Planet Extra - Performance

The Year of the Great Composers

20.01.10
As I write this, The Year of the Great Composers (GCs) is just coming to an end. Fomented above all by the BBC, its effects in terms of performance schedules spread to the furthest corners of these islands. Hecklefan might recall that our last bulletin touched on its results in Wales. Its fanfare was an opulent BBC4 TV series called The Birth of British Music. This began by celebrating the contribution of Purcell, the 350th anniversary of whose birth also fell in 2009, to Britain's cultural heritage. However, the programmes which followed were respectively dedicated to Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. The lives of these GCs (viewers were informed) “tell the story of our nation” - as it were, like Bards. True, it was admitted, “they came from continental Europe”, as if the word “Germany” was somehow not very PC. They wrote wonderful stuff for Britons to sing and play in honour of their ruling house... though little was made of the fact that said dynasty itself had also recently arrived “from continental Europe”. That we Brits took these GCs (and their attendant royals) to our hearts - how, in fact, we “made them British” - apparently showed how plural and tolerant we were, at least in the epoch before Germans became the chief enemies of our cultural heritage.

The Year of the GCs belted itself out with a choral-orchestral BBC jamboree of their famous large-scale works. As usual, the effect was overwhelming. Already the programmes for the mainstream winter concert programmes reflected - perhaps slightly more brightly than usual - the dazzling German hegemony. For example, for their 2009-10 season, the BBC NOW announced 52 performances of German composers compared to 70 of all other nationalities combined - though the latter (it must be said) included display of a healthy 21 Welsh products. A glance at the Radio 3 programme for almost any day will show a similar menu (but minus the Welsh rarebit). Of course, this has been the case for as long as anyone can remember, as I'm sure Hecklefan has noticed.

But not everyone seems to have sung from the official hymn-sheet.

Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites; for my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, nor for Handel.
The devil, with his foot so cloven,
For all I care, may take Beethoven.
I would not go four miles to visit
Sebastian Bach (or Batch, which is it?)

Charles Lamb's “Free Thoughts on Several Eminent Composers” (1830) ridiculed not only the GCs but a rising contemporary mood. His exasperation - even foreboding -  stemmed from anticipation of what one historian has recently called “The Triumph of Music”. For a period lasting well into the twentieth century, every nation which felt itself worthy of recognition needed a claim to proficiency in what became known as “classical music”. The material results of this pressure can be seen around us, in many of Britain's major urban conurbations - from opera-houses to higher education music faculties. The background to the phenomenon assembled itself during the nineteenth century. A scramble to nationhood began in the turbulent wake of the French Revolution, the era of Romantic Nationalism. Europe experienced a sort of 'triumph of testosterone' - a competitive ethnic edginess often pushed to open belligerence and organised violence. Yet by a species of Hegelian synthesis, this 'international anarchy' also led to the dawn of international co-operation. The Swiss philanthropist Henri Dunant founded the Red Cross - the world's first great NGO. He was inspired by witnessing the bloody shambles of Solferino, a battle between France and Austria over the future of Italy - lamented as 'a geographical expression' rather than a political one. Around the same time, Britain and the US collaborated in laying transatlantic telegraph lines. Thomas Cook began to organise Grand Tours for the middle classes, previously an aristocratic preserve rather than a bourgeois package. Vague yet powerful notions emerged of “a comity of nations”, along with criteria of qualification based on normative apprehensions of “civilisation”. The latter were derived from philosophers like Herder and historians like Burckhardt. Herder and his musical disciples (e.g. Schumann) believed that music would become the supra-national discourse of international harmony. It too should be released from aristocratic shackles and presented to the “rising bourgeoisie”, Europe's new ruling class. Burckhardt's discovery of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy helped to stoke up international support for Italian independence from “the Austrian Yoke” - the Risorgimento. Indirectly, too, Burckhardt - a scholar who like Dunant was from neutral Switzerland - helped bring about the mutual massacre of Solferino...

Secular humanism and narrow nationalism connived equally at the rise of “Great Art”: the more of it you had, the better qualified you were to become a nation-state. The most intensive site of struggle was art music and its two leading executant media, the solo concert pianist, and at the other end of the scale (as it were) the symphony orchestra. In both spheres, the GC whether as keyboard virtuoso or orchestral conductor was master of all he surveyed. Or rather “meister”, since the standard was set by German exemplars. An apostolic succession of sublime creators was selected and elevated by common critical appreciation to positions of transcendental significance. The Great German Composers were quasi-divine producers of “eternal values”, an asset more desirable than gold - even Rhinegold. The pound sterling may have ruled the roost of international finance for most of the nineteenth century: notoriously, it paid for the armies of Prussia and Russia which helped to defeat Napoleon. But already it was the Germans who had all the 'eternal values'. The profuse pump-priming production of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert enabled Germany to practice a species of quantitative easing: their Golden Geese were producing a timeless masterpiece a day. By 1893, George Bernard Shaw, whose writing career started with music criticism (under the daft disguise of “Corno di Bassetto”) judged all other music by the standard of Germany - and thus, badly. Even a figure such as Hermann Goetz, now lost almost without trace, elicited a sequence of silly hyperboles from GBS. Goetz had:

Yet in time - again by a sort of contrary motion - this very mood served to stimulate enormous musical activity in Germany's cultural dependencies. To give one example, in the small and circumscribed lands which were eventually to become known as “Czecho-Slovakia”, a process was under way which produced a century-long succession of GCs: Smetana->Dvorak->Suk->Janacek->Martinu. In the same period, Russian production was drawing level with - eventually ahead of - German, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. This is to employ a crudely politicised instrument of assessment. But my point is that an identifiable strand of every nation's political economy became concerned with investment of fiduciary assets and human energy in music. Accordingly, nations were forced to attempt competition on this impossible level: expending mere gold on founding conservatoires, building concert halls, producing pianos on an industrial scale, but above all, in finding (somehow, anyhow, by fair means or foul) a “great composer” of their very own. Your Country needed this One: viz., a composer-genius, a Bard of indisputable international stature, a messianic figure who would assume as much responsibility for the national destiny as any Great Warrior or Literary Genius. During the Risorgimento, the King of Savoy was merely a figurehead but Giuseppe Verdi - whose name could be read as V[ittorio] E[manuele] R[é] DI[talia] - was the soul. This was why the young Sibelius was granted a state pension for life by a nascent Finnish state. And why in Britain's case, Elgar, who “emerged” as such a One a century ago, was hailed as our Nelson, Kitchener, Shakespeare and Kipling all rolled into One.

“Where does Wales Wag in all this?” - I can hear Hecklefan asking. Hang on for a few months while I think about it....

Hecklephone