Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music
“Get Beethoven!”
Paul Cassidy
Matador 978-1-838-59342-1
264pp (pb) £10.47
Paul Cassidy has been violist of the Brodsky Quartet since 1982.
The ensemble’s 50th anniversary falls next year and ahead of a book celebrating that and his own 40 years with them comes this witty and forthright memoir of his turbulent early life in Derry, Northern Ireland.
The youngest child of 16, Cassidy grew up in a city fraught with violence and injustice, and he pulls no punches in hair-raising tales of priests, schoolteachers, criminals and gunmen from both sides of the sectarian divide – and the British Army.
While his anger is still raw, Cassidy is equally passionate about the good things in a rebellious boyhood of fishing, ‘fags, booze and girls’ – and people, including his sister Bridget, who introduced him to music. Scrapes are related with the larger-than-life glee of a pub raconteur or, as he puts it, ‘a fully paid-up member of the “why spoil a good story with boring facts” club.’
It’s a wild, sometimes wandering testament to the power of music to heal, sooth, ‘incite revolution’ and ‘chart love affairs’: at its best, divertingly good craic.
Steph Power ★★★
The Eighth – Mahler and the World in 1910
Stephen Johnson
Faber & Faber 978-0-571-23494-3
320pp (hb) £18.99
Although Mahler wrote down his choral and orchestral Eighth Symphony at lightning speed in the summer of 1906, its premiere performances in Munich took place in September 1910. By that time the great composer-conductor’s inner world had been upended by disastrous events in his own life – the death of his daughter Maria, then his young wife Alma’s affair with the architect Walter Gropius.
Stephen Johnson’s book is therefore as much about the evolution during 1910 of the substantially drafted, but not fully completed Tenth Symphony against this fraught emotional background, before the Eighth’s unveiling provided Mahler with his greatest-ever professional triumph. Johnson explores the different – but, as he shows, in some ways not so different – musical worlds of each work both individually and within the surrounding intellectual and cultural scene, literature (notably Thomas Mann) and psychology very much included. This formidable range of knowledge is assimilated into a fluent and insightful read, rich in humanity like the music itself, and with no trace of the self-regarding agenda that so often bedevils books of this kind. Unmissable, for Mahler pundits and punters alike.
Malcolm Hayes ★★★★★
The Royal College of Music and its Contexts
David CH Wright
Cambridge University Press
978-1-10716338-6 386pp (hb) £90
Holst, Vaughan Williams, Howells and Britten all studied there. But, as this exceptionally rounded history of the Royal College of
Music reminds us, it was far more than a hot bed of compositional talent. Founded in 1883, one of its principal purposes was to train a professional body of rank and file orchestral musicians – which it fulfilled magnificently, enabling the foundation of such world-class orchestras as the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In this very readable account, David Wright strikes an excellent balance between logistics such as how the building was designed and developed, the headache of balancing the books, and giving vivid if sometimes rather partial portraits of those individuals who made the RCM an enduring success story of British music. Wright’s redressing of reputations includes that of Stanford, who trained his student orchestra to the highest standard (Richard Strauss came to conduct) and overrode his personal tastes to programme a wide range of modern music including Rachmaninov, Debussy, Ravel, Dvo ák, Glazunov and even – despite their personal enmity –
Elgar. Daniel Jaffé ★★★★
Unsettled Scores – Politics, Hollywood, and the Film Music of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler
Sally Bick
University of Illinois Press
978-0-252-04281-2 256pp (hb) £79
The predominant musical style cultivated by composers working in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s was lush and late-romantic – an idiom that seemed perfectly tailored to the swashbuckling and escapist material frequently on screen. Yet not all composers accepted this stylistic status quo. In particular, two pioneers of a radically different approach,
Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler, challenged such conventions from a musical, intellectual and political standpoint.
Sally Bick’s absorbing study examines the Hollywood legacy of both composers, placing their extensive writings about the role and function of film music alongside a bar-by-bar analysis of their first contributions to the medium, namely Copland’s score for Of Mice and Men and Eisler’s for Hangmen Also Die! You need to see the films to fully appreciate the points that emerge, but there’s much of interest in Bick’s detailed examination of their essays on film music, not least how prepared they were to compromise their views to meet the commercial demands of the industry.
Erik Levi ★★★★