Hans, Milein and Igor

In March Toccata Press launched their new edition of Hans Keller’s writings on - and Milein Cosman’s drawings of - Stravinsky with a reception at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London. Stravinsky the Music Maker is the third incarnation of this book and the most complete yet, with all of Keller’s known writings on the composer, greatly enhanced by Cosman’s lively line drawings. Christopher Wintle, one of the trustees of the Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust and a publisher in his own right, gave the following address on the night, which we are pleased to post here in full:

The Time: Spring 1967. The Place: Oxford. The Occasion: I am cycling into College for dinner. As I come down the Woodstock Road, I see my tutor waiting at a bus stop. He is Dr. Egon Wellesz, one-time student of Arnold Schoenberg and classmate of Berg and Webern. I stop. “Good evening,” he says sweetly, “And what did you do today?” “I listened to Stravinsky!” I beam in reply. His smile becomes rictal: he is clearly agitated. “Stravinsky,” he cries, “was a FRAUD!” Whereupon he raises his arms as if dancing The Rite of Spring and emits a few primeval grunts. I bid him a pleasant evening and continue to College. Naturally, I spread the bad tidings among friends. No-one is delighted – but then, no-one is surprised: even in the 1960s, Igor is still ‘hot potato’.

In the preface to this combatively-titled book – for Hans believed that Stravinsky, unlike others, genuinely made music – Martin Anderson claims I supplied the articles that got the project started. Well, as far as it goes that’s true– but I can go further still. What happened was this. First, I breathed heavily down his neck to ensure he included all Hans’s writings on Stravinsky; and then I was forced to draw in my breath as he and Mark Doran added in extra pieces I’d either forgotten or knew nothing about. The result of their expert sleuthing is not just a gratifyingly tidy piece of archival house-keeping, but also a generically richer collection than I’d expected.

The writings are arranged chronologically over a period of 35 years from 1948 to ‘83; they are drawn from music magazines, learned journals, book reviews, newspapers, concert previews and programme notes; and they come to an imposing head in ‘Stravinsky Heard’, a reprint of Hans’s contribution to Stravinsky Seen and Heard from 1982. Yet taken together, they evince the refracted unity of a modernist collage. After a few introductory scraps, the main theme emerges in 1954 as Hans sets out to defend Stravinsky, not so much against Schoenberg, but rather against ‘the Schoenbergians’ – in other words, against the Welleszes and all those who couldn’t recognize genius when they heard it. Pre-eminently he targeted Theodor Adorno. It was, of course, an extraordinary mission: for if he didn’t count himself among the Schoenbergians, Hans was still deeply imbued with the thought of Schoenberg and the traditions behind him. Not for him was the Russian Stravinsky, the ‘neo-classical’ French Stravinsky or the time-travelling American Stravinsky; his Stravinsky could only be a co-opted Viennese. And it is no surprise that, during those 35 years, Hans had to wrestle with some demons of his own.

Let me sift the evidence. At first sight, Hans’s attitude to Stravinsky seems ambivalent. True in 1956, he berates Adorno for not being ‘inspired by that great respect for a great genius without which the truest observation on him lacks perspective’ [:45]; true too he deplores how Adorno tears ‘Stravinsky to shreds with the intellectual power of … a philosopher and the subterranean passion of a fanatic’ [:53]: after all, Adorno likens Stravinsky’s repetitions – the celebrated ostinati – to ‘the mask-like ceremonial politeness of certain schizophrenics’ [:54]. And even when he and Adorno both recognize ‘a sado-masochistic trait’ pervading the music, Keller again springs to the defence: ‘I should never have dreamt of evaluating a creative character trait as such, negatively or positively’ [:59], he writes: for Stravinsky’s ‘anti-expressiveness does not, as Adorno thinks, result in emptiness, but in fullness fully opposed’, yielding a ‘statically intense tension [by] opposing the flow of rhythm [with] rhythm itself’ [:60]. And so on.

But what happens when Hans himself takes the stage? His earliest views are so disrespectful that they’re not worth the debate. In 1951 he refers to The Rake’s Progress as a ‘sham creation’, ‘a pale and defective copy’ of Così fan tutte [:59]; and in 1954, in an essay that compares Schoenberg’s ‘Dance round the Golden Calf’ (which he sees as a rite) with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (which he sees as a dance) he derides the Rite as ‘a musical failure’:

I cannot see that it has any chance of survival, except as a museum piece [:40].

He listens uneasily to Stravinsky rehearsing Agon and failing to correct the ‘distonations’ in the string unisons: ‘his zest nevertheless carried off the passages in question,’ he remarks diplomatically, ‘but any lesser musician will have to be more pedantic at these points …’ [:71]. In a review of Robert Craft’s Conversations with Igor Stravinsky he reveals severe logical contradictions in Stravinsky’s pronouncements on music theory, resolves them in his own terms and saves up a stinging riposte to the end:

’Critics’, says Stravinsky, ‘misinform the public and delay comprehension. Because of critics many valuable things come too late.’ All the more so when artists themselves turn into critics and proceed to misinform themselves.’ [:81]

Hans berates Stravinsky (not unfairly) for ‘deceiving himself in his usual manner’ over the working of contrast in a later piece, Movements [:83]; and he notes how

the master was not beyond descending to the level of uncomprehending gutter journalism when pronouncing upon the music of such dangerous rivals as Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg or, most savagely, Britten [:110]

– especially when there was doubt as to how much of Schoenberg’s music Stravinsky actually knew [:142]. Finally in 1983, Hans considers it a positive ‘duty’ to reassure the reader that Stravinsky the man was not worth knowing about

unless one is childish enough to enjoy the coincidence, within one and the same mind, of supernormal art and moral sub-normality. I only met Stravinsky once – and had never met such a small-minded great mind before. [:167]

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hans would happily have taken tea in Oxford with Wellesz: the positives far outweigh the negatives. But when we take these strictures, along with those on Colin Mason, Peter Stadlen, Robert Craft, Joseph Kerman, Paul Griffiths and others, we understand that his appetite for publicly criticizing the critics, already whetted in the Music Survey by 1950, never diminished one iota.

More importantly, though, Hans set out to enrich ‘history of music’ and ‘textual criticism’ with ‘the application of psychoanalysis’ [:39]. It was a vital, lifelong initiative, though still not one much heeded by our relentlessly positivistic culture. As the book Music and Psychology shows, Hans was a classical Freudian enriched by the British psychoanalysis and sociology of the 1940s; and, as a hilarious chapter in his book 1975 shows, he could also play the unpious ‘psychological observer’. So it comes as no surprise to find him talking, in Stravinsky the Music Maker, of sadomasochistic masterpieces (such as the Mass or the Symphony of Psalms), or of self-castigating aggression, identification, object-love, creative mourning and melancholia, the return of the repressed, the capacity in art for pathology to yield health, and so forth. What is fascinating, though, is to see how the psychoanalysis, once allied to aesthetics, interacts with and reshapes Adorno’s critical stance. This happens in three ways.

First, Hans revalues the opposition between the respective followers of Schoenberg and Stravinsky into a positive dialectical field, and even considers a mutual influence between the two masters (though there is more to be said on how the mature Schoenberg not only reclaimed classical forms but also did a bit of neo-classicizing of his own). That is to say, Hans celebrates the tension between release and restraint, development and anti-development. Stravinsky, he concludes, is more a ‘counterpoint’ to Schoenberg than a ‘counterpole’ [:41]. Second, he relates this revalued dialectical field to Freud’s dual-instinct theory of 1920, with the Austro-Germans promoting Eros (love) and Stravinsky Thanatos (death). But that being so, he argues that the dialectic should not be between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but rather between Wagner and Stravinsky – Wagner being the counterpole that Schoenberg wasn’t. He writes:

Clinically, it is of the greatest significance … that the most passionate Stravinsky-lovers … are, at the same time, the most conscientious – invariably moralizing – objectors to Wagner’s music. [:164]

And third, he comes to recognize that it was not just Schoenberg’s death in 1951 that released the creative mourning behind Stravinsky’s late move into atonality and serialism, but rather Anton Webern’s in 1945. For Webern, ‘the ultimate expressionist’ [:112], was also, in Hans’s words, a fellow ‘sado-masochist’ whose ‘sparse, ultra-transparent textures [were] cleaner … than anything our entire musical history had had to offer until then.’ Indeed, they were textures whose brevity Stravinsky would emulate repeatedly, notably in the poignant setting of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle …’ analysed with some attention in the book.

All this is immensely stimulating. Today, for instance, we could extend the argument by aligning Hans’s work on small groups in the 1940s with modern sibling-theory. Juliet Mitchell argues that our deepest influences are not necessarily the father-figures of the past, but rather our professional brothers and sisters of the present. So not only did Stravinsky honour the ghosts of Schoenberg and Webern, but he also set out to prove himself with the post-war avant-garde – a Boulezian peer-group that, as we know, took for its pace-setter the pupil and not the master, Webern not Schoenberg. Add to that Keller’s observation that Stravinsky displayed ‘hostile identification’ towards Benjamin Britten by plundering the younger man’s texts and music [:100] and we conjure up yet another Stravinsky: the castrating father, the annihilating older sibling and – since Britten almost alone knew how to plunder Stravinsky to effect – a jealous cannibal gorging on his own, reclaimed flesh.

This is not the occasion to assess the book’s technical aspect. On the one hand the analyses restrict themselves (now unfashionably) to theme and motif, but on the other integrate their findings with psychology and aesthetics. Suffice it to note that the terms in which Hans analyses Stravinsky are those in which he also analyses Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – as is clear from the Essays on Music. In general he postulates a tension between a composer’s ‘background’ – his sources – and his ‘foreground’ – his invention. In Stravinsky’s case, though, he inverts the duality, with the sources now to the fore; out of this he reveals a new creative type, the anaclitic artist, one who can only operate by revealing his emotional dependence on others. And Hans also shows how style can arise from the exaggeration of some features at the expense of others. Although his contrast between Wagner’s surging ‘upbeats’ and Stravinsky’s restraining ‘downbeats’ may be a rhetorical exaggeration, he nevertheless illuminates counter-poles that were once united. Bach’s St. John Passion, for instance, begins with down-beating cries of ‘Herr, Herr, Herr’ and ends with up-beating injunctions of ‘Ruht wohl … Ruht wohl’.

In these and other respects, Hans’s contribution to Stravinsky the Music Maker may open up territory for others to invade, develop or dispute as they see fit. But it is still a momentous pioneering effort, and one that repays our closest attention.

The Way We Listen Now

We have already posted an excerpt from Bayan Northcott’s acclaimed new collection, The Way We Listen Now, on this blog. The book was given its official launch in mid-April at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London. Christopher Wintle, publisher of Plumbago Books and editor of the collection, gave the following address at that launch:

Many years ago, I used to rent a holiday flat in Cornwall from the artist Patrick Heron. Patrick was gregarious, and liked his guests to know what he was up to. One day, when I got back from the beach, he said, “Come and see what I’ve done this afternoon.” And there, in his studio, was a beautiful gouache.

“An afternoon’s work,” I cried, “and you’ll sell it for thousands!”

Patrick drew in his breath.

“An afternoon’s work, yes,” he said tersely, “but also a lifetime’s work.”

Bayan’s collection of essays – which is his first – is rather like Patrick’s gouache. In publishing terms we put it together rather quickly – it took about seven months from start to finish. Yet, one way or another, it seemed we’d been talking about it for half a lifetime. Back in the early ‘eighties, Bayan and I were closely involved in trying to make sense of the mass of writings that now make up the Hans Keller Nachlass: how on earth were we going to divide it all up – chronologically, topically, philosophically, or what? The categories we came up with eventually stood behind the CUP Essays on Music of 1994; but they’ve also formed the basis for all our later Keller books. So we’re used to sorting.

Then again, when I began Plumbago Books in 2000, with its emphasis on criticism and composition, Bayan was my strongest ally and has remained so ever since. Those of you who’ve read his preface to Hugh Wood’s Staking Out the Territory, which we published last year, know just how well he can position composers and their writings, not only of our time, but also of remote times. So he knows Hugh’s book well. And, in fact, Bayan’s book is directly modelled on Hugh’s: it’s the same size, about the same length, and is comparably illustrated – in Bayan’s case with marvellous portraits by Milein Cosman and iconic images by Michael Daley. The text even opens with a drawing of Hans by Milein – an appropriate start, as Keller is one of Bayan’s critical touchstones. Indeed, I can proudly say, The Way We Listen Now testifies to how deeply Austro-German thought has helped mould recent British musical thought. More still, Michael Daley’s cover shows Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky symbiotically fused; and in doing so, it distils that key aspect of twentieth-century self-consciousness that Keller used to describe as ‘foregrounding’ our cultural ‘backgrounds’. The work the cover refers to, of course, is The Fairy’s Kiss (1928).

But there the parallels stop. For whereas Hugh’s book is the work of a composer who approaches every literary genre from the standpoint of an Oxford-trained historian, Bayan’s is written by an Oxford-trained English scholar, later turned composer, who loves to bring everything into his purview. Musically, he chronicles our times in all its serious manifestations: Jean-Paul Sartre might have called him a compulsive ‘totalizer’. There are marvellous set-pieces here on different aspects of composition, on words and music, on composers from Sebastian Bach to Judith Weir, and on the flow of the musical scene through authenticity, the revolutions of 1968, broadcast music, world music, Philip Glass and Oasis. Sometimes his sentences overwhelm us with a Kantian sublimity of allusion. Here, for instance, is how he follows up praise for George Benjamin’s song of 1990, On Silence, for mezzo-soprano and five viols:

… an increasing number of other composers have been rising to the opportunities of early music ensembles – from the 1991 Glyndebourne Serenades for period wind ensemble commissioned from Jonathan Dove and Nigel Osborne in celebration of the Mozart Bicentenary, to John Woolrich’s deployment of the full Mozartean line-up of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in The Theatre Represents a Garden – Night (1991), by way of whole arrays of viol pieces commissioned by Fretwork in celebration of the 1995 Purcell tercentenary, and more recently by Concordia to complement the pavan sequence of Dowland’s Lachrymae.

He then cites Alexander Goehr, Tansy Davies, Gavin Bryers, Peter Sculthorpe, Paul Ruders, Tan Dun and ‘even Elvis Costello’.

Over two-thirds of these essays are drawn from the weekend review section of The Independent as it appeared in the 1980s and ‘90s. It is hugely to the credit of a national paper that it gave Bayan such freedom to map out his views, and we must all count ourselves grateful. Such an enterprise, I fear, is no longer possible. Yet, for all the quality of The Independent, assembling this collection was not just a matter of transferring newsprint to bookprint. On the contrary, much of our effort was spent trying to create a house-style that kept the fluency of reportage while rising to academic demands for accuracy. The outcome, I believe, is literary, focussed and sometimes witty. Here, for instance, is Bayan on W. H. Auden in the late 1940s:

… Auden had evidently known some of Mozart’s and Wagner’s operatic works since his youth, even if he claimed he only learned to love [Wagner’s] after reading Nietzsche’s arguments against it. Nor for that matter, were his interests entirely absorbed by opera in his later years. Despite such naughty aperçus as ‘people who attend chamber music concerts are like Englishmen who go to church abroad,’ his conversations and letters … are full of enthusiastic comments on choral, symphonic and chamber-music works by [composers from] Bach [to] Stravinsky.

However, there is a third and vital aspect to the book. I believe that in every thinker or artist worth their salt, we look, not just for the scavenger and the martinet, but also for the dancer who is prepared to leap through fire. Bayan is just such a dancer. He is nothing if not forthright in his views; he isn’t led by fashion; and for decades he has stuck out for genuine standards in composing, performing, and listening – and in this, he is a true heir of Hans Keller. Those who don’t bend with the times, of course, can be thought of as spoilers: but the test of time has shown that Bayan’s caveats remain, even when it concerns those whom he personally knows and likes best. For example, he notes that –

While the coruscating surfaces of a Carter, Boulez or Maxwell Davies score may be welcomed as the most exhilarating, dazzling or disturbing expressions of transformation, what is being transformed is by no means so obvious – and this is ultimately felt as an absence, or lack.

That was written in 1984. Yet the deeper questions, what does it mean for a composer to write thematic music on a theme which is never disclosed, and does that ‘lack’ have to be negative?, are still, 25 years on, worth debating. Modern composers, after all, are generally theme-shy; many of their popular precursors weren’t; and, audiences, oddly, still like tunes, or at least something to hang on to.

Staking Out the Territory

We are pleased to distribute the publications of Plumbago Books whose latest, Hugh Wood’s Staking Out the Territory and Other Writings on Music has just been published in both cloth and paperback editions. Our music editor, Bruce Phillips, attended its launch:

A goodly selection of composers, performers, critics, art lovers and just ordinary chaps like me assembled on Tuesday 26^th February at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Rutland Gate, London to mark the publication of a new book in the Plumbago Poetics of Music series entitled Staking Out the Territory and other Writings on Music by the English composer, teacher and writer Hugh Wood. The book was being launched in combination with an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Milein Cosman, whose instantly recognisable portraits of musicians and artists included one of her late husband Hans Keller, thus neatly encompassing the other sponsoring body behind the publication, the Cosman Keller Art and Music Trust. The speeches were short and witty: Julian Hogg speaking on behalf of the Trust, Christopher Wintle on behalf of Plumbago Books, and Hugh Wood on behalf of himself and of the many individuals who had contributed to the book, not least the William Scott Trust who had enabled the group of eight of the late William Scott’s paintings to be reproduced in colour within the book — Scott having been a favourite artist of Hugh Wood’s. The book itself, edited by Wintle, is a collection of Hugh Wood’s articles, reviews and other writings on music culled from various sources and written at various times over the last 40 or so years.

Wood’s writing is attractively pellucid, clear minded and sane, whether he is writing about the satisfactions of composition, composers and musicians he has known, books he has read, music he has heard. The tone is humane, humorous, witty, civilised, unpretentious and mercifully free of the jargon of music analysis or music theory. The book is full of apt quotations, strong opinions, and insights into musical history. Although Wood quotes with evident approval a couple of scurrilous remarks about publishers, we can all be grateful to Plumbago for bringing forth this happy compilation marking Hugh Wood’s 75^th birthday.

Christopher Wintle’s speech, which can be read in full by clicking on the link here, concluded thus:

Anyone who’s spent time in Hugh’s excellent company knows how happily and tirelessly he dances along the highways and byways of culture: he loves all sorts of books and music; he has an appetite for good stories; and he shows a Krausian relish for the ironies of modern life. Indeed, the sheer scale of the book’s index might almost have impressed Michael Tippett. But as we talk to Hugh, we gradually realize we are being observed. For there, standing in the shades, unmoving and unblinking, is an emissary from the underworld, equipped by Zeus with mighty thunderbolts, ready to punish us for hubris, falsehood and any excursion into phoneydom. No composer to my knowledge has ever walked so tight a rope, or so gone out of his way to make sure that the furies start at home. Hugh startles us with the truth of circumstances that we can all recognize but few can bear to admit. On the very first page of the book, for instance, we meet the undergraduate of New College, Oxford trying to rehearse his music. He describes the

“long-suffering singers or instrumentalists at last convened in one place and now attempting to decipher their manuscript parts as indefatigably as any Foreign Office clerk, while trying to follow the erratic beat and wild grimaces of a nervous composer-conductor; and the final scene – recording session, of course always under-rehearsed, or disastrous performance to a little group of kindly-disposed acquaintances and the freshman who thought it was all the Scandinavian Society [p. 3].”

Later in the book he turns his beady eye on his composing colleagues past and present. How much time did those French composers who embraced Iberian eroticism actually spend in Spain? As little, it seems, as possible. And whatever happed later in life to the young Tippett who had yearned for Hitler to win the war so that he could eradicate the Empire he hated as he ‘hated nothing else’? Why, Companion of Honour, Order of Merit and … Commander of the British Empire. In Hugh’s hands, truth-telling is itself an Aristotelian rite of purgation.