Musical parts
Philip Hope-Wallace
An Autobiography Igor Stravinsky (Calder and Boyars 0.95) Erik Satie James Harding (Seeker and Warburg £5.75) Gustave Mahler and the Courage To Be David Holbrook (Vision Press E7.95) Books about music — what an umbrella that constitutes. I heard a woman march into the book department of a big store and announce "I want a book about music for my nephew", such as one might ask for a book on chicken farming. I didn't stop to learn what she was finally Persuaded to buy. But it set me thinking how various and generally how ineffective is writing about music. The muse defies sharpest pens. An Ernest Newman, even occasionally a Hans Keller, can lure one into thinking that writing or speaking about music is a greater pleasure than hearing the stuff for oneself. But to my sorrow I believe that most of the efforts to describe music and its effect are laboured and vain.
However, a musican writing about himself and his art can often give acute pleasure. Igor Stravinsky's Autobiography is cool, dry, unsensational as you would guess. It must be the very antithesis of the school of musicians' autobiography of which Berlioz is the prime example — who breaks off to exclaim "Quel roman que ma vie!" Stravinsky writes about himself and the vicissitudes he endured without apparent surprise or dismay. He records the attitudes of others towards himself without rancour, only a faint raising of eyebrows when the attitudes seemed peverse. The family Photographs seem perfectly of a piece with the style. Tea on the gravel terrace of some Swiss Place of exile, with sons, wife and old mother. You seem to be keeping company with just any Other gifted white Russian of our days. Yet you are constantly coming up against the giants of our culture, bumping casually into people such as Cocteau, Gide and Auden. I did not find the book particularly revealing of Stravinsky himself but I was surprised how much it interested me and held my attention.
James Harding does very well by Satie, an elusive figure if ever there was one. I would finally have to say that he somehow slips through Mr Harding's fingers but I doubt if anyone ever could quite grasp this odd, Pugnacious recluse. What is achieved is a Placing of the man in such society as he allowed to meet him. Satie lived in poverty and seclusion, clothed in dust filled velvet in the dimmest of Parisian suburbs but managed to keep up a running fire against critics, even coming to blows with that dreadful Monsieur Willy, once Colette's husband. His music was queer and, if noticed, merely ridiculed. His "morceaux en forme de poire" were probably so named, Mr Harding suggests, to cheek the fine academician Guireaud who had probably been scolding poor Satie for his ignorance of proper musical form. In such matters the biographer here carries us along with him. Mr Harding is very good at this kind of subject, witness his books on such characters as Massenet, but the difficulty this time is inherent in the composer himself, whose music repels analysis. I am left with the impression, and I think it the right one to receive, that Satie was important not for what he achieved but as a portent of the kind of liberation creative art was striving towards. In somewhat the same way a poet such as Edith Sitwell now seems to me to be important for the history of poetry rather than inherently valuble as an artistic creator. On the title page of this highly enjoyable study in the elusive, Mr Harding quotes Olga Satie as saying "My brother was always difficult. He doesn't seem to have been quite normal". But he wasn't a bore, and this book makes that point as well.
Highly controversial will be the view taken of David Holbrooks's study of Mahler. I began it with intense prejudice, having found the combative Mr Holbrook slightly wrong-headed on many non-musical topics. But amende honorable, I wolfed through these well written, well argued pages with growing appetite and before the end was catching myself saying "I believe he is right". Briefly, Mr Holbrooks's argument is that you get Mahler all wrong if you think of him as a defeated world weary pessimist half in love with death. It is argued, with much recourse to psychoanalysis and a very professional analysis of the music, especially the Ninth Symphony, that Mahler on the contrary was a creative artist defiantly on the side of life and the "courage to be".
The last chapter is called The Art of being Human'. I know many musicians who will turn down the corners of their mouths on being told this. Many scholars will also raise their eyebrows in the perusal of some of the explanations of the music itself. But for my part I found the work engrossing. Donnington explained the Ring in Jungian terms and got scolded. Deryck Cooke dared to grasp the nettle of 'music as a language' and was stung several times. But such books seem to me to have been very well worth while and here I believe is another such. Discussable but mind stretching. And of the three books reviewed this is the one I myself would give to a nephew.
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