who has presumably made your way gamely through part 1 (and more kudos and sincere apologies if you remember it!), but we return to the structure of consciousness of our ordinary experience, which is: subject — mode of consciousness — object. I (subject) see (mode of consciousness) the tree (object). The experience of beauty is different from that of ordinary experience. In an experience of beauty, the object comes to me in such a way that I absorb it. It takes me over. I lose myself in the object. And in “losing myself” in the object, in a very real sense I become that object. There is no longer a subject or an object, what remains is just consciousness.

So what was different about the tree? Nothing. What was different was me: my openness to the possibility of losing myself in that visual image. Perhaps it was the incipient sunset in the background. Perhaps I approached it in a pensive moment of inner peace. Nonetheless, the visual image of that tree enabled me to absorb it, become it, and be moved. When the tree comes to me as beautiful, I am observing the tree but I am not observing it, because I am the tree.

Now this extraordinary experience couldn’t happen from just any old tree. That particular tree had numerous branches fanned out in a particularly gratifying shape. And the experience was fleeting, to be sure.

But there is an experience of beauty that is deep and profound: it is the one available from visual art, and from music. We open ourselves to the aesthetic object – the Rembrandt or the Picasso, the sublime performance of Mozart or Brahms. We focus on it, and it alone. We absorb it, it takes us over, we lose ourselves in it, we become it.

And in so doing it takes us to a magical place: ourselves. Our Selves. In this act of becoming the object, neither subject nor object participate in the conscious act. What remains is the very essence of our being, our consciousness.

Toward the end of his life Handel led a performance of Messiah. Afterward, legend has it, he was approached by a friend, who said, “Maestro, surely you have provided a great entertainment.” And he responded, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them, for I had hoped to make them better.”

Why music? We can know the very essence of our being, and we can be better.

This essay is adapted from the April and May Maestro’s Musings columns in Duluth Superior Magazine (reproduced by permission of the publisher). Markand Thakar’s book, Looking for the “Harp” Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty is published by the University of Rochester Press and available from all good booksellers.

For the month of February 2011 readers of From Beyond the Stave can order Markand Thakar’s book at 25% discount from our website. Simply use the discount code HARPWEB25 during our secure checkout.

Or you can wait for the movie.

‘To know a world of beauty…’

My first encounter with Grainger’s music - writes Penelope Thwaites, editor of The New Percy Grainger Companion - began not as a music student at Melbourne University, but in England in the 70’s, not long after my Wigmore Hall debut. The composer William L Reed said to me one day, “You’re an Australian – why don’t you play some Grainger?” I considered, and decided to include three folk-settings at the end of my next recital. I found them delightful, stimulating - and demanding. That, I learned, was a not unusual experience for those embarking on performing Grainger.

Fifty years after his death in New York on 20 February 1961, a fresh evaluation of Percy Grainger is due. This Australian-American composer and pianist who spent much of his youth in Germany and Britain and who revered the Scandinavian countries and their culture seems to have been born into a state of reaction against existing norms. The necessity to earn his living and support his invalid mother took him to the heart of the British establishment as a society pianist, when his own genes were drawing him inexorably towards the music of ordinary people – folk music. His quenchless curiosity led him to experiment with new instruments to introduce into the lush panoply of Edwardian orchestral writing – an orchestra for which he wrote superbly. He envisaged a kind of music that would dispense with regular time signatures and conventional pitch, music that would move as freely as the sounds of nature.

I have just come from rehearsing a trio of Grainger songs. Grainger’s pianist is a full partner to the singer and together, time and again, two artists are called upon to create a scene, a drama , more often than not with an undercurrent of sadness. The Sprig of Thyme tells the old story of the young woman betrayed by the disappearing lover, but this girl has spirit, and hopes for better things. The music reflects all that, with a kind of gaiety that is far more touching than a display of self-pity. Absolutely characteristic in the song is Grainger’s harmony, now poignant, now twisting the knife in the wound. It all happens in three minutes – a masterpiece.

Benjamin Britten recognised Grainger’s unique greatness in this field : “In the art of setting folk song, Grainger is my master”. Britten may have produced the greater volume of works, but neither he nor any other composer I know comes near Grainger’s strangely affecting mix of emotional earthiness enhanced by harmonic sophistication.

He wrote with passionate appreciation of the folk-singers who gave him their (often jealously guarded) tunes. Perhaps they sensed he was one of them? Grainger himself never mentioned, perhaps never knew, that his great-grandfather, Jacob Grainger (1796-1880) farmed in the south of County Durham, as did almost all of his (Jacob’s) family. Just one son moved to London in the 1840s and became a master tailor, and one of his family of ten left England to take a job in distant Australia as a draughtsman, later architect. That was Percy Grainger’s father.

Some 350 performers in eight concerts will take part in the Celebrating Grainger 2011 festival at Kings Place, London, from 17-19 February. They will traverse his choral and solo vocal music, woodwind, brass and string chamber works, with the Royal Artillery Band and Orchestra his superb writing for military band, a concert including Grainger’s non-western settings, multi-hand duo piano works, percussion ensembles, Theremins, experimental music machines, and a chance for audiences to sing Grainger’s music too. On the actual 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, Sunday 20 February, speakers and scholars from Australia, Canada, USA, Denmark, Germany, and the UK will gather at the British Library for a seminar entitled Percy Grainger for the 21st Century.

Grainger’s universalism is one of the most important themes in the book I have been privileged to edit The New Percy Grainger Companion – important not because Grainger solved every problem, and certainly not because his life was some kind of pageant of triumph. He struggled. But he did think more widely than many classically trained musicians of his time – or of this time – and because he thought so freshly about music, his provocative thoughts are stimulating.

At Kings Place on Saturday 19 February, we include a British premiere of his Thanksgiving Song. Ours must be a chamber version of a work written originally for full symphony orchestra and off-stage choir with instrumental ensemble. The first half of the piece is purely instrumental – a dreamy beginning leading to a frenzied apotheosis – then silence. The second half could not be more different. When it was premiered in 2003 in the spacious Adelaide Town Hall, the off-stage musicians were able to realise Grainger’s highly original (seemingly almost comical) idea of the endlessly repeated chorale fading very slowly into the distance, as the singers and accompanying group were transported on a trolley outside the periphery of the hall. Yet as they finally stood in the outer corridor singing ever more quietly, the doors were slowly closed and a pin-drop silence followed. For this magical effect in our restricted space on 19 February, Trinity College of Music has recorded that final section with their singers and instrumentalists, and that will provide our conclusion. The live performers will listen, along with the audience.

My hope is that audiences will leave feeling altogether happier!

And now to continue my own practice...

The New Percy Grainger Companion edited by Penelope Thwaites is available now from all good booksellers and will be on sale at the events mentioned above. More on Percy Grainger can be found here and here. For tickets to the Kings Place concerts, please visit their website, and for the British Library symposium click here. Chandos Recordings Grainger Edition is self-recommending. The quotation that names this post is by Grainger and runs, in full, ‘To know a world of beauty and not to be able to spread the knowledge of it is agonising’.

Nielsen in the South

Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) is arguably the most underrated composer of his generation, despite an ever-growing number of recordings and performances of his music. In a new book, Daniel Grimley offers a critical re-evaluation of his music and its rich artistic and literary contexts, drawing extensively on the newly completed Carl Nielsen Edition. Topics include the composer’s relationship with symbolism and fin de siècle decadence and his response to the Danish landscape. Running through the book is an engagement with the idea of musical modernism - a term which, for Nielsen, was fraught with anxiety and yet provided significant creative stimulus. In this excerpt, Grimley looks at the overture Helios. For anyone who might sympathise with the old joke that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, this is how it’s done:

The opening page of Nielsen’s concert overture Helios (1903) is one of the most magical dawn sequences in music. Long pedal notes in the lower strings suggest a seemingly infinite sense of musical time and space, of floating weightlessly in the musical ether: the pause over each second bar momentarily suspends the perception of regular clock time before the work has properly begun, so that the piece literally begins in a state of timelessness. The hairpin dynamics, rising almost imperceptibly from pianississimo and falling back again, reflect the vibrating amplitude of the bowed open string: it is as much a description of the sound object or ‘Klang’ as a performance direction.

The horn calls that then gradually rise above the bass pedal sound almost impossibly distant, gently arching upwards first through the octave and then to the flat seventh, as though sounding the upper partials of a single glowing harmonic spectrum. As this sound slowly echoes and peals, the resonance gaining strength through its waxing reiteration, the upper strings begin to weave a gently flowing quaver figure, gradually filling in the gaps between the widely spaced intervals of the horn calls and bass, so that the orchestral texture emerges as if from a clearing morning mist. As this slowly shifting curtain of sound grows, the harmonic palette also widens and enriches itself, the rocking fifth steps in the bass (a horizontalisation of the earlier vertical chord structures) followed eventually by the first chromatic descent (b. 30), tilting the music momentarily towards the flat side and casting aside the drowsy somnolent sevenths of the opening page.

The return to the opening white-note C major gains a greater sense of clarification or focus, prefiguring the arrival of the first fully fledged melodic statement, the striding chorale entry of the horns with a transfigured version of their opening call at b. 54, supported by a blaze of string tremolandos and organ-like woodwind writing. The final shadows of the night in which the piece figuratively began have melted away and the music surges irresistibly forwards to the start of the main section, an energetic Allegro ma non troppo in the bright, super-charged key of E major.

Formerly broadcast every 1 January by Danish Radio, Helios has gained a deeply symbolic place in Danish musical culture. It has become a ‘Morgensang’ (‘morning song’ or aubade), sounded optimistically at the threshold of each New Year. Yet the richly associative gestures with which the music begins invite a range of critical and historical interpretations. For example, the horn’s striding chorale belongs to a local tradition of Danish dawn hymns, a musical subgenre headed by Niels W. Gade’s setting of B. S. Ingemann’s ‘I Østen stiger Solen op’ (‘The sun rises in the east’) in his cantata Elverskud (1851–4), a pivotal reference work in the creation of a distinctively Danish musical romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century. The confident new dawn which Helios evokes, with its rising horn octaves and sonorous diatonicism, is at least in part a warm afterglow of this national romantic awakening, and also an affectionate tribute to Nielsen’s former teacher at the Danish Conservatory.

Yet the music delves even deeper into imaginary ideas of Danishness in its opening bars. The horn calls at the start evoke the sound of Lurs, curved Bronze Age brass instruments excavated (usually in pairs) from barrow mounds across Denmark and southern Sweden throughout the nineteenth century. They have discshaped bells that represent stylised sun symbols whose ritual function, it was believed, was to herald the passage into the afterlife. Pairs of Lurs were displayed in the Danish national museum, and in 1910 Nielsen even composed a Lur prelude as part of his incidental music for the Viking play Hagbarth og Signe, performed outside at Friluft Teatret in Dyrehaven (the open-air theatre at the deer park north of Copenhagen), one of his most atmospheric and evocative dramatic scores. Yet, as Svend Ravnkilde has revealed, Helios simultaneously evoked an even more startling archaeological discovery, now displayed in the antiquities collection at the National Museum.

In 1902, the year before composition of the overture, a ploughed field at Trundholm bog in Zealand unearthed a precious miniature model of a solvogn (sun chariot), a golden disc pulled by a stylised divine horse (equipped with spoked wheels) that was believed to represent the journey of the sun across the heavens: a metaphor, in the Bronze Age Nordic mind, for the course of human life and its relationship with the cosmos and the seasonal cycles of the natural world. The structure of Nielsen’s overture, waxing and waning from near silence to full strength and back to silence, traces the same circular trajectory as the imaginary path of the solvogn. Nielsen thus responded to this complex mythic notion of Danishness on different levels, both through the highly localised evocation of an antique Nordic sun cult as embodied in the archaeological treasures at the National museum, and also in its reimagining through the prism of the nineteenth-century national romantic imagination in Gade’s Elverskud.

Yet Helios also breaks out from such local associations and embraces a wider musical patrilineage. The musical representation of apparently organic, self-determined growth from a kernel cell points to a whole range of nineteenth- century evocations of nature – the opening of Wagner’s Rheingold is the most obvious and paradigmatic example. Such evocations conventionally serve as thresholds to an imaginary Arcadian landscape or enchanted nature realm, and signal displacement (or removal) from the modern world. Helios is similarly concerned with a sense of the mythic past, the temporal suspension and circularity of its opening bars a way of manipulating time so as to create the impression of reaching back into an imagined antiquity.

Yet its re-creation of a lost golden age serves a double function, casting expectation optimistically forwards towards the reattainment of previous greatness and cultural renewal. The music’s growth, evolution and fulfilment thus begin to gain a more pointed ideological focus. The chorale-like treatment of the morning song at b. 54, with its shades of the finale from Brahms’s First Symphony and the Academic Festival Overture, becomes the apotheosis of a broader Northern European cultural vision, a stylised synthesis of Hellenic and Nordic streams with elements of the early eighteenth-century German Baroque. The manner in which the music sheds the mythic Wagnerian gloom of the opening page for a brighter, leaner and more athletic musical discourse at the work’s heart reveals a great deal about Nielsen’s stylistic orientation.

The overture’s Hellenism becomes a musical realisation of Nietzsche’s decisive anti-Romantic turn and famous call for the ‘Mediterraneanisation of music’ in The Case of Wagner, promoted energetically in Copenhagen in the 1890s by Georg Brandes. The ritualistic dawn evoked by Helios’s opening pages thus gives way to a consciously modern, neo-classical, and ultimately comedic vision – its closest musical counterpart, in that sense, might be Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, a work which likewise opens with a dramatic musical sunrise and unveils the birth of a new Nordic-Hellenic superman. Just as his First Symphony had sounded a dramatic modernist breakthrough in 1894, therefore, Nielsen’s Helios became a further threshold to a new expressive and musical domain, a gateway that is as much the symbolic adoption of a particular aesthetic tone or vision as the literal depiction of the sun rising above the wine-dark waters of the Aegean Sea.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism by Daniel M Grimley is published by the Boydell Press and available from all good booksellers. Grimley's acclaimed book on Grieg is also available from the Boydell Press.

The Gamba's Return

Peter Holman’s long-anticipated Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch was published at the close of last year. In this fascinating post, he outlines how he came to his subject and some of the research that has grown out of it:

The origins of this book go back to a day in the late 1990s when my Ph.D. student Ian Davies mentioned that he had come across a manuscript in London University Library that contained some eighteenth-century English sonatas for bass viol – or ‘viol da gamba’ as it was more commonly known at the time. He had come across it as part of his research into English cathedral music around 1800, and he knew I was interested in stringed instruments and their history. The London University Library manuscript turned out to include six sonatas for bass viol and continuo or two bass viols evidently composed or compiled (it includes arrangements of violin sonatas by Angelo Michele Besseghi and recorder sonatas by Francesco Barsanti) around 1730. However, it was evidently copied much later: it also includes a gamba part from a hitherto unknown sonata by Carl Friedrich Abel as well as trio sonatas from Maximilian Humble’s op. 1 of 1768.

Researching the manuscript for an article made me realise that the viol did not entirely drop out of use in England at the end of the seventeenth century, as was conventionally thought, and that there was scope for a larger study. At the same time I had become aware that I was in danger of repeating myself in writing about seventeenth-century music, and that it was time for a change of direction. Working in a later period would give me access to a far richer range of primary sources than was available before 1700. I was aware that others were developing interests in late gamba music in other European countries, notably Vittorio Ghielmi, Christophe Coin, and Michael O’Loughlin, for example. I also benefited from the interest and encouragement of the viol player and cellist Mark Caudle, an old friend and colleague in The Parley of Instruments; he is the dedicatee of the book. From the material I had assembled at an early stage, in 1998 we recorded a CD, The Noble Bass Viol (Hyperion CDA67088). It covered the repertory of compositions and arrangements for one, two and three bass viols with continuo from Purcell to Handel, including pieces by them and Benjamin Hely, William Gorton, Giovanni Battista Draghi, Gottfried Finger, Francesco Conti, and Arcangelo Corelli.

In beginning to research and plan a book on the viol ‘after the golden age’ I started with two areas where I knew gamba players had been active and there was surviving music for the instrument. The first was a group of musicians associated with Handel and the orchestra of the Italian opera company at the Haymarket Theatre. It was known that Handel wrote a gamba solo in the famous Parnassus scene in Giulio Cesare (1724), and that about the same time he wrote out the first bar of his G minor violin sonata HWV364 in the alto clef, labelling it ‘Per la Viola da Gamba’, presumably as an instruction to someone else to copy out the whole work in that form. Handel’s involvement with the gamba had been explored before, though the problem had always been that these pieces appeared to exist in a vacuum: no gamba player was known to have been active in London around 1724, and no other contemporary English gamba works appeared to have survived.

That quickly changed: in addition to the Williamson Manuscript (as it became known), colleagues working on Handel and his contemporaries, including the late Anthony Hicks and Lowell Lindgren, pointed me to a cantata by Pietro Giuseppe Sandoni for soprano, two gambas and theorbo, and cantatas by Tommaso Bernardo Gaffi and Francesco Gasparini arranged in early eighteenth-century England with gamba obbligatos. It also became likely that the various trio sonatas by J.C. Pepusch with gamba obbligato had been written for Pietro Chaboud, an Italian bassoonist and flute player who arrived in England around 1700 and played in the Italian opera orchestra. Chaboud may also have been responsible for a set of gamba arrangements of Corelli’s op. 5 violin sonatas, two of which were published in London in 1712, and the publication Aires and Symphonys for ye Bass Viol (London, 1710), which contains a set of arrangements for solo bass viol of arias from Italian operas in the repertory of the Haymarket Theatre. Arrangements tended to loom larger in the repertory of early eighteenth-century gamba players than their predecessors partly because Italian opera and violin music was all the rage at the time, and partly because gamba players in England had begun to read music in the (octave-transposing) treble clef, which made all music written for soprano instruments and voices available to them.

The other task was to try to identify the person or people who had played this new repertory of gamba music. Chaboud was the obvious candidate for the second decade of the eighteenth century, but there is no trace of him in London (or anywhere else) after May 1719. To cut a long story short, a number cellists in the opera orchestra, including Nicola Haym, François Goodsens, Pippo Amadei and Giovanni Bononcini, may have played the gamba, though only the German David Boswillibald, principally a double bass player, seems to have been active in Handel’s circle around 1724. In the book I put him forward as the person most likely to have played the solo in Giulio Cesare.

The other topic I researched early on was Carl Friedrich (or Charles Frederick) Abel, the greatest gamba player in the late eighteenth century. Abel had been studied by Walter Knape in the 1950s and 60s, who produced a thematic catalogue of his works, a biography and a complete edition. However, Knape’s work is flawed in a number of respects and is now out of date; the time seemed ripe for a new study of his gamba music and his life as a gamba player. I started by reading through The Public Advertiser, the main newspaper for concert advertisements, for each London concert season between 1759 (when Abel made his London debut) and his death in 1787, omitting the period between 1782 and 1785 when he was in Germany. Getting a clear idea of his concert career (and the careers of other professional gamba players at the time) was subsequently made much easier by Simon McVeigh, who kindly made his database Calendar of London Concerts, 1750-1800 available to me, and by the appearance of the online database Seventeenth-Eighteenth-Century Burney Collections Newspapers.

Another topic that developed early on was the life and work of John Frederick Hintz (1711-72), who seems to have been the only maker of viols in England between Barak Norman and his contemporaries in the early eighteenth century and the first makers in the early music revival at the end of the nineteenth century. He is now by far the best documented London instrument maker of the eighteenth century, thanks to the work of furniture historians and those such as James Lomax and Lanie Graf who have researched the early history of the Moravian Brethren in England; Hintz was successively a furniture maker, a full-time Moravian evangelist, and an instrument maker. The realisation that he specialised in making and selling unusual and rare instruments led me to look more generally at the cultivation of them in the late eighteenth century, helping me to understand the role of the gamba in musical life. It led in turn to studying others in the same field, such as the inventors John Joseph Merlin and Charles Clagget, and the steam engine pioneer James Watt – who made at least one gamba before he moved from Glasgow to Birmingham in 1774 and went into partnership with Matthew Boulton.

One of the pleasures of researching a rare instrument, one that was not used in mainstream public and private music-making at the time, is that many interesting people were attracted to it. James Watt is one unexpected example, and others are the American statesman Benjamin Franklin; the writer Laurence Sterne; the aristocrats Sir Edward Walpole, John, Viscount Bateman, Elizabeth Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her cousins Margaret Georgiana, Countess Spencer and Lavinia, Viscountess Althorp; the musician and writer Ann Ford; and the artists Thomas Jones, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Cheesman, John Cawse, and perhaps John Constable. Many of these amateurs were inspired by Abel’s example and tuition to take up the gamba. Others doubtless thought that playing an unusual instrument would make them appear distinctive among their musical friends. For aristocratic women it was just about the only ensemble instrument open to them, since wind instruments involved distorting the face and playing the violin or violoncello involved adopting ungraceful postures. In addition, artists seem to have been attracted to the graceful shape of the gamba, which often featured in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings they studied.

A parallel study of amateur gamba players in the early eighteenth century revealed much about musical life at the time. Having made a list of all those amateurs known to have played or owned gambas at the time, it became clear to me that they divided into roughly three groups according to social status. There was a small group of aristocrats who probably received musical tuition from household musicians or on the grand tour – which at the time often meant a period studying in Paris or Leiden as well as visiting Italy. At the other end of the social scale there was an interesting group of self-made and self-educated artisans and tradesmen, including the musical coal merchant Thomas Britton, the apothecary and botanist James Sherard, the writer Daniel Defoe, and the clock maker John ‘longitude’ Harrison. In between there was the great mass of members of the professions – clergymen, doctors and lawyers – who must have acquired their musical skills and knowledge of the gamba at university in Oxford or Cambridge or (in the case of lawyers) at the Inns of Court in London; dissenters, who were barred from the English universities, went abroad, often to Leiden, or to Scottish universities.

We know from letters, diaries, inventories of music and surviving manuscripts that these amateurs often used the gamba as a solo instrument, though it was also indispensible for providing the bass line in the music clubs that were springing up all over the country at the time; amateurs did not start to take up the violoncello in England until about 1730. In general, there was a transition at the time from using the gamba as a bass instrument, reading music in the bass and alto clefs, to a solo instrument in the tenor register reading from the treble clef. This was also associated with a change of name, from ‘bass viol’ to ‘viola da gamba’ or some Anglicised variant such as ‘viol di gambo’. After about 1720 most people outside elite musical circles normally used ‘bass viol’ to mean a four-string unfretted instrument. This was particular true in parish churches, where people would have been familiar with the Sternhold and Hopkins ‘old version’ of Psalm 150, which includes the phrase ‘Praise him upon the viol’. However, this usage was not confined to church: Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789 that the six-stringed instrument ‘called Viol de Gambo’ is ‘about the Size of a Bass Viol, but is not the same’.

I originally planned to confine the book to the eighteenth century, but it soon became apparent that gamba playing continued sporadically throughout the nineteenth century. In 1889 the historian, lawyer and gamba player Edward Payne (1844-1904) stated in a lecture to the Musical Association (now the Royal Musical Association) in London: ‘I could prove, if it were necessary, that the art of playing it [the gamba] has never died out in this country, but that the traditions of the instrument have survived in a constant succession of amateur players’ – by which he seems to have meant Thomas Cheeseman (1760-?1842), John Cawse (1779-1862), and himself.

The last professional player in England in the continuous tradition, the Dutch cellist Johan Arnold Dahmen, died in 1813, though other professionals occasionally took up the gamba for particular concerts throughout the nineteenth century, mostly as part of the developing early music movement. They include an unnamed player in a concert directed by the harpist Nicholas Bochsa in 1836; the cellist Richard Hatton in a Concert of Ancient Music in 1845; the viola player Henry Webb in at least one of Ernst Pauer’s historical concerts in 1862; and the cellist Walter Pettit (1836-82), who became well known in the 1870s for playing the obbligato parts in J.S. Bach’s passions on the gamba. By the 1880s gamba playing by amateurs and professionals was fairly common, so that when Arnold Dolmetsch organized his first old music concert in 1890 his innovation was not to revive the viol per se, but to attempt to assemble a complete viol consort and to use it to play English seventeenth-century consort music. Even so there were compromises: his first viol consort included a viola and a viola d’amore. However, Dolmetsch was a turning point, and the model he developed of the scholar-performer came to dominate the British early music scene during the twentieth century.

As always with a major research project of this sort there are loose ends to tie up and further avenues to explore. One is the history of early music: I am hoping to write an article on the harpsichord in nineteenth-century England, and I have been asked to give a paper on the twentieth-century British early music scene at a conference in Salzburg in December. I have also been using material I have accumulated on other eighteenth-century ‘exotic’ instruments. I am editing Geminiani’s treatise on the English guitar for Christopher Hogwood’s Opera Omnia of the composer, and I have recently written a study of John Russell’s fine painting of the actress Dorothy Jordan playing a lute-family instrument. In addition, I am planning a study of Handel’s use of the archlute and theorbo, which will reveal the identity of the person I believe was his regular lutenist in the 1720s and 30s. I have also started work on another research project on the history of conducting and musical direction in Britain, in collaboration with Fiona Palmer. I hope it will result in another volume in the Boydell series ‘Music in Britain, 1600-1900’, provisionally entitled Before the Baton: Conducting and Musical Direction in Georgian Britain.

Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch by Peter Holman is available from all good booksellers.