Blessay 62: Tremble and Transcend (2)

Three years ago I wrote my first essay on six epiphanies I’d experienced from listening to classical music. Here are three more. If you want to remind yourself of my definition of epiphanies / frissons then please read Tremble and Transcend (1).

Music epiphanies are deposited in a bank of feeling. A money analogy isn’t a flippant one but a statement of a different definition of wealth. In this rich zone of musical taste a high interest (of pleasure) accrues significantly more than any interest on the money in my savings account or ISA. Each time I return to playback this music it still turns me on – a very 60s phrase and applicable to the time when I first discovered all 3 works on vinyl and cd.

(1) Scheherazade – Ravel

The young Ravel’s beautiful song cycle setting of three poems by Tristan Klingsor operates on a dual level. First as a 1904 version of orientalism (Long before Edward Saide’s important critique) with its depiction of the other and the allure of the East as being mythically dangerous, exciting, fearful, enchanting and mysterious: words that fancifully adorn a complex reality. The 1001 Arabian Nights still inhabits the cultural background of our perception of the East despite the problematic geo-politics of many parts of Asia. Yet at the beginning of the century Ravel and Klingsor centred very sensually on the Eastern romance of their composition: not only the fairy tale element but secondly an early modern view of individuality repressed by societal constraints.

Asie, The Enchanted Flute and The Other (Or better still in French L’Indifferent) are intoxicating songs. If I had to only choose only one then it would be Asie (Asia) and to be precise the very opening when the word Asie is sung three times by the great female soprano Victoria de los Angeles. Her voice has a beguilingly warm sweetness, technical ease and unsentimental lyric power. When I was nineteen I first heard her recording of Scheherazade and loved it. I hadn’t yet travelled abroad. Western Europe was out there and enticing – though Asia was the greater challenge. Victoria cried out Asie to accompany Ravel’s wonderful orchestration. I was seduced and literally wanted to fly to the East. Not on a plane but by flapping my wings. This is an Asia “where fantasy sleeps like an empress in her forest filled with mysteries” and a schooner will “spread its violet sails like a huge bird of night in the golden sky.”

The promise of Scheherazade is also generalised into a deep need to escape your circumstances, overcome the often crushing routines of life and achieve a greater imaginative freedom. In Tristan Klingsor’s case it might have been because he was a gay man. Ravel might also have been gay but there is no real evidence of his sexual preferences.

In my case I was a comfortably heterosexual teenager who vaguely wanted to escape from Liverpool. In 1969/70 I had a good friendship with a woman 10 years older than me. Pauline kept telling me that she thought Liverpool was a dump and that young people like me ought to leave. Ravel and Klingsor were members of an artistic group called Les Apaches (The Hooligans) and their creative ‘mischief’ was to create a fourteen  minute musical disruption. Scheherazade had me itching for new possibilities. Asie, Asie, Asie, magically sung as a stretched out Aaa-sie finally had me singing Get-out, Get-out, Get-out over De Los Angeles’s compelling voice.

 (2)  Symphony no 1 in D Major – Mahler

My first encounter with the symphonies of Mahler was through Charles Groves, now sadly forgotten. Once he was the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic and championed Mahler at the many concerts he gave. Yet I don’t recall going to hear his performance of Mahler’s 1st. I came to that through the CBS recording that Bruno Walter made with the CBC orchestra in 1962.

Nature inhabits Mahler’s first symphony – even the sound of a cuckoo is depicted in the opening movement as we hear the return of Spring. The symphony’s nickname is Titan: presumably meaning the titanic power of nature. We’ve had previous musical descriptions of nature – eg. Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony and Schumann’s Spring symphony yet not so violent. But the last time I listened to Walter’s recording was the day after I’d put on my CD of Songs for Swinging Lovers by Frank Sinatra. The song I was most drawn to was You Make Me Feel so Young with its great line “You make me feel that Spring has sprung.” Just what I felt Mahler had achieved, although Spring being sprung in his first symphony produced an orchestral scream moment that rudely shocked the audience at its premiere in 1889.

The symphony is superbly realised by Bruno Walter (Who as a young man met Mahler) and by 1962 was an elderly disciple making his second recording of a work that had so convinced him of Mahler’s greatness. Walter’s performance is timed at 52.03 minutes. About 3 minutes before the end of the symphony I experience a real heart beating epiphany with the last movement called the “victory chorale.” At this point the Mahlerian hero has escaped the blows of fate, the orchestral screaming, and comes triumphantly through. There are times when I’ve just played, as if injecting a needle into my arm, those last 3 minutes of Mahler 1. That ending echoing ideas of the opening, comes organically round full circle to its wonderfully resolved D major climax.

I now know Mahler’s “victory chorale” so well that I don’t even need to listen to the CD. It’s internalised: locked in my memory and, of all places pops into my head. The pulse of its musical triumph calms me when I’m in a supermarket and irritated that a certain item isn’t in stock, but an epiphany definitely is.

 (3) Piano Sonata opus2, no 3 in e flat minor – Beethoven

A protean restlessness is my first reaction to this early Beethoven sonata. In their liner notes for records and CDs music critics tend to employ too much technical language. With a few exceptions (Bryce Morrison, always astute and literary) they often go for musical terms over metaphors.

“Employing elaborate figuration, original pedal effects and a brilliant use of trills.”

That’s one least bad example: a description of this Beethoven sonata by William Kinderman and true enough. But the work is also mercurial, inventive, irrepressible and humorous. Here is Beethoven already imposing a Beethoven identity on the piano sonata form assisted by what he’d learnt from Haydn. He would compose 32 piano sonatas. Masterpieces like the Waldstein, Pathetique and The Hammmerklavier were to come. And 30, 31 and 32 would enter a new pianistic sound world.  

Of all the epiphanies I’ve written about in these two essays only the Beethoven Piano Sonata opus 2, no 3 in e flat major comes closest to depicting so much of my basic personality and individuality: especially so in its first movement. I simply see myself; hear the rhythm of me, my identity, moving through life: trying to escape, outwit death, and lesser disappointments, in a defiantly childlike manner. All the while testing social parameters and exerting my freedom to question authority.

Allowing for many different interpretations, and I do, of this sonata then the recording made in mono in 1951 by Wilhelm Kempf is the one that contains so much of me. Praised for the spirituality and poetry of his playing Kempf was from a golden age of pianists. He was born in Germany in 1895 (When the world still had the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and died in 1991. There’s a lovely story of him meeting Sibelius in 1957 and playing the Hammerklavier sonata. According to Kempf when he’d finished playing Sibelius said “You did not play like a pianist, you played like a human being.” I can’t verify how true that remark is but it feels right. Wilhelm Kempf sensitively playing in a human and direct way: naturally conveying the very human qualities of late and early Beethoven (that pesky yet genial sonata no 3) to my ears and subsequently my sense of what it is to be identified as being human.

Recordings

Ravel: Scheherazade – Victoria de los Angeles Orchestra de la Societe des Concerts de Conservatoire conducted by Georges Pretre.  Great Recordings of the Century EMI 1962

Mahler; Symphony no 1 CBC Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter, 1962 Sony Classical

Beethoven; Piano Sonata opus2, no 3 in e flat minor – 1951, Wilhelm Kempf in the box set of Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Deutsche Grammophon

Blessay 61: Nostalgia for a Lost City

A man calling himself Billy of Liverpool’s Yesteryear has been posting up old photographs of Liverpool, the city of my birth, on Facebook. The main nostalgia axis for Billy is the 50s, 60s and 70s – the post-war years of economic development. Edwardian, Victorian and even earlier architecture were threatened by the feverish expansion of the motor car industry. Buildings casually demolished for car parks, motorways, road extensions, flyovers and roundabouts. Trailing just behind the car was the ubiquitous office block. So pubs, often as large as grand hotels, streets of two up and two down houses, thirties estates, traditional shopping squares, the tough remains of cobbled streets and much more besides were unceremoniously uprooted and destroyed.

Setting to one side the necessary demolition of some dreadful slums this was naked, cultural vandalism of a high order: more a blind, insensitive progression than social progress. Then side stepping real social betterment came a piling on of new tacky architecture un-complimenting a wrecked central Liverpool, now with vastly increased space for its polluting cars, that justified the inflexible Local Council axiom – we are bringing you progress, you can’t stop it and don’t even try to.  

“That most logical of 19^th century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

                                                                              On Photography by Susan Sontag

I left Liverpool in 1971 to go to Sussex University. Yet roughly once a year I went back home to see my family. In 2009 my older brother died, whilst Mum and Dad had passed away some time back. Since then I’ve only visited Liverpool for one day trip and a weekend stay with my niece. Nostalgia for my roots has been kept in abeyance, deflected and even ignored. I haven’t pinned for Liverpool. I’m still a northerner at heart but now happily southernised from living in London for 43 years. Flashes of memory make me a little wistful but I don’t sentimentally dwell, hard and fast, on the past. Yet show me a photograph of Liverpool during the time I was young, or before I was born, and it exerts an irresistible pull. So the Billy photographs had me yearning. Not a longing to be back then but leisurely pass through, sit down and eat at that table of memory once more.

Clayton Square, Edge Hill, Lark Lane, Smithdown Road, Ullet Road, Granby Street or Wavertree Road. Place names when linked, as they once looked like, to black and white photographs, are irrevocably part of me. Although I only lived in Toxteth (Liverpool 8) Wavertree (Liverpool 9) seemed, from my young child’s point of view, a great distance away. Scotland Road was tarred as the roughest of areas and was, according to my mother, a “dirty road where only common people lived.” Lark Lane, both bohemian, posh middle class and on the fringes of Sefton Park seduced me. The great Victorian landing stages and tunnels of the Pier Head were awe inspiring. I could go on.

Opening again my copy of Liverpool Our City.Our Heritage by Freddy O’Connor I found even more streets and buildings, in parts of Liverpool, I’d rarely visited. Not all have gone. The most prized listed buildings, for the cause of tourism, survived. I mean contractors may still plant an incongruous hotel in front of the Liver Building but if you strain your neck and look up you will still be able to see the iconic Liver Bird. Yet travel a few miles out of the city centre and the scene becomes increasingly mournful. Why demolish that? Why build that? Why put a road there? What happened to the grass?

I’m not a student of architecture or sufficiently au fait about its styles, movements and fashions. I’ve a superficial knowledge about buildings and cityscapes but like most people possess an innate sensitivity to architecture that delights and inspires. I’m not an anti-modernist. I think the good new must co-exist harmoniously with the good old. Why couldn’t the English town planners of the past 50 years have learnt from Paris how to achieve this? Cultural Heritage is a big noble world. Did Liverpool live up to it? No, it lived down to it because of city planner Graeme Shankland.

‘Shankland was an important representative of what Peter Mandler has described as a new ‘more dirigiste version of urban planning’, an approach that had ‘little sentiment about historic townscapes’. As Mandler put it, ‘city centres were to be made “liveable” not by preserving the familiar (which was deemed grey and boring) but by projecting a vision of modern vitality.’ Shankland’s plan for Liverpool is notorious. Gavin Stamp described it as a ‘nightmare’ which was mercifully only ever partly completed. Raphael Samuel labelled him ‘the butcher of Liverpool’.’

                                        Architectural History Vol 65, 2022 (Editor Mark Swenarton)                            

If the money hadn’t run out in the 70s then Shankland would have fully realised his brutal, philistine ‘vision’ for the city. Of course the vandalism continued into our new century. The UN agency declared that Liverpool Waters, a 5.5bn project by Peel Group, to build on derelict land resulted in “serious deterioration and irreversible loss” and “significant loss of to its (city centre) authenticity and integrity.” In 2004 Liverpool was given a Unesco World Heritage status. In 2021 that status was removed mainly because of the crap architecture, bordering the magnificent Royal Albert Dock restoration, and the building of Everton’s 500 million football stadium involving the demolition of the Bramley Moore Dock closed in 1988.

This all brings me back to photographs and existence. That so many of the old Liverpool buildings and streets now end up dead in a photograph and only alive for the people, still living, who once inhabited some of them. Of the places that have survived, like the two up and two down of my home 79 Cedar Grove, there will be a fondness, tense love and critical affection. Yet I’d prefer not to have nostalgia for, lost only in time or lost through demolition, Liverpool architecture: only a kindly remembrance of my heady growing up: my freedom and existence in those once intense 50/60s haunts, both private and public, of a great city.

“Architecture for Thinkers. An insight is needed (and that probably very soon) as to what is specially lacking in our great cities – namely, quiet, spacious, and widely extended places for reflection, places with long, lofty colonnades for bad weather, or for too sunny days, where no noise of wagons or of shouters would penetrate…for us godless ones to be able to think our thoughts in them. We want to have ourselves translated into stone and plant, we want to go for a walk in ourselves when we wander in these halls and gardens.”

                                                                       Nietzsche – The Gay Science

When will such city plans be drawn up? Only in my dreams.

Blessay 60: Akira and Tom: Some Thoughts on T.S.Eliot and Cinema.

T.S.Eliot was known to occasionally visit the cinema with either his close friend Mary Trevelyan or Valerie Eliot. Mary records them going to see the Marx Brother’s A Night at the Opera (An irrepressible Groucho Marx was now corresponding by letter with the dour Tom); a Luigi Zampa film called Angelina, starring Anna Magnani, through which Eliot fell asleep and later told Mary “I thought Zampa was the name of an obscure opera.”  Also in 1949 Mary arranged for them to attend the premiere of Carol Reed’s The Third Man but Eliot missed it for he had to leave London for a lecture tour. That was a pity.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood, adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, has for sixty seven years been cited as T.S.Eliot’s favourite film. Again and again Eliot is reputed, presumed, reported or supposed to have said this in an interview. But where and when? I can’t find a source for his claim. Eliot lived in London not far from the Southbank NFT and The Academy Cinema in Oxford Street: both indubitably screening the films of Kurosawa.

If Eliot really saw Throne of Blood then I’m sure he would have been excited. Although much of Shakespeare’s dialogue is omitted, intense visual metaphors of fear, power, revenge and guilt explode on screen. And particularly so in the scene where a distraught Lady Macbeth attempts to wash off the blood she still imagines to be on her hands. Lady Macbeth (Lady Asaji in the film) is played by Isuzu Yamada whose Noh mask-like face proves to be so haunting. Her terror at smelling the spilt blood feeds into Eliot’s criticism where sensations and atmosphere inevitably accompany and motivate characters in a poem, play or novel (Eliot wrote about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and also spoke of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene as an example of his theory of the objective correlative in art.)

The young Eliot wrote enthusiastically about the music hall which he preferred to the serious new theatre on offer. When older he occasionally mentioned the theatre (most disparagingly concerning the film version of his play Murder in the Cathedral of which he said “the film is not a good medium for poetry.”) If he meant that cinema has a hard time with poetic verse drama then I would probably agree. Interestingly verse dramas performed in London’s West End of the fifties saw full houses. Not just for Eliot’s plays but Christopher Fry’s. And Fry went on to script films that although they aren’t verse dramas, have a quasi poetry. Forgetting the TV movies of his plays, now rightly or wrongly forgotten, Fry scripted two Hollywood biblical epics, Barabbas (Blank verse very well) and The Bible…in the Beginning (Well not so well). As for Eliot’s plays there was a BBC TV version of The Family Reunion but the recording was then wiped. After this, Eliot’s final play, it’s hard to imagine him taking up scriptwriting

The Waste Land was published in 1922. In 1925 The London Film Society was founded. Under a special club licence they were able to screen Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). Many writers, artists and intellectuals attended the screenings. Yet there’s no record of Eliot being there. The critic Michael Wood has said that The Waste Land is “modern montage par excellence.” It that’s correct then the fragmented disunity / unity of this modernist poem has much in common with the editing of the Odessa steps sequence of Potemkin and the savage climax of Eisenstein’s earlier film Strike ( 1925). I think Eliot must have been aware of 20’s Russian cinema but never let on. It was maybe that cinema, as modernism was a force concurrent with modernist poetry but only infrequently to be taken seriously and, as a tasteful commercial entertainment, snobbishly looked down upon.

Automatism is a word that Eliot and D.H.Lawrence recoiled from. Mechanical reproduction of art was not for them. Eliot could view an artist like Chaplin as a genius performing in films (viewed with his suspicion or antipathy) to possess a performance rhythm set apart from the rhythm of film editing and I assume, for Eliot, superior to the medium. His real figures of mythic stature were musical hall artists like Marie Lloyd. For Eliot Lloyd’s spontaneity and ability to ad lib for a working class audience was a more visceral experience than a film comedy that’s sealed in the can. Of Laurel and Hardy Eliot he did not find them to be “comedians for national life.” The brilliance of their routines had been pre-recorded. And therefore lacked the immediacy and authenticity of comedy in the here and now. To that I would say no. The greatest physical screen comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy or Jacques Tati) rarely improvise on screen but construct a comic universe. Though all that rigour and artistic control also creates the illusion of occurring easefully in the moment.

I wonder what Eliot would have thought of Laurel and Hardy if he’d attended one of their theatre shows when they toured the UK in the early fifties? Would that have made them proper comedians for national life or would hyper-fussy Eliot have regarded that as only a stage record of the duo’s tried and tested movie routines? My own brother told me he saw and loved their stage act in Liverpool. It slipped my mind to ask him how much they improvised for their adoring audience.

Given Eliot’s prominence as the leading modernist poet then you might have assumed he’d be attracted to early experimental cinema (Hans Arp, Rene Clair’s Entr’acte, Jean Epstein or Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou) and that he’d adopt similar cinematic devices. Certainly the fragmentation of the epic The Waste Land collage was innovatory and yet was it, before its time, more a prescient radio play than a cinematic experiment akin to the film avant-gardists? Last year (2022) Radio 3 produced The Waste Land in the manner of a radio play with actors, sound effects and music. It fitted very comfortably inside this other medium: resonating as powerfully as Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (though that was written as a specific play for radio and is still regarded as a landmark drama).

Eliot saw some early silent westerns and enjoyed them. Probably The Great Train Robbery (1903). Afterwards he was playing round with a scenario called Effie the Waif in which he included technical film terms. Eliot was attracted to playful, mainstream popular cinema. No avant gardism here. But before writing The Waste Land Eliot read a book by the surrealist French director Jean Epstein. He found it very interesting. Did it influence his writing? There are contradictions round Eliot’s seemingly indifferent and very passing engagement with film.

“He do the police in many voices” was once the first title over “The Burial of the Dead” opening for Eliot’s great modernist poem. That suggests ventriloquism for The Waste Land more than imagism. Yet cinematic impressions, with an edgy soundtrack, of Eliot’s own invention or borrowed from other classic texts, working class pub chatter and classical music are in the poem. In 2021 Four Quartets was done on stage as a one man show by Ralph Fiennes. He attempted to dramatize the verse and it was mainly successful. But can you really make a version, re-imagined as an authentic film, of The Waste Land or should you resist the idea of an immersive cinematic event? Maybe going for Eliot’s possible preference – commercial cinema over art house: old Possum’s ruins shorn across a huge IMAX screen in 3D with a Hans Zimmer soundscape battering on? Not for me.  I’m happier to remain at home with my copy of Eliot’s collected poems and mentally zoom into his haunting language, producing and directing it all in my head.