Music and its discontents

My friend Stephen Pollard has written a fine as well as news-making biography of David Blunkett. He has followed it, in The Independent, with an article that is wrong on a grand operatic scale. He is lamenting the state of musical appreciation:

This year is the centenary of the birth of Michael Tippett and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Both were gifted composers, one British, one German. Both composed some pieces which repay repeated listening. But both also composed a string of pieces which had already outlived their worth on first hearing. None of that matters, however, since the simple fact of their centenary appears of itself to have attached an undue reverence to their name. Programme planners, devoid of imagination, have latched on to – as they do every year – this year’s anniversaries and themed entire seasons around their work, irrespective of the worth of their compositions.

It is unfashionable to make judgements about the relative – and absolute – merit of composers. (The same is, of course, also true of other artists). Plainly, almost all strive to give of their best. They can endure anguish as they go through the process of composition. Perhaps it is the simple generosity of the human spirit which prevents us writing off the result as barely worth bothering with, let alone dismissing the produce of an entire life as a waste of time.

Certainly, discrimination is essential in criticism, and the ability to exercise it – to tell good art from bad, and art from mere entertainment – is a neglected part of public discourse. But from this unexceptionable principle Stephen builds an incredible conclusion, using the conceit of a musical festival to celebrate the work of light composers such as Burt Bacharach in order to mock similar efforts for classical composers.

The problem is not that there is anything wrong in the lack of a serious retrospective of either Tony Hatch or Burt Bacharach. Light music is light music, whatever the level of skill in its composition. The problem is that far more frivolous composers, with far less skill, are accorded unmerited stature by dint only of having lived a long time ago, or written in a genre – classical music – which lends itself to pretension and unmerited acclamation.

If I understand this properly – and the problem is not that Stephen’s prose is unclear but that his argument is extraordinary – the proposition is that minor classical composers are unwarrantedly celebrated because the musical language they used is regarded today with, respectively, snobbery and deference. The only evidence Stephen presents is that the South Bank in London is shortly to present an eleven-concert festival devoted to Felix Mendelssohn, whom Stephen terms “the very archetype of the hack composer”.

The least that is wrong with this argument is the musical judgement, but that judgement is nonetheless highly eccentric. Mendelssohn is a minor composer, but it is not true that:

Mendelssohn’s great achievement was to compose a series of middle brow pieces – above all, his Violin Concerto, his Octet and his oratorio, Elijah – which do precisely what compositions by the likes of Tony Hatch, Richard Carpenter and Burt Bacharach manage: give the listener an easy fix.

The Octet for strings is a fugal masterpiece, written when Mendelssohn was just 16; his failing as a composer was never to reach this height again, but to be content with much Romantic sentimentality (such as the Songs Without Words). Whereas great composers have sublimated personal tragedy in their art, Mendelssohn was incapable of doing this on his own great bereavement, the death of his sister Fanny. Nonetheless the Violin Concerto in E minor is one of the most technically perfect pieces in the Romantic repertoire; the solo violin is present through almost the entire work, yet the orchestra is a full partner alongside it.

In particular, it is far more true in Mendelssohn’s case than in Sir Michael Tippett’s that there are “some pieces which repay repeated listening”. Tippett’s operas are not merely hack works but literally laughable – it’s a constant struggle when listening to his portentous librettos not to burst out laughing. The problem is not with the earnest and misguided pacifist politics – Benjamin Britten held similar views, but managed to set them movingly to music and to be one of the half-dozen greatest composers of the last century – but that, in the words of the critic Kenneth McLeish (writing about The Knot Garden), “the gibberish of the libretto … disables the music, making the piece a garbled and baffling charade”.

What is still odder about Stephen’s animus is that the theme of the festival he derides is, as he tells us, ‘Mendelssohn the Musician’. What is wrong with that? There is no question but that Mendelssohn the musician is an important historical figure. This is not confined to – in Stephen’s words – “promoting someone else’s music… a famous performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion (albeit in his own butchered version) which revived interest in the music of a real genius”. As conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mendelssohn made it the greatest orchestra in Europe; he popularised both modern works and what were then unfashionably early works. As a composer and musician, he influenced numerous other composers, who themselves influenced others. (The excellent Niels Gade, known as the ‘Danish Mendelssohn’, is becoming increasingly-known in the English-speaking world. He influenced the later Danish symphonist Carl Nielsen, truly one of the outstanding 20th-century composers.) All that Stephen’s criticisms amount to is that concert promoters are doing their job properly: alerting audiences to minor figures in the repertoire, and putting those composers in their proper context.

But, as I say, it’s Stephen’s conclusion that astonishes. What age is he living in, to suppose that classical music is regarded with indiscriminate reverence because of us snobs who urge its value? The problem is the opposite: classical music is almost everywhere seen as a taste rather than an achievement. And because classical music is complex, it is inevitably a minority taste. Whereas popular music relies almost entirely on melody, classical music has development and argument. Classical music isn’t literally a language, but it has a formal structure that can be thought of as a metaphorical language. Musical appreciation requires a knowledge of that language, not necessarily in the sense even of being able to read music (though it helps), but of being able to recognise the shifting relations between melody and harmony. What effect does Stephen suppose his strictures about ‘pretension’ will have? That they will encourage musical appreciation, or instead the denigration of serious music as - in that dismal catch-all term of abuse - ‘elitist’?

Learning to listen to Beethoven is no more elitist than learning German in order to understand his opera Fidelio, but on the other hand it is no less arduous a task. When I read that Stephen believes a mark of the worth of musical compositions is that they should “come close to meeting the aspirations of their listeners”, I wonder just what he has heard in those many, many hours he has spent in the concert hall. Artistic appreciation is not about what is inside us: it is about how we respond to what is outside us, namely a work that mediates the artist’s subjective impressions to us by means of that metaphorical ‘language’. Come back, Stephen, to its defence.