New Bearings
By CHARLES REID Tile recent London con-
, certs of Pierre Boulez, especially the one at which we heard his cantata Le Soleil des Eaux, are likely to prove as much a part of the city's musical his- tory as Wagner's Albert Hall concerts in 1877, Debussy's conducting of his La' Mer and Schon- berg's of his Five Orches-
tral Pieces, Op. 16, both at the Queen's Hall something over thirty years later. This isn't to say, that Boulez is as great a creator as Wagner, or to insist on my feeling that he's as big a /.man as at least one of the other two. My point is that the occasion marked a breakthrough by sorts of music which, for a long time, had most music-lovers scratching their ears uncertainly.
The issue is, in part, that of colour, a word borrowed long ago from the sister art to denote the nature and range of musical timbres, instru- mental ones especially. There are musicians still, I suppose, and influential ones at that, who en- dorse Beecham's arrogant pessimism on this and related subjects. As late as 1959 Beecham said that no valid new orchestral colour had been created since Delius. The modern orchestra (the one 'invented by Rossini and Berlioz') was de- clining for want of new repertory and would be stone-dead in twenty-five years.
One of two things. This pronouncement made nonsense before the event of M. Boulez. Or M. Boulez makes retrospective nonsense of Beecham. It is Beecham who goes to the wall. There is no reason in the nature of things why aural imagination should not be renewed or why new aural perspectives should not go on opening up until the end of time. Nor is there any plainly foreseeable limit to the corresponding evolution of technical means.
One of the Anton Webern pieces which M. Boulez conducted with the BBC Symphony Or- chestra (under his hand, so true, rich and supple an instrument) was the transcription (1935) of a six-voice fugue from J. S. Bach's Musical Offer- ing. Consider the, opening statement. Bach's theme is cut into snippets which are voiced alternately, at piano or pp levels, by muted trom- bone, horn and trumpet; with occasional point- ings by the harp. A procedure which at one time would have earned a cuffing for any first- year composition student not only seduces the ear, but also brings out the tension and sense of drama that are latent in all Bachian polyphony.
More than any other composer in an age of aural renewal and reorientation, Webem had the knack of making us feel we're hearing this stale old instrument or that for the first time in our lives. This is strikingly the case with the trumpet. 'On the second page of Webern's Op. 6, the Six Orchestral Pieces of 1909 (revised 1928), the first trumpet the other night had a few bars which alternated between square and triple metres. In- stantly one groped for a visual analogy. The first trumpeter was not merely playing a tune. He was drawing a pale scar upon the air. More than that, the tune's character, its spacing in relation to other parts, the contrasted timbres (bass clarinet, harp, violas, etc.) which were de- ployed alongside or below it—all conspired to induce a mood of ravishing, remote melancholy.
There could be no greater mistake than to write off Webern as one of music's ingenious pattern-mongers, a deviser of subtle gewgaws for the ear which lack emotional coefficients. In one aspect, Op. 6 is to the ear as are Klee, Cotman and Ingres to the eye. In another aspect, it is as emotionally loaded as the music of his fellow Schonberg-pupil-Alban Berg. In its way the com- plex percussion crescendo at the end of No. IV is as hair-raising as the two orchestral unisons on B natural which follow the murder scene in Wozzeck. Altogether, Op. 6 seems to be telling us a story whose terms are not disclosed. It is music in search of a scenario. A fault, yes; but one which I, for one, am prepared to put up with any night of the week.
Le Soleil des Eaux (written in 1948 for chamber ensemble, revised and expanded ten years later) presents us with no such dilemma. In this case the music's associative purpose is plainly stated. Chorus and three soloists sing (and sometimes speak or shout) the poetry of Ren6 Char. M. Char's lines not only determine the elegant, angular vocal writing, but also evoke every bar of accompaniment or commentary in the orchestra. At the Festival Hall, despite the singers' talents (which, in the case of the soprano, Josephine Nendick, especially, were consider- able), so few words got through—or seemed meant to get through—that some may have toyed with the idea that Boulez had used Char as a mere peg for tone structure and textures whose significance is essentially autonomous and abstract. One thought back to Boulez's best- known score, Le Marteau sans Maitre. The pellucid, pretty twanglings and tinklings of Le Marteau and other Boulez facets have been summed up by one German critic as `Schmelz and Siisse'—chromium and candy, let us say.
No such assessment is remotely applicable to Le Soleil. In this case, pattern and texture are surely bred of Char's imagery and sentiment as a Mass by Palestrina is of the liturgical text. Here are two instances. In Complainte du Lezard Amoureux, first of the cantata's two sections, Char writes of high sun, goldfinch, nest, swaying meadow grasses. Word-landscape is followed by a tiny tone poem (three pages long) which turns imagined sights into pulsing sound with a techni- call nicety and delicacy of filament which make the Debussy of L'Apres-midi sound almost cumbrous by comparison. In the second poem, La Sorgue, the poet has a crescendo of images which, while reaffirming nature's sovereignty, preaches the vileness of destroying man and the grandeur of man in revolt. There is a momentous upheaving and interlocking of brass and other rhythms with the sung and spoken lines. A great unison shout, hammer-heavy, indicts the prison- cum-madhouse which man has built for himself. Then a last gentle evocation of sunlight and hori- zons. Flutter-tongued flutes initiate a final cadence whose mysterious (mystic, indeed) tranquillity reconciles all internal conflicts of a work which, poetically and musically, couples violence and la dauceur with uncommon daring and mastery.
Admittedly; it took me six hearings (including five at rehearsal) to bottom Le Soleil. Do not forget that little over a century ago seasoned amateurs were foxed by the late lOothoven quar- tets, thought the Ninth Symphou>> went a bit far and couldn't hear a tune in Tannhauser, The Soleil concert had yet a third landmark : a golden, superbly moulded account of Stravin- sky's Symphonies for Wind Instruments in memory of Claude Debussy. After their London premiere (1921), the Symphonies were tweaked, laughed at and roughed up by most of the pundits. In forty years the ear can do a lot of self-adjustment. In any case. new generations bring brand-new ears to the failures and follies of the old. One thing this BBC performance proved was the beauty as well as the pungency of Stravinsky's harmony, which used to make many a musical doctor grimace as if he had drunk tartaric acid in mistake for founder's port. While on this subject, I must say, in fairness to the 'esteemed _and witty colleague' whom I quoted a fortnight ago, that the late Cecil Gray really did apply his Hymns Ancient and Modern crack to the finale of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, as well as to the 'religioso' stuff in Strauss's Zarathustra. He committed this gatk in a volume of essays called(Predicaments., and an extraordinary gaffe it was. The problem with the Symphony of Psalms was exactly the same as with the memorial Symphonies. Gray and many others were looking for a nice, nob/lime/ire tune when what they were being offered was ..n adventure in polytonality, with tunes to match.
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