MUSIC AND POLITICS
By W. J. TURNER
DECENTLY, in these pages, Mr. Dyneley Hussey referred to ni two new works, by Alan Bush and Benjamin Britten respec- tively, as avowedly "political symphonies," and added that since both musicians held the same political views the fact that he found one of the works good and the other bad showed how little a com- poser's political ideas had to do with the merit of his music. There is such complete confusion of thought on this subject, even among musicians, that an attempt to clear it up ought to be welcome to all but deliberate obscurantists, for whom any mental fog is a great help when exploiting people's emotions for their own purposes.
Much of the confusion arises from the fact that music is a sealed world to many people. I once heard a very intelligent but puzzled man ask a composer "How do you compose music?" To this man, whose literary knowledge and judgement were of a high order, music was an incomprehensible mystery. He simply could not understand how it happened or what it was. To others the higher mathematics are an equal mystery. Music and mathematics (which often go together) are the two sciences or arts most puzzling to the plain man. This is mainly due to faulty education. Few people are wholly unmusical or wholly unmathematical, and, incidentally, one of the causes of the faulty_ teaching in these subjects is that music, like mathematics, partakes of the nature both of science and of art, and so offers peculiar difficulties. Both are concerned with the organisation, in a highly special way, of sense-perceptions. These sense-perceptions are not without an emotional context ; pleasure also is associated with them, but it is pleasure of a special kind. Neither the musical nor the mathematical sense is stirred, it is not even engaged, if its possessor learns, for example, that Churchill has shaken hands with Stalin, that the Conservative party has lost a seat to Labour or vice-versa, or that the Isolationists have kidnapped Roosevelt.
"But," it will be asked, "did not Beethoven dedicate the Eroica symphony to Napoleon?" For the sake of our argument let the answer be: "Yes, indeed, he did. He wrote the Eroica symphony Inspired by a Conception of Napoleon as a great man, taking Napoleon to be a democrat, a destroyer of absolute monarchs, a champion of liberty." But then, when Napoleon made himself Emperor and seemed to be a tyrant, what did Beethoven do? Did he destroy the Eroica symphony? No, he only destroyed the dedica- tion, thus revealing that the symphony could stand, since it was the expression of Beethoven's own emotions and of his musical science and art and not the expression of political ideas. Neither music nor mathematics can express -political ideas, or ideas of any sort except musical or mathematical ones ; but since music and mathematics, as we know them, are the product of human minds, human senses and human feelings, they do express human beings and partake of their nature for good or ill. As well as their sense- Perceptions, their passions, possibly of any sort, can be a stimulus to men's intellectual activity, including music and mathematics ; so music may seem to result from a political passion just as easily
as from a passion for a woman ; but a sonata dedicated to Countess Guicciardi tells us nothing about her, only, possibly, what Beethoven thought and felt about her at a certain moment. Another day he could have written a quite different sonata inspired by and also dedicated to her. The very greatness of true art, I would say the uniqueness of art, is that it is not concerned with app,rances but
only with reality, and I would maintain that Beethoven's music dedicated to the Countess Guicciardi, or to anybody else, did not
directly' relate to its supposed subject at all. In other words we do not know what great art is about, and the best mathematicians have also found that they do not know what higher mathematics is about. Why and how is this? I am convinced that in great art, certainly, we are brought into direct contact with what is most fundamental, with what is most real, and it is something much deeper than all temporary appearances.
In other words the symphony dedicated to Napoleon, the sonata dedicated to Countess Guicciardi„ have nothing to do with the fact of greatness in Napoleon or beauty in Guicciardi (real or imaginary), but only with a greatness or a beauty conceived by Beethoven ; just as Shakespeare's Hamlet tells us nothing about any real Hamlet, who may or may not have lived. The conceptions of genius, like the creations of Nature, require a seed in the world of appearances (because they themselves have to appear), which is like the irritating grain of sand round which the oyster makes a pearl. What is unmistakable is the loveliness of the pearl, the greatness of the Eroica symphony and the beauty of the " Moonlight " sonata. These are real, to be felt as undeniably real by every musical human being in whom the germ of like greatness and beauty exists. Art is not information, that can be imparted to him who does not already even partly know ; we can only perceive in art what we ourselves possess an inkling of, and to the degree that we possess it. It is likely that nobody has ever felt and understood the greatness of Mozart's music to the degree Beethoven did, for the simple reason that there has been since Mozart no musician so great as Beethoven. "We shall never be able to compose like that," said Beethoven to his pupil Czerny once, after hearing Mozart's D minor pianoforte concerto. "Neither you nor I could ever have written that," said Mozart to a fellow-musician in Vienna when listening to a Haydn quartet. The inferior are apt to see nothing in anything, but the great recognise greatness, especially in the sphere where they are gifted.
Many difficulties disappear if we remember that in every great artist it is the universal that is embodied in the particular. It is the universal which gives a composer's music truth and value, a truth and value which enables us to use it as a touchstone. Weigh in your heart and mind the writings and speeches of democrats with the music of Fidelio, and somewhere you will find the demo- crats lacking. I would not be content to say that Beethoven loved llberty to a depth beyond their capacity, and to point out that although you could feel this in his music you could not know from his music what particular political idea he associated with liberty. I would further insist that he simply was capable of greater love ; he loved more, so much more that no such comparison is possible. So true is this that if ever there came about a world of men where liberty was hated and tyranny loved Beethoven's music would either be totally meaningless to them or would seem to them, equally with us, the truest and deepest embodiment of their passion. Difficult as it may be for our human intellects to imagine, both liberty and tyranny arc superficial appearances com- pared with the more elemental or primary reality which is in Beethoven's music. When I listen to the prisoners' choruses in Fidelio I feel that no prisoners ever felt so deeply. When I listen to Shostakovitch's " Leningrad " symphony I feel that the citizens of Leningrad have more in their souls than the tremendous physical energy and fervour which is in the symphony, fine as that is. In the Eroica, as in Fidelio, Beethoven shows himself greater than his supposed theme, in the " Leningrad " Shostakovitch shows himself less. But if you are speaking as a politician then, of course, a Bonapartist says "the Eroica, that is Napoleon," and a British Communist says " Shostakovitch, that is the greatest composer the world has ever seen."
In his art a man reveals not what he pretends or wishes to be but what he actually is. This is clearest in the art of music, fairly clear in the art of painting (where it is slightly obscured by paint ing's power of representation or imitation) and very dark in litera ture, where the simple and the self-deceiving and wishful thinker can never resist taking words at their face value. The writer wh says "I believe in the people" will have all the people believing in him and his belief—all except those whose developed literary sensibility and natural powers of mind and soul are adequate t discern the worth of what the writer says from his style ; for styl is the man, not a trick that can be borrowed from other writers The mere words can be used by anybody, and their dictionary meaning is the same whoever uses them ; what gives them signifi cance is when, somehow, they have depth, when they are connected with a universal reality, the invisible source from which all lif springs. When we call an artist great we mean that the truth i in him, that he is rooted in this fundamental reality. It is thi that makes him a great artist, while his specific manner of expression the medium in which he works and makes the real appear, is wha makes him a painter, or a musician, or a writer, or a mathematician.
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