An Obsession with Music

The long-awaited biography, Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music by John Lucas will be published on September 18th. It is the culmination of a lifelong interest in Beecham for the author who describes, in this extract from the book’s preface, his first encounter with the great man some sixty years ago:

I first saw Beecham conduct in the late 1940s. I had witnessed Malcolm Sargent in action, and Boult and Barbirolli, and I even retain a vestigial memory of Henry Wood, but I was very young at the time and far more interested in the music that was being played than who was conducting it. The Beecham concert was at the Royal Albert Hall, promoted by the impresario Victor Hochhauser, who in an advertisement had announced that the great man would be giving an introductory talk about the items to be performed. Beecham walked on to the platform purposefully, stepped on to the rostrum, eyed us up and down with an air of hauteur, and paused. ‘Ladies and gentleman’, he said in a voice pitched a bit higher than I was expecting, with the words articulated very precisely, even primly. ‘Mr Hochhauser has said that I shall be talking about tonight’s programme. I shall be doing no such thing.’ And he turned and plunged straight into the most vigorous performance of the National Anthem I had ever heard. (I had no idea that his conducting of it was famous.)

This was pure theatre, pure Beecham. He had caught the audience’s attention and he held it until the end of the concert. I can still recall the magical, diaphanous effect in that first programme of Liszt’s symphonic poem Orpheus, with the perfect balance in the orchestra (it was the year-old Royal Philharmonic) and the subtle grading of the dynamics. Suddenly, for the first time, I was made aware that conducting was not just a matter of beating time but, at its best, an inspired act of recreation.

Beecham is arguably the finest executant musician this country has produced. He was certainly the most influential. He raised orchestral standards in Britain to an unprecedented height. He proved by example that opera was for everyone, and not just for the society-led coterie which, for social as much as musical reasons, attended the short summer seasons at Covent Garden. And, however incredible it might now seem, he was responsible for the works of Mozart and Haydn becoming staples of the concert repertory in Britain and, in Mozart’s case, the operatic repertory as well.

What he was unable to do, despite his tireless advocacy, and his incomparable performances and recordings of the music, was to persuade audiences that Delius was indeed, as he claimed, the ‘last great apostle in our time of romance, emotion and beauty in music’. I recall turning up for an all-Delius concert at the Festival Hall in 1958 to find that so few people had bought tickets for it that Beecham had had to change the second half of the programme to Sibelius’s First Symphony in the hope of attracting more customers. I cannot pretend that it bothered me. Beecham was one of the best Sibelius conductors of his time, a verdict with which the composer himself concurred.

Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music by John Lucas includes a CD of Beecham in rehearsal.

The Secrets of Maurice Duruflé

Maurice Duruflé was one of the last great proponents of the French Romantic School of organ playing. For many years he was the organist at the church of Saint Etienne-du-Mont in Paris, on the northeast corner of the large square where the massive Panthéon stands, on the highest hill south of the Seine. He composed a handful of major organ works, a luminously impressionistic chamber work, a major orchestral work (Trois Danses), and, of course, the Requiem, considered to be his greatest work. In this first posting of our Autumn season, James E Frazier describes some of the pit-falls of writing biographies of the recently deceased:

Not every author receives published reviews in advance of a yet-to-be-published book. In my case, two “reviews” appeared nearly five years before the publication in 2007 of Maurice Duruflé: The Man and His Music (University of Rochester Press), the book I had worked on for perhaps eight years before that.

In the course of my research I discovered the facts about several of Duruflé’s open secrets and thought they merited publishing in two back-to-back articles in The American Organist. At the time, I innocently surmised that their publication would generate interest in the book, and while I correctly anticipated an energetic response, I got much more than I anticipated.

For reasons that remain obscure to me, the fact that Duruflé had a first wife was not to be discussed in polite society. Duruflé’s second wife, the virtuosic organist Marie-Madeleine Duruflé-Chevalier, quickly garnered an international reputation as his primary interpreter, and, after their marriage in 1953, any remembrance of the first wife served no useful purpose. She became one of Duruflé’s open secrets, even though she was a respected teacher of piano and solfège, as I discovered, and was legally Duruflé’s spouse at the time he wrote his major works, including most of the Requiem.

The second secret was not exactly an open one, as nobody knew about it until the late 1990s when the American musicologist Leslie A. Sprout did some research into previously sealed documents from the Vichy era. It was she who disclosed the existence of a government program to provide work to composers by offering them commissions to write symphonic works, operatic works, chamber works, and the like. The program actually began in the waning years of the Third Republic, but Vichy continued it. Duruflé was among eighty-one composers who received commissions from the Vichy government. He agreed to write a symphonic work, but produced the Requiem instead.

Both of these “secrets,” along with a few others (for instance, the fact that Duruflé had studied composition with Charles-Marie Widor though he denied doing so, and the fact that from his adolescence he wore a toupee to cover some unsightly scars to his scalp), were among the material that I presented in the The American Organist.

The journal later published two letters written in response to my articles. One was from Frédéric Blanc, then president of the Association Maurice et Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, in Paris, who was a protégé of Mme Duruflé and lived in the Duruflé apartment on Place du Panthéon, with total control over the Duruflé estate. The other was from Ronald Ebrecht, an American who in 2002 published Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986): The Last Impressionist, for which I supplied a biographical chapter (without mentioning the open secrets). Both men wrote scathing critiques of the articles.

Mr. Blanc declared the articles “an accumulation of false information and insulting implications concerning the Duruflés, who were upright, honest, and virtuous artists,” saying my research was based on “small anecdotes, things [I] considered sensational, and some perfectly indiscreet revelations concerning the private life of Maurice Duruflé, a procedure considered to be in very bad taste in France.”

Mr. Ebrecht lamented that my articles constituted “an extreme disservice” to the journal’s readers, who were thus treated “with both disdain and disregard,” and claimed that my treatment of the first wife and Duruflé’s baldness constituted poor taste, insofar as they brought “no demonstrable influence upon his music.” Neither of the letter writers mentioned the Vichy commission specifically, but one can well assume that both men thought the matter entirely too sensitive to mention. So much for pre-publication reviews.

In support of his position, Mr. Blanc solicited letters from five prominent French organists, including one of the titular organists at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. These he submitted (in French only) to the editor of the journal, who refused to print them. He subsequently published them in the French journal of the Duruflé Association. All the writers were incensed by my articles, but none offered any specific response to the points treated in them, suggesting that for them the open secrets were still too sensitive to name, even in rebuttal.

Duruflé’s secrets were real, and some of them remain unexplored or unexplained. Their answers - if there be any - may lie hidden in the Duruflé apartment, among the papers still protected by Frédéric Blanc, with no forecast as to when they might be opened to researchers.

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!