Britten’s national opera?

(Originally posted 2009)

I was reminded yesterday of an uncomfortable fact by a gushing review in the Guardian of a new ENO production .

I don’t like Peter Grimes.

This is close to heresy for a British musician, and I apologise for transgressing.

To be clear, I love the Four Sea Interludes, so it’s not the music that’s the problem. It’s the story. To understand Grimes it helps to grasp that Britten and Pears were interested in George Crabbe’s poem because its protagonist was an outsider in his community, The Borough, in much the same way as they felt themselves to be sexual outsiders in post-war Britain.

Early drafts of Montagu Slater’s libretto make it clear that Grimes is a violent monster, responsible by negligence at the very least for the deaths of the three apprentices under his charge.  But Britten changed the libretto as he went along to make Grimes a more ambiguous figure, so that we never know to what extent he is responsible for the first two deaths, and the third boy dies when scrambling down a cliff to Grimes’s boat.  The audience sees no violence (although Grimes does threaten the boy).

According to the Graun‘s review, in the new ENO production, the boy dies when Grimes, distracted by a vigilante crowd from The Borough, lets go of the rope holding him.  So here Grimes has tried to safeguard the boy, and The Borough is partly responsible for his death.

This just won’t do.  One reason I find sitting through the opera so tedious is that no-one in it is terribly sympathetic.  Grimes is horrible.  The Borough are all hypocrites.  The boy is a cipher (he doesn’t even sing).  Only Ellen Orford gets to sing two minutes of the most poignant music.  Now I accept that it may be too much to ask that all art depicting human relationships should have someone nice in it somewhere; but life is short, and three hours in the company of unpleasant people is not something you should have to pay for, however good the music.  Moreover, the opera portrays a whole society, and how many societies are entirely made up of the thoroughly disagreeable?

But it’s not just that.  The drama is fundamentally unbalanced.  We are asked to believe that Grimes is both a victim and a creation of The Borough, and that, according to the Graun‘s reviewer, they are “hypocritical . . . . a totally dysfunctional community, fuelled by religious bigotry . . . ”  Well perhaps, but even these are nicer people than Grimes.  Grimes is a twisted self-hating bully, whereas they are just hypocrites.  Who would you rather get stuck in a lift with?  Ah yes, reply Britten enthusiasts, but Grimes is twisted because the Borough hates him.  It’s all Society’s fault.  Well I don’t buy that.  Give me the Borough any day.

This curious moral blindness reminds me of something Frank Kermode once said.  He found that when teaching Camus’ The Outsider he was always amazed by how readily his students identified with the existentially tortured murderer; yet almost none of them were interested in the anonymous Arab victim.

Yes, it’s true: for artists, there’s no crime worse than provincial conservatism.

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Celebrity Composers

(Originally posted 2009)

It was perhaps predictable that, after posting a month or so ago about the forthcoming performance of Rufus Wainwright’s opera Prima Donna at the Manchester International Festival, my wife would buy a pair of tickets and insist we go. “I’ll be miserable”, I protested. “Either it’ll be brilliant, in which case I’ll be jealous, or it’ll be dreadful, in which case I’ll be furious”. But my objections were in vain, and off we went last night to the packed Palace Theatre.

Actually Prima Donna was neither brilliant nor dreadful, and I was neither jealous or angry. Wainwright is clearly a very talented guy, and about a quarter of the opera worked really well. OK, a lot of it sounds like Puccini, but perhaps better so than Birtwhistle, and there is after all a lot of Haydn in Mozart. A lot of other bits reminded me of no-one at all.

As for the remaining three quarters, the word which sprang to mind was amateurish. Wainwright cannot write a climax and does not know how to make the music move forward. He doesn’t always know how to write music which underscores and amplifies the (fairly melodramatic) story, often serving up the bland at what should be the most gripping moments (the suspended dominant chord when the heroine may or may not be about to chuck herself from the window ledge perhaps the most memorably dreary example). Some of his writing for voices is leaden and unsympathetic (just because tenors can sing high doesn’t mean you have to make them sing high all the time). It came as no surprise to read in the score that Wainwright had needed the assistance of an “orchestration assistant”. I read this as meaning, “Rufus doesn’t know how to score for orchestra, so we’ll get a guy in who does”.

The truly depressing thing about Prima Donna is not that it is no good at all, but that all these superbly professional people – the singers, designers, producers and orchestra all aquit themselves honourably – had been put at vast expense at the service of someone who is essentially an inexperienced amateur. Why? Because Wainwright is famous; the fact that he is famous for doing something else does not seem to have bothered the people who commissioned his piece. This is exactly the same mistake as that made routinely by the chairmen of football clubs, who appoint managers thinking that because they were good at football they must also be good at management. Bobby Charlton, John Barnes, Paul Gascoigne and many others tried it and failed. The best managers in the English league on the other hand in the last few years – Fergie, Mourinho and Wenger – were all average or worse as players. The gifted player like Mark Hughes who makes a good manager is an exception.

So now as well as celebrity managers we have celebrity composers. Is Leona Lewis writing an opera? Not so far as I know. But her agent should get onto it as soon as possible, because I’m sure that the organisers of some arts festival somewhere would like to hear from her. I am available if she needs an orchestration assistant.

Alan Green at the Proms

(Originally posted 2009)

As the umpteenth Proms season grinds its way to a close, I find guiltily that yet again I have failed to listen to more than a fraction of the concerts. There are several reasons for this. The pressures of family life. Being away on holiday. Not liking some of the programmes. And, it must be admitted, reluctance to face the sobering reality, experienced annually by the vast majority of British composers, that one’s own music does not feature. Again. This chilling douche makes the Proms as much a horse-syringe sized injection of humility as a great music festival. Attendance can be as painful as it is enjoyable.

The Proms and I go way back. As a student I queued for hours outside the Albert Hall to hear Rattle conduct Mahler, or Elder with the NYO doing bits of Valkyrie with Gwyneth Jones as Brunnhilde (quite the loudest singer I have ever heard). It was there that a performance of Nielsen’s fifth left me speechless for a full ten minutes. And after the concerts we’d literally run down the street to the Queen’s Arms to get two pints in and somewhere to sit before the crush of listeners and orchestral players arrived, arguing the toss about the music we’d just heard. Later, when I was working near Chancery Lane, I’d get the Tube to Marble Arch and walk across Hyde Park in the evening sunshine to meet my wife outside. It was a thoroughly civilised and invigorating thing to do, and now, ten years after having left London, it is still the only thing I miss about living there.

Notwithstanding all the concerts missed this year, there were still some great performances. Maris Yanssons doing Sibelius 1 with the flair and conviction of a great conductor at the top of his game. The Lebecq sisters playing the Poulenc Double. And has there been a more arch performer since Liberace than the uber-charismatic Lang Lang? For all his eye-rolling and gurning at the piano, he made the Chopin F minor concerto look really easy, and played with all the grace and finesse you could ask for.

To the downside, I didn’t like any of the newer stuff. I caught bits of a Xenakis piece which sounded truly dreary, and there was something by Louis Andriessen which did nothing very much before lumbering and stumbling to the finishing line. Did Roger Wright really have to commission Goldie, the former electronica luminary, a man who does not even read music, to write an orchestral piece?

And the BBC TV coverage was infuriating. Yes, no-one else would do this – and thank God for the BBC generally – but did the pundits have to be so bland? Not all performances were great, and neither was all the music. Strauss’s Alpinesinfonie is a monstrosity. The English singers in the otherwise wonderful John Wilson prom were wooden and lacklustre. The programme of the Gustav Mahler youth orchestra concert was a turgid fin-de-siecle Viennese-fest in which the lightest item was the Kindertotenlieder and rows of empty seats were clearly visible behind the presenter. You wouldn’t know any of this from the coverage, because in this the best of all possible worlds everything was great, the audiences loved it all and classical music was in rude health.

Barry Manilow and the decline of classical music

(Originally posted 2009)

A couple of recent conversations, both with educationalists, have filled me with gloom about the future of classical music in the UK. The distinct impression gleaned from both is of the slow death of classical instrumental teaching in schools. “My school used to have half a dozen outstanding musicians at any one time”, one said to me. “But now they all want to do electric guitar or drums”. Another lamented the death of the local youth orchestra. “They lost the endangered instruments first, oboes and bassoons, and then they just didn’t have enough players and had to shut it down”. What, I asked, was the prospect of finding a good local young soloist to do a concerto? Much shaking of heads. “You might find someone, perhaps in one of the private schools. But I’d have to put out feelers. I can’t think of anyone off hand.” This autumn a local University renowned for its music department, one told me, had no string players in its new intake of students.

It is a cliche that things are not what they used to be, one widely mocked because we all know that things have a tendency to remain exactly the same; but let me record one way things truly were different in the 1970s. I had violin lessons till I was 17, but hardly had I got into double figures when I realised that girls had an irrational weakness for boys who could play the electric guitar. So the violin was a chore (enjoyed playing, hated practising), whereas the guitar was a pleasure to be indulged whenever there was a free moment. The school had a visiting guitar teacher, but the kids who had lessons were universally useless at rock and roll. That’s because you cannot teach someone to play it. You have to work it out for yourself. Classical music requires technique, and if you can acquire one it will take you almost to the highest level, where only the last few percentage points of musicality marks the difference between Alfred Brendel and a journeyman. But rock and roll is not like that. In a discipline which prizes above all else the ability to improvise, every player has to find their own way: after all, the great masters of the electric guitar, from Hendrix to Richard Thompson to Tom Verlaine, have styles so divergent they might be playing different instruments.

Not only were lessons useless, but they were given by adults. Pop music was ours, the music of the young, and we would no more have let them teach us about it than they would have known how. You may say that the slow death of classical music (if that’s what it is) is just a natural consequence of an art form’s obsolescence. Perhaps. But is not that also true of pop music? Is it not the case that when a medium is taught in schools, when there are exams you can take in it, when Phd students pore over the lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon, the medium’s time is up? When my children know more about the Beatles and AC/DC than I do, when the latest in electro-pop (Lady Gaga, La Roux) is just the 80s revisited, when pop is condemned to rehash the cultural stylings of its heyday for a new generation, when the X-Factor churns out singing strippers who would make perfectly capable cruise-ship chanteuses in another life, isn’t that the sound of a dead horse being flogged? When will the new punk come to sweep it all away? And if it does, will it just be a re-hash of the old?

Kids do not need adults to tell them about pop. They will spend their youth discovering it and making it for themselves. But they do need adults to tell them about classical music. Why? Well, because although it’s amongst the greatest art the West has ever produced, because although once discovered it is an emotional and psychological resource for life, most kids won’t find it on their own: they are put off by the language and the lack of surface glamour which most pop music strives assiduously to cultivate. There are other reasons for the decline of classical music in Britain, but a woeful blindness on the part of educationalists must take its share of the blame. I have heard teachers say in all seriousness, “We’re glad we don’t have to teach classical music at GCSE any more: it helps with inclusivity. Now we’re doing keyboard and karaoke more kids want to get involved”. It is with difficulty have I restrained myself from shouting, “Take that, you smug bastard”, whilst beating them with a riding crop. Would they make the same argument about Shakespeare? Can you imagine someone saying, “We don’t bother with Macbeth or Hamlet any more, because the kids don’t want to get involved. We let them do Harry Potter or Garth Nix instead”? And yet that is effectively the place we have reached. A generation of teachers who were themselves taught little about classical music is now responsible for teaching a new generation of children. We have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind.

My remedy? How long have we got. I would start, and it would only be a start, at the very bottom, in primary school. Every classroom has a CD player already. Make teachers play classical music every day while the kids are doing reading or drawing. This already happens in my youngest daughter’s school. Play the Brandenburgs. Some Handel. Start them off slow. Get the language into their heads. That would do to get them going.

Unfortunately my daughter’s teacher is a Barry Manilow fan. She now knows the words to Copacabana by heart; but when I conduct Beethoven’s 5th tomorrow night I know my wife will struggle to persuade her to come.

The Ring of the Nibelung – could have done better?

(Originally posted 2014)

I have had opera up to the eyeballs. Last week I went with my wife to Glyndebourne to see Rosenkavalier, and on Saturday sat through Opera North’s concert performance of Gotterdammerung in Salford.

Salford / Glyndebourne. You choose.

At last I can say I have seen The Ring. The Twilight of the Gods was the last instalment of the Opera North’s four-year cycle, and OK it was only semi-staged, but rarely did we think any of it could have been improved by full production.

Is The Ring any good? That’s a very large question. In 1990 Radio 3 broadcast it in a sequence of one act per night, and I listened to it religiously in a remote cottage on the island of Lewis in between bouts of reading Anna Karenina and writing a very bad orchestral piece. At the time I wrote in my diary, “A stupid story, but what wonderful music“.  Nearly twenty five years later I can’t disagree much with that.

It was reassuring to find that enthusiastic Wagnerians like George Bernard Shaw felt Gotterdammerung was the weakest of the four operas. So did we. Oddly, Wagner wrote its libretto first, and The Ring was conceived when Wagner realised that he would have to include a lot of back story for Gotterdammerung to make sense.

If the narration was cut down, it didn’t show. The opening scene with the Norns felt like padding, and, even though I love Wagner, Act I, at 2 hours 15 minutes, was interminable. Shaw thought that Gotterdammerung was a reversion to the Grand Opera Wagner had been trying to avoid in the first three parts of The Ring, and whilst this may be true he nevertheless dealt with the grand passions of the characters in a majestic fashion. Brunnhilde’s refusal to part with the ring even as Siegfried is unwittingly betraying her was magnificently written.

Nonetheless I felt the overarching dramatic scheme of The Ring would have been improved by a professional dramaturg like Hugo von Hoffmansthal. Hoffmansthal’s work with Strauss in Rosenkavalier (and elsewhere) has a roundedness that Wagner’s libretto lacks (and probably wouldn’t have aspired to). The operas would have been better, shorter and more dramatically effective. Hoffmansthal might have done more with a character like Gutrune, the woman whom Siegfriend, under the influence of a magic potion (stupid story, remember), has betrayed Brunnhilde. Gutrune is thrust in front of us after the prologue and, embroiled in the plot immediately without any opportunity to establish herself as a character, remains an unengaging cipher.

However the character most conspicuously missing from Gotterdammerung is Wotan. He has banished Brunnhilde to the high rock, but Siegfried has rescued her, redeemed her even, with human courage and love. I would have given a good deal to see Wotan walk back on stage at the end. What music Wagner could have summoned up for a confrontation with Brunnhilde! But Wotan should also surely have been present for the fall of Valhalla – in his absence the collapse of the Gods is like Hamlet without the prince. It would have been good to know a little more of why the return of the ring to the Rhinemaidens necessarily meant the end of the old world and beginning of the new. After all, the Rhinemaidens had the ring at the beginning of Rhinegold, and that seemed to work for the Gods. And why should we think that the new world would be any better? Wagner doesn’t tell us.

It may seem picky to find fault with The Ring‘s plotting and pacing, but that is the sort of exacting engagement Wagner would have expected and wanted. It’s impossible to imagine his being satisfied with an audience which walked out thinking “Well that was nice”, and then went home for tea and toast. We left talking about what we’d seen, and were still talking about it an hour later.

Of course, the heavenly length of The Ring, its unwieldy structure and dramatic raggedness, are part of its peculiar charm. The fact that it could have so easily been better still merely adds to the compelling nature of Wagner’s creation.

I haven’t mentioned the music. The best bits are amongst the best bits of 19th century Romanticism, and therefore amongst the best in any genre anywhere. In some of it Wagner seems to be treading water slightly, but in an idiom which you have to credit him for inventing, exploiting and finally growing out of. It is an amazing achievement.

On Saturday the Opera North orchestra played mostly well in a desperately unflattering acoustic, and Richard Farnes, who has lovely hands, conducted unflappably. I could have perhaps done with a bit more flapping. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but here is George Solti conducting the Vienna Phil with Birgid Nilsson in the Immolation Scene. This gives a sense of the possibility of a no-holds-barred style of Wagner conducting which sometimes The Ring cries out for.

Sir Harrison Birwistle at 80

(Originally posted 2014)

Harrison Birtwistle is 80 round about now, and an article appears on the Guardian‘s leader page praising the old controversialist.  Sir Harrison is a “profoundly British composer” it seems, perhaps even “a natural successor to composers such as Elgar, Holst and Delius . . .as powerfully distinctive as that of any composer alive today“.

It won’t surprise my friends and enemies to learn that I am not a Birtwistle fan. I tried listening to Earth Dances again this morning, and, after the marvellously effective opening low brass and percussion notes had begun to blend and criss-cross each-other I found myself thinking, “this is actually quite boring”. It took about a minute and a half.  I felt as if I were being beaten over the head with a rubber truncheon.  For me, Birtwistle has never learned that it is not what you say – everyone has something interesting to say, and most of us can come up with the profound from time to time – it is how you say it. Art is a mediation of experience, and we won’t persist with it if it doesn’t mediate in a way which generates pleasure.

But this is of course just a personal view, even if it’s one which is widely shared in Britain. The Guardian‘s comparison with Holst, Elgar, Butterworth, RVW is instructive.  I have been a musician for about fifty years, soberingly, and in truth I have never once heard anyone say, “Did you hear that piece of Birtwistle’s on the radio last week?” or “I’m playing some Birtwistle at the moment”, or “I really like that piece of Birtwistle’s”.  And of course I couldn’t whistle anything of his, nor have I ever met anyone who could.  Neither have I ever met anyone in all this time in and around the profession who was interested in Birtwistle’s music.

What’s really striking about Birtwistle is that, notwithstanding that the Guardian‘s leader writer (probably Andrew Clements) thinks he is of a similar stature to Elgar et al, he is almost totally absent from British musical life. He is our most celebrated composer, but almost no-one involved in the business (whether as a listener, and amateur or a professional player) pays any attention to what he does. And this despite the many hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money that, over the years, has been pushed in his direction (much of it via the Royal Opera House, the biggest recipient of Arts Council money in the UK).

In the year after Elgar’s First Symphony was premiered it received over one hundred performances in Britain.  That’s because people like Elgar’s music and were willing to pay to hear it. Other of his pieces have entered the national consciousness, so that even now most British people will recognise Nimrod or the Pomp and Circumstance marches; and those with an interest in classical music will have listened hundreds of times to or performed the symphonies, the Cello Concerto, Gerontius, the Serenade for Strings and the Introduction and Allegro (I could of course go on).

The same is not quite true of Holst and Delius, but it’s much truer of them than it is of Birtwistle. The Planets is a work which every musician, like it or not, recognises as a ubiquitous part of the cultural fabric of British life. The same goes for the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending with RVW.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, Birtwistle has ever written has come remotely close to entering the consciousness of the British people. His music hasn’t even entered the consciousness of those charged professionally with the task of delivering it to the public. I had dinner with a professional orchestral player last night. Had she ever played any Birtwhistle? She thought she must have; after all, she’d been in the business for twenty years. But if so she couldn’t remember anything about it.

(Incidentally, it’s quite funny to finding the Guardian defining something as British, since the general drift of its comment on recent utterances by David Cameron is loftily sceptical. “So Mr Rusbridger, what did the Guardian mean when it said Birtwistle was a very British composer . . . ”  As someone commented on its website, the newspaper is in danger of falling through its own thin ice.)

How then have we got to the stage where, despite this strange absence from British musical life, Birtwistle can merit a leader in the Guardian on his 80th birthday?

The short answer is that the Graun is not short of the kind of people who admire people like Birtwistle; but there’s more to it than that.

Birtwistle was very fortunate when, in 1959, William Glock was made controller of Radio 3 and decided that the cow-pat school of British music was outdated. What the public really needed, Glock thought, was a good dose of European total serialism. This rejection of the politer art of the old school tied in rather well with the working class revivalism which followed Look Back in Anger (1956), and it must have helped that Birtwistle was a Northener from Accrington.

At any rate Birtwistle was taken up by Glock, as was Peter Maxwell Davies, and their two careers flourished accordingly. Birtwistle in particular became a poster boy for the kind of “challenging” and “edgy” art whose advocates felt divided them from the safe and suburban Mr and Mrs Concert Goer, arriving in a coach party from Frodsham. “But it hasn’t got a tune“, these tedious provincials wailed, bolstering the hipsters’ sense (already pretty strong) that they themselves were breathing an altogether more rareified atmosphere.

So Birtwistle over the years came to be not just a purveyor of music that almost no-one wanted to listen to, but a symbol (for both sides of the argument) of the idea that avant gardism was not so much paving the way for the masses to follow as constituting an end in itself, a kind of super-art that only a certain tiny percentage of society was intelligent enough to “get”.

Of course the fact that the masses were paying for their pleasure did not trouble the elite (nor, apparently, Sir Harrison).

So actually Birtwistle is really a British composer only in the sense that the British have paid for him to become what he is. He might be more accurately described as a European composer, firstly because his music owes much more to the European influences which took root on the continent and which, pre-Glock, British composers regarded with some suspicion, and secondly because the idea that a self-appointed elite should sit at the apex of a system, political or cultural, is one which has more parallels in recent European history than in Britain, with its long democratic traditions.

Ironically then, Birtwistle’s eminence speaks much more eloquently about British cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century than his music ever has to British people.  In this sense, and only this, is Birtwistle “a profoundly British composer“. His fame tells us something important about British society.

This is not an argument against public subsidy in art. Still less is it an argument that what the masses like must by definition be good. It involves instead a recognition that between Birtwistle at one end of the continuum and Karl Jenkins at the other there exists a great body of composers whose music the public might have liked if it had had a chance to hear it. It says that while it may be legitimate to use public money to pay for something for a bit to see if it catches on, there comes a point when the public’s distaste becomes clear.

That point was reached with Birtwistle many decades ago.  But, as so often, the people who dish our money out knew better.