This week Mahlerman stands well back and takes in some Big Music…
When the Leviathan that is Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony came up for air at the Proms recently, it had been submerged for almost 30 years, and even before that this curate’s egg of a work had only been performed half a dozen times since its birth 90 years ago. It spans a restless couple of hours, and calls for up to one thousand performers, including nine choirs, four offstage brass bands, and the normal orchestra size doubled-up to about 150 players. A vast percussion section includes chains, a thunder machine and a bird scare.
That Brian was one of the great British eccentrics has never been in doubt, but we are on trickier ground when his real worth is being considered. Could a man who was a failure in almost everything he did, actually be the the neglected genius that some believe him to be? The ‘Gothic’ is his first symphony, but the staggering fact is that he followed it with a further 31, the last 22 composed after he had passed his 80th birthday – the 32nd being a classicly proportioned 20 minutes in length. And during his long life (96) he also found the time to father 10 children with two wives. Everthing about him was big – not least his extraordinary self-belief – keeping the compositional flame burning when virtually everything he wrote was ignored or treated with indifference. Here, the closing pages of the fourth movement of six, the Te Deum laudamus.
The thunder machine crops up again in the last great tone poem of Richard Strauss, the Alpine Symphony, along with a huge battery of other unusual things to hit or wind – Tam Tam, Cow-Bells, Wind-Machine. By some measure his largest purely orchestral piece, its almost hour-long span reveals not a symphony as we understand it, but a continuous, 22 section ‘giant Wagnerian tonepainting’, illustrating, in vivid technicolour, an Alpine ascent starting in the darkness just before dawn and ending 11 hours later at nightfall. Whenever I hear this piece, I am forced into thinking yet again about the whole business of composing music, and what the conductor Bernard Haitink (not given to excess in language or musical interpretation) said about ‘these people’, shaking his head in wonder. He was talking about Gustav Mahler, but his wonderment was concerning the ability of great composers generally, to hear and ‘compose’ with their inner ear, and then to ‘orchestrate’ that sound in their mind and then, wonder of wonders, get those thoughts down as black ink on a stave, inscribing for all five sections of the strings, adding woodwind, brass and percussion, and turning that mass of information into something wonderful…..and Haitink was and is a great musician of 50 years experience; and he was shaking his head in wonder.
Strauss once compared his need to compose to that of a cow giving milk, and such was his genius and fecundity that, in this work in particular, as the ideas spill over each other, I am left shaking my head with Bernard. Here, one of the most majestic sections in all romantic music, as the climbers reach the summit and stand in awe at the beauty of the natural world.
In the Gurre-Lieder, completed in 1911 just after the death of Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg expanded the nineteenth-century song-cycle into a vast cantata of operatic dimensions, and in this post-Wagnerian tableau, Tristan and Isolde become Waldemar and Tove. Close to 400 musicians are called for, including three four-part male choruses and five soloists; eight flutes, five oboes, seven clarinets, ten horns, seven trumpets etc; and a huge percussion band including ‘heavy iron chains’ and a Ratchet. The great bogey-man of music conjures some wonderful pages, including the opening Orchestervorspiel below, but the work as a whole leaves the impression of tasteless luxury, which goes some way to explaining the rapturous reception it received from the bourgeois Viennese audience at the first performance.
The American Charles Ives was that rare bird, a highly successful businessman who virtually taught himself musical notation, and fashioned himself into a great composer. His Insurance company made him rich enough to be able to quit business at 50, and devote the rest of his life to composition. But, like Brian above, the musical world reacted with indifference to Ives’ revolutionary tone clusters and quarter-notes. However, his saving grace was the love of a strong woman. He married Harmony Twitchell (was there ever a better name for a composer’s wife?) in his early 30’s and, later in his life, as the indifference to his work grew into hostility, and his health began to fail, Mrs Ives supplied encouragement, took over family business, maintained his correspondence, and defended his solitude against all intrusions. The multi-layered Fourth Symphony is generally considered to be the greatest American symphony and, though just half an hour in length, it requires the same vast forces as the trio above and is, in fact, scored for two orchestras. It is usually performed with two conductors, but at the first performance in New York in 1965, Leopold Stokowski needed two additional stick-men. Here we have the fairly straightforward third movement, a fugue, ending with a brief quotation (a favourite Ives device) from Joy To The World.
Good to see Havergal Brian given his due. From the moment I discovered the Gothic Symphony a couple of decades ago, I was entranced by his sheer bonkersness. For those who care about such things, he was the inspiration for Binder, whose 49 symphonies I wrote about here…
http://hootingyard.org/archives/2700
Ives and Schoenberg do a grand job, but I’m with Verlaine when he said “there’s no such thing as a long poem” – if indeed he said it. Webern knew what he might have meant.
As for Havergal Brian I feel that, like George Lloyd, he falls into the “rightly neglected” category. He relapses into brassy marches whenever melodic inspiration fails him, which is all the time. There are many British composers worth rediscovering who didn’t bother with this sort of bombast. Rubbra, for one, and Binder for another.
I’ll take on the task of “Welsh composers you may of thought you’ve heard of” for The Dabbler one of these days.
In the meantime I recommend Uzz Kalnis, Ruthenia’s most persistent composer and cause of the infamous 1949 Yütz Theses. As Zhatko writes in “Anti-Danube”:
“Socialist Ruthenia had fought a stern rearguard action against the advance of music throughout the postwar period, prompted by Comrade General Secretary Yütz’s displeasure at a performance of Symphony No 5 in G# Minor (The Bastard’) by People’s Popular Composer Uzz Kalnis.
“Massed timpani had hammered out the Morse Code for ‘Starve The Comprador Latifundistas!’ a few metres from the General Secretary’s box, while a chorus of Fishwives for Peace chanted ‘Fist Up, Fist Up, Comrade Yütz!’ during the 20-minute Ondes Martenot improvisation in the scherzone.
“The Central Committee’s decision was swift. Kalnis was called up for a lap of honour’ second stint of military service, this time in the 8th Experimental Submarine Parachute-Launching Brigade, despite his advanced years and inability to breath underwater.”
The education continues! As Strauss is one of my absolute faves, I think I’ll have to pick the alpine symphony as my favourite new discovery this week!
” calls for up to one thousand performers, including nine choirs, four offstage brass bands, and the normal orchestra size doubled-up to about 150 players. A vast percussion section includes chains, a thunder machine and a bird scare.”
That’s the funniest thing I’ve read for a long time.
Has it ever been performed according to the composer’s wishes? Four offstage brass bands?
Well Brit, as you probably know, or could guess, I am something of an authority on musical instrumentation, and I have also seen the original manuscript of the ‘Gothic’. Old Havergal, practical to a fault, had obviously thought this through, and realized that most orchestras don’t have a bird scare lying about or, if they do have one, would struggle to find somebody who can play it. An alternative, clearly marked in the score, is to project upon a screen behind the orchestra a picture of a loathed and detested public figure – Fred the Shred, Baroness Uddin, Chelsea & England legend, family-man and racial-harmonizer John Terry for example. This produces in the audience an almost instant groaning, hissing or jeering, this being the required aural effect. Simple.
After the gentle and delectable cow-pats of two weeks ago comes the collected droppings of a million migrating wildebeest, and Havergal Brian certainly knew how to drag and layer them into a mile-high pile. I remember the Marco Polo label releasing the Gothic Symphony in about 1990 and a distinguished reviewer of the Gramophone magazine thinking it was pretty good. I very nearly bought the CD because of that review but was put off by the thought of having to collect it from the record shop in a large van.
Thanks once again MM for some fascinating insights.
I’m afraid I failed to connect with the recent performance of the Gothic when I listened on the radio. It lost me somewhere halfway, and this may be more to do with my poor attention span than with the wayward ways of Havergal Brian. The Alpine Symphony, though – that’s what the wide open spaces and great heights of the Albert Hall are really for, surely: a real summit and no mistake.
But if we want eccentrics, Ives took some beating, and not just musically. He gave a lot of his insurance fortune away – to needy relatives, to charity, and to musicians who were trying to get new music performed. He didn’t understand why he should get tax rebates when he made charitable donations and at first refused to claim them, until his tax lawyer pointed out that if he claimed the refunds he’d have even more money to give away.