Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  Liszt, for example, died in his seventy-fifth year. For about fifteen years before his death, his music shows a remarkable change. There is none of the old flamboyance, and no more transcendental virtuosity – or at least no virtuosity for its own sake. Instead, there is a preoccupation with Hungarian folksong; the genuine, peasant variety, not the ersatz kind to be found in the early rhapsodies. There is also a partial abandonment of conventional tonality, which anticipates Schoenberg and Bartók. Instead of using the habitual system of stating a theme, developing it through various keys, recapitulating it, and finally arriving at a goal, Liszt experiments with violent contrasts and clashes, and with impressionistic effects achieved by the sustaining pedal. Humphrey Searle writes:

  The style has become extremely stark and austere, there are long passages in single notes and a considerable use of whole-tone chords, and anything resembling a cadence is avoided; in fact, if a work does end with a common chord it is more often in an inversion than in root position. The result is a curiously indefinite feeling, as if Liszt was launching out into a new world of whose possibilities he was not quite sure. For the majority of these works he returned to his first love, the piano; but in general the old pianistic glitter is absent – Liszt was now writing for himself, and no longer for his public.9

  Searle’s comments on Liszt’s late style are strikingly similar to Martin Cooper’s remarks on Beethoven’s late style which were quoted above. Beethoven and Liszt have comparatively little in common as composers, but both, in their early and middle periods, used rhetoric to convince their listeners, and both abandoned it in their last compositions.

  There are, of course, other examples of artists turning more and more toward some kind of inner development as they grow older. Bach’s Art of Fugue, which was his last major composition, may not have been primarily aimed at an audience. It is not even certain for what instrument or combination of instruments The Art of Fugue was written, or whether it may have been a purely theoretical work, not designed for performance at all. Malcolm Boyd is certain that

  performance alone can never result in a complete apprehension of Bach’s last-period works. Even with the most thoughtful performance and the most attentive listening the augmentation canons in the Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue will sound dry, academic and even ungainly if experienced in the same way as one might experience the Orgelbüchlein or the ‘48’. But to the score reader, able to follow and to ponder on their cold logic, they offer an insight into the mysteries of infinity every bit as teasing in its mathematical beauty as Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise … One would not, of course, willingly forgo the degree of comprehension and enjoyment that performance of this music can offer, but only through study can we hope to arrive at a complete perception of it, and after study, contemplation; for it exists in a world far removed from the musica humana of our own, where music, mathematics and philosophy are one.10

  Once again, we see that, toward the end of life, interest becomes increasingly directed toward pattern-making and the impersonal.

  Even in so lushly romantic a composer as Richard Strauss, something of the kind can be detected. Between the age of seventy-eight and his death at the age of eighty-four, Strauss composed the Second Horn Concerto, the First and Second Sonatina for wind instruments, Metamorphosen for twenty-three strings, the Concerto for Oboe, the Duet Concertino for clarinet and bassoon, and the Four Last Songs. Mosco Carner comments that, with the exception of Metamorphosen, these are slight works, but that

  a classical tendency, manifest in the young Strauss, showed itself again in the octogenarian, yet greatly enriched and mellowed by the artistic and human experiences of a life-time. The neo-classical tendency is displayed in a number of features: in the turn to pure instrumental music; in the avoidance of an emotionally charged expression and the emphasis on exquisitely refined and polished workmanship; in the symmetrical cut of thematic ideas (mostly in regular four and eight bars) and ‘old-fashioned’ cadences; in the marked preference for simple diatonic writing, and in the transparent scoring, whose sparseness and economy – already to be found in Daphne and Capriccio – is in strong contrast with the sumptuousness and lavishness of Strauss’s symphonic poems and the majority of his operas. Metamorphosen, which is the most important of Strauss’s late compositions, shows all these features at their most characteristic, to say nothing of a formidable skill displayed in the polyphonic interweaving of the parts.11

  Brahms, like Mozart, was inspired by a brilliant clarinet player toward the end of his career as a composer. He first heard Richard Muhlfeld in 1891 in Meiningen; and the latter’s skill as a performer inspired Brahms to write the Clarinet Trio, the Clarinet Quintet, and two sonatas for clarinet (or viola) and piano. Although Brahms himself preferred the Trio, most critics agree that the Quintet is the greatest of these works, but disagree about the feelings which it evokes. Some find it characterized by nostalgia tempered with resignation; ‘autumnal’ is a favourite adjective. Robert Simpson finds it permeated with an underlying melancholy. William Murdoch found it ‘rapturous’;

  a work that is intimate, yet full of warm colour, the clarinet adding such a glow that one can hardly believe that the composer is not a young man full of the joy of life, with all the exuberance of youth and the glamour of a passionate love.12

  In 1893, Brahms published his last set of pieces for solo piano, op. 119. Composers often write music in a minor key but end in the major. It is one way of reaching ‘home’ in triumph or in happiness. It is worth noting that the E flat Rhapsody which concludes op. 119, and which is the last piece which Brahms composed for solo piano, reverses the usual order. It is written in the major key but ends in the minor.

  Brahms, as Richard Strauss was to do over fifty years later, wrote four last songs: the Four Serious Songs which he composed in 1896, the year before he died. The settings are of words from the Lutheran Bible, but carefully chosen so that none conflict with Brahms’s agnosticism. The first song, of which the words are taken from Ecclesiastes 319–22, is so relevant to one theme in this book that I cannot forbear to quote it. After declaring that men have no pre-eminence above the beasts, for all must the, the author of Ecclesiastes goes on:

  Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?

  Brahms’s very last composition was a set of eleven Chorale Preludes for Organ, which remind both Denis Arnold and Fuller Maitland of Bach. The former refers to them as ‘tranquilly introspective in a manner reminiscent of Bach’.13 The latter, commenting on the last of the set, writes:

  it must be admitted that none of the great composers has given the world a final utterance of more exquisite and touching beauty. The last few bars have a cadence of such fresh and expressive beauty as even Brahms himself never surpassed, and once again we are reminded of Bach …,14

  Both Richard Strauss and Brahms showed some of the characteristics of third period works in their late compositions: lack of rhetoric, lack of any need to persuade or convince, and some inclination toward the impersonal rather than the personal. But their late music also exhibits a nostalgic trend which is absent from the compositions of Beethoven and Liszt. I am inclined to link this with the fact that both men, in their private lives, were cautious, hesitant individuals, uncommitted to living life to the full. Nostalgia, which is close to sentimentality, seems usually to be an expression of regret for opportunities missed, rather than regret for actual past accomplishments or pleasures. Brahms was a cautious man of whom Nietzsche wrote: ‘His is the melancholy of incapacity.’15 Although he was seriously in love with Clara Schumann (who was fourteen years his senior), and had a number of emotional attachments to other women, he never whole-heartedly committed himself and remained a bachelor. He destroyed all his apprentice compositions and m
any later works which he felt did not come up to standard. Peter Latham writes: ‘It is as though he feared that they might somehow be produced later in evidence against him.’16

  Following the disappointment of his hopes of a life with Clara Schumann, Brahms became involved with Agathe von Siebold, but broke his engagement to her when the question of marriage became urgent. It was noticed by everyone who knew him that, as he became older, Brahms became more and more reserved and withdrawn, concealing his true feelings behind a wall of abruptness and sarcasm. By nature, Brahms had a warmer, more emotional temperament than the philosophers discussed in the last chapter; but disappointment and rejection prevented his emotions from finding fulfilment. No wonder his later music is tinged with nostalgia and regret.

  Richard Strauss’s life was also incomplete. He was married to a singer who, as she grew older, became more and more dominating, grasping, snobbish, and waspish. One has only to look at their wedding photograph to guess their relationship. Pauline Strauss seems to have been heartily disliked by all who knew her. She was clearly a severely obsessional character. She required her husband to wipe his feet on three sets of doormats before entering the house, and lost her temper with the servants if the linen closets were not ordered with mathematical precision. Strauss may have taken a masochistic pleasure in being so imperiously dominated, but five of his operas revolve around the theme of fidelity, and he is said to have had an affair with one of the prima donnas who sang Salome. He was a weak man who welcomed the rise of Hitler, supported Goebbels’s attack on Hindemith and Furtwängler, substituted for Bruno Walter as a conductor when the latter was threatened by the Nazis, and also substituted for Toscanini when the latter refused to conduct in Germany. He wrote to Hitler apologizing for his connection with the Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig, who had written a libretto for him. For twenty-five years before the Indian summer which produced his last group of works, Strauss composed little of consequence. Strauss was an egotist whose main interest lay in money and the promotion of his own works. Toscanini once said to him, ‘For Strauss the composer, I take my hat off. For Strauss the man, I put it on again.’17 The composer whose Elektra and Salome are full of horror, violence and perverse sexuality, was himself an inhibited weakling. It is not surprising that his last works, beautiful as they are, evoke more feelings of nostalgia than of reconciliation or integration.

  Henry James is an author whose ‘third period’ presents features of particular interest. His last three novels, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, are even more densely complex in style than his early and middle work. Partly because they were dictated, rather than handwritten, revision was more easily accomplished, and constant revision became habitual. Perhaps we should be grateful that, during James’s lifetime, the word-processor had not yet been invented. James’s anxiety to avoid the expected sometimes results in prose which is opaque and difficult to understand. The reader finds that he needs to concentrate more intensely than most readers of novels wish to do if he is to follow the twists and turns of James’s tortuous writing.

  What is interesting is that James, in The Ambassadors, exhibits the preoccupation with pattern and order already noted as characteristic of the third period, combined with a determination to preach the gospel of living life to the full which, in other artists, would be more typically associated with earlier periods in their work. Henry James was fifty-seven when he wrote The Ambassadors, the age at which Beethoven died. James himself picks out as the core of the book the speech given to Lambert Strether in chapter 2 of Book Fifth.

  Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?18

  It was an injunction which James himself had singularly failed to follow. But, in 1899, while staying in Rome, James had met a young American sculptor of Norwegian origin, called Hendrik Andersen. James bought one of his busts, and exacted a promise that Andersen would come and stay with him, which, for three days, he later did. Leon Edel comments that James became aware that he had deeper feelings for Andersen than he had ever had before for anyone outside his own family. Moreover, James’s letters to Andersen contain far more references to physical affection than had previously been evident in James’s correspondence. Henry James was sexually inhibited. He had

  exalted the intellectual and emotional rather than the physical in human relations … We must remind ourselves also, in weighing this delicate and ambiguous evidence, that James had hitherto tended to look at the world as though through plate glass. Andersen seems to have helped James emerge from behind that protective wall. If we let our fancy run, we might think of him as opening James up to sensory feeling to a greater degree than had been the case earlier; perhaps the touch of those strong fingers of the sculptor’s hand may have given James a sense of physical closeness and warmth which he had never allowed himself to feel in earlier years; and it is this which we read in his letters.19

  So James’s third period is out of kilter. Instead of the physical being less evident as he became older, it suddenly impinges upon him as a valid, albeit irrational, part of love; something which he himself had failed to grasp in earlier days and which made him feel, rightly, that he had missed something in life of signal importance.

  Although the main theme of The Ambassadors is Strether’s injunction to ‘live all you can’, the novel also displays a symmetrical pattern. The inhibited, fifty-five-year-old Lambert Strether is despatched from America to rescue a young American, Chad Newsome, from the supposedly bad influence of Parisian life and, more especially, from the clutches of Madame de Vionnet. However, after meeting Madame de Vionnet, and himself succumbing to the liberating influence of Europe, Strether abandons his rescue mission, and urges the young man to stay. Meanwhile, Chad’s attitude has changed. After at first refusing to leave France, he then eagerly embraces the idea of returning to America and engaging in business. Thus, the two main protagonists of the novel change places.

  Ralf Norrman, who has studied such patterns in Henry James’s fiction, refers to this switch as an example of ‘chiastic inversion’: ‘A changes and becomes what B has been; while B changes and becomes what A has been.’20 Chiasmus refers to a crossing over, as in the case of the optic chiasm at the base of the brain, in which some of the fibres of the optic tracts cross over to join those from the other side. The novel which precedes the last three, The Sacred Fount, derives from this device in such an artificial way that I find it unreadable. In Notebook III, on 17 February 1894, James records two ideas suggested to him by Stopford Brooke. The second runs as follows.

  The notion of the young man who marries an older woman and who has the effect on her of making her younger and still younger, while he himself becomes her age. When he reaches the age that she was (on their marriage), she has gone back to the age that he was. – Mightn’t this be altered (perhaps) to the idea of cleverness and stupidity? A clever woman marries a deadly dull man, and loses and loses her wit as he shows more and more …21

  However, this type of pattern-making does not necessarily result in artificiality. James’s last novel, The Golden Bowl, which is one of his greatest, depends upon multiple chiastic inversion, as Ralf Norrman points out. The four main characters are the widowed American, Adam Verver, and his daughter Maggie; Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant. Maggie marries the Prince, and persuades her father to marry Charlotte in order to compensate for her loss. However, the tie between father and daughter is so persistent that they continue to spend a great deal of time together, which revives a former attachment between Charlotte and the Prince. Maggie eventually brings this situation to an end by despatching her father and Charlotte to America, whilst she remains in Europe with the Prince. The four characters encounter each other, form new partnerships, revert to the former pattern (with the addition of what is now adultery), and finally settle for the partnerships made after their original encounters.

  What is
extraordinary is that this apparently artificial pattern does not kill the human emotions involved as I think it does in The Sacred Fount. The aesthetic pursuit of symmetry is tempered with a real appreciation of human passion, and, as Edel makes clear, for the first time James conceives as possible, and actually brings off, a marriage between the Old World of Europe and the New World of America.

  Henry James seems archetypally an ambiguous figure; sympathetic, and deeply concerned with human feelings, yet somehow always detached from them. To revert to Howard Gardner’s oft-used classification, James is both a dramatist and a patterner. As he grew older, his awareness of the physical aspect of love grew more rather than less, because of his feeling for Andersen. This awareness both saddened and enlarged him. I think it made possible the synthesis between opposites which is apparent in The Golden Bowl, and prevented that rich and daring novel from being overwhelmed by the aesthetic patterns from which it originated.

  ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, written toward the end of 1902, is James’s most powerful and most tragic tale, and is also clearly autobiographical, in that it expresses his bitter regret for what he had missed in life, and his shame at having been so enclosed within the prison of his own egotism that he had not dared fully to love.