Box of delights
Robin Holloway
The God of Small Things has enjoyed a fulltime month. The human propensity to gather, hoard, tabulate, display goes all the way from stamp collecting, trainspotting and birdwatching to the glories of great libraries and museums collecting facts and freaks, coins and Rembrandts, instruments scientific and musical, antiquities and Klees, first editions of Newton or a complete run of Beano or Dandy.
More modest, touching in its uniqueness, was the Box of Delights recently presented, after fascinating vicissitudes too complicated to relate briefly, to my college in Cambridge. Its origin was very different: a 50th birthday tribute in 1924 to David Bach, admired and beloved figure in early 20th-century Vienna, whose catholic tastes and entrepreneurial energies bridged high and low, avant-garde and commercial, in all the arts as in life. His many friends collaborated to fill a custom-built box, covered in python skin, with original drawings and autographs of poems, prose and music that testify to his range. Quite something, to receive warm tributes from Richard Strauss (‘Schoenberg is only fit now for shovelling snow’), Schoenberg (‘What I have learnt from Strauss I am glad to say I only misunderstood’) and Franz Léhar (in dislike of whom they might have found common cause) — here doodling a scrap of music destined to become the hit song in The Land of Smiles a few years later. Most of the great names in German-language literature of the day are present, among them von Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Kraus, Musil, Heinrich (but not Thomas) Mann. Could any of our cultural placemen claim the like?
A few weeks later, down the lane to Queens for another unique event: an afternoon of new music and dance inspired by a Box of Delights held there since the earliest years of the 18th century, in which Vigani, the university’s first professor of chemistry, housed 700 specimens (animal, vegetable, mineral) mainly for medicinal use but also to demonstrate the construction of insects and reptiles and the composition of painters’ pigments. This cabinet of curiosities, redolent as much of witchcraft and alchemy as of modern science, could be pored over en route between artistic manifestations it had suggested, beginning with decorative athletics for dancers in the college’s recent all-purpose auditorium, moving out into the open for ear-piercing strains on four flageolets, thence over the river and upstairs into a Long Gallery populated by isolated musicians — here a violin, there a bassoon, a duo, a madrigal group, a lute consort, playing and ceasing at quasi random, listening to or conspiring against their colleagues in the distance, overhearing — remotest of all — the grand piano in an adjacent chamber that seemed to infiltrate from another sphere.
The overall effect, though, was more homely: a realisation of Satie’s musique d’ameublement — ‘furniture music’; just happening to happen while its inadvertent auditors shuffled around the sofas, firescreens, portraits, etc., and inspected the dried powders of Vigani’s vigilance. Further stages reached the old Hall, a jewel box itself, with its riot of Victorian mediaevalry, to end up in Chapel with full choir and organ. An enchanted two hours, whose total effect was quite disproportionate to the mere sum of its sometimes exiguous parts.
Altogether elsewhere: a sheet-shrouded corner of the Royal Academy of Music in London, negligent of rather than devoted to a miscellany of past instruments, dusty background for a different sort of collection. It was not so various as Bach’s Box, every bit as obsessive as Vigani’s cabinet: the sheaf of tributes, by himself and others, paid to the Erhu from the director of ethnomusical studies, and played by him with ascetic yet sensuous concentration. The Erhu is a Chinese two-stringed bowed instrument, timelessly archaic even when as now demonstrating its contemporary possibilities. My own three-piece suite, heard first, makes the elementary if excusable error of taking it for a kind of fiddle. Its true genius lies in wailing sensitivity, delicate and plangent, vocal, infinitely flexible in subtle nuance, except that power, brilliance, display are off the range. The other offerings in this recital of specially requested repertoire were variously better suited, but none more so than its own native melodies.
Finally, a higher plane; coincidently, I’ve been listening this month to a couple of CDs which chart the most touching musical gatherum imaginable: J.S. Bach’s loving and reverent anthology of his ancestors’ works down some four generations before his own. With a profoundly proud/ humble sense of his own supreme value as synthesis and culmination, he piously collected whatever he could from his forbears’ reliques and, whenever possible, included them in the services at the Thomaskirche. Even without the familial impulse, this music is all worth hearing in its own right. We expect the tropes of Protestant devotions — spiritual inwardness, lament, groans of unworthiness and contrition — and are not disappointed. Surprising, however, is the festive splendour of a superb battle-piece (St Michael and all Angels vs Old Satan) with drums and four trumpets going like blazes, the work of Johann Christoph (1642–1703), whose relation to Johann Sebastian is clearer from the printed genealogy than words can utter (great-grandfather twiceremoved?). That he is the most gifted of the greatest Bach’s predecessors is amply confirmed in an extended cantata probably composed for the wedding of another Johann Christoph in 1679. It dances gaily and juicily off into realms of frank sensual relish loosely (in every sense) drawn from and condoned by suggestively tinctured texts from The Song of Solomon, where the Master himself scarcely set foot.
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