Music
Artistic renewal
Robin Holloway
Scrumpled together with hindsight, the 1940s are a particularly bad decade for major musical losses. With the passing of Rachmaninov (1943) and Falla (1946) two master-composers disappeared who altered nothing, but simply added to the store of pleasure. With the deaths in 1945 of Webem and Bart6k, both clearly in their prime, the loss is communal as well as indi- vidual. In 1949 the last giants of German Romanticism achieved death and transfigu- ration — Pfitzner at 80, his isolated master- piece Palestrina long behind him, Strauss at 85 still refining his art into yet more glow- ing farewells. And in 1951 Arnold Schoen- berg died — 'the solar plexus of 20th-century music'. The jury is still set on his achievement as a whole, but Stravin- sky's phrase graphically conveys his unavoidable importance.
All this by way of prelude to the 1950s, under survey at this moment on the South Bank, the BBC and elsewhere, in the mil- lennium venture which offers an overview of the century's music decade by decade in each successive year of its last. And in spite of, perhaps even because of, the pre- ceding decimation, the 1950s shine with a sense of liberation. Absolutely new (though strictly speaking it dates back to the late. 1940s) was an embattled young avant- garde, international in membership but centred initially upon Paris. Messiaen, their father-figure, went his unique way as the decade progressed.
It is wry to look back from 30 years on at his one-time disciples, the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the German Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Italian Luigi Nono, once regarded as the 'holy trinity' of con- temporary music. The first seems to have abandoned himself almost wholly to con- ducting and cultural imperialism, the sec- ond is lost in megalomaniac vapidity, the third (before his relatively early death in 1990) had declined via agitprop into gentle meditative musical wallpaper. For in the 1950s they were the Young Turks, and such landmarks as le marteau sans maitre (Boulez 1954), Gruppen for three orches- tras (Stockhausen 1955) and Il canto sospe- so (Nono 1956), together with the contemporaneous work of another Paris- centred radical, the Greek Iannis Xenakis, retain all their original knock-out vitality. And one old radical pioneer, Edgard Varese, produced a gaunt but impressive final yield, partially realising at last, after years of frustration, his dream of sonorous spatial liberation in Deserts (1954) and the poeme electronique (1957-8).
For the average music-lover, however, it is the mainstream that matters; and this particular stretch of time's river is rich in middle-ground achievement, most of it so firmly established in repertory as not to need special revival. The 1950s see two symphonic monuments by Shostakovich the somewhat portentous 10th and the bril- liant epic-fresco 11th (`The Year 1905'), as well as a host of subsidiary works from his undiscriminating pen.
Britten, another prolific composer who needs no special pleading, was at his peak, in quality too, during this decade; from Billy Budd, a Festival of Britain commission in 1951, via Gloriana and The Turn of the Screw (1954) to the Midsummer Night's Dream of 1960. Britten's complement in this country's post-war music was also at his peak. Michael Tippett's first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, was completed in 1952 after prolonged gestation; his three purely instrumental masterpieces, the Corelli-fantasia, the piano concerto and the second symphony, belong wholly to the `He's a little more of a pig than he was.' Fifties, as does the second opera, King Priam (completed 1960), in which he changed direction and began on his long slow journey downhill.
Back finally to the International Mod- ernists. One, Paul Hindemith, tended to chug along through the Fifties with more of the same. But Stravinsky (70 in 1952) did not stay put. It is his self-transformation after 1951 (the year in which he completed The Rake's Progress and a 30-year epoch in his stylistic practice) that still affords the decade's most striking feature, though with one exception the somewhat hermetic results of his rapid move towards an idiosyncratic handling of Viennese serial- ism will always remain marginal to main- stream pleasures. The exception is Agon, his last ballet score (1954-7), which has enjoyed wide exposure thanks to Balan- chine's superlatively elegant choreography.
These early Fifties, immediately follow- ing the death of Schoenberg, which also saw the quasi mystical posthumous eleva- tion of Webern, were marked by an almost universal tendency towards the serial idea. It pulled like gravity — and those who didn't master it, it spoilt. But the principal beneficiary was surely the old Stravinsky. He and serialism were made for each other, and his gradual acquisition of this new territory from 1951 onwards makes an absorbing and stirring episode of artistic renewal.
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