#Beethoven250 #Wordsworth250

There’s a lovely Peanuts cartoon strip by Charles M Schulz that I won’t reproduce here for fear of breaching copyright laws. I think I can describe it, though, without incurring the wrath of the courts. Schroeder is playing away at his little piano, his head bent towards the keyboard, lost to everything but the music he is making. And Lucy, who has a crush on Schroeder, sits by the piano, and tries to make conversation. She is looking, she says, for the answer to life. What is the answer, Schroeder?

Suddenly, without warning, Schroeder stops playing, and erupts. “Beethoven!” he bellows at her. “Beethoven is it, clear and simple!! Do you understand?” Such is his ferocity, that Lucy literally flips back into the air. When she lands again on the ground, Schroeder is back playing his music again, head down towards the keyboard, oblivious once more to all save the music.

I suppose this can be read as a joke at Schroeder’s expense – of a man who, immersed in his private passion, has no time for, or interest in, the human relationships he might be cultivating. But actually, I am on Schroeder’s side in this. For what is the answer to life if not Beethoven?

I suppose those on Lucy’s side (“Good grief!” she ends up saying to herself) will insist that cultivating human relationships, and thereby acknowledging our commonality and our shared humanity, overrides all else, and renders private obsessions at best trivial. But I can’t say I am entirely happy to go along with that. I don’t think it is to devalue the importance of these aspects of life to assert, or to re-assert, that aesthetics are also vitally important. Nietzsche famously asserted that life could only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, and, while I don’t know that I’d entirely go along with this either, I don’t think I have the temerity to disagree with old Freddie on this matter: for, really, if the answer to life isn’t Beethoven, then what is?

Or Shakespeare. Or Michelangelo. Of course, when we list the names of artists, we are referring to their works; and those works that strike us with awe and with wonder, that give us glimpses into the fullness of life, and impart a sense of something far more deeply interfused, are more, much more, I’d submit, than of merely peripheral importance, something merely to be indulged in when one has nothing better to do.

Next year is the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. Now, some may argue that it’s pointless to celebrate the birthday of someone who is no longer around to accept birthday felicitations, but, since the only really objective test we know of for artistic greatness is the Test of Time, passing this almighty test does seems to me well worth celebrating. I knew nothing of Beethoven till my late teens: he had been, to me, just a name. When, aged seventeen or so, I started to take an interest in this classical music lark – purely out of curiosity – I went first of all to those composers I knew to be the “heavyweights” – Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Bach took a bit of time, I must admit, and even now I’m not sure I have come close to absorbing his music adequately; but the other two won me over right away. I have particularly fond memories of the summer of 1978. I was 18 years old, and, earlier that year, with the cheque my parents had sent me for my 18^th birthday, I had bought a box of long-playing records of the nine symphonies of Beethoven. (For those interested in these matters, the performances were by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Karl Böhm.) What an era of discovery that was! I remember listening to those works, and pacing up and down the room in excited agitation, my fists clenched, my head whirling, unable quite to believe that mere music could affect me so powerfully.

Years have passed since then. Indeed, decades have passed since then. And that sense of discovery is, inevitably, no more, since one cannot discover afresh what one has already discovered. So, although I no longer pace up and down the room like some inebriated arse, these symphonies have now, as it were, entered my system, in much the same way that the plays of Shakespeare have: they are permanent fixtures inside my mind,  things that I am aware of even when I am not consciously thinking about them.

Soon, other works by Beethoven followed – concertos, string quartets, piano sonatas, the titanic Missa Solemnis, that flawed-but-who-cares opera Fidelio … all works that have taken possession of my mind, that are now part of me. And if this isn’t worth celebrating, then what is? If this cannot give life some semblance of that meaning that Lucy was asking about, then what can?

There is another important 250^th anniversary next year of another great artist: William Wordsworth. Wordsworth didn’t enter my mind so dramatically as Beethoven had done. Perhaps appropriately, given his quieter voice, he entered my mind more insidiously. Indeed – and it pains me greatly to think what I prat I must have been in my younger days – for many years, I thought his reputation overblown; I thought of him as somewhat effete, blabbering on childishly about how lovely the daffs were beside the lake and beneath the trees. It took several years, and what I like to think of as a greater maturity, to realise that this very well-known poem wasn’t talking about how lovely the daffs were this year: he was describing how our minds may find significance – meaning, if you will – in earthly things, in seemingly minor things, and how it is possible for memory to re-create this significance in our minds. And that he can talk about matters so profound in a language that even a child could understand is a testament not to childishness, but, quite the contrary, to an extremely high degree of sophistication. Over the years, I can think of no poet whose work has come to mean more than me. So much so, indeed, that, as perspicacious readers of this post will no doubt have noticed, I find it hard to express my thoughts without borrowing a line or two from him.

Different though these two figures were in temperament, there are points where their minds do seem to touch. Both were initially enthused by what was happening in France, only to recoil afterwards. And both found in Nature a sense of divinity – not a Divinity that, as Creator, stands outside and above Nature, but one whose presence is immanent within it.  The “still, sad music of humanity” that Wordsworth heard in Nature is also the music Beethoven often composed. And in the final movement of Beethoven’s 6^th symphony, the “Pastoral” – still possibly my favourite of the nine – Beethoven inspires a sense of reverence and of awe – not in contemplation of some other world beyond this one, but in this world, right here, in the here-and-now.

If all this sounds very facile, I can only plead that it is pointless my trying to express in my own inadequate words what Wordsworth expressed in his. This is why I find it so damn difficult to write about poetry. To express adequately what Wordsworth’s poetry makes me feel, I really need to have Wordsworth’s own genius with language. And of music, I am even less qualified to write. But such considerations haven’t, frankly, inhibited me yet. And since I am, after all, a blogger who blogs specifically to talk about all the things I love; and since it is only right that Wordsworth and Beethoven should both be celebrated next year; I suppose I should risk the reader’s ridicule and at least have a go.

Watch this space, as they say.

On bookshops, cathedrals, and fanciful analogies

We all have a favourite bookshop. And if we don’t, we should. We who are into blogging about books – we book-lovers, or, to employ a diction more suited to our pretensions, bibliophiles – should ideally have one particular bookshop that is particularly close to our heart. Not necessarily the biggest, nor even the best stocked, but one to which, for whatever reason, we find ourselves sentimentally attached.

For me, that is not an easy choice to make. Living as I do in a place from where it is as easy to travel to Central London as it is to Oxford, I am a bit spoilt for choice. In London, I do like Hatchards, which, unlike other big bookshops, has not diluted its bookishness by incorporating a coffee shop within its premises. And the big Waterstones in Torrington Place, near University College London, is particularly well-stocked, and is a delight to browse in. On the other hand, I have been known to describe the Blackwell’s in Oxford as my “spiritual home”. Spending a day in shops like this, if you ask me (and you probably don’t), is worth more than all your online outlets put together.

But there is one bookshop that is particularly close to my heart: Minster Gate bookshop, in York. It is an antiquarian and second-hand bookshop, and is much smaller than the ones I have mentioned, but it has character. The ground space is actually very small, but what it lacks in horizontal space, it makes up for in vertical: there are five storeys, including a basement, connected by very steep and very narrow flights of stairs. And these stairs, not having much room to extend, turn one hundred and eighty degrees between each successive pair of floors, creating a small landing half-way up. (I’m sure there is a technical architectural term to describe this, but since I do not know what it is, I have no choice but to provide laboured descriptions.) And these small landings each have a set of shelves, which one can only peruse by having to move to one side every now and then to let other customers squeeze past.

Minster Gate bookshop, York. Picture taken from bookshop’s website.

Needless to say, there’s no café here. Nothing compromises its air of bookish seriousness. And the stock is a delight. Being primarily an antiquarian and second hand bookshop, this stock is always changing, but every time I have been there – and I first went there over forty years ago now – I have found no shortage of items to tempt me. I don’t live very close to York these days, but when I do visit, not having a look at this bookshop is as unthinkable as not having a look at York Minster itself.

Which brings me to what is, perhaps, the greatest charm of this utterly charming bookshop: its close proximity to the mighty York Minster. The shop is situated a mere few yards from the magnificent soaring south transept of York Minster, which is one of the world’s greatest sights.

York Minster Cathedral, rising majestically above the city of York

The building itself I cannot help thinking of as a symphony in stone. I am not sure why this analogy with a symphony keeps coming to mind, but it seems apt: there is to this edifice an uncompromising and massive grandeur; it soars high, high above the maze of narrow streets around it, and looks down with a seeming disdain upon the small world below which seems almost too insignificant to encompass such glory. And, no doubt fancifully but nonetheless compellingly, this puts me in mind of the craggy grandeur I find in Beethoven’s symphonies, which, while enjoining us (quite literally in the finale of the ninth) to live our lives heroically, give us at the same time an image of a vastness so immense and so incapable of being adequately embraced by mere mortals such as ourselves, that we are put very firmly back in our place.

The interior of York Minster

The contrast between York Minster and Salisbury Cathedral – another favourite of mine, and one which, being closer to where I now live, I visit often – could not be greater. Instead of rising above narrow medieval streets, Salisbury Cathedral is situated in a spacious and airy close. Indeed, the world “close”, though literally accurate in this context, is also inappropriate, as this “close” is as open as may be imagined. Within this “close”, the cathedral is surrounded by gentle lawns and trees. The building itself epitomises grace and elegance. Even that famous spire, which is actually higher than any of the towers of York Minster, imparts no sense of massiveness or of grandeur, but rather of a certain lightness.

Salisbury Cathedral

For some tastes, compared to the mighty York Minster, Salisbury Cathedral conveys merely charm, is merely decorous, and is, hence, in the final analysis, merely insipid. I disagree, most vehemently. If York Minster is a Beethoven symphony, then Salisbury Cathedral is a Mozart piano concerto, delighting the senses with its charms, but touching also the strings of the heart, and sounding the deepest of chords. But then again, there are those who also think Mozart’s music is also a mere display of triviality, or, at best, of pleasant but ultimately insignificant fripperies. It is best, I think, just to shrug one’s shoulders and pass such people by.

And yes, Salisbury Cathedral is equally glorious inside

To complete the set, I think I should mention also the third of my three favourite cathedrals – Chartres Cathedral. In Chartres. France. And I guess I should liken this, too, with the works of a great composer. Bach, perhaps? The great passions, maybe, or the B minor mass? No, enough of this. An analogy that was no more than mildly fanciful to begin with reveals its silliness all too easily if stretched too far. So let us not stretch matters here.

Porch of North Transept Of Chartres Cathedral

But wait, wait … I got sidetracked. I was meaning to tell you about what I bought at the Minster Gate bookshop, and next thing I knew, I was talking about cathedrals and symphonies and all the rest of it. This is what happens when one has no discipline in one’s writing. So, let’s get back to where I had started: books. Or, rather, buying books.

What – I need more books? When I have so many at home I haven’t read yet? Of course, all bookish people – to which tribe, dear reader, I assume you belong – have been asked that question. And other questions too: Why do you have so many books in the house? Have you read them all? Yes, but surely you’re not going to re-read all of these? And so on. Nowadays, tired of explaining at great length why I surround myself with books, and still, despite my detailed and (as I like to imagine) articulate replies, encountering puzzled and uncomprehending faces, I have taken to saying, having put on as serious a demeanour as I can manage, that I fill my house with books because I believe they ward off evil spirits. That usually shuts ‘em up.

And the two books I came out with from Minster Gate bookshop yesterday to ward off evil spirits was a volume of Nabokov’s short stories, and a hardback edition – which, though second hand, looks not merely unread but unopened – of David West’s commentaries on the sonnets of Shakespeare. David West was, of course, a noted classical scholar: I have been greatly enjoying lately his translations of the odes of Horace (and I gather his translation of the Aeneid is also very fine). I am very curious to see what he makes of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

I’m on a long train journey back home tomorrow, so I should have plenty of time to start reading these. And even if I don’t, they will, I am sure, prove most effective in warding off evil spirits.

Please note: while the pictures of Salisbury and of Chartres are my own, the much better taken pictures of York I found by Google search, and they were not accompanied by a copyright notice. There was no intent on my part to breach copyright, but if I have inadvertently done so, please do contact me. Thank you very much.

Ode to Joy

When, towards the end of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn, staring full into the abyss, declares he will take back the 9^th symphony, we don’t need to ask whose 9^th symphony he is referring to – Schubert’s, Dvořák’s, Bruckner’s, or Mahler’s. And neither do we need to ask what Leverkühn means by saying that he wants to take it back. Beethoven’s 9^th symphony stood then, as it stands now, for all those ideals and values that, for all the lessons of history, still stir the blood – freedom, liberty, love, brotherhood, comradeship, joy.

Ibsen had warned us, in Brand and in The Wild Duck, against the Claims of the Ideal. No matter how noble the ideal, no matter how heroic and self-sacrificing the idealist, “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”. (That quote, a quick Google search tells me, is from Kant. It was a favourite of Isaiah Berlin’s, who titled one of his collections of essays The Crooked Timber of Humanity: the undesirability of even trying to attain Utopia here on earth was a theme that much exercised him.) Dostoyevsky too had known that straightening crooked humanity to make it fit for a utopia can only be achieved through violence: the Grand Inquisitor may indeed be correcting Christ’s work for the greater happiness of mankind, but burning heretics in an auto–da–fé is, presumably, a price that needs to be paid for that universal utopian happiness.

All this the history of the last centuries has taught us, all this we know. Or, at least, should know. And yet, even knowing this, Beethoven’s 9^th symphony continues to thrill. And it thrills not merely by the power of the music, but also by the message it explicitly gives us – that of universal love and brotherhood, of ideals, out of which, some still believe, a Utopia may still be built, right here on earth. How can we remain still in thrall to this message? Could it be that even with the knowledge of the dangers of Utopia, even with all the bitter experience of history, we cannot still inside us that longing for a heaven here on earth? And could the message of Beethoven’s 9^th symphony, and the great, noble feelings it still arouses in us, actually be dangerous?

At this point, it’s as well to pause a while to reflect. Did Beethoven, whom we often tend to refer to as a “visionary”, really lack the vision to perceive what is now so obvious to us all? Lewis Lockwood, in his splendid book on Beethoven, reminds us that when he was composing the 9^th symphony, these ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity had already failed, and were in retreat: Beethoven had lived through the times when these lofty ideals had given way to the Terror; he had seen Napoleon (whom he had initially admired, and about whom he continued to harbour conflicting and ambivalent feelings) unleash the most horrific warfare across Europe; and, most recently, he had seen the settlements reached in the Congress of Vienna plunge Europe back again to the most ruthless reactionary despotisms. Beethoven’s assertion of the ideals of freedom and of brotherly love, far from being triumphalist, is better seen as a sort of rearguard action.

So, maybe, he wasn’t advocating a utopia; maybe he wasn’t advocating building Jerusalem on England’s or anyone else’s green and pleasant land. The lines he set of Schiller nowhere imply – as Blake’s famous lines do – striving to build anything at all: it is an assertion, a celebration, of human love for its own sake. And I think it is right that this very idea is something that should thrill us, fill us with joy. I can speak from personal experience on this: it’s over a decade now that I came out of the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, having heard Sir Charles Mackerras conduct this symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra (a recording of this remarkable live performance is, happily, still available), my head spinning with … well, spinning with joy, I suppose. To this day I have never heard anything quite so joyful, quite so thrilling. This symphony does what it says on the label.

Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Your magic binds again
What convention strictly divides;
All people become brothers,
Where your gentle wing abides.

(Anonymous translation copied & pasted from Wikipedia.)

“What conventions strictly divides” – all those divisions of wealth and of social status, and also of ethnicity and of gender and of sexuality, all those divisions that so many modern strands of thought passing themselves off as “liberal” seek to reinforce rather than overcome… Beethoven’s symphony is, amongst other things, an ecstatic rejection of such pettiness: it urges us all to look higher.

In a conversation book of 1820, Beethoven had written: “The moral law within us, the starry skies above us.” This is a simplified version of a passage from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

(Translated by Lewis White Beck)

Both the moral law and the starry skies seem to find their place in the great finale of the 9^th symphony. This finale opens with a depiction of chaos, with a wild and discordant cascade of notes. This is followed by a sort of orchestral recitative, which appears to be searching for something. Each of the previous three movements is briefly reprised, and each rejected: no, this is not what we are searching for. Only when the now well-known “Ode to Joy” theme emerges does the recitative seem to express approval. And then the orchestra plays it, first low in the bass, then in a higher register, and finally, triumphantly, with the full orchestra. So when the initial music of chaos re-enters, it can be rejected once and  for all. This is where the human voice enters: “No more of these sounds!” it declares. And we move into what we all know now as the Ode to Joy – three verses from Schiller’s poem, sung by the soloists. It may be argued that the tune itself is rather banal, and the truth is, yes, it is [but see addendum below]: the point is to create an anthem that may be sung by all. After the third verse, the music becomes, possibly, more banal still, with a tenor solo above a “Turkish march”. But, even as the music is in danger of sinking into triviality, Beethoven introduces a quite fabulous fugal passage, followed by an ecstatic choral restatement, supported  by the full orchestra, of the Ode to Joy theme. What Beethoven could achieve with a merely banal theme still defies belief.

This is where the symphony may well have ended. The noise of chaos is banished, and human voices have declared that joy has bound all that custom had separated. What more can there be to say? But what follows is, for me, perhaps the most extraordinary thing in the symphony: we may have heard the joyful expression of the moral law within us, but Beethoven wants us also to wonder at the starry skies above. And if the Ode to Joy we had heard was intended to be so simple that anyone could sing it, what follows taxes even the finest of solo singers and choirs. No music I know fills me with such a sense of wonder, of awe. Even after all these years of familiarity, a good performance, like the one I heard in Edinburgh all those years ago, can still leave me enraptured. And towards the end of this symphony, a variation of the Ode to Joy theme returns, and combines with the music that expresses this sense of wonder.  For, in Beethoven’s vision, the moral law within and the starry skies above are not two separate entities, divorced from each other: our place in the vast, incomprehensible universe does not render us insignificant, for what is within us is as glorious and as mysterious as what is without.

This, at least, is what this symphony means to me; and that we are still capable of responding to such a vision fills me, despite everything, with hope. For Adrian Leverkühn didn’t really need to take back the 9^th: Gustav Mahler had done that already with his 6^th, symphony, which is the antithesis of everything that Beethoven’s 9^th expresses. (And I have heard also a very great performance of Mahler’s 6^th symphony at the Edinburgh Festival once, this time with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez – but that’s another story.) But even with the knowledge of something so implacably nihilistic as Mahler’s 6^th, somehow, beyond anything that could be reasonably expressed, we continue to respond to Beethoven’s 9^th. And that in itself is something of a wonder.

 

ADDENDUM (added 16th May, 2018)
The perils of writing about things one knows nothing about is that one is likely to get pulled up by someone who is, shall we say, a bit more knowledgeable.

I had described the “Ode to Joy” theme as “banal”. A good friend of mine, who, unlike me, actually has a good understanding of music, kindly wrote to disabuse me. I quote from his e-mail, with permission:

The theme is certainly deceptively simple, but that, to coin a phrase, is simply deceptive. Over 24 bars it makes do with just five notes, encompassing a fifth, (as does the mysterious opening of the first movement, which is a bare fifth).  Be that as it may, the theme, ostensibly in D Major, starts on the third note of the triad, F sharp, and that note (and not the tonic D) remains the centre of the theme, constantly and immensely subtly repeated and reaffirmed. Indeed, around a quarter of the theme is nothing but the note F sharp. If you sing the theme through, you will easily hear how it revolves around that opening F sharp, and not the tonic D.

Now the effect that Beethoven achieves comes about because the F sharp is treated as a leading note, leading to the G a semitone higher, followed in turn by the A. In other words, the opening of the theme could easily be in the Phrygian mode (there is no tonal certainty as the theme is unisono and so initially has no harmonic foundation), and the D, when it eventually arrives in bar 3, sounds less like the tonic and more like the sixth note of the Phrygian mode. Even when in bar 8 the tonic D is more firmly sounded, it then acts as a kind of elastic buffer, pushing on the flow of the music, rather than acting as a caesura, as the tonic is mostly expected to.

The entire theme is 24 (3 x 8) bars long, not the 32 one might expect, two lots of 2 x 8, and thus, as it were, dispenses with eight bars by cleverly nesting the ‘missing’ bars in the central section of the theme. And all this using precisely and merely five consecutive notes, mostly in scalar form, plus an octave A, over said 24 bars.

The effect of this ‘leading note as quasi-tonic’ F sharp which is resolved upwards, as one would expect of a leading note, but then continuing to the dominant A (not stopping at the tonic) and then back again, gives the theme a sense of, as Everton football club claims, onwards and upwards. The theme is restless, constantly moving forwards, while yet revolving around itself, and it is the working out of these thematic characteristics (there are plenty more, but more technical) which makes up the tremendous variations which are the rest of the movement. The Turkish march, far from being banal, is of a visceral excitement.

I could actually follow that analysis since I can still give a mean performance of that tune on a descant recorder.

I have made, as Bertie Wooster would say, a “bloomer”. But if after each bloomer comes such enlightenment, may I carry on making yet more such bloomers!

 

Confessions of a culture-vulture

It was Cosi Fan Tutte last night.

Every November, the Glyndebourne Touring Opera give a few performances in nearby Woking, and, almost invariably, they perform a Mozart opera. Which, obviously, is fine by us. Last year, it was Don Giovanni (I reported on that briefly here). I was recovering then from serious illness, and, in my weakened state, was afraid I might fall asleep during the performance; but, in the event, it turned out to be a first step back, as it were, to life: by the end of that performance, I felt less of an invalid, less weighed down by my troubles and worries – in brief, less of a miserable old sod. Those three Mozart-da Ponte operas have that effect on me: no matter how serious the aspects of our humanity they probe into, they elate, they exhilarate.

Take last night’s Cosi Fan Tutte. One of my earliest posts on this blog was about this opera, and I dwelt at some length on how deeply troubling the whole thing was. I cannot think of any other work, in any other artistic medium, that is so exquisitely beautiful, and yet so profoundly troubling. And last night, I felt the full force of this paradox all over again: the music is so perfectly beautiful, that the sense aches at it; and yet it presents a view of ourselves, of us all, that perturbs, and leaves one uneasy. I have read many accounts of this work, and even writers with far greater command than myself of the English language clearly find themselves struggling in trying to describe its effect. It remains elusive: just when you think you have found the key to it, some new detail occurs to you, and the entire edifice you have built for yourself suddenly comes tumbling down. It is hard indeed to account for a work that so entrances with its beauty, and yet so troubles you to your very depths; and which, even despite this troublesome nature, leaves you, somehow, elated by the end.

In other words, it’s a right bugger to blog about. So let’s move on.

One full year on from when I was feeling so sorry for myself and so comfortably self-pitying, I find myself in the midst of a spree of nights out. Last night, as I said, it was Cosi Fan Tutte; last week, it was Handel’s Rodelinda at the English National Opera. This was unplanned: a friend of a friend had an extra ticket which he was willing to see off at a ridiculously low price, and it seemed rude to turn it down. I must confess, though, that I am not really convinced by Baroque opera. Not dramatically, I mean. As I understand it, opera audiences of Handel’s time went to hear fine singing from star singers; and they went for spectacle; but they didn’t really go for what we would nowadays consider drama. So Handel operas tend to consist of a long sequence of solo arias – each very beautiful, and each very expressive, but each rather static, designed as they were for the singers simply to stand-and-deliver. Modern stagings invent various piece of stage business – some ingenious, others (to my mind) a bit pointless, and even a bit silly – to prevent it all becoming a merely a long sequence of dramatically static arias; but I rarely find myself convinced. The ENO production did as good a job as can be imagined, but I don’t think I’d have lost much if it had all been done simply as a concert performance. Certainly, in musical terms, and in terms of their expressive power, the arias themselves are top-drawer stuff, and they were quite beautifully performed; but I still can’t quite see this as drama. However, this is just a personal reaction: aficionados of Baroque opera may well disagree.

And I am also attending a series of concerts given at the Wigmore Hall by the Spanish quartet Cuarteto Casals, covering all of Beethoven’s mighty string quartets. I’ve been to two already, and there is a third concert in early December. We are also going to a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers in two weeks’ time, in which a friend of ours is singing in the chorus. (To clarify on this point, when I say “I”, I mean I am going on my own; when I say “we”, I am going with my wife. We share some tastes – we both love Mozart and Verdi, for instance – but not all, and we see little point dragging each other off to events we may not enjoy.)

I will not be writing here about any of these concerts, since I am not really qualified to pass my layman’s opinions on musical matters. But when it comes to dramatic matters … well, truth to tell, I’m not really qualified to write about these matters either; but if I were to keep quiet about everything I am not qualified to comment on, this blog would never even get started. (And in any case, remaining silent when you have nothing much of interest to say would be going very much against the spirit of our times.)

And there’s theatre, of course. The Royal Shakespeare Company will be in London this winter, and they are bringing down from Stratford-on-Avon all four of Shakespeare’s Roman plays – Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Titus Andronicus has never been amongst my favourite plays, although, given I have never seen it on stage before, I may well go along to have a look come January. More surprisingly, perhaps, I have never seen Julius Caesar or Coriolanus on stage either, and have tickets for both between now and Christmas. And also between now and Christmas, I’ll be seeing Antony and Cleopatra, which I often name as my single favourite Shakespeare play: I find it a hard play to keep away from.

(And speaking of which, the National Theatre promises us an Antony and Cleopatra next year with Ralph Fiennes. It also promises us also Macbeth with Rory Kinnear and Anne-Marie Duff. At the same time the Royal Shakespeare Company is also promising us Macbeth, this time with Christopher Ecclestone and Niamh Cusack. Which one will be better? Well, there’s only one way to find out, as Harry Hill might say…)

And if all this weren’t enough, one Sunday in early December, the British Film Institute promises us screenings of all three films comprising Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy (which I often regard as possibly cinema’s finest artistic achievement) in newly restored prints. I used to be a very keen film-goer in my student days, but I must admit that this is something that has long fallen by the wayside. However, I have never seen these masterpieces before on the big screen, and this really is very tempting.

So much to see, so little money in the bank…

“All that is I see”

HAMLET
Do you see nothing there?

QUEEN GERTRUDE
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.

• From Hamlet, III, iv

Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes has entered our consciousness, and we are quick to point our finger at those who claim to see that which isn’t there. But there is also its direct opposite: there are also those who, unable to see anything at all, are convinced that there is nothing to see. For how can there be, when they are so utterly convinced, as Gertrude is, that “all that is” they see?

Steering a judicious course between the two opposites can be a tricky business. For instance, an artist dropping paint-filled eggs from her vagina some consider “art”, while I find myself both amused and bemused by the whole tawdry business, and cry “Emperor’s New Clothes”. But then, I find myself utterly entranced by Elliott Carter’s Symphonia, and those many to whom this is merely random noise similarly point their fingers and cry “Emperor’s New Clothes”. Now, there is no proving by algebra that I am right and that others are wrong. I am not even very willing to put it to the vote, as whatever music is currently fashionable, or even much that is currently unfashionable, is likely to get more votes by far than anything composed by Elliott Carter. And so it goes, each of us defending what we value from attacks by philistines, while ourselves attacking as “pretentious” that which may be valued by others.

And I am not really sure that debate and discussion can take us too far towards breaking this impasse. I could, I suppose, try to put into words what, say, Elliott Carter’s Symphonia makes me feel, but I have neither the vocabulary nor the technical understanding to go beyond that. And if someone feels nothing on hearing that music, then a mere description of what I may happen to feel will mean little.

The easy way out is to say, as many do, that it’s all subjective, that there isn’t any absolute criterion to judge these things, and that, taken admittedly to extremes, one cannot even say with any objectivity that Rembrandt’s drawings are superior in any way to my own lazy doodles. But, for various reasons, I have never been at all satisfied by this solution. “I like this and you like that.” Far from being the start of the dialogue, that’s the end of dialogue, for there’s nowhere further we can go. The concept of excellence itself becomes redundant. And we all find ourselves, each one of us, stuck in our own individual bubbles, unable to enter anyone else’s, and unable equally to invite others into our own.

So, when faced with that which others find of artistic value, but which means little or nothing to me, I tend to keep quiet. I tend to accept that my own horizons are far from all-encompassing, and that there may indeed be much of value that escapes me. (Although I do draw the line at dropping eggs from vaginas, diverting though this may be.) I would prefer not to join the ranks of “reviewers”, as they are known, on Facebook and Goodreads, and, no doubt, book boards and reading groups around the world. I would prefer not to peremptorily dismiss works created by minds greater than my own with such withering criticism as “It was boring” or “Nothing happens” or “I could not relate to it”, or some such.

But there is more to all this than pretending to see what isn’t there, or failing to see what is. There are also cases where one does see what’s there, but finds oneself not caring much for what one sees.

Recently, a good friend of mine, someone who is steeped in Western musical culture and whose understanding and discernment in musical matters really are beyond dispute, told me that he didn’t much care for Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, a work often regarded as one of the high points of Western civilisation. He wrote to me (and I quote with his permission):

I’m really not that fond of it, never have been. I can’t see, as it were, the point of it. … By making this confession I’ve at last been honest with myself, obviously it doesn’t matter a jot what I think, but I’ve been plaguing myself all these decades, wondering, and there! Now I’ve said it.

In the section of his mail that I have replaced with three dots, he gave a brief explanation of what he disliked about the work. I will not reproduce those lines here, since this post is about our responses to art in general, and not specifically about the Hammerklavier sonata. But his comments are not the unthinking “it was boring” of Amazon reviewers. This is the view of someone who can see quite clearly what is there, but who, even having seen, finds himself not caring for it.

As he says himself, what he thinks about it makes no difference to the wider picture: the Hammerklavier sonata will continue to be regarded as one of the high points of Western musical culture. But his view of the work, outlier though it may be, nonetheless highlights an important point: although I have spent much time insisting, mainly in reaction to unthinking condemnation, that “all is merely subjective” is not a very tenable position, subjectivity does indeed have a place, a very necessary place, at the feast.

And yes, I too have what may be termed “blind spots”. But this particular piece of terminology may be defective: there are times when, like my musical friend, the problem is not that I am blind, but that I just don’t care for what I see. I tend not to write on this blog about those things I don’t care for. For one thing, I find I am less perceptive on things I don’t like. And more importantly, what’s the point? There is so much I do love and can happily write about, why waste my energies rubbishing what I don’t?

But the main reason why I tend not to write about what I do not like is my uncertainty on these matters: I am never quite sure whether I have failed to see, or whether I have seen, but didn’t much care for what I saw. There have been instances enough of the former: those with sufficient time and patience may look back on older posts where I have been less than admiring of certain writers, whom I have later gone on to praise. We all change over time, and our perceptions change even as we do. And that is as it should be.

But sometimes, I do feel I know a work adequately, but I still fail to admire. Or, at least, to admire as much as others admire. Or to admire as much as I think I should. So let me get it off my chest (confession is good for the soul, after all): I have never much cared for The Tempest. There. Having plagued myself with this for decades, now I, too, have said it.

Of course, there are passages of exquisitely beautiful poetry throughout. When it comes to the art of creating verbal music, Shakespeare seemed able to turn it on as and when he wanted. But is this admittedly beautiful poetry saying anything very profound? I frankly doubt it. And the drama – where’s the drama? The exposition is achieved through a very long and boring narration – so boring, that Prospero has to keep interrupting himself to tell his daughter to stay awake. Even now, when I read it, I can’t help wondering what Will was playing at: even a novice playwright would have known better. And where’s the dramatic tension? What little tension there is in the play  dissipates completely by the end of Act 3, so the fourth act is mainly taken up with a masque, and the fifth shows us what we knew all along was going to happen. As for the comic scenes, they’re the most tedious and the most unfunny since all that palaver with Launcelot Gobbo back in The Merchant of Venice.

Once again, my view of the play doesn’t matter a jot. The Tempest will continue to be seen as one of the great peaks of our civilisation. And it may well be that some time in the future, I will read over the above lines with profound embarrassment. But I have known this play for some four and a half decades now, both on page and on the stage, and while I have no doubt I have further discoveries to make about it, I doubt very much whether any of these discoveries will make me like this play significantly better than I do now.

For many, The Tempest is the culminating point of Shakespeare’s art, his parting gift to mankind before his well-earned retirement to New Place in Stratford. But for me, that parting gift is The Winter’s Tale, which ends with a vision of the Resurrection itself. It is true that this Resurrection is a mingled chime: it is subdued, and is, perhaps, more melancholy than joyous. Not even the Resurrection, in Shakespeare’s vision, can atone fully for our guilt, or restore all the losses that we have suffered in the course of our lives. But it is the best we may hope for. And this subdued and melancholy joy, this radiant half-light, seems to me a more fitting and more moving end to Shakespeare’s dramatic career than the forced and bitter reconciliation at the end of The Tempest.

None of the above, incidentally, is intended as a critique of The Tempest: it is intended merely as an example of our refusal, given our individual temperaments, to respond to things that are far outside our scope. It is true that we expand our scope by taking in things that had initially been outside it, but certain things are too far outside: there are limits to how far our perspectives may be expanded. Confessing to this may not matter a jot in the wider scheme of things, but there it is for what it’s worth. In the time-honoured phraseology of Amazon reviews, I couldn’t relate to it.

I shall now go away and listen to Maurizio Pollini’s recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, which, despite the views of my far more knowledgeable and discerning friend, I continue to find thrilling. There really is no accounting for tastes, is there?

On reverence

Many people have a very strict definition of reality: only that which exists as a physical entity in the real world may be considered real. Turgenev’s Bazarov may have agreed: twice two is four, and everything else is nonsense, he gleefully proclaimed, though it may be worth asking the Bazarovs of this world (and there are many) if, given that definition, “two” and “four” can themselves be considered real, given that, when not attached to objects – e.g. “two trees” or “four cars” – numbers do not have a physical presence either. But if this is indeed an adequate definition of reality, what are we to make of our emotions – those things we all feel, such as fear, anger, joy, contentment, anxiety, apprehension, delight, and so on? I’m sure that the definition of reality is a complex philosophical issue, and one that I, as a layman, am not qualified to comment upon, but if our definition of reality does not accommodate our emotions, then, it seems to me, such a definition doesn’t come close to describing our real lives as we live them.

So let us grant that, however we choose to define reality, our emotions are “real”. Let us, for convenience if nothing else, cut through the various philosophical subtleties and complexities, and proclaim that what we feel must be real. For, without such an assumption, our thoughts, our actions, our very lives, would be based merely upon illusions.

We may describe most of our emotions by ascribing to them labels: we may label certain emotions as “anger”, or as “fear”, or as “contentment”, and be confident of being understood when we use these terms, since these emotions have been felt, we can be fairly certain, by most, if not all, other humans. There’s no point trying to formulate definitions when a general understanding already exists.

But what about those emotions that one has felt for which there is no handy label, no descriptive term or word? And which we cannot even be sure have been universally experienced? I mean those experiences that, for want of universally understood terms, we tend to refer to as “spiritual”, or as “transcendental”, or something similarly vague. Those experiences that, in Wordsworth’s words, give us a “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused”. Such emotions may be straying too close for comfort to religious experience, but even diehard atheists often admit to having felt this kind of thing. We may feel these things in the presence of a resplendent sunset, say; or on viewing some majestic vista from atop a mountain; or on viewing the glory of a star-emblazoned sky on a clear and cloudless night.

We may, indeed, describe the experience of these emotions as “sacred”, but here we run into difficulties: the sacred is usually defined as that which is related to divinity; however, though belief in divinity has declined sharply over the last few decades (at least, in the western world), our capacity to experience those feelings that we may describe as “sacred” hasn’t. And neither, I’d argue, has our need to experience them. So, if the concept of the “sacred” continues to hold meaning for us even if we have stopped believing in God, or even if, like myself, we’re agnostic, we must question whether the “sacred” need necessarily be tied to religion. But how can we define “sacred” otherwise? If we decouple the “sacred” from religious experience, and describe it in more secular terms as anything to which we feel we owe reverence, then the concept of the “sacred” loses all objectivity, and, can, indeed, be anything. To Félicité in Flaubert’s story “Un Coeur Simple”, even a stuffed parrot becomes “sacred”.

However, if what may be deemed “sacred” is not purely objective, it is not, I think, purely subjective either. For what gives rise to these feelings are generally not stuffed parrots, but, rather, resplendent sunsets and mountain-top vistas and the like. And, also, certain works of art. This last I know for a fact, because I have felt this emotion myself when I have come into contact with certain music, certain poems, certain paintings. And, if we deem emotions to be real, then this emotion, too, must be real.

And these emotions are, I’d argue, very precious emotions, whether we feel them in the presence of starry skies, of Michelangelo’s Pietà, or even, for that matter, of stuffed parrots. Towards the end of Flaubert’s story, Félicité, her mind never too strong to begin with and now further weakened by age, as she breathes her last, has a resplendent vision of a gigantic parrot hovering above her. It is utterly absurd, yes, but at the same time, this passage has about it a sense of gravity, of solemnity, that, given the ludicrous nature of the image, is hard to account for. I find it hard to tell whether Flaubert intended to debunk the very idea of religious experience, or to elevate Félicité’s absurd vision into something significant, something that gives a meaning to her otherwise meaningless life. Perhaps there are elements of both: literature can signify many things, even contradictory things, simultaneously. But either way, the sense of rapture Félicité feels is real, even if the gigantic parrot hovering above her isn’t. That sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused exists even here, and is precious, even though there is nothing here interfused, far more deeply or otherwise.

I think this accounts for the often quasi-religious zeal many of us feel for the arts: the arts provide, or, at least, are capable of providing, experiences generally considered to belong to the realms of religion. The idea that art can, or should, give rise to such feelings remains, however, hotly disputed. There are those who insist, often quite aggressively, that the arts exist for one purpose and one purpose only – to give pleasure. The arts, we are told, traditionally existed for no other reason, and that we only started to become precious about it in more recent times. For instance, Alan Bissett, in the article linked to above, solemnly tells us:

Stretching back to oral folk culture, stories were democratic in their nature, bonding communities in a shared experience. Everyone had a tale to tell around the fire; the audience could decide for themselves if it was good or not.

Tempting though it may be to picture our distant forefathers seated around a communal fire and entertaining themselves, purely for pleasure, with recitations from The Book of Job, it doesn’t seem to me an image that rings particularly true. From even the earliest of our surviving literature, it is obvious that the creators, even when they set out to entertain, had set out also to achieve more.

Bissett starts his piece by telling us that there is “art appreciation” and “art worship”, and while he allows the former to be acceptable, the latter he doesn’t. Which would be fine if he could at least explain to us what the difference is between the two, but he doesn’t. And since he doesn’t, I can only guess at what he means: I’d guess that what Bissett refers to as “art worship” is the reverence that some of us may feel for a work of art. And that, according to Bissett, is a Bad Thing. For the purpose of art, he solemnly informs us with all the earnestness of a conscientious hedonist, is to provide pleasure. Nothing more.

The claim that there can be no other point to art than to entertain and to provide pleasure, and that, by implication, anyone who claims to have obtained from art anything other than that must either be fooling themselves or are lying, strikes me as, frankly, gratuitously insulting. Even if one does not feel certain things in the presence of art, the contention that no-one else can or should feel these things either, is presumptuous, to say the least. It also strikes me as boorish and ill-mannered.

The idea that the arts can give rise to certain feelings that are close to religious emotions has long, I think, been acknowledged. Religion itself has recognised this: various religious institutions have either outlawed the arts from the act of worship, considering the quasi-religious feelings derived from art as unwanted rivals to true religious feelings; others have done the opposite, and have incorporated the arts into the act of worship, welcoming the quasi-religious as a legitimate means of approaching the religious. And in recent times, with religious beliefs receding in the West, the arts have in many cases become a sort of secular religion in themselves – a replacement for religion, providing experiences that we can no longer obtain from religion, but which we nonetheless require to prevent our lives from sinking into triviality. For a mortality in which there is nothing serious, in which all is but toys, is, we instinctively realise, a sort of hell.

Yet this hell of triviality is what many seem to recommend to us. Here, for instance, is pianist Charlie Albright, who tells us in a well-meaning article that to bring audiences back to classical concerts again, we must make it fun, and take the seriousness out of it.

Breaking down such “classical” rules will kill “classical” music — and thus save it. It will make the artform more accessible, more entertaining, and more disinhibiting … It will welcome those of us who are interested yet apprehensive about making the leap to buy a ticket to a concert.

But could it not be the case, I wonder, that the “seriousness” of classical music may well be the very reason why so many of us are drawn to it in the first place? Albright is not gratuitously offensive, as Bissett is, but interestingly, he too conjures up a picture of music once being fun, until we unnecessarily burdened it with all our deplorable seriousness. But once again, this does not ring true. The oldest music I know is the choral music of medieval composers such as Josquin des Prez, or Hildegard of Bingen, and I can’t say it is music that makes me want to get up and boogie. Beethoven wrote above the score of Missa Solemnis “From the heart – may it go to the heart”; the piece itself is eighty minutes of very knotty and immensely demanding music. Some may disagree, but I do not get the impression from this that Ludwig had set out to give his audience a bit of fun. What the music does give us, however, is something I do not have the words to describe, and for which I need once again to borrow from Wordsworth – that “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused”. I feel, indeed, a reverence. And if anyone tells me that I am but fooling myself, and only imagining that I feel this; or even that I shouldn’t feel this; then, frankly,I don’t know that we need take this person too seriously.

I do not know how to describe these emotions, but since I can feel them, they are real. If these emotions I feel aren’t real, then no other emotion I feel can be real either. And yes, the music – or the painting, or the poem – that can give rise to such emotions is indeed something to which we owe reverence. And if that is a definition of the sacred, then yes, it is sacred, and will continue being so, no matter how many Bazarovs there may be in our world telling us that twice two is four, and all else merely nonsense.

Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline” at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Usually, when I read a Shakespeare play, I have a pretty good idea in my mind of how I would ideally like to see it staged, what the sets and costumes should look like, where the actors should be positioned, how the lines should be spoken, and so on. These may not necessarily be the best ideas: I’m sure experienced Shakespeare directors understand these matters far better than I do. Nonetheless, I find myself, as it were, directing these plays in my head. Cymbeline, however, is among the exceptions: I have no idea how this should be staged. Despite passages that only Shakespeare could have written, it’s a work that always leaves me puzzled. Maybe Shakespeare just flopped with this one. Alternatively, and more likely, that extraordinary mind of his was working on a plane to which my rather ordinary mind does not have access.

I had never seen the play on stage before last night. The only version I had seen was in the BBC Shakespeare series in the early 1980s – a very accomplished production with a quite magnificent cast, but which left me as puzzled as did my readings. Last night, I went to see the play in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse –  an extension of the Globe Theatre built to emulate the indoor venues in which so many of Shakespeare’s plays had originally been performed.

I am, I admit, very much in two minds when it comes to the issue of “authenticity”. I accept that it is worthwhile to see these plays in spaces similar to those for which they had originally been written – whether in the outdoor Globe Theatre, or, as here, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Similarly, it is worthwhile hearing the music of Handel or of Bach, of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, played by orchestras of the size the composers would have recognised, playing instruments of the composers’ own time, and adopting performance practices, as far as music scholars can determine, the composers would have been familiar with. But even if we get everything right in terms of authenticity – even if we were to go to the length getting boy actors to play the female roles – there remains one important component that is bound to remain inauthentic: audience expectations. Shakespeare’s audiences were unfamiliar with the drama of Ibsen or of Chekhov; they had not seen television plays, or films: we have. And we cannot unsee them.

In Cymbeline, a character is beheaded just off stage, and soon afterwards, the severed head and the headless corpse are produced. We may only conjecture how Shakespeare’s own audience, used as they were to seeing public beheadings, and accustomed to decapitated heads on public display, would have reacted. In our own age, for most of us, experience of decapitation comes not directly, but from the horrific reports, and, should we choose to look at them, from horrific images, of executions and judicial killings committed in Syria or in Saudi Arabia. When confronted with extreme violence such as this on stage, our minds are as likely to turn to Monty Python and the Holy Grail as to anything else: we see it as “over-the-top”, and find it funny for precisely that reason. I doubt Shakespeare’s own audiences would have reacted in such a manner. No striving for authenticity can re-create in our minds what Shakespeare’s own audiences would have felt.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting experience to see this play in this venue. The hall itself is exquisite, like a bejewelled box. The audience is packed quite close on back-less and handle-less seats, and no-one is very far from the stage: this creates a sense both of intimacy, and of taking part in a communal event. The hall is lit entirely by candles, so variations in lighting can be achieved only by varying the number of candles used for any given scene (thus ruling out sudden or frequent changes); or by adjusting the height of the chandeliers. Needless to say, there were no sets: the stage was entirely bare throughout, with the occasional large prop – in this play, a bed and a trunk – wheeled in and out as and when required. As with historically informed performances of classical music, this is not the only valid way of performing these works, but it’s certainly interesting, and, as with any other approach, when done well, immensely rewarding.

As for the interpretation, I really find myself not knowing what to say with this play: having little idea in my mind of how it should be interpreted, I can neither criticise this production for falling below what I think the text contains, nor praise it for exceeding my expectations, or for subverting my preconceptions. I think, though, that, perhaps, I am now beginning to understand this play. Whether this is due specifically to this production, or to my having repeatedly revisited it over the years in the conviction, given the passages of genius throughout, that Shakespeare couldn’t have expended so much of his greatness on something of so little worth, I really cannot say.

The play is a mish-mash. That is usually a criticism, but perhaps not here: we have to give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt, and say that if it is a mish-mash, that is because he intended it to be such. Or, to put it another way, unity of tone was not high on his agenda here. The plotline, when summarised, is effectively a fairly-tale, and Shakespeare, I think, had been here before: in the midst of writing his great tragedies, he also wrote All’s Well That Ends Well, a play with, effectively, a fairy tale plot, and as far removed from the world of high tragedy as may be imagined. Shakespeare was already, it seems to me, anticipating his late works: the fairy-tale format of Cymbeline was no sudden whim.

And in order to appreciate a play such as Cymbeline for what it is, we must, I think, reject our preconceptions derived from the earlier works – and, especially, from the great tragedies. Characterisation is no longer the point. We may disagree on the characters of, say, Othello or of Iago, but the nature of their characters is central to the drama: to understand thedrama, we must investigate the characters. But here, it is not even to be asked why Iachimo poisons Posthumus’ mind, or why he later repents: it is enough that he does so. We no more look into the psychology of Iachimo – or of Posthumous, or of Imogen, or of Belarius – than we do of Rapunzel, or of Snow White. And the various different tones juxtaposed cheek-by-jowl, with no attempt to modulate from one to the other, have to be taken as they are: late Shakespeare is not interested in unity, or in modulating between different states of mind, any more than the late Beethoven was.

All that’s very well – but to what end? I still find that question difficult to answer, but, last night, I found myself more willing to submit to it than ever before. The vision seemed to be – I can only say “seemed to be” as I am still far from certain – of a bewildering diversity, of seeming randomness, all eventually finding a consummation of sorts in a final reconciliation and in forgiveness, and, ultimately, in a state of wonder. At the end, as at the end of The Winter’s Tale, those thought dead are restored: the vision is that of the Resurrection itself. Once again, this is not new in Shakespeare; those thought dead are restored also at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, and at the end of Twelfth Night (the restoration of Viola and Sebastian in that play is one of the most heart-meltingly beautiful passages that even Shakespeare ever wrote). But now, in his late plays, this theme of eventual reconciliation, and, above all, of forgiveness – of reconciliation with oneself as well as with others – seemed to weigh more heavily in Shakespeare’s imagination. And to convey this vision of reconciliation, Shakespeare turned not to the character-driven tragic world of Hamlet or of Othello, but to fairy tale, and to pantomime.

The production is as fine as I could have hoped for: it is thrillingly staged, achieving a far greater variety of effects than I could have thought possible given the venue; and the verse was spoken beautifully. Emily Barber, especially, makes a huge impression as Imogen (called Innogen here, as Shakespeare had done before the printer’s error immortalised her as Imogen) – making it entirely credible that all whom she encounters find themselves charmed by her, and in love. Only Eugene O’Hare’s Iachimo I found somewhat underplayed: as the pantomime villain, I think I’d have welcomed a bit more overt mustachio-twirling villainy. I think also I’d have preferred a greater intensity when, on first encountering Innogen, he is struck with wonder that beauty such as this could even exist. (Admittedly, Iachimo’s lines at this point are among the knottiest and most tortuous in all Shakespeare.)  But, given that I have never really known what to make of this work, I am not really in a position to make critical comments on interpretative decisions.

The production makes much of the comedy – and, I think, quite rightly. The scene where Jupiter appears to Posthumous in prison is rightly spectacular: Pauline MacLynn (better known to television viewers as Mrs Doyle in Father Ted), who plays the wicked queen in this production with a wonderful comic relish, doubles up in the prison scene as a transvestite Jupiter, and, perilously suspended high above the stage, plays the part as pure pantomime. Whether or not this is the right way to play this strange and awkward scene I don’t know, but it works. The tone of pantomime pervades the final scene also, when the beloved returns from the dead, and all is forgiven. I was initially worried that such a pantomime tone would overwhelm the seriousness, but there was no cause for fear: as with the late Beethoven, Shakespeare is happy simply to lay very different states of mind next to each other, without bothering with the shades in between; and somehow, all these different tones register. Don’t ask me why: I really don’t know. But when, even in the midst of all the knockabout comedy, even at the end of two hours and more of pantomime madness, Posthumous, Innogen once again in his arms, says

… Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die!

I think my heart missed a beat.

Mozart achieved this sort of thing in The Magic Flute. I don’t think anyone else has.

“The Soul of the World” by Roger Scruton

Never write about politics or religion, they say. You’re bound to get into a heated argument and you won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you. And whatever you say, you’ll alienate a good number of your readers. However, if you’re writing on cultural matters, you can’t really keep the subjects out. Religion especially. The entire culture of the western world – and of other worlds too, I think – rests on its religious heritage. And in any case, it’s a subject that interests me, and what’s the point of writing a blog if I am to steer clear of matters I find interesting? So, having recently read philosopher Roger Scruton’s book The Soul of the World, and generally blogging as I do about what I read, this seemed to me an ideal opportunity to alienate good numbers of my readers.

This post is not, however, intended as a review. For to review anything is to set oneself in judgement, and for someone like myself, not trained in philosophy, and who is, furthermore, not even well read in the subject, to pass judgement on the writing of an eminent philosopher, a visiting professor of philosophy at Oxford University no less, would be a trifle presumptuous. But since the book The Soul of the World is not aimed solely at the specialist reader, there seemed no reason why a mere layman such as myself should not at least set down, for what they’re worth, some of his more or less random thoughts and impressions. And if I should go badly wrong, I’m not so conceited that I cannot accept correction from those who know better.

The book was a present from my brother last Christmas, who told me (tongue very much in cheek, I hope) that he thought I’d find it interesting as I was into “mumbo-jumbo”. This was because, in some of our previous conversations, I had refused to accept the contention that there can be no more to us than the sum of our constituent physical parts; or that our consciousness is contingent upon our existence as physical entities; and so on. Not that these contentions were necessarily wrong; but, since they cannot conclusively be proved to be right either, I saw no reason to reject at least the possibility that they may be wrong. And, given my temperament, it’s a possibility that I very much wanted to hold on to, for it seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that our lives are much diminished if we lose sight of this possibility.

At this point, I realised that I ran into problems: I did not have the words to articulate what precisely I meant. I could, of course, use words such as “transcendence”, or “spirituality”, or whatever, but such words are not merely vaguely defined, they have been used so glibly and so often by various snake-oil salesmen that it’s difficult to attach to them any significant meaning. Poets, of course, can express these things better, so I quoted Wordsworth’s “sense sublime of soething far more deeply interfused”; but this is the language of poetry, not of debate. The truth is I do not know how to debate these matters without sounding, after a while, like those various quacks and charlatans, and those professional purveyors of meaningless platitudes that are so regularly plastered across social media as if they were expressions of great wisdom.

We live, sadly, in times where the middle ground is not recognised as valid, or, at least, considered but as the consequence of a timid unwillingness to align oneself with one extreme pole or another. Expression even of doubts concerning the ability of science to answer, or potentially to answer, all questions we may have concerning ourselves and the universe we inhabit, marks one out as merely as a crank. But I most certainly do not wish to disparage science: I myself have a professional background in science (or mathematics, at least), and have no desire to join the ranks of creationists, proponents of intelligent design, climate change deniers, anti-vaccine campaigners, astrologers, homeopaths, crystal ball gazers, tea-leaf readers, and the like. (Oh dear – I have lost myself a great many readers with that, haven’t I? But since I have started, I guess I might as well continue.) Nonetheless, the questions I found myself asking seemed to me worth asking: can we really be so absolutely sure that we are nothing more than the sum of our constituent physical parts? Is our existence as conscious entities necessarily contingent upon our existence as physical entities? Of course, I do not know the answers to these questions. I do not even know if these questions are adequately formulated. But, given the kind of person I am, I cannot help asking them.

I cannot help asking also whether it is indeed the case, as Dawkins and his followers seem to insist, that the entire purpose of my living is none other than to propagate my genes; that, whatever I feel, no matter how precious or valuable – whether it be love for family or the warmth of friendship, or awed wonder at rivers and mountains and seas, or the ecstatic and elevated states of mind induced by the poetry of Shakespeare or by the string quartets of Beethoven – that these are all nothing but the consequences of complex electro-chemical reactions going on in my brain. I may ask why these things should set off these particular electro-chemical reactions in the first place, and my atheist friends tell me that these are but “adaptations”, by-products of the evolutionary process, and nothing more. That even my Wordsworthian sense sublime of soething far more deeply interfused is but a reaction to some stimulus determined by the evolutionary process that has made me what I am. Only this and nothing more.

Now, all this may be so, but my point is that, given my temperament, I’m not happy for it to be so. It may well be that I am a mere machine, responding merely to stimuli in a manner determined by the evolutionary process, but I am not happy to be a mere machine. “What’s wrong with being a machine?” I am asked. Are not machines as complex and as intricate as human beings wonderful things? Why attach to such wondrous machines the adjective “mere”? No doubt, no doubt, I reply, but how can I set aside what I can’t help feeling?

All this scientific determinism seems very plausible – and may even be true for all I know – but I can’t help reflecting that if it were that easy to understand the nature of reality, it’s hard to account for philosophers still arguing and tying themselves in knots over these very questions. At the very least, all this may be worth further consideration. And in any case, we tend, perhaps, to make more of our rational faculties than is warranted. I increasingly believe that our thoughts and actions have more irrationality about them than we perhaps care to admit – that not even the most rational of us could ever whole-heartedly embrace any idea or ideology that we are emotionally uncomfortable with; that our thoughts and values are determined to a great extent – to a far greater extent than we are perhaps prepared to admit – by our emotions, and that we use reason to do no more than to justify and perhaps to fine-tune these thoughts and values. But, as I have perhaps already meandered into areas I did not mean to when I set out writing this post, let us leave that particular chestnut for later. For the purposes of this particular post, I found it, and find it still, hard to accept that I am but a machine whose purpose is to propagate my genes; and that any sense sublime I may harbour of transcendence is but an illusion – some mere by-product of the evolutionary process. It is not, after all, to deny the importance of reason, or to refuse to acknowledge the immense danger of jettisoning rationality, to insist that our emotions have their claims also.

It is at this point that my attention was drawn to the book The Soul of the World by Roger Scruton. The blurb on the dust-jacket seemed to articulate clearly the various vaguely formed and even more vaguely articulated thoughts and ideas that had been whirling around my mind:

[Scruton] argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgements hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive – and to understand what we are – is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defence of the truth of religion, the book is an extended reflection on why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life – and what the final loss of the sacred would mean.

This is not really a book on philosophy: it is, rather, a statement of the author’s personal values and beliefs, stated both with elegance and with passion. It is, however, informed by philosophy, and it is not possible to discuss this book without addressing the philosophical ideas the author discusses. And, since I very much want to discuss this book, I must, I fear, put aside my diffidence on this matter: I’m sure I’ll go wrong in some things, but I’ll try my best not to; and, as I have already said, I am not averse to being corrected. So, on that understanding, let us proceed.

Right from the start, Scruton rejects Cartesian dualism – this idea of “the ghost in the machine”, the incorporeal soul inhabiting the corporeal body, but not subject, as the body is, to the laws of nature. So in answer to my question “Is there no more to me than the sum of my constituent physical parts?” Scruton’s answer is a flat “no”: he holds to Spinoza’s idea of monism, claiming – although without going into it here in greater detail – that dualism raises more issues than it solves. But while he rejects ontological duality, he proposes instead a duality of a different order – a cognitive duality.

The exposition of this is complex, and I don’t know that I am capable of providing anything more here than a summary that must necessarily be crude. He speaks first of all of persons as subjects as well as objects:

A person is, for us, a someone and not just a something. Persons are able to reply to the question “why?” asked of their state, their beliefs, their intentions, their plans, and their desires. This means that, while we often endeavour to explain people in the way we explain other objects in our environment – in terms of cause and effect, laws of motion, and physical makeup – we also have another kind of access to their past and future conduct. In addition to explaining their behaviour, we seek to understand it; and the contrast between explaining and understanding is pertinent to our whole way of describing persons and their world.

Scruton moves on from this to introduce the theory of Verstehen, proposed by Wilhelm Dilthey, and he describes it thus:

According to Dilthey rational agents look on the world in two contrasting (though not necessarily conflicting) ways as something to be explained, predicted, and brought under universal laws; and an occasion for thought, action, and emotion. When looking on the world in the latter way, as an object of our attitudes, emotions, and choices, we understand it through the conceptions that we use of each other, when engaged in justifying and influencing our conduct. We look for reasons for actions, meanings, and appropriate occasions of feeling. We are not explaining the world in terms of physical causes, but interpreting it as an object of our personal responses. Our explanations seek the reason rather than the cause; and our descriptions are also invocations and modes of address.

Scruton concedes that Dilthey’s thesis is both “difficult to state and controversial”, but it is a central plank in his own argument. He now introduces a second German term, used by Husserl – Lebenswelt, the world of life, the world that is “open to action, and organized by the concepts that shape our needs”. This, Scruton says, is what Dilthey’s concept of Verstehen leads towards. He equates this with the concept of the “manifest image”, introduced by Wilfred Sellars in “a now-famous article of analytic philosophy” (well – “now-famous” to philosophers, no doubt …). This “manifest image” is the “image represented in our perceptions and in the reasons and motives that govern our response to it”. This is distinguished from the “scientific image”, which is “the account that emerges through the systematic attempt to explain what we observe”. The two are not commensurate:

Thus, colors and other secondary qualities, which belong to the way we perceive the world, do not feature as such in the theories of physics, which refer instead to the wavelengths of refracted light.

[Note: although Scruton is a British writer, the book is published by Princeton University Press, and uses American spellings throughout; I have retained these spellings in my quotations.]

Scruton uses for the rest of the book Husserl’s term Lebenswelt rather than Sellar’s “manifest image”, as Sellars’ distinction, according to Scruton, “does not get to the heart of our predicaments as subjects – that there is, underlying his account of the ‘manifest image’, an insufficient theory of the first-person case and its role in interpersonal dialogue”. Furthermore, he continues, he wishes “to emphasize that the distinction between the world of science and the world in which we live is as much a matter of practical reason as perception”.

I have, so far, used direct quotations from the book wherever I can: unused as I am to writing about these matters, I am afraid I will distort the author’s argument by paraphrasing. And, as this part of the book, laying out as it does the framework for the subsequent arguments, is particularly important, I did not wish to run the danger of misrepresenting it. All this is very new to me, and despite having read these passages over a few times, I am not sure I understand them fully. However, if I continue doing this for the rest of the book, I’ll end up with a post about as long as the book itself. So I will do my best to summarise as best I can what strikes me as being the central ideas and arguments , without too much recourse to direct quotation.

After laying out this initial framework, Scruton goes on to develop this idea of a “Cognitive Duality”, citing Spinoza’s view that “thought and extension were … two attributes of a single unified reality” – distinguishing between the facts describing the real world, and ideas concerning the real world. Kant’s approach too, is similar: we may consider something to be the outcome of immutable laws of biology, but also, at the same time, “from the point of view of practical reason”, a free agent.

Scruton provides many examples of this Cognitive Duality. A portrait may be described completely in scientific terms, by listing for each pixel the shade that is determined by a precise balancing of the primary colours. To reproduce the Mona Lisa, say, the computer will not require any information other than this. But this is not how we see the painting: the shades of the pixels do not enter into what we perceive, even though that’s all there is. Conversely, an account of what we perceive when we see the Mona Lisa is of no use to the computer in attempting to reproduce the picture. We here have two quite different modes of perception of the same thing, each complete in itself, but neither touching the other: partial information in one mode of perception cannot be completed by information from the other mode.

And similarly with music, a subject on which Scruton is particularly knowledgeable, and on which he writes with an evident passion. He describes the main theme of the first movement of Beethoven’s C minor piano concerto – a movement up from C to E flat to G, and a stepwise descent back to C again, followed by two emphatic two note phrases from G to C; then a pause; then an answering phrase, this time harmonised … and so on. This is how we hear it. But scientifically, what we are hearing is a sequence of frequencies, and nothing more. Where exactly is this movement occurring that we perceive so clearly? It cannot surely be a delusion, since we can all perceive this musical line, and we perceive it on repeated hearings. But where does it exist?

But could this be a delusion? Could it be the case that this Lebenswelt is merely a mode of perception that we cling to because it is useful to us, and that it has no correlate in the real world outside our minds? Scruton spends most of this book arguing against this contention. Twice he cites Leibniz’s concept of a “well-founded phenomenon” – i.e. “a way of seeing that is indispensable to us, and which we could not have conclusive evidence to reject”.

Scruton ranges across a wide gamut of topics, from architecture to inter-personal relations, from eroticism to our consciousness of our selves, and so on. Intriguingly, he interprets the myth of the Fall in terms of how we view and interact with each other. We do not normally regard our own selves as objects: we are aware of our own existence as thinking and perceiving subjects; and, when we interact with other humans, we grant them the same self-awareness that we claim for ourselves. The Fall, in Scruton’s version, is an allegory of our learning to see the other as objects. It does not necessarily follow that the two modes of perception followed each other in time, as the story of the Fall, set in time, may suggest; but the two co-exist.

In the discussion of inter-personal relationships, Scruton considers the contracts, the responsibilities and obligations, that bind us together. And, as part of this, he considers marriage: is marriage nothing but contractual obligations? Is love for our family, our children, no more than the fulfilment of contractual obligations, no matter how willingly undertaken? Here again, Scruton sees an instance of “Cognitive Duality”: yes, we have contracts that we are obliged to honour; but we also make vows, that present to us an entirely different mode of perceiving the nature of our relationships. Everywhere we look, we find this same Cognitive Duality – an explanation of what things are, and the meaning we attach to them. And this latter, Scruton insists, is not illusory.

This leaves room for – indeed, it perhaps necessitates – the concept of the “sacred”.  Here, I wish Scruton had essayed a comprehensive definition of the term. When he first uses that term, he cites Durkheim’s definition – the “sacred” is that which is “set aside and forbidden”; but that is not how he uses the term in the rest of the book. Neither does he use the term “sacred” exclusively as meaning “relating to the divine”: it is only in the last chapter of the book that he addresses the topic of God, whereas the word “sacred” is used throughout. Rather, he sees the “sacred”, it seems to me, as that the impairment or destruction of which strikes us as something that goes beyond mere impairment or destruction, just as our marriage vows go beyond our contractual obligations; he seems to see the sacred as that which, when damaged, is desecrated. Yet again, we return to the central concept of the book – Cognitive Dualism: the sacred is determined by the way we perceive it.

In the last chapter, Scruton addresses the subject of God. We are not at this stage in the world of philosophical argument: as atheists never tire of pointing out, the existence of divinity is not something that can be proved. Rather, Scruton declares the nature of his own faith, and argues that this faith is not something that conflicts with the philosophical framework he had presented up to this point. Indeed, it is entirely consonant with it.

This book is an account of personal values, a confession of personal faith, written with great passion and with great eloquence, and informed by a vast erudition. I personally found Scruton most companionable, and his arguments, insofar as I understood them (I do not claim to understand it all fully), fascinating.  But then again, given my own starting point, this is perhaps not too surprising.

I started off very much in sympathy with his outlook: I needed no convincing that if we lose the sense of the sacred, that sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, we diminish the our very lives: I do believe that very strongly. And, while I have the greatest respect for science, and have no patience with the fashionable “mystics” whose vapid aphorisms litter social media, I am really rather fed up with what philosopher Mary Midgeley calls “nothing buttery” – this tiresome insistence that, as Scruton puts it, “emergent realities are ‘nothing but’ the things in which we perceive them”. Scruton expands on the position of “nothing buttery”:

The human person is “nothing but” the human animal; law is “nothing but” relations of social power; sexual love is “nothing but” the urge to procreation; altruism is “nothing but” the dominant genetic strategy described by Maynard Smith; the Mona Lisa is “nothing but” a spread of pigments on a canvas, the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre.

Of course, my impatience with this “nothing buttery” is a reflection of my personal temperament; but I think it may be argued that those who hold to “nothing buttery” do so similarly on account of their personal temperaments. Scruton’s idea of Cognitive Duality is one that I find very attractive, but, given my temperament, it is only to be expected that I should do so; those of differing temperaments will, I suspect, remain unconvinced.

It is only in the last chapter, where he speaks of God, that I couldn’t quite go along with Scruton, although, of course, I respect his religious beliefs. I, personally, remain agnostic: there comes a point beyond which I find myself unwilling to speculate. This earns me the disapproval of believers, for refusing to take further steps beyond that point, and also of atheists, who deny that there can be any point beyond which speculation could possibly be required. But my agnosticism is not, I think, a token of pusillanimity on my part: I acknowledge a great mystery, I acknowledge the validity of great questions, but I am content to leave the mystery unsolved, and the questions unanswered.

Let me finish on what is, perhaps, an incidental point in this book. In the chapter on music, Scruton refers to Schubert’s G Major String Quartet. I was delighted to find that Scruton values this work highly – for I do too. Here is Scruton writing with characteristic eloquence on how he views this piece:

… Schubert can show us stark terror in the G Major Quartet gradually interrogating itself, coming to acceptance, finding beauty and serenity in the very recognition that everything must end.

I can’t help seeing this piece differently. It does indeed start, as Scruton says, with an “intense stare into the void”, but in the subsequent descent into the void, heroic though it is, and in the life-and-death struggle to find something in that void that may possibly redeem it, I can find no “acceptance”, no “serenity”: the only passage in the entire work I recognise as “serene” is the central section of the third movement, and, even there, because we know that the movement is in ternary form, we know that the serenity will not last, and that the nightmare will return. Throughout this entire piece, I find unease, anxiety, even terror, and, while it is certainly resolved as a musical structure, this unease and the anxiety and the terror, for me, remain till the end. None of this is to deny that Scruton sees the piece precisely in the terms he describes; but what we perceive in the mode of cognition Scruton refers to as Lebenswelt varies, it seems to me, from person to person, and is as unpredictable as individual human temperament itself.

[10th August: slight edit to the above to clarify that the quote expanding on Mary Midgeley’s objection to “nothing buttery” is Roger Scruton’s, and is taken from his book.]

Concert in Egham on the Ides of March

I tend not to use this site for advertising, but since it’s my site, I guess I am free to break my own rules. For most of you, it won’t matter anyway: this post is aimed solely at those who live within reasonable travelling distance of Egham in Surrey, and who are free on the evening of Saturday the 15^th – the Ides of March.

For on that evening, the Egham and District Music Club, of which I am currently chairman, will host the distinguished pianist James Lisney in a concert featuring the three final sonatas of Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. The concert will be held in the United Church of Egham, on Egham High Street. You may find here  details of the concert here.

The piece by Haydn, I must confess, I am not familiar with. The Beethoven sonata is nothing short of visionary: that long variation movement with which the movement closes – and a discussion which forms one of the most memorable passages in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus – takes us into regions of sound and of feeling that had not till then been imagined.

And that final Schubert sonata – the last of the three he composed merely weeks before his untimely death – is simply a miracle. If I were given to gushing, I would describe it as balm for the soul. But since I’m not, I won’t. (How about that for a bit of paralipsis?)

You may see here Mr Lisney’s website, and the various concerts he has in his future itinerary. May I just say that our hall is a relatively small one, and it isn’t often one gets to hear a musician of such quality playing music of such quality from such close quarters.

Have I sold this to you enough? No? All right then, if, during the evening you come up to me and mention this post, I promise to buy you a raffle ticket. Now, I can’t say fairer than that!

(You may buy tickets in advance here.)

Staging the classics: the radical, and the unintelligent

As You Like It ends with multiple marriages, and the god of marriage, Hymen himself, comes down to officiate. It is an ending permeated with joy. Now, let us imagine that in a production of this play under the auspices of a respected body – such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, say – the director decides that marriage, far from being joyful and something worth celebrating, is essentially dark and tragic; and, because Shakespeare does not depict it as such in this play, he interpolates at this point some of the darkest passages from Othello.

It doesn’t really work, does it? I don’t mean the interpolation of lines from Othello into As You Like It (although I don’t think that works either): I mean my rather ham-fisted attempt at parody in the opening paragraph above. For to parody something, you have to exaggerate, and sadly, what I am attempting to parody cannot be exaggerated. For in the current production of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio at the English National Opera, director Calixto Bieito, believing that the reunion between Leonore and Florestan should not be joyful (although Beethoven’s music at this point unambiguously tells us that is is), has interpolated at this point ten or so minutes from the slow movement of Beethoven’s A minor string quartet. And I am left racking my brains trying to think of a parody that could exaggerate the sheer stupidity of this.

However, in talking about “sheer stupidity”, I am going very much against the grain: to object to a production such as this is to brand oneself a hopeless conservative who wants mere cosiness rather than a drama that challenges and stimulates. In this context, any argument beginning with “I’m no conservative, but…” is self-defeating: nothing one says afterwards is likely to be taken seriously. Now, I don’t think I’m particularly conservative in these matters: if I may be so immodest as to quote myself from my previous post:

When a work of art becomes very familiar, there is a danger that it becomes too comfortable, too cosy – that it loses its edge. Or, rather, our perceptions are so dulled that we can no longer feel its edge. Instead of exciting, or provoking, or disturbing, it merely relaxes, and becomes merely a sedative.

Other than the clumsy repetition of “merely” (one only notices these things once one has hit the “post” button!), I stand by that. I went on later in that post to say that what matters is not so much whether a staging is “conservative” or “radical”, but, rather, whether it is intelligent. And interpolating a passage from the slow movement of a late quartet – a passage that communicates a profound introspection and inwardness – at the very point where the music (composed by Ludwig himself specifically for this point) communicates boundless joy, strikes me as supremely unintelligent.

However, the production has been receiving good reviews: here is a typical one. In the course of this review, we are directed to an interview with Bieito in which, we are told, he “gives his reasons”. Except that he doesn’t give his reasons. He doesn’t explain why the reunion between Leonore and Florestan is not presented as joyful when Beethoven composed music at this point that very definitely expresses joy.

There are many other idiocies also in that interview – a lot of stuff about office buildings of glass and mirrors, Borgesian labyrinths, questioning who is really making decisions in our society, and so on – all tremendously fascinating, no doubt; but, sadly, there’s not a single word explaining what any of this has to do with Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Of course, it can be said, quite rightly, that it is foolish, and, indeed, somewhat glib, to speak of the “true meaning” of any major work of art: meanings of major works of art are rarely obvious, and good productions, both conservative and radical, can bring to light elements of the work that one had previously not considered. I agree enthusiastically. But if an alleged insight cannot be related to any part of the text of the original – and also, in the case of opera, to any part of the music – then I can’t for the life of me see how such an insight can be considered an insight into the work. If that makes me a hidebound conservative, then I’m afraid I have no option but to accept the title, albeit unwillingly: for I do agree with Pierre Boulez (in a quote so famous that I can’t seem to find it on Google Search!) that when one sets oneself to be the guardian of a pure tradition, one ends up as a guardian merely of a mausoleum.

However, it will be objected that I am criticising a production I haven’t seen. This is true. Neither have I seen Calixto Bieito’s earlier production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, which opened with a lot of people sitting on toilets having a crap. Neither, indeed, have I seen a great many other instances of similar “re-interpretation”, where the very fact of people taking exception is seen as evidence of success. I don’t, as it happens, fully subscribe to the contention that one must experience something before one is entitled to criticise it, if only because one does not need to eat a turd to know it tastes like shit; but nonetheless, let me focus now on a production by Bieito that I have actually seen: Don Giovanni at the English National Opera, some twelve years ago.

Here, the drama of Mozart and of da Ponte was presented as a bunch of lads and laddettes having a wild night out. Donna Elvira is here a drunken floozie, staggering around a bar, gulping down all the unfinished drinks she can find – not, perhaps, what we might expect given how she is perceived by Donna Anna and by Don Ottavio (“Cieli! Che aspetto nobile! Che dolce maesta!”) She, Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio, are, like Don Giovanni, mere lads and laddettes on a wild night out, thus eliminating any moral distinction that might have existed in Mozart’s opera.

As for the plot itself, there are some significant changes: as in Mozart’s version, Don Giovanni kills Dona Anna’s father in the opening scene; but, as not in Mozart’s version, he first rogers the not unwilling Donna Anna; and at the end of the opera, where, in Mozart’s version, the dead spirit of the murdered man appears as a statue to drag Don Giovanni into Hell, here, the dead man appears merely as a drug-induced hallucination: Don Giovanni’s downfall comes afterwards, as the other characters tie him to a chair and, in the manner of Murder on the Orient Express,  queue up in orderly fashion to stab him to death. New insight into the opera? Admirers of this production, and there are many, say so. But once again, I can’t see what there is either in da Ponte’s libretto or in Mozart’s music that can justify any of this. In the opera (as opposed to Bieito’s production), we are never sure whether or not Don Giovanni has had his way with Donna Anna before killing her father, and neither are we sure, assuming he had, whether she had a been willing partner; this ambiguity gives the drama an uncertain edge, and I really can’t see what is gained by removing this ambiguity – although I can see that much is lost. In the course of the opera (once again, as opposed to the production), various people try, with singular lack of success, to revenge themselves on Don Giovanni, but it is eventually only a supernatural force that achieves what mere mortals can’t. There are many legitimate ways of interpreting this, but changing it to its opposite so there is nothing to interpret surely isn’t amongst them.

One may, of course, have one’s own opinion on the quality of Bieito’s re-writing: my opinion happens to be that it is trite and unimaginative: a lot of bad boys and girls boozing and copulating and tripping on drugs is not in itself likely material for compelling drama. But that’s just my opinion: I don’t insist upon it. But whatever one’s opinion on the quality of Bieito’s re-write, why anyone should go to see a work advertised as being by Mozart and da Ponte, and see instead something entirely different, I really can’t imagine.

And what does Bieto himself have to say about all this? He talks about it here:

That Don Giovanni, he says, illustrated “what happens every Friday night” among young people across Europe…

Yes, I know, I know. But once again, he is remarkably quiet on how these typical Friday night happenings relate to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Lads and laddettes having a wild time of it on a Friday night really is pretty boring stuff: Don Giovanni isn’t.

So why does Bieito do this? Here he explains, in his own words:

And this is all done to provoke my audience, to make them think.

So now, thanks to Bieito, I’ve thunk. And, having thunk, I find I have no problem with Bieito taking a radical approach to these great works: I really have no desire to see safe, conventional stagings that put these works reverentially behind glass, as if they were museum pieces. No – I’m fine with radical reinterpretations. But I do, I must admit, have a problem with radical re-writing, and, especially, with Bieito (and other directors of similar inclination) re-writing these works in such a dull, trite, and supremely unintelligent manner: that seems to me unforgivable. Whatever Bieito’s vision may be, when I pay good money to see operas by Mozart or by Beethoven, or, indeed, by anyone else, it is not Bieito’s vision I’m interested in.