Shelley by Jon Addington Symonds

Consider these elements. A young, rich and gifted man is obsessed with revolutionary idealism. He attends prestigious schools and the most prestigious university but is expelled from the latter because of his outrageous outspoken views, opinions he chose to publish in pamphlets. He is disowned by his family, runs away with his girlfriend, gets into drugs and devote his time to writing poetry that no one else professes to understand. He gets bored with his wife, has a fling with a teenager and sets off with her to travel, apparently none too troubled by leaving his wife and children to their own devices. Soon afterwards, his estranged wife kills herself. He takes more drugs, regularly, wanders around on his travels with his new wife, gets in with a heavy crowd of fellow travellers, falls foul of authority and does stupid things.

He continues to write, but generally has to publish his work at his own expense, because others still find it baffling. He seems to be obsessed with a particular pastime, a practice that, for him, is positively dangerous and is eventually killed on an escapade where he pursues this risky activity, has an accident and dies, aged very young. His friends recover his body and they ritually burn it, but the heart seems to survive its roasting and is retrieved.

This is no 1960s hippie, no millennial millionaire millionaire’s misguided, spoilt son. This is Percy Bysshe Shelly, the English poet, in the first two decades of the 19th century. And reading J.A. Symond’s 1878 biography, with its copious quotes from the Romantic poet’s work, we view a portrait of the artist as a young man. He stayed forever the young man because he died well before he ever became old. But he was also young because he never seemed to shake off the infant’s need for attention, for the kind of special treatment that demanded other’s accommodate his whims whilst he, himself, did not seem to notice that others might need some of the same.  He was the artist because his entire life seems to have been a pursuit to express a platonic essence of life and experience, a life he seemed to reject, or at least take for granted, an experience he clouded with narcotics.

A 21st-century visit to Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s biography might persuade the reader to reject the whole as merely the pranks of a headstrong, spoiled sick boy, who was also rich boy. But this 19th century biography offers a more contemporary view of this great life than one clouded by more recent assumptions or interpretations about the individual and his era. It enables us to view Shelley’s undoubted genius more in the context of how it was received in its own time and, though it cannot be the last word on the great poet, it can offer interesting and arresting perspectives.

What is doubly interesting about this work is that it’s author, John Addington Symonds, was himself a rebel in his own time, apart from society because of his homosexuality. And strangely, the author was buried in Rome, not far from the grave where Shelley’s ashes were interred. Poetry, it seems, is alive and well.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Adam Fischer, Elisabeth Leonskaja and the Dusseldorf Symphoniker in Beethoven and Mahler in Alicante's ADDA

 

I have seldom had the privilege of participating in a concert audience that showed their appreciation with such heartfelt enthusiasm. At the end of this performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, the fourth time that this symphony had been performed in this hall in recent years, this particular orchestra, the Dusseldorf Symphoniker, and this unique conductor, Adam Fischer, was cheered loud and long by admirers who stood to pay their respect to the quality of what they had just heard. Again the power of live performance is underlined as yet another life changing experience is perhaps surprisingly provided by a work whose intricacies were already familiar to most of the listeners.

And it must be said that the first half of the evening had already proved to be equally memorable via a performance of an equally familiar piece, the Emperor Concerto of Beethoven. The soloist was to have been Andras Schiff, but he had unfortunately had a fall and could not perform. We must wish him a speedy recovery.

His place at the piano was thus occupied by Elisabeth Leonskaja, no less, and she proved to be much more than a mere replacement. Throughout, her precision and touch were nothing short of breath-taking, especially in the quieter, more subtle parts of a work that too often is treated as a tour de force, which it definitely is not. The concerto provides a soloist with an opportunity to communicate Beethoven’s overall musical idea. Of course there is bravura, but as always with Beethoven, the meaning is in the contrasts, and these must be as vivid as possible. And it’s not just a matter of loud and soft, fast and slow, because the true contrast in this piece lies in the juxtaposition of tenderness alongside the boasting, intimacy alongside grandiloquence. Overall, it is a work that reminds us of our humility and humanity, though it also acknowledges that at times we have to make a show of things.

Elisabeth Leonskaja not only achieved the right balance, not only communicated these contrasts perfectly, but she also brought that something extra, that indefinable quality that we can all sense but never describe when we are in the presence of genius. And that genius became even more apparent when she offered her audience a substantial encore, a piece whish explored the impressionistic and symbolist imagery of music a century later than the work she had just performed. The result was spellbinding.

In the second half, it was the work, not the performer that was the replacement. Originally Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin had been programmed and its replacement brought a certain amount of disappointment to this particular member of the audience. I should not have been concerned, because what transpired over the fifty minutes of the second half was nothing less than miraculous.

Misgivings turned to gold as Adam Fischer’s clearly magical relationship with both the orchestra and the work unfolded. It seemed like the conductor was convinced he could drag extra expression from his players by brute force, persistence and dogged insistence. To describe him as living every note would be understatement, since his relationship with the piece is clearly deeper than that. At one point, there was real concern that he had put too much into his work as he stepped aside to take a short breather. In reality, we all needed that little space. The attention to detail was phenomenal, right down to the balance of the offstage trumpets at the start being controlled by just the right distance to leave the side doors ajar. At the end, Adam Fischer insisted that the final fanfares be delivered by standing horn players and the sound was resplendent. But again, it was in the vision of the overall balance of the symphony that Adam Fischer displayed his complete genius.

The inclusion of a Brahms Hungarian Dance as an encore certainly did not compensate for the missing Bartok, but by then we all felt that we had at least visited the conductor’s cultural home, albeit from afar.

The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt

John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830, just six years after the poet's death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and then was part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been legging it around the Mediterranean for a number of years, his entourage significantly greater than a backpack. Modern reads will need to readjust their ideas of travel when they read details of the veritable caravan that accompanied the Good Lord and will then immediately understand why it was that everywhere he went he was immediately able to access elite society. In modern day terms, this is like a dot-com-owning billionaire moving into the local estate that in feudal times used to own the locality. His presence, it seemed, demanded attention. Having said that, he was always short of money.

Apart from occasional vocabulary that we no longer recognise, John Galt's work reads easily, its tenor remarkably modern, except in matters of race and religion, where a modern interpretation might just confuse. It is important to understand the assumptions of these people in order to understand their work. Yes, Wagner was anti-Semitic, but wasn't everyone else at the time? Rejecting his work on that basis would lead to an equal rejection of other people and institutions that shared the same beliefs, which would automatically include anything to do with Christianity and most writers. Two centuries ago, people did not see the world in the same light and it is through their eyes, not ours, that their work must be seen.

Paradoxically, the Lord Byron was perceived as a Liberal which, at the time, must have placed him in sympathy with at least some of the aims of the French Revolution. This is interesting, given his title, but understandable given his relative penury. He supported the Luddites in Britain, but his domestic political life in the House of Lords was not easy and he was not chosen or perhaps suited for a life in public affairs. His identification with liberal politics is exemplified in this passage from Galt, though it must be noted that at the time liberalism did not extend far into the realm of gender relationships (a cicisbeo is a lover, by the way).

“but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable Count did not object to her availing herself of the privileges of her country in selecting a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made it quite agreeable: indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a Liberal.”

His liberalism did extend to the support of liberation movements, however, particularly those in Greece, where still today he is seen by some as a national hero. That is not to say that he was particularly fond of the people.

 “Do you know,” said he to the doctor, “I am nearly reconciled to St Paul; for he says there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks, and I am exactly of the same opinion, for the character of both is equally vile.”

The significance of the above reference to Wagner's anti-Semitism now becomes clear. Perhaps we ought to reject much of Romantic poetry from the canon if we deny Wagner a place. What would be left? Answer – very little...

So what was it that Byron saw worthy of struggle and sacrifice in liberating people for whom he had little respect? The key, which becomes clearer as Galt's biography progresses, is that Byron, like other Romantics, possessed an internal motivation, a personal interpretation whose vivid emotion perhaps raised a screen that was capable of obscuring, even contradicting experience. His response to reality, it seems, is not directly born of the real, but of an idealised knowledge, perhaps pre-formed via education, birth-right and culture, that was more important, at least for the poet, than hard evidence, which could be dismissed or ignored. Galt sums up the process thus.

“that is another and a strong proof too, of what I have been endeavouring to show, that the power of the poet consisted in giving vent to his own feelings, and not, like his great brethren, or even his less, in the invention of situations or of appropriate sentiments”

The author describes how Byron was ambivalent towards the reality of Classical sites, not really showing much interest in the archaeology or the history. Perhaps, via his English public school education, he was au fait with the detail all along and so did not need to absorb direct experience. Perhaps the assumptions of his social class and culture did not admit contradiction of an already internalised ideal that was simply more important than any concrete reality.

Galt's account of Byron's life, however, seems to lack evidence of the hours that the poet devoted to writing. Given that he died in his mid-thirties, spent eight years on the road and did fifteen years in the House of Lords and several years in education, one would expect to find him at work with pen and paper much of the rest of the time. But Galt offers little evidence of this, preferring to concentrate on the travels, themselves, the people he met and the consequences of the complete breakdown in his family and marital relations. But Galt does quote extensively from the poems which, once we absorb the author's analysis that the work is rarely descriptive of anything but the poet's own emotional state, become distinct statements of personality. One feels that Lord Byron was not prone to great self-analysis or soul-searching. He had his opinions, and those were made from granite.

He did campaign for Greece's independence and he did much to achieve what the Greek people wanted at the time. But one feels that for Byron he was working towards the re-establishment of a Classical ideal, a quintessence of democracy that existed longer in school textbooks than it did in ancient Greece. Perhaps "liberal" is too strong a word for Byron... Perhaps "libertarian" would be closer to the modern equivalent. He was for individual freedom, what he saw as the natural order and more democracy, though this probably did not include either women or the lower orders.

How far we have progressed in the last two hundred years can be judged by the fact that Byron secured both personal fame and prestige of office in his own time with certain personal characteristics. He went to public school and Oxbridge, studied ancient Greek, achieved political status and public fame while being largely ignorant of the scientific advances of his day, was a libertarian and had distinct failures in both personal and familial relationships. Couldn't happen now, could it?

Das Lied von der Erde in ADDA Alicante and a mention for a bass trombone concerto

This was a more than merely memorable concert, ending with the Valse Triste of Sibelius as an appropriate encore. “Appropriate” is an important term, since Mahler’s great song symphony cannot be followed any mere showing off or other lollipop.

Having completed eight symphonies and mindful of the precedent that no composer since Beethoven had completed more than nine symphonies, Gustav Mahler did not officially title Das Lied von der Erde as a symphony, despite labelling it as such in its subtitle. We know that the composer had suffered the loss of his daughter, a professional snub and the diagnosis of an incurable condition in the period that preceded the work’s composition. We also know that he became captivated with Bethge’s free translations of classical Chinese poems. These texts, if I might summarise inadequately, tend to be based in the more mundane aspects of life while alluding to the usual larger imponderables that preoccupy human thought. In many ways, this perfectly reflects Mahler’s tendency to grandiloquence via transforming and reshaping the banal.

Das Lied von der Erde is demanding of all its performers. There are many moments where attention is focused on small sections of its large orchestra, moments when it is impossible for any player to hide. On the other hand, there are abrupt and spiky orchestral tutti that have to be timed perfectly. There are times when string players have to hold very long pianissimo pedal notes and these have to be perfect to achieve their effect. The players of ADDA Simfonica were superb, of course. The singers spend the full hour on stage, and the tenor especially needs to work hard to be heard. The alto, on the other hand, has to negotiate the half hour of final song with total control. In this performance, Ramon Vargas and Cristina Faus were very much more than competent. Their voices seemed perfectly to match the demands of this work. The perfection was probably achieved via rehearsal. It was clear from the start how much time and effort all involved had devoted to getting every detail right.

And a work like this does have to hang together. Six unequal and varied movements, a change of soloist each time, a vast orchestra often called upon to play with the detail and intimacy of chamber music, all of this demands a director with more than the usual amount of control, accuracy and interpretive vision. ADDA’s artistic director, Josep Vicent, seems determined that the resident orchestra should take on challenging repertoire such as this work. And a mixture of Josep Vicent’s obvious talent and his orchestra’s dedication and determination to achieve the highest standards has thus now firmly established their partnership among the elite. I do not care which city you are in. I don’t care about reputations. I do, however, trust both my ear and my experience and for me at least this is as good an orchestra and conductor as can be found. They are worthy of their audience’s adoration, and they will surely make an international name for themselves in the very near future.

Das Lied von Der Erde is not the kind of work where an audience will naturally stand and cheer at the end. It tends to leave an audience in a reflective mood, and it also tends to live long in the memory. This audience did cheer, eventually, after the applause had continued for several minutes and the performance will live in the collective memory as long as it exists. But it is a mark of this hall’s audience’s priorities that, no matter how long the applause has lasted, it always ends with abrupt expectation with any signal for an encore.

As a footnote, I cannot offer this review of the week in Alicante’s ADDA without mentioning the extraordinary performance of José Antonio Marco Almira and Pamela Pérez that brought Daniel Schnyder’s Bass Trombone Concerto to vivid life just a couple of says before the orchestral concert. If one thought that the trombone part of this piece was demanding, one might pause to think of the job done by the pianist. What a performance!

G. F. Watts by G. K. Chesterton

GK meets GF sounds like the title of one of those mid-twentieth century albums when a producer with an eye for a buck teamed up some ancient crooner with an equally aged instrumentalist to perform newly arranged standards. In this case it’s a book from early in the 20th century when the Christianity-inspired art-trained writer G. K. Chesterton put pen to paper to analyse the work of G. F.  Watts, the renowned Victorian painter. Chesterton´s style has been described as dealing in popular sayings, proverbs and allegories, and then turning them inside out. Basically, he follows this model in presenting the reputation of George Frederick Watts in this biography.

Watts was a grandee of English painting during the Victorian era. Chesterton starts by claiming Welsh roots for the painter, along with Celtic sentiments, but the theory is vague and frankly contradicted by the eventual location of the Watts museum, close to Guilford in the utterly English Home Counties.

In many ways, it is easier to describe Watts by starting with what he was not. He was not a Pre-Raphaelite, but probably sympathized with many of the group’s artistic aims. He was not an Impressionist, preferring always the classical, centrally placed, consistently-lit subject. He was not a modernist in any sense, but many of his images have a curiously modern feel. Perhaps he comes closest to being an English Symbolist, but that is not what Chesterton thinks.

Watts was a Romantic. He was an establishment figure who was also arguably anti-establishment. He took commissions from the state, often donated works to grand projects and painted the rich, famous and significant. But he also refused national honours and used the earnings from his celebrity portraits to fund projects to depict the social conditions of his age. He was not a member of the Arts and Crafts movement, but his wife was, and he was clearly a sympathizer. Next to the Watts museum is arguably Britain’s finest example of Arts and Crafts Celtic Revival architecture, the Watts Chapel at Compton, which essentially was his wife’s project. We may return to Chesterton´s opening at this point to record the fact that Watts, himself, did not claim this linked to his own heritage.

Watts’s work is highly individualistic within a framework that might appear at first sight to be conventional. Chesterton, in his characteristic obfuscation, defines three fundamental characteristics of this work. “…first, the sceptical idealism, the belief that abstract verities remained the chief affairs of men when theology left them; second, the didactic simplicity, the claim to teach other men and to assume one’s own value and rectitude; third, the cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of any such thing as art or philosophy perpetually with reference to a general good." Apparently, such things as cosmic utilitarianism can be gleaned directly from the visual image, though a modern reader of this biography might find that rather difficult.

 

Chesterton, as ever, cannot resist moralizing about his own opinions. “So far the result would painfully appear to be that whereas men in the earlier times said unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now say unscientific things with the plainness and the certainty of science.” Perhaps, as a writer, GK should have read this quote before writing the analysis just quoted. The author, nevertheless, does occasionally deal with the visual content. Watts did have a tendency, perhaps a proclivity for the human back. “The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor”

 

Chesterton does describe some of Watts´s memorable work. He concentrates on the portraiture and the poetic, dreamlike works, such as Hope. What is missing is any description of the social comment. But, after a hundred pages of embroidering the artist and his work with his own brand of prolixity, Chesterton concludes with “And this brings me to my last word. Now and again Watts has failed. I am afraid that it may possibly be inferred from the magniloquent language which I have frequently, and with a full consciousness of my act, applied to this great man, that I think the whole of his work technically triumphant. Clearly it is not. For I believe that often he has scarcely known what he was doing; I believe that he has been in the dark when the lines came wrong; that he has been still deeper in the dark and things came right. As I have already pointed out, the vague lines which his mere physical instinct would make him draw, have in them the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic manual action was, I think, certainly a revelation to others, certainly a revelation to himself. Standing before a dark canvas upon some quiet evening, he has made lines and something has happened. In such an hour the strange and splendid phrase of the Psalm he has literally fulfilled. He has gone on because of the word of meekness and truth and of righteousness. And his right hand has taught him terrible things.” Not really talented, GF, it seems, got lucky, at least according to GK. One hopes the meeting was cordial.

Time Regained by Marcel Proust

All we have is the present. Our future, if it might exist, is a mere proposition of whose eventual reality none of us can be sure, may only be imagined, until it arrives, when it becomes the present. Then, like every present, it instantly passes us by into our past, a fragile, self-interested fiction we are condemned to recreate, to reimagine via a memory capable of invention. All experience thus becomes malleable, capable of being reshaped to fit whatever mould into which we might desire to contain it. Though we might often want to deny the tangibility of the present, its reality still pains the toe that kicks the stone, whereas memory anaesthetises time remembered and allows any surgical intervention to create whatever painless past we desire.

After six volumes of re-creating the past in “A la recherche de temps perdu”, Marcel Proust entitled the last work in the series, at least in English, “Time Regained”. It is worth remembering, however, that a literal translation of Proust’s series title refers to ‘lost time’, experience possibly mislaid, or even wasted in a continuing past. But that time can indeed be regained, reimagined, recreated, and it takes a person with a mission to carry out the threat, a mission that itself becomes a new present, which can be transformative. I was no longer indifferent when I returned from Rivebelle; I felt myself enlarged by this work I bore within me (like something precious and fragile, not belonging to me, which had been confided to my care and which I wanted to hand over intact to those for whom it was destined). And to think that when, presently, I returned home, an accident would suffice to destroy my body and that my lifeless mind would have for ever lost the ideas it now contained and anxiously preserved within its shaky frame before it had time to place them in safety within the covers of a book. Now, knowing myself the bearer of such a work, an accident which might cost my life was more to be dreaded, was indeed (by the measure in which this work seemed to me indispensable and permanent) absurd, when contrasted with my wish, with my vital urge, but not less probable on that account since accidents due to material causes can take place at the very moment when an opposing will, which they unknowingly annihilate, renders them monstrous, like the ordinary accident of knocking over a water-jug placed too near the edge of a table and thus disturbing a sleeping friend one acutely desires not to waken. And, while accidents can happen, the creation of several thousand pages of recreated past cannot be achieved by accident, but only in the doing, the regular application of re-creation in whatever present remains.

And, after seven volumes of this life recreated, a reader is left to marvel at how small it was, how insignificant these important people eventually became and how small a universe they themselves imagined, let alone inhabited. To describe the procession of attitudes as petty might be ascribing greater consequence than it deserves. And, for all their airs and graces, for all their wealth, property and influence, these upper-class subjects were most at home when indulging their personal predilections in their eternal present, tastes that were sometimes as mundane as eating a snack and at other times distinctly more individual, though no more significant.

Take for example, the war memories of Mme. Verdurin. On the morning the papers headlined the sinking of the Lusitania, she clearly had her own enduring priorities. …they thought about those hecatombs of annihilated regiments, of engulfed seafarers, but an inverse operation multiplies to such a degree what concerns our welfare and divides by such a formidable figure what does not concern it, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly affects us more unpleasantly than a draught. Mme Verdurin, who suffered from headaches on account of being unable to get croissants to dip into her coffee, had obtained an order from Cottard which enabled her to have them made in the restaurant mentioned earlier. It had been almost as difficult to procure this order from the authorities as the nomination of a general. She started her first croissant again on the morning the papers announced the wreck of the Lusitania. Dipping it into her coffee, she arranged her newspaper so that it would stay open without her having to deprive her other hand of its function of dipping, and exclaimed with horror, "How awful! It's more frightful than the most terrible tragedies." But those drowning people must have seemed to her reduced a thousand-fold, for, while she indulged in these saddening reflections, she was filling her mouth and the expression on her face, induced, one supposes, by the savour of the croissant, precious remedy for her headache, was rather that of placid satisfaction.

And what about the moral rectitude (no pun intended) of these pillars of society? Always ready to cite themselves as examples of behaviour in order to enlighten the labouring, and thus less than worthy classes, sometimes these elite, privileged classes plumbed the depths of their own depravity whilst no doubt simultaneously passing moral judgment on the tastes of those below them. Aberrations are like passions which a morbid strain has overlaid, yet, in the craziest of them love can still be recognised. M. de Charlus' insistence that the chains which bound his feet and hands should be of attested strength, his demand to be tried at the bar of justice and, from what Jupien told me, for ferocious accessories there was great difficulty in obtaining even from sailors (the punishment they used to inflict having been abolished even where the discipline is strictest, on ship-board), at the base of all this there was M. de Charlus' constant dream of virility proved, if need be, by brutal acts and all the illumination the reflections of which within himself though to us invisible, he projected on judicial and feudal tortures which embellished an imagination coloured by the Middle Ages. This sentiment was in his mind each time he said to Jupien: "There won't be any alarm this evening anyhow, for I can already see myself reduced to ashes by the fire of Heaven like an inhabitant of Sodom," and he affected to be frightened of the Gothas not because he really had the smallest fear of them but to have a pretext the moment the sirens sounded of dashing into the shelter of the Metropolitain, where he hoped to get a thrill from midnight frictions associated in his mind with vague dreams of prostrations and subterranean dungeons in the Middle Ages. Finally his desire to be chained and beaten revealed, with all its ugliness, a dream as poetic as the desire of others to go to Venice or to keep dancing girls. And M. de Charlus held so much to the illusion of reality which this dream gave him that Jupien was compelled to sell the wooden bed which was in room No. 43, and replace it by one of iron which went better with the chains.

But perhaps we should not judge, merely exist in an eternal present, free from recollection, reinterpretation and, of course, from comparison. A work in which there are theories is like an object upon which the price is marked. Further, this last only expresses a value which, in literature, is diminished by logical reasoning. We reason, that is, our mind wanders, each time our courage fails to force us to pursue an intuition through all the successive stages which end in its fixation, in the expression of its own reality. The reality that must be expressed resides, I now realised, not in the appearance of the subject but in the degree of penetration of that intuition to a depth where that appearance matters little, as symbolised by the sound of the spoon upon the plate, the stiffness of the table-napkin, which were more precious for my spiritual renewal than many humanitarian, patriotic, international conversations. More style, I had heard said in those days, more literature of life. One can imagine how many of M. de Norpois' simple theories "against flute-players" had flowered again since the war. For all those who, lacking artistic sensibility, that is, submission to the reality within, may be equipped with the faculty of reasoning for ever about art, and even were they diplomatists or financiers associated with the "realities" of the present into the bargain, they will readily believe that literature is a sort of intellectual game which is destined to be eliminated more and more in the future. Some of them wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic procession. This conception was absurd. Nothing removes us further from the reality we perceive within ourselves than such a cinematographic vision.

But perhaps, in our age of the demonstrable, the provable, the reproducible, the cinematographic vision provided by a photographic memory might just be an advantage, especially when our memory or perhaps our understanding plays tricks. The library which I should thus collect would have a greater value still, for the books I read formerly at Combray, at Venice, enriched now by memory with spacious illuminations representing the church of Saint-Hilaire, the gondola moored at the foot of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Grand Canal incrusted with flashing sapphires, would have become worthy of those medallioned scrolls and historic bibles which the collector never opens in order to read the text but only to be again enchanted by the colours with which some competitor of Fouquet has embellished them and which constitute all the value of the work. Does anyone care if San Giorgio Maggiore is not actually where the author remembers it? Perhaps, we may presume, that he is merely confusing it with Santa Maria della Salute, whose whiteness and elegance ought to carry the attachment “maggiore” in proportion to the impression it makes upon a visitor’s memory. And, in an age of mass consumption and marketing, do any of us scoff at the use of “the greatest”, “the best” or “five star” when it is habitually associated with the mundane mass-produced products of Capitalism? And precisely when was the last time you heard a new pop singer described as “original”, and was such a label accurate? Clearly, there is room for fiction in the present, and, because we are all eventually flawed, what can be wrong with inaccuracy in memory? The impression was received as expressed and it is the indefinable emotion that was real, not the name of the thing that provoked it. But from the moment that works of art are judged by reasoning, nothing is stable or certain, one can prove anything one likes. Whereas the reality of genius is a benefaction, an acquisition for the world at large, the presence of which must first be identified beneath the more obvious modes of thought and style, criticism stops at this point and assesses writers by the form instead of the matter. It consecrates as a prophet a writer who, while expressing in arrogant terms his contempt for the school which preceded him, brings no new message. This constant aberration of criticism has reached a point where a writer would almost prefer to be judged by the general public (were it not that it is incapable of understanding the researches an artist has been attempting in a sphere unknown to it). And here Proust yearns for the kind of judgment that can only be gleaned from sales figures, the kind of evaluation that makes burger and beans washed down with carbon dioxide pressurised burnt sugar solution apparently the ideal food. The publicist involuntarily associates the rascals he has castigated with his own celebrity… but there is a difference between a memory tricked and a deliberate attempt to falsify, to offer cliché to apparently eager market. 

But not to judge would excise the reality of memory and with it the raison d’etre of the writer. He (for this author is a “he”) who pontificates from distance, both physical and temporal, imposes possibly invented opinion on those he cannot wait to judge. And, from the safety of temporal distance, that judgment is often driven by jealousy. Jealousy is a good recruiting sergeant who, when there is an empty space in our picture, goes and finds the girl we want in the street. She may not be pretty at first, but she soon fills the blank and becomes so when we get jealous of her. But whatever the motive for changing how we view our recollections, the act of trying to communicate them can lead to a process of clarification, albeit via avenues where we deliberately embellish them.  It is uncertain whether in the creation of a literary work the imagination and the sensibility are not interchangeable and whether the second, without disadvantage, cannot be substituted for the first just as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting entrust this function to their intestines. An innately sensitive man who has no imagination could, nevertheless write admirable novels. The suffering caused him by others and the conflict provoked by his efforts to protect himself against them, such experiences interpreted by the intelligence might provide material for a book as beautiful as if it were imagined and invented and as objective, as startling and unexpected as the author's imaginative fancy would have been, had he been happy and free from persecution. The stupidest people unconsciously express their feelings by their gestures and their remarks and thus demonstrate laws they are unaware of which the artist brings to light.

But it might even be the present that is defective. We encounter people we once knew, whom we have fixed in our memory with particular and recognisable attributes. Then years pass and we meet again. We recognise them, but at the same time they are transformed by age into something that contradicts the reality our memory has fixed. It’s a two-way process. As I went near to him, he said with a voice I well remembered: "What a joy for me after so many years!" but what a surprise for me! His voice seemed to be proceeding from a perfected phonograph for though it was that of my friend, it issued from a great greyish man whom I did not know and the voice of my old comrade seemed to have been housed in this fat old fellow by means of a mechanical trick. Yet I knew that it was he, the person who introduced us after all that time not being the kind to play pranks. He declared that I had not changed by which I grasped that he did not think he had. Then I looked at him again and except that he had got so fat, he had kept a good deal of his former personality.

Time passes, people pass away, become part of the past, a past that continues. The living can then say what they really thought all along, without ever previously having the courage to come clean, a state they probably never did, nor ever will attain. Hearing that Mme d'Arpajon was really dead, the old maid cast an alarmed glance at her mother fearing that the news of the death of one of her contemporaries might be a shock to her; she imagined in anticipation people alluding to her own mother's death by explaining that "she died as the result of a shock through the death of Mme d'Arpajon." But on the contrary, her mother's expression was that of having won a competition against formidable rivals whenever anyone of her own age passed away. Their death was her only means of being agreeably conscious of her own existence. The old maid, aware that her mother had not seemed sorry to say that Mme d'Arpajon was a recluse in those dwellings from which the aged and tired seldom emerge, noticed that she was still less upset to hear that the Marquise had entered that ultimate abode from which no one returns. This affirmation of her mother's indifference aroused the caustic wit of the old maid. And, later on, to amuse her friends, she gave a humorous imitation of the lively fashion with which her mother rubbed her hands as she said: "Goodness me, so that poor Mme d'Arpajon is dead." She thus pleased even those who did not need death to make them glad they were alive. For every death is a simplification of life for the survivors; it relieves them of being grateful and of being obliged to make visits.

And such caustic observation is not surprising, since the author of these judgments suffered permanent disability, illness, relative disadvantage in the competition of life that was conjured by these recreations from those with whom he mixed. And his revenge was to remember, to describe, perhaps to invent. Eventually he would hold the pen and write, an activity of which no-one thought him capable. Thus he created his own past in an evolving present which may become our own as we share his gift.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Marin Alsop, Kian Soltani and Vienna RSO play Eisendle, Schumann and Dvorak in ADDA

 

It’s hard to describe what a complete success this concert was. For the first time I have heard Marin Alsop conduct a live concert. I expected superlatives. I got much better than that. She is not one to show off. She is not one to grab the spotlight. But what she does is completely professional and carefully thought out. She is such an expert at what she does that her contribution seemed transparent, shunning attention that would always be better focused on the music, itself.

With a programme like this, with a new work which has been commissioned by the orchestra from a young composer, one would expect it to be delivered with care and attention, otherwise what was the point? Hannah Eisendle’s website indicates that she is interested in music for film and theatre. Well it showed, and advantageously. In under seven minutes, Heliosis visited Bartok’s Sonata for two pianos, Shostakovich’s string tones, a touch of Rite of Spring here and there and probably much more. But this was not mere pastiche. This was musically impressionistic, a series of pictures flashing through sound to make a satisfying and surprising journey.

But what more can one say about the rest of the programme? In an age where originality is seen as an essential right, or perhaps rite, and where it is so often absent, what can an orchestra and a soloist do with two mainstays of the mainstream repertoire?

Well, one can start and finish by delivering performances that are judged, faithful and at the same time exciting, because what is on offer is of great, enduring quality. One can also fail, of course, and fall short of the possibilities that these great composers have offered. But when the conductor is Marin Alsop and the soloist is Kian Soltani then nothing less than perfection is almost guaranteed.

Schumann’s Cello Concerto is a staple of the repertoire, one of perhaps three concerti for the instrument that every cellist must learn. It is also therefore a piece whose vitality and freshness can be hard to recreate. Kian Soltani’s interpretation, however, was both vital and fresh, but also it was tense where conflict surfaced and lyrical where tenderness appeared. It was certainly far more than a mere performance of standard repertoire. Such playing reopens a listener’s interest in a work, allowing it to be approached anew, as if for the first time. It takes more than technical virtuosity to achieve that. His encore was a Ukrainian folksong with a miniature but utterly delicate orchestral commentary. It delighted everyone, not just the much-applauded resident Ukrainian contingent.

And what of Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony? Again one must be faithful to the score, but there is always great space to fall short. I always feel that the lines in Dvorak’s music should stand out. Where we start and finish as listeners in such music should feel like a journey, not a slide show. And of course Marin Alsop’s reading of the score created the momentum that drove the travel and of course the audience was totally in step.

The two encores were similar in concept, but diverse in style. A nineteenth century romp of a dance from the orchestra’s home city was followed by a modern parody of the same idea, just to ensure that no-one took anything too seriously. As we had already been reminded, there were other things happening in the world.