In my setting of the Credo I divide the men from the upper voices as if innocence from experience. Only the treble/soprano and alto voices actually sing the word ‘Credo’, constantly interrupting the fast-paced mutterings of the tenors and basses. What at first is a youthful encouragement to believe becomes a despairing cry as the men’s pattered rote appears to turn into defiant unbelief and the final clauses about resurrection and eternal life fizzle out. A last ‘Credo’ is sung an octave lower by the upper voices – quietly, as if tired and shattered from their earlier, futile exertion.
Before this drama unfolded, the Kyrie movement had introduced us to a gentler, less complex world of forgiveness, and the melodic and harmonic material is sweet and consoling. The Gloria is based on a rising scale and a falling zigzag, joyful and exuberant in its outer sections, more anxious in the central Qui tollis section where a few prophetic hints of the Credo appear, in the Miserere nobis for example.
The Sanctus and Benedictus seek to contrast the divine and the human. The angel’s ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ is something beyond the universe itself in grandeur and scope, and the music here is huge, broad, immense. In the Benedictus God has become man in the incarnation, and the music is deliberately and sentimentally intimate – as if two people are sharing a drink in a Parisian café, with a whiff of Poulenc perhaps in the harmonies, or maybe even the sound of a distant 1950s pop tune coming from a neighbouring café’s jukebox.
The Agnus Dei takes the ‘Credo’ motive, sung by the upper voices, and develops it in a plaintive way, sung unaccompanied. All is restrained and quietly expressive until the third, louder statement of the text, where the response should be ‘Grant us peace’. Instead of ‘peace’ the organ or orchestra plays a short interlude of mounting agitation and desperation based on chromatically altered fragments of the opening vocal chords. As this passage reaches its high point, with still no sign of Dona nobis pacem, the choir sings a full-throated Agnus Dei to the music that had accompanied the baptism clause in the Credo. Finally, as a climax to the whole work, the Dona nobis pacem is sung; it is a variation of the descending scale we first heard in the first movement’s Christe eleison. The spell has been broken and all gradually becomes calm. The piece ends musically as it began, the Dona nobis sharing the same melody of consolation as the Kyrie. It is the Lamb of God who has brought the piece full circle, as well as bringing peace and healing to all of creation.
My First Piano Sonata: fragments of fragility
Sonata for Piano (broken branches)
Prelude (Autumn) – desolato – fragile – inquieto – piangendo – immenso – sentimento – malancolico – passionato – freddo – volando – ritmico – non credo – morendo – crux fidelis – Postlude (Spring)
Originally ‘sonata’ was a term used to denote a piece ‘sounding’ rather than ‘singing’ – for instruments rather than voices. It has had a rich history from the single-movement forms of Scarlatti through the Classical centre point of the Viennese classics to the outer boundaries of Boulez and Cage. For all its multiplicity, the term itself has kept meaning in its wordlessness and its seriousness: a sonata, regardless of form, is a statement – of unity, if not of uniformity.
My First Piano Sonata (broken branches) is constructed of sixteen small, inconclusive sections. The work is not a collection of album leaves though – of saplings existing comfortably in their own space – but rather branches from a single tree. And branches broken in three senses: fragments of fragility, related in theme but incomplete and damaged; an oblique tribute to Janáček’s cycle On an Overgrown Path; and finally a spiritual dimension: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Cut off from me you can do nothing,’ said Christ to his disciples in St John’s Gospel. The climax of this sonata is a section called non credo, based on material from the Credo of my Missa Mirabilis, which explores issues of doubt and despair in the context of the concrete affirmations of the Nicene Creed. The penultimate section, a wordless but metrically exact setting of the sixth-century text Crux fidelis, reveals another ‘branch’ – the wood of the Cross.
The sonata begins with a Prelude (Autumn) and ends with a Postlude (Spring). The music is identical in both except that the anguish of the former’s G sharp minor is blanched into G major at the end of the piece. Branches begin their lives anew in the spring, and nothing is so broken that it cannot be healed.
My Second Piano Sonata: insomnia in a seedy bedsit
Piano Sonata no. 2 (Notturno luminoso)
The subtitle for my Second Piano Sonata suggests many images: the moon on a calm lake perhaps, or stars across a restful sky. But this piece is about a different kind of night and a different kind of light: the brightness of a brash city in the hours of darkness; the loneliness of pre-morning; sleeplessness and the dull glow of the alarm clock’s unmoving hours; the irrational fears or the disturbing dreams that are only darkened by the harsh glare of a suspended, dusty light bulb. But also suggested are nighttime’s heightened emotions: its mysticism, its magic, its imaginative possibilities.
The sonata’s form is ABA and there are three musical ideas: one based on sharps (brightness), one based on flats (darkness), and one based on naturals (white notes) representing a kind of blank irrationality. The piece opens clangorously, its bold, assertive theme – sharps piled on sharps – separated by small cadenzas. Yearning and hesitating to reach a cadence, it finally stumbles into the B section where all accidentals are suddenly bleached away in a whiteout. Extremes of pitch and dynamics splatter sound across the keyboard until an arpeggio figure in the bass gathers rhythmic momentum and leads to the ‘flat’ musical idea, jarring in its romantic juxtaposition to what has gone before.
This whole B section is made up of a collision, a tossing and turning, between the two tonalities of flats and naturals, interrupting each other with impatience until the whiteout material spins up into the stratosphere, a whirlwind in the upper octaves of the piano. Under this blizzard we hear the theme from the beginning of the piece, firstly in purest, brilliant C major in the treble, then, after it subsides to pianissimo, in a snarl of dissonance in the extreme bass of the instrument. The music stops … and then, for the first time, we hear the full statement of the ‘flat’ material, Andante lamentoso. The music’s sorrow increases with wave after wave of romantic ardour, deliberately risking overkill and discomfort.
At its climax the music halts twice at a precipice then tumbles into the recapitulation, the opening theme now in white-note tonality and unrecognisably spotted across the keyboard. As this peters out we hear the same theme but now with warm, gentle, romantic harmonies. A final build up to an exact repetition of the opening of the piece is blended with material from the B section and, in the last bar, in a final wild scream, we hear all three tonalities together for a blinding second-long flash, brighter than noon, before the final soft chord closes the curtain on these night visions.
My Third Piano Sonata: tonality, dogma, modernism
Piano Sonata III (Trinitas)
Art, like life, moves ahead by reimagining and sometimes even destroying what went before. As new cells in the body form when old ones die and as it’s natural for children to move away from parents (if only in tastes and ideas) so artists find energy both by building on the past at the same time as leaving it behind. This moving on can sometimes involve violent destruction as well as a more organic construction. But there has arisen a challenge for artists in every field over the past century: what if it’s the destroyers whom we wish to destroy? What do we do when modernism is no longer modern? Where do we find ourselves when we are après the avant-garde?
It is a vast topic, and one that has significance in every corner of cultural life, but suffice it to say in the present context that around a hundred years ago atonality finally triumphed in Western classical music. The bending trunk that had supported dissonance’s tonal tensions from before Bach to Wagner and beyond finally snapped. The resulting shattering of rules and the threat of anarchy’s reign required a new
system, a new framework. There was no going back to the old regime but new freedoms needed new structures. Arnold Schoenberg came up with a system of composition in the 1920s (twelve-note technique) where atonality (music separated from clear harmonic roots) would be guaranteed. In this construct each note of the Western chromatic scale appears just once in a sequence until all the notes are used up and the sequence begins again. The row can be inverted or reversed or transposed but, strictly speaking, it shouldn’t be disordered.
Traditional tonality works by creating tensions that are resolved, by mixing familiarity and repetition as if signposts, markers along the way, paths to return home. Conversely the twelve-note system ensures that all roads are equal, that no note is more important than another, that all lanes lead only to each other – a nomadic, circular path where home is the journey itself. For many post-war years it was pretty much the only map in print for young composers who wanted to be performed, commissioned or broadcast.
I wanted to try an experiment with my Third Sonata: could I use twelve-note technique to undermine or at least to question the technique itself? Could I find a path outside the circle? Some tonal composers (Britten, Shostakovich and Barber spring to mind) had used note-rows in their works as symbols of modernity, as decorative or cynical nods to a musical establishment that had disowned them, but could a whole piece be constructed with this principle? Could a system designed to avoid tonality become one that unashamedly reclaimed it?
To begin with I used a note-row shot through with tonal implications. Not only does it begin in C major (notes 1 and 2) and end in its dominant G major (notes 10, 11 and 12) but thirds, both major and minor, are carved into the very contours of the sequence’s twelve notes. The sonata is in three sections, with the first two using the note-row in a traditional manner. But at the centre point of the piece, the start of the third section, there is a scramble towards the top of the piano ending in a scream of a C major chord.
From here to the end of the piece the row is set free and commences a thoroughly eclectic journey. It begins as the harmonic foundation for a stately chaconne, then splinters into a minimalist motive of swirling, hammered loops. After a pause, we hear a super-soft descending scale of mini-clusters (as if played by an infant’s chubby digits) as the accompaniment to a hymn tune under which the row appears as a sour shadow of dissonance. Then there is a passionate, pleading mantra using the row, then a radiant reappearance of the hymn tune now accompanied by crashing clusters played with a book or the flat of the hand – all these shuffled around seemingly at random until a long silence appears on the final page of the sonata. A sudden return to strict twelve-note technique occurs with twelve, short, soft, six-part chords made up of the original row and introducing a new row from the suspended notes held on top, as distant from tonality as I could make it. The sonata comes to a quiet close on the same notes with which it began – a C major chord.
Why Trinitas? Well, I like subtitles and as this piece was commissioned by the (Catholic) Tablet magazine I wanted to incorporate some spiritual or religious aspect in the creative process. When I realised that this piano sonata would be my third, that it was going to be in three sections, and that it would utilise major and minor thirds in its musical material, the Trinity seemed to be an appropriate tag. But then, as I continued to think of the dogmatic aspect of the twelve-note system, I could see a strange parallel with the Trinity – another dogma. Both are an ordering with numbers, man-made constructs, intellectual braces to aid recovery after a crisis, whether after the collapse of tonality or after the Christological confusion of the Arian controversy in the fourth century. Both dogmas have positive and negative elements … and consequences. The musical ones have already been discussed, but what about the Trinity?
At its best this non-biblical term, invented by theologians, was an attempt to convey the idea of the one God as ‘relationship’ within God’s own inner life, with all the implications of wisdom (the Son) and love (the Spirit) which that implied. But it was also a doctrinal ‘line in the sand’ on an issue that is ultimately unknowable, and it proved to be the final straw in the embittered relationship that developed in the early centuries of the Common Era between Christians and Jews. It was, and was intended to be, the end of fudge. It also proved to be the end of the road. After the Trinity was defined, the two faith communities parted like a train divided and there began to develop, with increasing vigour, a tradition of anti-Jewish polemic in the post-Constantine Church’s vigorous defence of orthodoxy. Perhaps it is not overly melodramatic to see a line stretching from Nicaea to Auschwitz.
I love living in the present eclectic age. I love the fact that the size of my collar or the width of my tie is not dictated by changing, authoritarian fashion. I love modernism now because, in the free-flowing twenty-first century, I’m able to choose it, and to play with it, and then leave it, and then take it up again. Its challenge to the status quo or to comfortable conservatism is ever relevant and refreshing – until it begins to enforce its own rigidity. Schoenberg did say (tongue in cheek perhaps, or maybe even with a dash of hope) that there were still pieces to be written in C major. Tonality in the end proved to be indestructible. Amid the debris of the post-war, post-Shoah years composers slowly began to discover it again as diamonds among the rubble. The snapped tree had begun to grow again.
Alfred Cortot: the poet speaks
There are only a few surviving films of my favourite pianist playing, but one extraordinary one is readily accessible on the internet: Alfred Cortot teaching the final piece of Schumann’s Kinderszenen. He plays the short, one-page movement but also talks us through it – he is giving a lesson after all. But this is a transcendental clip in every way. First, phrases on the keyboard are caressed as if improvising, yet also as if those notes have lain under those ageing fingers for a lifetime. Then there are the words themselves – ideas of risky sentiment, but expressed with an innocence that charms us, even if they would be virtually impossible to utter today. Alain de Botton put it memorably once when he said, ‘The great fear of us moderns: being naive.’ Certain pure, powerful ideas can be expressed only when their author is open to vulnerability.
Beyond the tangibility of music and words is the sheer aura of the man towards the end of his life: the exquisite detachment and refinement of manners, the haunting vision in the piercing eyes. He is both unafraid to reveal his personal thoughts (almost with the intimacy of lovemaking) while at the same time keeping a profoundly respectful distance. It’s just impossible to imagine him uttering a crude phrase or word, linguistically or morally. The clip also raises the issue of whether music can have a story or message behind it, in the light of Stravinsky’s famous statement that ‘music means nothing’. The title, Der Dichter spricht, is Schumann’s own contradiction of this claim, allowing Cortot to take him at his word, and leaving us with a film-as-poem, a pianist-as-poet, and a peerless example of one of the great re-creative artists of the twentieth century.
Two formidable ladies
Most of us spend most of our moral lives in the middle – sitting on a fence much broader then the gardens on either side. Our days are filled with small acts of cowardice and laziness alternating randomly with small acts of generosity and kindness. The big gestures, whether courageous or cruel, usually pass us by – more often through circumstance than through choice. But, at certain times in history, circumstance demands of people difficult decisions, forcing them to confront virtue and vice in real situations, when such choices involve life and death … for themselves and for others. There were two female pianists in the last century, both Beethoven specialists and exact contemporaries, who did not sit on the broad fence like most of us, but who stood in the gardens on opposite sides with utter conviction and determination.
Elly Ney (1882–1968), it is said, was a ‘fanatical supporter’ of Hitler. She voluntarily joined the Nazi party in 1937, participated in ‘cultural education camps’, became an honorary member of the League of German Girls, and wrote
adoring letters to ‘mein Führer’. According to the pianist Edward Kilenyi, who was a captain in the US Army at the time, she would read extracts of Hitler’s writings and soldiers’ letters from the concert stage, and in Salzburg, where she taught during the war, she used to honour Beethoven’s bust with a Nazi salute. After the war she was banned from performing in Bonn, and a request in 1952 for this ban to be lifted was refused. Her career, which had flourished in the earlier years of the century, never recovered, and just a few years ago the mayor of Tutzing, the small Bavarian town where she died, finally removed her portrait from the Town Hall.
Dame Myra Hess (1890–1965) could easily have escaped safely to America, where she had a huge following, at the outbreak of the Second World War, but she chose to abandon her international career and stay at home in central London during the worst of the bombing. After the outbreak of war all public places of entertainment were closed, but she convinced the government to allow her to start a daily series of concerts at the National Gallery, beginning on 10 October 1939 and continuing until 1946. Although all the paintings and sculptures had been removed for safe keeping, and occasional daytime air raids meant that the audience and musicians had to retreat to the basement, 824,000 people attended 1,698 concerts during London’s darkest days. Dame Myra felt that music could give a genuine moral boost to people facing terror and hardship, and she was prepared to risk her life and livelihood for that cause.
Rough Ideas Page 24
