Purple patches
Robin Holloway
exander Goehr, my revered composition teacher, and later longstanding boss in the music faculty at Cambridge, was always snooty about writing on music that was anything less than exalted: 'colour supplement' or 'record-sleeve culture' were favourite hates, and the shudder of disdain was summed up in one withering phase: belles-lettres. Stimulated early by colour supplements, owing most of what I know about music to record sleeves (and their successors, the stocky blocks of info in CD packs), and often diverted as well as edified by belles-lettres. I've long wanted to put the opposite case, and in doing so to repay some ancient debts.
Principally to that masterpiece of the idiom The Record Guide, written originally by Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, with further help in later editions from William Mann and Andrew Porter — this last still happily keeping up the standard elsewhere, nearly 50 years after the first version of the Guide first appeared. Obviously this venture's practical value is by now virtually nil. What survives, and gives the hefty volume its classic status, is, secondarily, many a sharp-eared comment, treasurable as such though its occasion has long since passed, characterising performances from abysmal to superlative (for which hack in the 1950s two asterisks sufficed): and, mainly, its marvellous initial and evocative introductions to individual composers.
I'm not sure that these stylish epitomes have ever been surpassed, even by Tovey in the composer-entries he wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, recently reprinted by the Oxford Press. Tovey, magnificently weighty, beyond all taint of belle-lettrisme, covers only a handful of the greatest names. Whereas the Guide has no choice; if a composer's work was recorded, she or he has to have an introduction. And its authors' style is anything but weighty — rather, grateful and graceful in best belles-lettres tradition, somewhat literary but eschewing preciousness. Words such as amateur-gentleman, connoisseur, even butterfly, could be applied, not unfairly, so long as the grip within the glove is also acknowledged. These flowers are grounded in wide and profoundly comprehending appreciation of European music and its culture, worn lightly enough yet strong and durable, with stringent judgment and taste transcending mere
aestheticism to edge over, albeit unobtrusively, into a moral category.
Again and again as I idly dip for pleasure, I'm surprised by the perfect formulations, impeccably expressed, that have proved starting points for exploring all kinds of music, starting points that turn out, when expanded by experience, to be some kind of arrival point too. Then the authors' quizzical insights — e.g. Beethoven's identification with his Leonora, Tchaikovsky's with his Tatiana; the distinctions between Debussy and Ravel; the word-transcending music of Wagner; the splendeurs et miseres of Strauss (to name but a few, for there is scarcely a page without illumination glanc
ing or dead-centre) have proved uncannily fertile in suggestion and stance, whatever their readers' later accretions or divergencies. Secondhand copies remain quite frequent; and once owned, it's not willingly yielded.
My other principal debt is still larger and more fundamental. Perhaps belles-lettres are not the mots justes for Wilfrid Mellers's style, in his half (Haydn to the present) of a two-author history entitled Man and his Music, for it was born of the Cambridge severity that stood steadfast against grace and elegance. Unlike The Record Guide I don't return to Mellers for nips of delight that its continuous format and unabashed didacticism aren't intended to yield. Rather, an initial lump of red-hot leaven, taken in via adolescent absorption in its pages, has saturated the whole system ever since. One is fashioned by such influences even while what they've fashioned is transformed into something quite other.
Though he does not abhor the occasional purple patch, Metiers could never be charged with fine writing: its qualities are more important — urgency and missionary zeal in communicating what matters so. And continues to, for he is still at work, bubbling into the new century, more than 40 years after Man and his Music first appeared, and 60 since his pioneering studies of Mahler, Faure and late Debussy first appeared in Leavis's Scrutiny. There have been full-length studies of Bach, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams; slim volumes on Poulenc and Grainger; and copious essays, some collected. All are euphoric with energetic enthusiasm; but never recapture the focus of the big, bold canvas.
Such individual overviews have long been unfashionable (though the world of music awaits with desire and trepidation the latest one-man survey of its history, by the formidable Professor Taruskin of Berkeley). Instead, there is a splintering specialisation, requiring full-time attention merely to keep up, yet often enough too narrow to be enjoyable even for the fellow-specialists who comprise the principal readership. The sheer bravura of trying to hold it all together invites hubris. When it succeeds (like Gombrich's comparable Stan' of Art) something is effected which could happen no other way. The Record Guide succeeds beyond its ostensibly humble aim, suggesting via a useful dictionary of introductory cameos a coherent picture of Western music, without recourse to historical continuity or an explicit aesthetic. Man and his Music, with greater ostensible ambition, attempts both; its higher leap is thoroughly vindicated by the integrity and intensity of its message. They couldn't be more different. Yet both are equally rooted in the wish to share and spread joyous involvement in a musical culture broad-based and humane.
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