No poetry after Auschwitz … but music
‘It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz,’ wrote Theodor Adorno, and George Steiner went further when he spoke of the death of the German language after Nazism. Sadly there are few, if any, languages in human history that can express themselves with a truly innocent tongue.
Replying to these two intellectual giants or entering the gates of Auschwitz … well, angels fear to tread. And silence is the only (beginning of an) adequate response. Except that true silence exists only in an artificial chamber, a radio booth, a scientist’s laboratory. The quietest field is ever scurrying and spitting with nature’s blood and sap.
For one person the vacuum of appropriate words was filled by music. The pianist, teacher and Terezín concentration camp survivor Alice Herz-Sommer, who died in 2014 at the age of a hundred and ten, claimed that, despite her being Jewish, Beethoven was her religion – a sort of appendix to Adorno, music appearing out of the charred ground when words have been burnt to ash.
Shortly before her death, Alice made the following comment: ‘I think I am in my last days but it doesn’t really matter because I have had such a beautiful life. And life is beautiful, love is beautiful, nature and music are beautiful. Everything we experience is a gift, a present we should cherish and pass on to those we love.’
Her lack of bitterness after losing her husband and many friends and family members in the camps, and the optimism and joy that seemed to fill her every day are immensely uplifting to read about. Indeed, the word ‘miracle’ came so frequently to her own lips: ‘The world is wonderful, it’s full of beauty and full of miracles. Our brain, the memory, how does it work? Not to speak of art and music … It is a miracle.’
I could never have said all of this to her, growing up as I have in circumstances of peace and prosperity; it is an obscenity to cast easy words of comfort into the cauldron of someone else’s suffering, a form of Adorno’s ‘barbarism’. But she can say those words to us. She has the right to tell us that ‘everything we experience is a gift’ when there was a time in her life when everything was being taken away from her. The beast for her has, inexplicably, miraculously, been tamed – through music.
Beethoven is my religion
Alice Herz-Sommer’s striking statement that ‘I am Jewish, but Beethoven is my religion’ raises a number of interesting questions: Beethoven the man or Beethoven the musician? Is a composer a creator or a conduit for something greater than him- or herself? If so, a conduit for what? From where? Does great music have a moral influence … or not?
One of the things that kept Alice alive, physically and psychologically, during her terrible war-time suffering, were the concerts she gave with other inmates in Terezín. But the chilling fact is that the men operating the ovens and the evil political system fuelling them also loved and celebrated fine music. Those men would return home from a day of killing and weep over Schubert songs. It’s a moral conundrum that challenges any easy assessment of the mystery of human behaviour and its capacity for evil.
Of course, Alice’s comment about Beethoven was not meant to be read theologically, and for someone who lived through such toxic times a suspicion of religion is understandable. But maybe there is a path shared between great art and great living, which is what religion is ultimately about. To lift us out of ourselves, to point beyond, to awaken a sense of the ‘other’ … all of this can flow from music. As nuclear power can keep a life-support machine working as well as destroy a city, so music can inspire us to great things as well as anaesthetise us when we have become monsters.
‘I have had such a beautiful life,’ said Alice not long before she died. If Beethoven can be the source of such serenity then who am I to argue? He is certainly a composer who takes us to the rarest spiritual peaks, whose striving and struggling, whose ecstatic highs and lows are some of the greatest musical expressions of the human spirit in history. But then I can’t help wonder: who does Beethoven worship? I imagine that Alice by now has discovered the answer to that intriguing question.
The expectation of change: dis-ease in twentieth-century art
L. P. Hartley wrote in the introduction to his novel The Go- Between (1953), both as an explanation to critics why he depicted a Golden Era over fifty years earlier and as a defence against being accused of decadence and outmodishness:
There is [an] element today with which novelists of the past did not have to contend. There is not only change but the expectation of change [italics mine]. Sixty years ago changes were neither apparent nor thought to be pending, and in writing of the present the novelist believed he was also writing of the future. He had the benefit of that illusion – the illusion of stability so helpful to fiction.
The ‘expectation of change’, whether vast social change or merely the imminent need to move apartments, makes a certain kind of root-forming impossible. Few people take the trouble to renovate a bathroom in which they will shower for only a few weeks; few people invest energy in a relationship that will last only a few hours. The ‘exile’ is not so much someone living far from home or someone with no home, but someone with no fixed abode: the sadness of a short lease; the restlessness in possession of an expiring passport.
The ‘requirement of originality’ is another of the twentieth century’s curses, closely related to Hartley’s ‘expectation of change’. No creative artist wants to duplicate (or at least to be seen to be duplicating) another artist in the same field, but it was never an obsession until after the First World War. Originality originally came as if by surprise, when one was not looking for it. The integrity of creation resulting from the struggle with material was the fruit of a clear focus on the material itself, not on those who might later view it or hear it. We have now lived through generations of artists in all disciplines where a concern for originality is often the only concern, the overriding arbiter of importance or quality. It’s a view blind to the distinction drawn by George Steiner between a word derived from ‘origin’, suggesting roots, a source, the past – and ‘novelty’, a jingle of superficiality, an unformed idea’s already jaded smirk, one mid-afternoon’s warmed-over trend.
I think Rachmaninov would have been struck by the L. P. Hartley quote and I think the idea of unease with change and the compulsion to be original was a central backdrop of anxiety to the least known of his piano concertos – the Fourth op. 40, discussed earlier in this book. In this work’s wild seesaw between romantic gesture and twisted harmony, between melodies breaking down and rhythms snapping to attention, Rachmaninov unwittingly ended up writing one of the most original works of the twentieth century.
Teju Cole and neutering poets
‘Spring is coming. Please remember to spay or neuter your poets’ – a plea from the brilliant writer and photographer Teju Cole that appeared on Twitter a number of years ago. I, and a few hundred others, retweeted it instantly and savoured its piquancy. But then a dissenting voice arose within me …
One thing that has infected the arts since the World Wars (initially after the First and then even more fiercely after the Second) has been a fear of sentimentality. Twentieth-century artists came to regard Victorian culture and Victorian expansionism as the same lumpy cornice to be removed from a decaying edifice. With this new aesthetic came the demolishing of much beauty, inside and outside buildings, inside and outside human lives.
I understand Teju’s desire to muzzle mawkishness but might not such an attitude risk stifling the courage that anyone needs to create anything at all? I often see the results of this in the timidity of musical emotion heard in many masterclasses. I will sometimes ask students to exaggerate a rubato to the absolute limits in an aim to loosen them up. They smile, take a little more time than usual and then stop with embarrassment.
‘No, wildly more than that! How far can you go? Go to the edge!’
Boys don’t cry, thus the eyes in our audiences remain dry too. Composers too have been infected. Cynicism (parody, iconoclasm) has no limits in the co
mposition departments of our universities or music colleges, but if you stray too close to sentimentality there is an instant, mocking derision.
Of course, in all of this I’m being an advocate for the Devil. I can’t bear the soggy pap of bad poetry or bland, banal, beige music. I love the sharp knives of much cutting-edge culture. I, too, wince at the kissing kittens on the chocolate box. But for those who wish to perform music from a less emotionally bashful era (Elgar and Rachmaninov, for starters), it is essential to overcome cynicism and emotional fear. That portamento slide, that exquisitely turned phrase, that seductive inner voice, that ripe modulation … all of these have to be believed in. No spaying, no neutering.
So the next time spring appears, please give everyone a pen and notebook. Celebrate those trees. Exult in those daffodils. Take joy in those birds in the park, those lighter evenings, those warmer mornings. Risk the kitsch. Place a heavy bet on the meretricious. ‘April is the coolest month’ – well, not necessarily.
Architecture as eureka in Sydney
Because we listen to music in time I think any eureka moment with sound will always be a work in progress – a series of moments strung together like an animated film. There might be one chord (or frame) that punches us in the stomach or runs a feather down our backs but the real impact of the experience is culminative. Elgar tried in The Dream of Gerontius to convey the electric shock when the soul of his character is given a flash sight of God and then responds with an agonised, ‘Take me away.’ But even here the build-up in the orchestra, the moment of silence before the chord and the exquisite subsidence of sound after it, before the tenor’s blazing entry … it’s the sequence that creates the effect. It’s all of a piece.
For me only the visual and in particular buildings really have the power to take away my breath in one explosive instant. The impact of a great edifice is immediate, but then we can stand there holding it in our gaze, embracing its outline with awe. For this to happen with music we need to play the piece again, either in sound or in memory, but a great building seems to freeze time itself. We look at its stillness and become still ourselves.
Cathedrals often do this but so do many secular spaces as well. The Sydney Opera House, when I first saw its white mosaic flesh, was a flash moment. I had travelled the seemingly endless distance to get to Australia for my first tour in 1991 and in those days artists were put up at a hotel at the Optimo end of George Street where the Sydney Symphony and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had their studios. After a large breakfast, and already in love with Sydney’s white-gold morning light, I walked for thirty minutes towards the harbour. Eureka! There was the monument we’ve all seen in postcards – a familiar face, but now seen breathing for the first time. Perched on its haunches by the ocean with sufficient energy for a whole continent, yet also at rest in the harbour with ease, with confidence.
I’ve walked past it countless times since and never without feeling I was altered – if only my passing mood. I’ve gazed at it from every possible angle; I’ve watched its tiles change hue with the changing sun and clouds; I’ve run my hand along its cool, chaste contours; I’ve looked out from its dressing rooms or its Green Room cafeteria across the harbour on dozens of occasions over the years. It’s an example of how great buildings, almost uniquely, can produce eureka moments repeatedly. They expand time into the space of their presence. They push aside the air that surrounds them in a way a painting cannot do. Even a sculpture, the closest relation, is somehow movable, however heavy and monumental. We place it somewhere, whereas a building is a ‘where’.
Mastromatteo’s obsession
One of the nicer things about growing older is that some people you knew years ago and who showed promise are now at the stage of fulfilment. I first met Anthony Mastromatteo in New York in the early 1990s, before he had squeezed his first glob of oil paint from his first plump tube. One day he showed me a poem he had written – on a large piece of exquisite paper, unfolded within a larger hardboard folder. I don’t remember the poem now except that it was about ten words long, but I do remember how it was intensely etched in razor-to-the-wrist precision of penmanship. In fact it was almost impossible to read the words because the eye was so captivated by the shapes of the letters. Some years later he told me that he was taking art classes, and his rise from first breath to breathtaking brilliance was alarmingly swift. In a matter of months, exquisite pieces in pencil and oils had been produced. I proudly own the very first oil painting he did in class – a small portrait of an old woman in gently fading colours, an image of cataract-unclarity and blurring memory.
Tony now has a successful and flourishing career – indeed, one of international stature and acclaim. Using the style and technique of trompe l’œil hyperrealism he has explored for a number of years the subject of the comic strip. It is as if Vermeer had decided to send away the woman (and her pearl earring) and stick an old Superman magazine cover on his Delft wall instead. Of course the subject matter calls instantly to mind Roy Lichtenstein, but where he was painting contemporary culture and questioning the value of ‘art on a wall’ itself (and I do love his iconic pieces whenever they shout at me from the walls of a museum), Mastromatteo, fifty years later, with a technique from five hundred years earlier, is exploring a much wider range of issues … memory, beauty, nostalgia, reality. The comics depicted are no longer contemporary ‘pop’ images; they are faded … torn … dated. There is nothing light-hearted about these paintings, nor are they cynical or whimsical: they are heart-rending. And the grubby, torn tape that usually affixes the image to the imaginary wall is often the most beautifully painted object in the whole composition. They are images from a lost adolescence discovered in a dusty attic; memories cutting into the present, their fiction suggesting terrifying facts: the sadness of the lonely collector shuffling in the back of a junk shop; the disposability of pulp magazines … now lining forgotten drawers, now stained at the bottom of a birdcage, now wrinkled and blotched like the contemporary faces of those who first bought them.
After decades of ‘high art’, and particularly Abstract Expressionism’s frequent conceptual contortions in post-war New York, the Pop artists wanted to return to the people with a splash – to celebrate ordinary tastes, lives and images with innocence and simplicity. Indeed, the word ‘vulgar’ derives from the Latin vulgaris, meaning ‘the general public’. The splash now has dried, whether of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens or the garish, measled images on Lichtenstein’s canvases. They were limited in conception and are now imprisoned by their epoch. What allows Mastromatteo to step into their aesthetic shoes is that, unlike their rubber sneakers, his ‘footwear’ is hand-made of the finest materials … threaded with gold, studded with jewels. Before we start (or need) to think about what the images actually mean, we are immediately intoxicated with the technique and precision. In fact, as utterly, mind-blowingly ‘realistic’ as his paintings are, our mind truly begins to bend before the unreality our eyes insist on. The dance of discernment between the three visual negatives (a cartoon that is not a cartoon, stuck on with tape that is not tape, casting shadows that are not shadows) makes us dizzy.
In his 2009 painting Obsession, he takes a small, perfectly painted cartoon image of Wonder Woman, already a miracle making us gasp with its technical audacity, then he reproduces it nine times – a throbbing, flesh-and-blood Xerox machine. This is virtuosity spinning dangerously into space. We squint with the artist; we feel the pain of his narrowing eyes in the detail, which then broadens out to a stare approaching insanity. We don’t know where to look on the canvas, but we can’t take our eyes away from it. If we look at one torn square, the others draw our eyes with a maddening siren call. And yet, in an email to me, the artist spoke of this act of image repetition as an act of worship: ‘For me the brutally faithful representation of the object becomes the generation of a sign or icon.’ At the end of the day (or the end of our tether) there is a strange, deep, restful joy at beholding something so completely, gorgeously pe
rfect … and ordered. It becomes a liturgy, an endlessly repeated act, which is not without concept but beyond it.
The ring of silence: the pots of Anna Paik
I’ve known Anna Paik for years as the spouse of my friend and colleague Leon McCawley. I’ve always liked her paintings and admired their technical virtuosity, their contemplative strength, their Asian undertones – as if a subtle spice were flavouring the Western subject matter. But over the past few years she has begun painting Korean pots and these pieces are absolutely astounding. They ring with silence. There is a timeless quality to them that forces the viewer to leave behind the reference points of daily life and enter another world, another zone.
It’s partly because the gentle colours and shapes are simply pleasing and soothing to the eyes; it’s partly because the aura of mystery behind the objects depicted is by definition unresolved: a pot is made to contain something, we think, and these paintings (unlike Vermeer’s milk jug or Cézanne’s tumbling fruit bowl) celebrate the self-sufficiency of an empty vessel. Neither a stag’s head nor the needling embroidery of a tablecloth distracts us from the sacred spheres.
Beyond these thoughts, I realised, as I looked at one and then another and then another, that earthenware can remain when human bodies are dust. A pot, even when broken or cracked, measures its life in centuries not decades. And their emptiness is not a void but a symbol: if we approach any work of art with that emptiness that suggests receptivity and space we are more likely to be filled and fulfilled.
Paul Klee at Tate Modern
There was a wonderful show at Tate Modern in 2013 called Making Visible – a survey of the quiet, small, gently lyrical paintings of Paul Klee. The exhibition was cleverly arranged in chronological order, showing the amazing variety of his work. There are no clear ‘Blue’ or ‘Rose’ or Cubist periods as in Picasso, and there is no progression to abstraction down an ever-tightening grid as in Mondrian. Rather, Klee’s style remains constant and distinctive from beginning to end but with an array of recurring characters along the way.
Rough Ideas Page 28
