BOOKS
Significant sound and fury
Philip Hensher
HARRISON BIRTWISTLE: MAN, MIND, MUSIC by Jonathan Cross Faber, £14.99, pp. 295 Towards the end of his life, Stravinsky remarked that what he missed in the music of all his contemporaries was the effects Beethoven draws from the passing of time. Like most of his critical pronouncements, this one was chiefly designed to direct attention towards one of his own music's excellences. But, had he been making a serious point, he need only have waited a few years before the explosive arrival of one of the great manipulators of time in music.
Harrison Birtwistle's music has not always had an easy ride from listeners, and it has taken a long time for its rebarbative and unique methods of expression to estab- lish an audience. All the same, it looks increasingly as if the four great English composers of the 20th century are Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Tippett and Birtwistle. Like them, he is a hermetic visionary. His work, like theirs, attaches a great deal of importance to establishing a unique voice; a great deal more, it is tempting to say, than most great composers working in the continental traditions. Any page of Birtwistle reveals the master's hand, as does any page of The Knot Garden or Job. Nor is it a question, merely, of surface ges- tures, of a particular sequence of chords, a particular orchestral flavour. Birtwistle's idiosyncrasy, just as with Vaughan Williams, lies as much in a unique approach to form, a deep originality which has proved profoundly nourishing to his contemporaries and successors. Some com- posers make their mark by a few pleasing mannerisms; some, who ought to be name- less, perpetuate their reputation by endow- ing a festival to perform their works. Birtwistle, like his great predecessors, has quite simply transformed the musical lan- guage. His music is, in a favourite phrase from Robert Graves, 'an unforeseen and fiery entertainment'.
Like anything really new, it is a language which may alarm or even repel the unaccustomed listener. Certainly, that is a response which Birtwistle has had to grow used to. Benjamin Britten is said to have walked out of the first performance of that delicious chamber opera, Punch and Judy, and, if his works of the 1980s and 1990s increasingly played to large and apprecia- tive audiences, when his music was exposed to a wider audience than the cognoscenti it could still awaken a violent response. The outgoing director of the Proms, Sir John Drummond, marked his departure in 1995 by commissioning a grand concertante piece for saxophone, drums and orchestra from Birtwistle, Panic, and programming it among the familiar patriotic fare of the sec- ond half of the Last Night. It was a superb Drummondesque gesture of faith in high modernism, and had the desired effect — the Proms, since his departure, have been about a tenth as interesting or amusing. The ensuing outrage in the newspapers at these expensive rude noises had a wonder- fully nostalgic air for any Birtwistle fan; it had, surely, been a good 20 years since any Birtwistle piece had managed to antagonise anyone so thoroughly. The piece, of course, was vintage Birtwistle, a splendidly exuber- ant piece of cumulative fury, and should have surprised nobody, either by its vio- lence or its excellence.
The violence is the first thing that strikes many listeners, and it remains at the heart of Birtwistle. He is capable of great suave- ness, as in his 1990s cycle on the poems of Paul Celan. From time to time, there is even evidence of a certain delicate wit; the wonderful little chamber piece, Carmen 'Fetch, Rover!, Go on, boy! Fetch!' Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, which begins and ends with the noise of a three- wheeled circus car falling downhill and, seemingly, only just hanging together, may even evoke laughter. But in most of his best things it is the sheer violence which is apt to strike. He likes fast music, and even when the music is slow, it seems always on the edge of an acceleration. His character- istic textures are a furiously fast sequence of brass chords, at top volume, often given extra edge with the crockery-noise of xylo- phones, a high shrieking trumpet, perhaps, a long-breathed, wailing woodwind tune. The strings are often used percussively, plucked or stuttering through a sequence, and rarely given anything more fluid. The harp — a regular member of the dramatis personae — is stripped of all romantic asso- ciations, and pierces the texture with stab- bing, painful punctuation; there is nothing more violent in all music than the four harp chords which bring Silbuty Air to an abrupt and random end with a mysterious and baffling quotation.
Above all, he loves volume, to the threshold, sometimes, of pain. The first night of The Mask of Orpheus, at the English National Opera in 1986, was prob- ably the single most shattering experience of my musical life; the second act remains the best thing Birtwistle has ever written, but it's useless to pretend that the huge impact of Orpheus's descent into the Underworld didn't depend in large part on the unparalleled ferocity of the tuttis, punc- tuated every few minutes by an electronic roar which made the Edwardian auditori- um tremble worryingly, as if a gigantic underground train was passing beneath. Lots of people write loud music, but what was unerring here was the sense of a cool musical intelligence calculating the escala- tion of the terror, placing the orchestral events with a sure judgment of proportion. As Debussy remarked of Le Sacre du Print- emps, this is primitive music with all mod- ern conveniences attached. The stuttering climax of the act, as orchestral and dramat- ic disasters chase each other and the opera house shakes to its foundations, has a power like nothing else written since the war, and I still treasure the memory of the white-faced patrons stumbling out in the second interval, like prisoners into the light.
Not everything Birtwistle has written has remained on that level of accomplishment, and, for me, he wrote all his best music in the 1970s and 1980s. Gawain, his long and frankly rather tedious opera for Covent Garden, was exactly the same whenever you woke up; it was alarming, too, that when Birtwistle revised it for the later revivals, he cut out a lot of the best music, such as the very grand ballet music for the turning of the seasons, and changed the end of the opera, which had been its most strikingly individual passage, into some- thing very banal and obvious. Of course, it was still a great deal better than the work of most of his contemporaries, but it is deeply unfair that Gawain, a big, conven- tional, Tannhauser-ish sort of opera, gets revived by Covent Garden all the time, and The Mask of Orpheus, which is the greatest English opera since The Midsummer Mar- riage, has, as far as I know, never been revived on stage.
Even if Birtwistle continued to write well in the 1990s, as in the grand and mellifluous song cycle on Paul Celan, his reputation seems most likely to rest on the orchestral music that he was writing in the 20 years before that. Oddly, it is often more dramatic than his stage works. A piece like the sublime chorus and orchestra . . agm . . . has an intrinsic drama, an invisible and fluid narrative which makes all but the best of his operas seem painfully literal by comparison — the brass-and-xylo- phone tutti halfway through makes your hair stand on end. Earth Dances is just an orchestral piece — one so ferocious that it has been remarked that in the course of the piece the second word of the title stops being a noun and becomes a verb — but also an intensely dramatic experience. Six simultaneous streams of events are taking place in the enormous orchestra, each bril- liantly well characterised; each rises to the surface in succession, exploding onto the listener's attention. The effect is seismic, like watching a millennia-long geological process compressed into 40 minutes.
What, in the end, is most remarkable about Birtwistle is his sense of the effects to be drawn from the passage of time. Like all the great composers, he dares to bore the listener, and, in that stupendous piece, The Triumph of Time, draws unique emo- tional resources from what, from one point of view, is nothing more than three tunes, circling each other and rising with immense slowness to another of those ground- shaking climaxes. All his music relies, in the end, on permutation rather than repeti- tion, and the appalling sense of The Tri- umph of Time is that, by the end, the events of the musical landscape are continually the same, and never have the same exact meaning, and the listener comes to feel like a lost Arctic explorer wandering helplessly in circles.
This is quite a reasonable book about Birtwistle, despite one's immediate feeling that nothing subtitled 'Man, Mind, Music' can be any good. (When Michael Kennedy called his book about Richard Strauss Man, Musician, Enigma or Joan Peyser her ghast- ly biography of Pierre Boulez Composer, Conductor, Enigma it was, in each case, a usefully concise indication of the book's worth and interest.) It is analytically based, which can be useful and productive; Jonathan Cross is strong on describing the processes of Birtwistle's forms, which are more like ceaseless evolution than anything else; it's rare to get anything repeated exactly. It is true that he gets muddled over Birtwistle's taste for the visual arts — Paul Klee gets terribly mangled, but then few musicologists have much of a feeling for the other arts. Perhaps, at this point, it would be nice to have a really proselytising tome, to convert the concert-going masses to the joys of Birtwistle. A bit of purple prose over the sheer sexiness of Earth Dances might do the world of good. It might have been good to stress, too, that he is a glorious, though unconventional melodist; the long, beautiful tune which begins Secret Theatre, ceaselessly turning back in on itself, feeding on its own sub- stance, is not unusual in the orchestral music. He is not, in the end, a difficult composer to enjoy, though he is certainly hard fully to understand; anyone who really likes music will share Birtwistle's passion- ate relish of the rudest noises you can pos- sibly make with a musical instrument.
Previous page
