Paul Driver

Early in 1914 Jean Sibelius visited Berlin and went to hear Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, in which an added soprano sings of ‘air from other planets’ as the music moves towards atonality. ‘It gave me a lot to think about,’ he wrote in the diary that he kept for much of the second half of his life and on which his biographer Erik Tawaststjerna relies heavily. A few days earlier, a Schoenberg song had made a ‘deep impression’ on him and he had found the Op. 9 Chamber Symphony ‘a legitimate and valid way of looking at things … But it is certainly painful to listen to. A result achieved by excessive cerebration.’ This encounter with Schoenberg occurred just over halfway through Sibelius’s life and in the middle of the original five volume version of this biography.

If a serious radio channel is a success it can define the state of a culture. Looking back over old copies of the Radio Times, one realises with a keen nostalgia the extent to which the national identity has been embodied in daily sequences of radio and television programmes. Those at the more serious end of the broadcasting spectrum, and their manner of presentation, afford an ideal barometer of cultural health – better, for example, than any study of reading habits.

Extracts, or pericopes – to borrow his typically ornate term – from Robert Craft’s diary of his years with Stravinsky first appeared in the famous series of their conversation books issued throughout the Sixties. In 1972, after the composer’s death, a far bigger selection was published as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-1971. But this volume left its author dissatisfied from the start. ‘Hastily put together’ to coincide with a Stravinsky ballet festival in New York, it omitted the year 1954, was exiguous with five others, failed to lay proper emphasis on what he now sees as the crucial years of 1951 and 1956 or to supply an adequate context for the Sixties; and Craft did not want it reprinted. Now he has gone to the trouble of remedying the defects with a revised edition that extends the original length by over a third. Each year of the stated period gets a decent amount of coverage; a solid 1994 postscript has been added to each except the last, which is followed by a chapter-length Postlude. Letters to Craft from Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard are newly included. Letters (also to Craft) from Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, Glenn Gould and other musical luminaries are also published for the first time; and most of the illustrations are new. Gone are the itineraries that laboriously prefaced each chapter-year in the original edition and the interpolated 12-page ‘Afterword’ which Craft wrote for a book of Arnold Newman’s Stravinsky photographs. The new edition of the Chronicle is virtually a new book.’

There was something unnerving about Bartók, as Agatha Fassett indicates in The Naked Face of Genius, her 1958 ‘novel’ about his American last years. ‘That’s one bit of information that might have been left unremembered,’ Bartók curtly informed her when, on their first meeting, she had given the wrong answer to the absurd question: ‘Would you call this a coconut?’ The object he was holding reminded her, she confessed, of a ‘weird-looking Indian head’, but he had tender sympathies with the downtrodden, and the dinner party was ruined. Bartók seems to have had a comparably unnerving effect on the critics and historians of 20th-century music. They always manage to leave him out of the reckoning. Summarising Bartók’s position from the vantage-point of the Nineties in the first chapter of The Bartók Companion, Malcolm Gillies notes that since the late Forties and Fifties ‘the authors of books on 20th-century music have generally placed him about fourth in their line-up of leading innovators – if number of pages can be taken as a guide – after Debussy (as father of impressionism in music), Schoenberg (pioneer of atonality and serialism) and Stravinsky (rhythmic innovator and Neoclassicist). Bartók is, almost invariably, given as the chief representative of folk influence in art music.’ One question that a hefty and scholarly Companion such as this might therefore resolve is whether or not that end-of-term grade is accurate, and if not, whether Bartók might climb to number one.’

Although W.H. Auden, who ranks with Hugo von Hofmannsthal among the master librettists of the age, thought that the meaning of libretto’s words were its least important component (at any rate, so far as the audience is concerned), and that a libretto is ‘really a private letter to the composer’, he also found that ‘as an art-form involving words, opera is the last refuge of the High Style.’ The syllables are the main thing, the singability. The poet-librettist’s verses ‘have their moment of glory’, the moment in which they suggest ‘a certain melody’ to the composer; ‘once that is over, they are as expendable as infantry to a Chinese general.’ Yet opera is ‘the only art to which a poet with a nostalgia for those times past, when poets could write in the grand manner all by themselves, can still contribute, provided he will take the pains to learn the métier and is lucky enough to find a composer he can believe in’.