Bach, Mozart, Beethoven; turgid, trite and clumsy! Learning about classical music...

When I was a child, it seemed to me that classical music was all the same. It also seemed that adults who liked classical music liked it all.

So when I decided to try and appreciate classical music, in one sense I did not know where to start; in another sense I thought it did not matter.

But when I did start, I began with tackling The Great Composers. Luckily, the nearby city of Bristol had an LP library; so I began borrowing a couple of discs a week - also listening to the classical music channel on the radio (BBC Radio 3).

I soon found that I had strong preferences - not just between musical eras (I liked best the baroque and classical) but between the works of a specific composer. Indeed, I found that even the Great composers, the ones whom I fully agreed were Great, wrote a lot of dud and dull music... some more than others.

But when they wrote 'bad' stuff, the Great Composers exhibited different kinds of badness.


When JS Bach is bad, and because he wrote such a lot - a lot of it is bad, especially the vocal music for church performance; he is worthy, dull and constipated. He desperately needs an enema. When inspiration flags in the day-to-day chore of composition, Bach grinds-out the music with technical correctness and zero inspiration.

(A friend, who was one of the most musical people I have ever met - and who later worked as a BBC Radio 3 producer, used to opine that most of Bach needed 'a drum kit' to enliven it - and would start miming a driving rhythm during what he termed the 'turgid' passages.)

But genius is all of-a-piece; and the greatness of Bach (in strictly musical terms, the supreme greatness) is a product of that same earnestness and attention to detail which leads to the turgidity of many uninspired cantatas and fugues.  


Mozart is never as dull as Bach at his most constipated; but much or Mozart, indeed most of Mozart - essentially everything he wrote in his childhood, youth and early years - is trite: merely decorative patterning, which because it lacks the complexity of Bach, sometimes seem like be a maddening waste of time.

Bach may be crushingly boring; Mozart is always superficially-charming but often feels like being stuffed with chocolates.

But the very greatest works of Mozart have exactly that easy-listening simplicity which makes his lesser output seem such a trivial timewaste - when Mozart touches the heights (and nobody touches higher) the effects come from something indefinable but transcendentally beautiful that is added to, or infuses, something close to bathos...

...Well, I don't need to say more, because the essence of the genius of Mozart was perfectly captured in this scene from the movie Amadeus, written by Peter Shaffer: The relevant piece excerpted in the film is the Serenade for 13 wind instruments in B flat major K 361 - and is one of the very best - and most Mozartian - things Mozart ever did.


Beethoven was a man at his best when striving; a composer of strength, energy; we seem to feel him grappling the material into shape, and triumph at his triumphs against the odds.

There are a few places where Beethoven successfully produces relaxed, unstressed music (such as the really lovely, but uncharacteristic, Pastoral Symphony); but it is part of Beethoven's struggle that on the one hand he sometimes fails to win.

And then Beethoven just comes across as clumsy - and exhibits technical failures, ugliness, clunkiness in a way never seen in Bach or Mozart.

This is the case in many of Beethoven's attempts at writing fugues; and most obviously in much of the Ninth 'Choral' symphony, where there or examples of horribly big holes in the orchestration, abrupt gear changes, and sustained howling required from the chorus which is extremely wearing. The Hammerklavier piano sonata is similar. He was trying so very hard to be great, that it shows.

And some of Beethoven's 'light music', done as commissions and not from inner need - are like an elephant trying to dance a ballet.

His variations on God Save the Queen I recall as excruciating (and never listened again) - it was a task (probably not worth doing) calling for lightness of touch and fluency - Mozartian charm - but in trying to make something significant out of fluff, Beethoven becomes embarrassing - something Bach and Mozart never are*.

But then, Beethoven's courage in over-reaching and trying so obviously hard, made his work the main fulcrum of the classical tradition - his work changed the direction of  music and created wholly new possibilities and range in the symphony, the concerto, the sonata, even in opera. Composers lived-off Beethoven for a century, and when this impulse became exhausted, the classical tradition declined and (all but) died.

For this reason, many would regard Beethoven - for all his adolescent oafishness and buffoonery, indeed because of it - as the greatest of them all.

*NOTE: I revised this opinion when I attended a live recital by Sarah Beth Briggs, playing in a small venue; after which I said that although I had always assumed these were just a kind of over-extended Teutonic joke: "The concert revealed them to be of tremendously exciting virtuosity - consistently interesting, and thoroughly enjoyable!"  

Kenneth McKellar wafts the angels

Kenneth McKellar was treated rather as a joke in my childhood - a Scottish chap who wore a kilt and sang patriotic songs to old people...

 

But he was perhaps the finest British tenor of his generation - indeed conductor Sir Adrian Boult stated he was the greatest Handel singer of that era (Boult being the premier Handelian). But McKellar did not like the life of an opera/ oratorio singer, and quit to became a middlebrow concert artist.

What made McKellar such a superb singer was very simple: primarily the quality of his voice - as is the case with most singers - he just had a lovely clear tone. But his intonation was excellent, the phrasing was highly lyrical - although unobtrusive, and his technique was strong without being spectacular. His pointing of word meanings was also exceptional - although, again, subtle.

But the general public will always recognise a singer whose voice is beautiful - especially a tenor, which is a rare voice where vocal beauty is even rarer. There is an inbuilt thrill of being toward the limit of the natural range, with the constant danger of 'cracking' to worry about and add frisson, particularly when the singer uses an open-throated style of production, like McKellar. 

At the opposite end of McKellar's achievement is his unaccompanied version of the Irish song - She moved through the fair. This puts a microscope to his technique and musicality - it is hard to listen without tears.

This is the essence of ballad singing, and would have been loved by any people at any point in history - in ancient Greece or modern New Zealand, around the camp fire or in the Lord's great hall, in a bothy or a palace - McKellar was a true 'bard'.

Scott Joplin: the best, most original, most important composer from the United States

Scott Joplin (1867/8-1917).

There are no great US composers - no-one of the stature of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner - so we are comparing minor figures.  

Joplin was a miniaturist - but he achieved perfection, many times over, in his genre. He established Ragtime and became, without dispute, its best writer; and Ragtime led to Jazz - which was America's major contribution to world music.

Consider one of Joplin's less-well-known works, but a favourite of mine: Nonpareil. I find it absolutely and completely delightful in its gentle, lyrical fluidity! -- Great all through; but wait for the fourth and final theme with its extreme syncopated arpeggios -- so wistful, so yearning - yet so easy to enjoy!...

Glenn Gould's Bach depicts the detail of Heaven

I see now that when I was (or am) responding to Glenn Gould's playing of Bach, it is a depiction of Heaven in a very detailed sense. I can (sometimes) feel this moment by moment, each tiny decision, nuance; the lines, tones, harmonies asif happening for the first time with surprising inevitability.

I am able to re-experience Gould's ecstatic absorption in his playing, and in the music as Bach composed it - and my condition in Heaven (when I want it) will be to play like Gould and compose like Bach but in my own (unique) way; because if I can respond to it on earth, then I can do it in Heaven.

Primarily, Heaven is a place of love and relationships; but/and Heaven is a place of creativity - the creativity of making and of performance. (It is a place of all positive Goods.)

Each person's creative ability and urge is different, and changed and expanded by experience and in combination. There is no repetition; and the creating can go on for as long as wanted.

Glenn Gould and the importance of ecstatic experience

Glenn Gould - the musician - has been a significant person in my life since I discovered his piano playing in the autumn of 1978; indeed, he became an important role model at various points - despite the vast dissimilarity in our temperaments and talents.


I bought my first Glenn Gould - the double LP set of Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier, primarily because I wanted to explore Bach on piano, and secondarily because I was intrigued by the poor reviews he invariably got from the Penguin Stereo Record Guide (the nature of the criticisms made me feel that I would like what he did).

Extremely rapidly, I began to develop an interest in Gould the Man as well as the musician; or rather, something about the way he played, when supplemented by a few scraps of knowledge of his biography and opinions, was enough to convince me that here was a fellow spirit.

I first managed to glean an impression from the liner notes on the (relatively few) LPs I could buy in England, a couple of journalistic pieces; and then, on a family visit to Toronto, I bought a precious (and expensive copy) of the first biography: Geoffrey Payzant's Glenn Gould: Music and Mind.

This crystallised what it was that magnetically-attracted me to Gould: the importance of Ecstatic Experience.


In the best of Gould's performances (a lot of them) there is an intensity of absorption which is ecstatic, and which induces a similar ecstatic absorption in me. While a student I can recall listening to a short piece - a prelude for example - at lunchtime, and feeling a swirling ecstasy, at the 'top' of my mind as I walked and worked, which lasted for some hours afterwards - and which seemed to enhance my experience of life.

This fitted with an already existing idea about the aim for my life to be lived 'at concert pitch' - a phrase which doesn't literally mean what I meant by it, and which I got from a passing comment of Hendrick Willem van Loon. In 1978 I was spending more time in solitude than ever before, and I began to realise that - as Gould said  - Solitude is the pre-requisite of ecstatic experience; and which I made the central theme of my radio programme Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy -

http://solitude-exile-ecstasy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/solitude-exile-and-ecstasy.html


My central problem was that Gould's basis for ecstasy was a genius level of creative musical performance - whereas I had no basis for any such creativity. Now, it provoked in me a (rather feeble but sustained) search for some such ability - a search variously looking at music and acting, but mostly exploring writing: poetry, prose, drama and essays and also simply writing journals.

But as an immature young man I was too easily convinced of other similarities between Gould and myself; and in particular the notion that Gould's life - as I very partially understood it at that time, which was a very idealised and abstracted version of the real thing. Gould, it is now known, spent a vast proportion of time interacting with other people - more than I do, in fact; including various romantic and sexual relationships with women.

Nonetheless ecstatic solitude, in the state of total absorption during playing and creative composition, was perhaps Gould's essential reality.


In particular, I tried to believe that a solitary life of technological interaction with 'the world' would be an ideal for me, if only I had the strength of will to embrace it - yet whenever I got anywhere near this state, I found myself extremely discouraged, lapsing into an idle and disaffected and despairing condition.

Gould never gave live performances, was an expert on recording methods, lived alone, seldom went out, and was almost constantly in the presence of mass media - TV or radio were switched-on most of the time (even during sleep), newspapers were devoured, telephone bills amounted to several average person's salaries per year.

Yet/and Gould was very productive of recordings, broadcasts, writings - he was an international figure, much discussed; and a considerable influence on ideas.

The modern world now has many people who live in what is broadly the kind of way pioneered and advocated by Glenn Gould - a world in which technology is primary and human communication is primarily mediated by technology.

But now it is here, it doesn't seem much like Gould's world - in particular ecstasy, in the sense Gould meant it, seems extremely rare.


The obvious reason is that the mass of modern people are not Glenn Gould! - and the fact is that a self-created environment in which Gould thrived, and which he found conducive to creative ecstasy; is when scaled-up and applied at a population level leads the mass of Men merely into passivity, into inattentive dissipation.

What Gould thought were general principles about the world and Men, turned-out to be at most distinctive to a like-minded minority; and were perhaps even unique to him.

Thus are geniuses often poor guides to life and living! What a genius wants - and indeed needs - may be poison to people in general.



Glenn Gould's 'Solitude Trilogy' of radio programmes are well worth detailed consideration. The Idea of North is the most famous - but the Latecomers and Quiet in the Land are both considerably better. It is worth noting that despite the name these programmes are not actually about solitude- they are about life in isolated communities (Canadian far north, Newfoundland, Mennonites) that are - to some extent- cut-off from the modern Zeitgeist.  

Five Desert Island Discs

According to the rules, the castaway can take eight records, one book (other than the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already provided) and a luxury item which must be of no practical value.

The conceit is that these should sustain life on a Desert Island, in practice the idea is to make a selection which provides pegs upon which to hang a brief biography.

I insist that my interlocutor should be the programme's originator, the gentleman-enthusiast Roy Plomley (or Roy Plum-in-the-mouth as I used to quip as a teenager).



First disc: Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie

This was my favourite of four overtures featured on our family's one and only classical music record when I was a young child. I used to visualize the story of the opera (as summarized on the sleeve notes) as I listened - including a part which I added-in where a cat stalked the magpie. 

So it symbolizes my very happy early life, and the rhythm of its main theme - diddly dum-dum-dum daah - still has a function in being my favourite music used to wake up my wife and children - especially my daughter.

It is also a delightful piece of music; sunny, effortlessly tuneful, brilliantly orchestrated and very exciting!


Disc Two: From Steeleye Span's LP Below the Salt

One Misty Moisty Morning was the first Steeleye Span track that I heard, the first electric folk music, and it led onto the first time in my life that music became very important to me.

At the time I heard it I was, rather unhappily, 'into' underground and progressive rock music - none of which I have since regarded to with enjoyment. So I was listening to a late evening BBC radio programme which played mostly this kind of stuff - hosted by a DJ called John Peel. However, Peel had eclectic tastes and on this occasion played something from a new album by Steeleye Span: this signalled the kind of music that I had been waiting for. 

Because some time earlier I had discovered Tolkien; and that had changed my life - and the implication of Tolkien seemed very much against pop and rock music, whereas Steeleye Span sang epic ballads about elves and the supernatural, earthly songs about ordinary people such as milkmaids and sailors, and played jigs and reels and other Hobbit-like dances.

Of course, they did this with un-Tolkien-like electric instruments such as guitar, bass, violin, dulcimer... but somehow that made it better, because electric folk seemed to represent the infusion of modernity by folk influences, a saving of shallow civilization by ancient thoughts - for me, then, it seemed to be the future.

Staying with Steeleye Span I moved to explore other electric folk, and other folk music of all kinds; also I discovered medieval and renaissance music- and then Bach and Telemann as the first classical composers I engaged with, at least partly because they used the Treble Recorder which I had come to like through early music and folk.

So, this Desert Island Disc of Steeleye Span represents for me that teen period of musical exploration and expansion; during which music came to occupy a more central place in my life than before or since. And although Misty Moisty is a long way from being my favourite Span track, I do still enjoy it.

Disc Three - Mozart's The Magic Flute, conducted by Solti

I did not touch the sublime in music until I experienced opera in my mid-teens - and the first time that opera hit me with full force was in watching TV.

There were two: the funniest opera - The Barber of Seville by Rossini, in the performance conducted by Claudio Abbado and starring Berganza, Alva and Prey; and then there was Ingmar Bergman's Swedish-language movie version of the best opera/ the best piece of music ever written - namely Mozart's Magic Flute.

When I got from the record library the Magic Flute excerpts conducted by Georg Solti I felt for myself musical greatness - as in the above-linked performance of Sarastro by the gigantic Finnish Bass Martti Talvela.

This is music which Bernard Shaw, the greatest British music critic of his day (as a young man) said was the only music which it would seem appropriate to hear from the mouth of God.


Mozart's Magic Flute is both the simplest and easiest, most child-like of the canonical operas, and also the deepest, most heavenly. Through its five contrasting main characters it touches on the most important human emotions and types - Tamino, the heroic poet; Papageno, the earthy, lusty, family-loving Everyman; Pamina the innocent maiden; Sarastro the noble sage; and Queen of the Night, the beautiful, insightful, gifted, proud demon.

Bergman's film version is not just the best of all opera films, and a fine musical rendering (with good although not great singers) - but Bergman's subtle reworking of Schikaneder's inspired but chaotic libretto matches more closely the depth of the music with the words. For instance, Bergman unforgettably makes Sarastro into Pamina's father - which makes perfect dramatic symmetry.


The role of the Magic Flute in my life was spiritual, as well as aesthetic. I recognized, but struggled to make sense of, the vision of something higher and beyond. It is to my credit that despite professed atheism I did not reductively explain-away this experience of the transcendent - but unsuccessfully tried to articulate it within my covert and imprecise belief in Creative Evolution (a doctrine which was also derived from Bernard Shaw - especially as it was put-forth in my favourite play of that time: Shaw's Man and Superman, an explicitly Mozartian drama).


My enjoyment of The  Magic Flute and Barber of Seville led onto an intense period of opera exploration on LP recordings, with the vital assistance of the Bristol City library - such that over the next four year I listened to the whole of the canonical opera repertoire from the classical and romantic era. Sometimes I was seeking aesthetic experience, often it was a love of singing - especially technical aspects of the tenor voice.

Music, especially opera, became a serious activity: a religious activity. As often as not I would borrow a musical score of the opera - and read that as I listened; if not, I would follow the libretto; and while I listened my focus was intense - I would not be doing anything else.


Naturally I wanted to participate in this world of classical music, and did so in the only way I could - by singing in choirs and choruses, and on my own at home - which was unsatisfying but better than nothing. I had vague, unformed, but important-to-me notions of doing something musical more seriously at some point - perhaps being a music critic.

The best of Classical Music, especially opera, was the highest thing I knew, and I deeply wanted to be 'inside' it - somehow.

But at the same time I always held back from commitment, somehow knowing that even if the luck went my way; music could not provide me, with my nature as it was, and very limited aptitude and inadequate training, with what I sought.

Disc Four - Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, played by Glenn Gould

When I attended a comedy revue and Hamlet parody called Hamalongayorick at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1978, I enjoyed the interval music in which a jazz piano trio played Bach - and soon afterwards I bought an LP of Jaques Loussier's jazz trio (which was presumably being emulated); but also Glenn Gould playing Bach's Well Tempered Clavier Book One. 

Buying this double album was a double act of rebellion, since until then I had been a purist who insisted on Bach on harpsichord (and who indeed indeed was mildly hostile to the piano); and a rebel also in buying Glenn Gould's performance since the British musical establishment were barely aware of him, but when his performances were reviewed in The Gramophone they were usually given only two stars (out of five) due to their many eccentricities.

Insofar as the British establishment knew of Gould, they were hostile- and focused only on spiteful gossip. For example there was a false rumour that the fugues on his recording of the Bach 48 Preludes and Fugues had been recorded multi-tracked, with Gould playing one voice at a time. Of course, this was inadvertently very high praise of his ability to perform counterpoint!

But Gould and Bach's keyboard work provided my first serious, long term, and still-enduring instrumental obsession in classical music. I will listen to these pieces by Bach performedby many artists, on many instruments and combinations. And as for Glenn Gould... there were periods over the next few years when Gould - both his performances, and his example, became almost a life-line to me: a model of how I hoped, ideally, to live.

I have many memories of solitary times in various places (including Toronto - Gould's home city) listening to Gould and Bach with a luminous note-by-note intensity; projecting myself into that musical world as a place of detailed meaning and exalted inspiration.

At first I had to mail order Gould's LPs because they were not stocked by British shops, I bought some more on trips to the USA and Canada - but by the time he died four year later Gould had become almost a household name - and his star has continued to rise for many years. I even contributed a small piece to the edifice of his posthumous fame:

http://solitude-exile-ecstasy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/solitude-exile-and-ecstasy.html

I find Bach's pieces, and especially (most of) Gould's performances, are just about the only music that never stales for me, no matter how many repetations - probably because its appeal is rather subtle and deep, so I never feel close to plumbing the depths.

Its appeal is also ascetic, monastic; and this is the best music for the enjoyment of solitude - even if that solitude was a moment grabbed from an over busy life, in a tiny room in a tower block in a city... Gould and Bach can make it as deserted as an island.

Disc Five - Wagner's The Ring cycle, conducted by Solti

1979-80 was undoubtedly the apex of my musical life, and it began with listening to the complete Ring cycle of opera's by Richard Wagner - on vinyl LP and a state of the art HiFi system, with a couple of friends, following the whole thing on scores, cocooned by the sensory isolation of a soundproof room in an underground 'bunker' administered by the Music department. In between we talked and read Wagner

The impact of living and breathing the mythic world Wagner for these four days was overpowering - and the mood lasted for several weeks afterwards - I recall a walking holiday in the English Lake District with my brother when almost everything seemed to remind me of the Teutonic woods and landscape, and I was continually more-than-half-expecting to find nymphs in the streams and wicked dwarves popping out from behind rocks.

The following year I was sharing a flat with some music students, one of whom was one probably the most 'musical' person I have ever known - he later became a BBC Radio Three producer, and then bought his own concert hall and recording studio.

I attended pretty much all the classical music concerts in the city and university - selling programmes at the main concert hall to get free tickets. I sang in tow Gilbert and Sullivan shows in lead parts (high baritone/ tenor) and sang tenor in large choral works with the auditioned Newcastle Bach Choir, and in a Chamber Choir of just twelve voices which was founded by the music students (and is still going, 35 years later).

Other highlights included attending a rehearsal with Sir Charles Groves conducting Das Rheingold, giving Sir Michael Tippet a birthday present on his 75th birthday, and later attending his birthday concert in London - travelling back five hours on the overnight train to arrive in Newcastle at 05.00h and going to medical school lectures the next day after only two hours of sleep!

Outside of classical music I played folk music on the accordion - at one point accompanying an impromptu ceilidh in the depths of Northumberland playing with the Duke of Northumberland's official bagpiper, busking for the Rag charity, and playing 'Scotland the Brave' in a country dance band made up entirely of my six flatmates (accordion, clarinet, guitar, piano, snare drum and double bass) at my 21st birthday party.

I suppose this was 'living at concert pitch' - and there were plenty of other non-musical activities going-on as well; not least learning medicine; and the frenetic year was followed by a bit of a collapse of morale and optimism which took a bit of getting-out-of. Such is what happens if one comes to rely on sequential powerful external pleasurable stimuli for personal happiness - the stimuli inevitably lose their potency, and there comes a point when the dose cannot be increased any further.


As for Wagner, and the Ring cycle - I never really appreciated them again with the same depth and intensity - except for Das Rheingold, which I still regard as a magnificent and mythic achievement.

I never got beyond choosing these five Desert Island Discs, although there were supposed to be eight (according to the rule) - perhaps because, after 1980 and The Ring, no music ever had quite the same impact. 

Piano transcriptions of Beethoven Symphonies

Almost everybody who likes classical music rapidly listens to Beethoven's nine symphonies - buys recordings, picks out their special favourites - and then listens then to death!

Eventually what Colin Wilson terms 'the robot' in our minds takes over listening to Beethoven Symphonies it can become hard to listen afresh.

Well, one way to renew the experience is to listen to Liszt's piano transcriptions which bring out whole new aspects of the pieces, with a wonderful clarity, lyricism and excitement.

Glenn Gould played a few, including the wondrous Pastoral (number 6) :

And some kind person has put ALL of the transcribed symphonies on YouTube played by a chap called Cyprien Katsaris who has a real feel for this music. Here is number 5 - Daa-Da-Da Daaah:

So which are my favourites?

1. Number 3 the Eroica. One of my very favourite pieces of music of all, one of the most significant pieces of music ever written. Exciting, optimistic, delicious, noble and superbly adept and innovative.

I love the first and last movements especially. (Actually this one does go significantly better with full orchestra - but I love the alternative tonic dominant end cadences on piano).

2. Number 6 the Pastoral. The first one I liked, a joy from first to last, and a wonder indeed.

These two above the rest - and all the others I like except... number 9, the contrived and clunky 'choral' symphony; which I usually don't enjoy much, except for the short tenor solo in an otherwise mostly raucous and shrill finale.

Still - in the piano transcription you can escape the endlessly shrieking sopranos...!

**

Note: In general, and with one shining exception, I do not agree with the sophisticated view that 'late' Beethoven is the best - I find the late stuff to be too constipated; Beethoven is trying too hard to overcome the loss of his lyrical facility and being too consciously experimental and innovative. The shining exception is the Piano Sonata number 32in C minor Opus 111 - the second 'variations' movement is simply one of the most wonderful things ever written by anybody; as was recognized by Thomas Mann who put a whole chapter analysing it into his novel Doktor Faustus. But as a rule I accept the common consent of the middlebrow concert-going, record-buying masses that the best Beethoven is in his 'middle' period.