GREAT MUSICIANS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 105, 30 October 1935, Page 21

GREAT MUSICIANS

ESSENCE OF THEIR LIVES

A GROUP SURVEY

"Th.c Musical Companion,", a book that obtained remarkable success last winter, has itself a companion now in the form of "Lives of the Great Composers," a collection of twenty-eight biographical essays by nineteen writers, writes Richard Capell in the "Daily Telegraph." . Again the editor is A. L. Bacharach. Then the choice of composers is generous. Byrd, the Scariattis, Moussorgsky, and Wolf are here, as well, as the inevitable names. Since Grieg has a place it was perhaps unfair to leave out Franck, but that is as much fault as can be found with the selection. •Mr. Anderson starts off with a breezy Life of Bach. Beethoven, by Peter Latham, comes next—a readable essay, however disputable some of the interpretations of the facts. Edwin Evans's Berlioz is a good example of the straightforward biographical" narration which was what the editor principally asked of his contributors. In a volume in which the general level of the writing is high—such a phrase as "the four principal protagonists" of one essayist is exceptional—there is no better piece of English than Mr. McNaughl's Handel. Dyneley Hussey's H^ydn and M6zart, too, are in this class. The Mozart essay, moreover, has a decided critical value, in its attack on the common conception of the composer as a dainty rogue in porcelain. Another biography with a sharp critical edge is Mr. Boiiavia's Brahms. Here is ah extract:— ■''Upbringing may explain his deficiencies up to a point. But something else was surely wanting in a man utterly unable to put 'himself into another's place, to sympathise with others' feelings, to imagine the effect of his taunts on those who suffered them." ... "SOME INJURY." Mr. Bonavia suspects "some injury done to his mind when he was physically and morally defenceless." "What he saw and heard in the sailors' haunts at Hamburg as a half-grown lad affected his whole outlook. Those who allow-

Ed it, those who were responsible for it.jiave a good deal to answer for." "He was a great artist," says Mr. Bonavia, "but a great artist has no need to be also a great hero"—an interesting verdict which may be compared with this saying of Alfred Einstein's on Beethoven: "The great artist was rooted in a great man; nor can it ever! be otherwise." Dr. Colles's comment on Mr. Bonavia's essay in the introduction to this book runs thus: "He suggests sides of Brahms's personal character which we do not want to I think about in listening either to the | gracious 'Liebeslieder' or the majestic finale of the Fourth Symphony." ' Here, then, from three distinguished j pens, are texts to prompt a whole aesthetic dissertation. For one's own part, if tempted to a debate, one would feel strongly inclined to question the reality of the dichotomy suggested by the two English writers between the man and the artist, and to propose the argument that something may be wrong either with our moral or aesthetic standards if we censure the character of an individual while wholeheartedly admiring his art—for the word "individual" speaks for itself, and it is the very nature of the modern European art of musical composition to drain the whole man who puts his hand to it. NARROW SCOPE. But enough has been said to indicate how suggestive Mr. Bonavia's essay is. It he stops short of reconciling Brahms's character and music (the solution might perhaps be found in a lenient view of the former and a somewhat mitigated admiration of the latter), there is explanation enough in the narrow scope allowed him. It would be lack of candour to deny that the whole book has too narrow a scope. The contributors seem to have been asked to deal with everything about the great composers except their music. Nothing that concerns a great composer is wholly uninteresting-—not even such questions as whether his mistress's name was Therese or Mathilde. whether he had the habit of going up to town by tube or by 'bus. But there are proportions. Music, after all, makes up nine-tenths of a great composer's life, and most of the other tenth consists of the social and historical influences of his time and place, as they bear upon his art. Musical biographies with the music left out are like portraits without' faces: we see only the ■ backs of the heads.

in making out Byrd, that highly-fav-oured gentleman of Elizabeth's chapel, to have been "persecuted"? Jews in Germany, Liberals in Italy, and ministers of religion in Russia would today consider all the "persecution" that Byrd ever knew to be a positive pleasure. ■ ' \ Mr. Calvocoressi's ' Moussorgsky stands alone in the collection as representing sources of information not generally available. His bibliography consists of only three items, all postwar Russian publications, his own celebrated little biography of Moussorgsky being excluded, since, he says, the material recently unearthed in Russia renders all the earlier Moussorgsky literature invalid.

If the writers had always borne in mind the music of their subjects as the heart of the matter, there would not have been such a sentence as this in the Beethoven essay:— "His character always lacked decision, and his infirmity of will grew on him as he got older." | In point of fact Beethoven's character never lacked decision, and his firmity of will grew almost superhuman as he got older. But Mr. Latham happens to be preoccupied not with The I Beethoven, but with a'Beethoven who ■ hesitated about going to London. So preoccupied is he, indeed, that this hesij tation over a question that was really I about as important as whether Mr. Latham and I are going to Brighton on Sunday becomes "fatal irresolution" in the next sentence. GAP IN WORK. Having grasped the wrong end of the stick, he proceeds to correlate this irresolution concerning a perfectly insignificant concert tour to the pause in Beethoven's productiveness between the second and third periods, suggesting that just as BeethoveiV- could not make up his mind about the trip, to London, so he could not make up his mind to begin the ninth symphony the minute, he had finished the eighth. "Irresolution" is an odd reading of that portentous pause in which Beethoven was assembling his forces for the most prodigious creative effort known to the whole history of music. But then, a moment later, Mr. Latham recalls the Mass, the last symphony, the last sonatas and quartets, and says the right thing handsomely. If there is nothing better in the book than William dock's Schubert it is, for one reason, because the author has j the thought of the music always in I the forefront of his mind. Following I Sir Donald Tovey's writings, the essay I is another indication of a revised appraisement of Schubert, for long the most seriously underrated of the great j composers. Not only the songs are j praised, but also the instrumental works. "Schubert was the last great composer of pianoforte sonatas." Even about Schubert's external life there is freshness here; Mr. Glock seems to be the man for an adequate book, so far wanting, on Schubert's life and works. Sir Richard Terry gives us in his two vigorous essays numerous interesting impressions, the result of unique practical experience, to compensate for the paucity of personal facts known about his subjects (Palestrina and Byrd). But does he not stretch a point