In the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra we are rehearsing Beethoven Symphony No. 3, the Eroica. It is said to be the symphony that completely revolutionised music in the early part of the nineteenth symphony. It is unusually long, about fifty minutes, and unusually fraught, full of Sturm und Drang. Beethoven planned to dedicate the symphony to Napoleon, who I guess he initially thought was a man of the people. But then Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and Beethoven realised he was just like all the other movers and shakers – in it for himself. So in a fit of rage (it is said) he scored Napoleon’s name out of the score’s frontispiece so violently that he tore right through the paper. This autograph, this iconic memorial to disgust, survives, and remains to be seen. Some people think that the second movement, the funeral march, stands as a memorial to what might have been. It is a remarkable piece of music to play, or even to attempt to play. Central to the movement, its fugue seems to explore heights, or depths, of emotion quite unprecedented.
The notion of music exploring, and expressing a response to contemporary events, is examined in a book by the critic and historian Jeremy Eichler, Time’s Echo, Music, Memory, and the Second World War (Faber & Faber, 2023). Eichler makes the startling proposition that music might serve as a kind of cultural memory. Music is history, a unique way of recording and defining the past. He looks at the response of four composers to the events of the Second World War – Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich. In particular, Eichler concentrates on four major works – Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13. These four composers all had an uneasy relationship with the authorities, and the society in which they moved, and worked. They were all outsiders, who might easily have been destroyed, but for the fact that their celebrity and their pre-eminence offered them a modicum of protection. Strauss survived the Third Reich, and also managed to escape the subsequent censure of the allies, in a way that Furtwängler didn’t quite. His relationship to Nazi high officialdom remains ambiguous. Schoenberg’s opposition to Nazidom was entirely unambiguous, and he had to get out. In the USA, as a composer he was revered, but perhaps not loved. Serial music has yet to “catch on”. He did not fulfil his ambition of having his tunes, or more precisely tone rows, whistled in the street. Nevertheless, the highly unlikely world premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw, given by an amateur orchestra and a choir of cowboys in Albuquerque, was a huge success. The piece was immediately encored in the way that, for example, the allegretto of Beethoven 7 was immediately encored. Perhaps twelve tone music had finally found its home, depicting episodes of utter degradation.
Britten was homosexual and pacifist. But that wasn’t why he felt tortured; rather it was the combination of these traits with his wish to be conventional, a pillar of the community. He set the words of a First World War poet while commemorating an event that occurred during the Second World War. Setting “Futility” was perhaps more acceptable when it alluded to events two generations ago.
Shostakovich greatly admired Britten’s War Requiem. Always at odds with the authorities, he himself famously lived in various apartments, a suitcase packed ready to go, with the expectation that the secret police would call for him in the night. There was huge pressure on him not to go ahead with the premiere of the 13th symphony, with its settings of poetry by Yevtushenko, in particular Babi Yar, the dreadful atrocity at Kyiv, whose depiction forms the first movement of the symphony. The authorities tried to obliterate the memory of Babi Yar, precisely by obliterating the site itself. But the memory lives on in the poetry, and in the music. That is the point.
I found myself wondering about contemporary music, and its relationship to the troubled world in which we live, when I attended the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday for a concert of Scandinavian music, part of “Nordic Music Days”, a long-running music festival that has come to Scotland for the first time. The RSNO were joined for the opening piece by young players from Big Noise Govanhill, an educational enterprise modelled on the Simón Bolívar project in Venezuela. The concert is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday evening. It was introduced by Radio 3’s Ian Skelly. There was a sense of occasion. We heard music by Lisa Robertson, Errollyn Wallen, (Master of the King’s Music), Rune Glerup (a violin concerto played by Isabelle Faust), Bent Sørensen, Hildur Elísa Jónsdóttir, and Aileen Sweeney. I think all the composers were present.
It was certainly an interesting, if emotionally somewhat chilly, concert. And although the audience reception, by contrast, was characteristically Glaswegian and warm, I can’t say I was conscious of any profound sense of emotional rapport which bound us all together. But then the RSNO played Sibelius 7, and at last, we heard great music.
jamescalumcampbell 