1 AUGUST 1981, Page 18

BOOKS

The elegant miniaturist

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Words and Music Philip Hope-Wallace (Collins pp. 280, £9.95) tew workaday journalists are well advised to collect their occasional stuff between hard covers. Newspapers and magazines are indulgent media, books less so. What made you laugh (or even think) on its ephemeral appearance is less funny and more fragile on reappearance. Faults are more glaring: stylistic clumsiness, maybe, or a certain cheapness of tone. It is easy to think of scribblers whose work has not passed the test. And still the fashion persists: we get collected volumes of transient polemics, of parliamentary sketches, of television notices even.

I picked up this book with foreboding. Some of us admired Philip Hope-Wallace — who died two years ago this September — as a journalist almost as much as we loved him as a man. Would the admiration last? Would this selection from his criticism and occasional pieces — edited by his sister Miss Jaqueline Hope-Wallace and introduced by Dame Veronica Wedgwood — stand up or would its publication prove merely an act of pietas?

In the event I was more than just relieved. I was startled to find how well these pieces read so many years after the events which they describe. On the face of it, after all, Philip did not write for posterity. Many of the notices gathered here were not strictly speaking written at all, not with pen and paper or writing machine. Scrawled notes in hand, and after a few moments' reflection, they were extemporised from call-box to badtempered copy-taker. Few reviewers really get away with this; he did.

Indeed, he was better at immediate description than at the 'think piece'. Along with opera and theatre reviews, and some funny reminiscences, the more successful of his Saturday columns for the Guardian are included here. As I recall, these columns did not always come off. Admittedly I am not among those who regret the demise of the causerie — the Chestertonian Essay on Nothing in Particular, or the Times Fourth Leader — as a journalistic form. But more than that, Philip needed something to report, an event to describe. He could describe it matchlessly.

Part of the reason was the natural grace of his prose. It was not quite classical English. One of the odd jobs Philip took in the Thirties was as an 'uncle' on Radio Fecamp, near Rouen, where he had learned French as a boy, and among his first critical assignments were the Zurich premiere of Mathis der Maler in 1938 and the Frankfurt Faust in August 1939 (he reflects on the temptation `to draw comparisons between the supreme wisdom of this great play and the supreme unwisdom of the present hour'). This is noteworthy, not only because he was a rare Englishman in his love and knowledge of both French and German culture, but also because the syntax, idioms and rhythm of French in particular influenced his style. Absence often of main verbs. Or, as he puts it in one notice, the music 'was given a most vivid eloquence' — unusual English, but itself eloquent.

Philip had strong tastes, not to be moved by fashion. In fact, and to his surprise, he lived to see fashion turn his way. At Balliol he shocked the aesthetes with his love of Verdi; It must be hard to imagine the contempt in which Donizetti as a composer was held in the late Twaties and early Thirties', when he remembered seeing the 'rictus of dismay on the face of Sir (then Mr) William Glock' during a performance of Don Pasquale; 'in those days I was still innocent about Massenet . . . I did not know that the mere mention of his name in my own country was enough to set the table in a roar; to make lady members of the Bach choir turn pale with disapproval; to induce apoplexy in the most bloodless cathedral organist'. Forty years on one of the two London opera houses had a Manon, and both shared a production of Werther.

He was not, however, a musical historian, still less a musicologist; not even a critic, I think — it was not for him to tell composers how to write music — not one of those who give that amorphous concept 'criticism' a bad name. He was a critical journalist, who possessed three essential attributes for the part: style, a faultless ear and — rarest of all — the gift of communicating enthusiasm. Not that he was always uncritical. He heard what Solti lacked — sincerity. He correctly said that Pavarotti has a 'long way to go until he gets into the Gigli or Schipa class'. And he was sharp about Callas's enormous technical imperfections.

And yet who has better described her magic? 'Mme Callas never fails to hypnotise her audience. She takes the stage as Rachel must have taken it. Visually she is magnificent. Musically she exerts so much will power and bends art to her fashioning in such an imperious manner that even if she were to whistle the music . . . she would still make us hang upon her every phrase.' Philip lamented that he did not have Kenneth Tynan's knack of the dazzling phrase. But truly some of his lines could not be improved on. 'I think the most magical high note I ever heard was the C in the aria of Gigli's Rudolfo in his first Boheme here — right at the back of the gallery, it enveloped you in its beauty, as if the tiny frog-shaped figure on the stage had reached up and stroked your ear.'

Here he is on Caballe: 'The strong voice is so perfectly placed in the "mask" that loud notes and soft ones ring out like the strokes of a bell . . . '; again, `Mme Caballe looks like a portrait by Ingres and draws a vocal line like that of this painter; not overcharged with colour but riding on the invisible breath like the bow of a violinist on his string.' And this — 'as Fischer-Dieskau asked the question in the last song of Die Dichterliebe . . . "Know you wherefore the coffin must be so large in weight?" and sent the three words "schwer mag sein" out on a perfectly sustained pianissimo portamento, one was conscious of a dozen critical points to be made but somehow all otiose: the control, the immense dignity and sympathy which totally exonerates the poet from any mawkish overemphasis, the fact that the whole cycle was being, had been, accomplished without a false emotional accent at any single point' — seems to me to give critical journalism a very good name indeed.

Dame Veronica regrets that Philip 'never wrote the major book his friends hoped for'. I am not sure that major is quite right. He was, par excellence, a miniaturist and, as I have said, never the heavy 'critic'. For my part I regret more that he never wrote his memoirs which might have combined his literary felicity with the saltiness and fun of his conversation. (A mezzo friend was complaining the other day that her producer had forbidden her to make love on the day of a performance. I remembered Philip's tale of Destinn, who would not go on for the last act of Aida until a beefy bobby had been fetched from Bow Street station across the way to attend to her needs in the dressing room. 'The audience waited and waited, Queen Mary tapping her lorgnettes on the front of the box . . . ') In lieu of that, this book will do very well. Philip might have sighed at one or two things, such as the proof-reading (the editors at Collins cannot be expected to know whether `Je suis encore tout etourdie' or 'ie suis encore toute etourdie' is correct but might have supposed that they can't both be —within four pages of each other ). He would surely have approved the selection. I do not imagine that Philip's work is or will be much studied by Ken Trott, Dave Spart and Nell Nargs at the Guardian, for which most of these pieces were written. Other journalists will re-read it with profit as well as pleasure.