Music Richard Osborne
MUCH WAS made in the obituaries of the late Brian Sewell of his rubbishing of the Tate Gallery’s 1994 exhibition of women’s art and his subsequent remark after a Critic of the Year awards ceremony, ‘Women are bloody awful painters. Don’t ask me why; they just are.’ He was talking of high art, of course, and his ‘bloody awful’ was less than gracious. More interesting was his parenthetical ‘don’t ask me why’. It is indeed a mystery. And it’s as much a mystery in music as it is in art.
The other day I took down from the shelves an entirely wonderful 1993 CD entitled In Praise of Woman, which the late Anthony Rolfe Johnson recorded for Hyperion with pianist and musical polymath Graham Johnson. (It’s currently available on Hyperion’s budget-price Helios label or track-by-track as a download.)
An anthology of 27 of the finest songs written by British women composers over the past 150 years, it was a characteristic offering from Graham Johnson, who knows as much about Lieder, chanson and English song as anyone ever has or probably ever will. It also happens to be one of Rolfe Johnson’s finest records. His performances of Maude Valérie White’s ‘The Throstle’ and Amy WoodfordeFinden’s highly erotic ‘Pale Hands I Loved’ are more than a match for classic recordings from yesteryear by Heddle Nash and that fine Lincolnshire-born tenor (largely ignored in his own country) Alfred Piccaver.
Acquire In Praise of Woman and you will hear settings by White, WoodfordeFinden and Liza Lehmann which in intelligence, craft and emotional intensity outrun most things written by the likes of Elgar, Parry, Somervell, Bax and Butterworth. (Only Quilter might be said to match them.) Nor were these women setting greetings-card verses. Maud White’s ‘The Throstle’ sets Tennyson, ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’ transforms a well-known poem by Byron, and one of White’s greatest songs, ‘My soul is an enchanted boat’, a piece Richard Strauss might have been proud to own, draws on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, no less.
Well educated and widely respected within the national musical community, these women were absolute mistresses of their art. And yet the question remains, why this and so little else? Liza Lehmann’s song-cycle In a Persian Garden created a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic yet she had little success with her musical comedy Sergeant Brue or with her one-act opera Everyman which the Beecham Opera Company staged in 1916. Is it a case of what Jane Austen self-deprecatingly referred to as ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush’?
For some time now Radio 3 has been including music by women composers on its drive-time Breakfast programme. Whether the initiative pre-dates or postdates the diatribe to which the station’s new administrator Alan Davey was subject on Radio 4’s Feedback, I’ve no idea. Perhaps it’s simply a tick-box requirement, now that Radio 3’s former territories have been invaded by that powerful new insurgency ‘BBC Music’.
It’s an agreeable enough initiative, albeit one that needs informed oversight and deft presentation. Back in September we were subjected to the embarrassingly plagiaristic and musically vacuous twelve-minute opening movement of Louise Farrenc’s Second Symphony, completed in Paris in 1846. I have yet to hear presenter Clemency Burton-hill say anything remotely interesting on air, and that morning was no exception. After reading out a ‘why-oh-why’ email about Farrenc’s neglected ‘genius’ (emails are very much Burton-hill’s forte), she simply played the disc. After it was over we were told it was ‘a really fantastic piece of music’. Not that Burton-hill is the only Radio 3 presenter to corral us with superlatives after a performance.
As an exercise in the promotion of women’s music it was a disaster. Farrenc, a leading figure in mid-19th century French musical circles, was no ‘genius’ but she was an accomplished composer of chamber music. Her Nonet achieved cult status in its day and I’ve long admired her C minor Sextet: a gossipy three-movement conversation-piece for piano and wind quintet – Jane Austen would have loved it – which hints at what a Farrenc piano concerto might have been had the long-term illness and subsequent death of her daughter not caused her to trade composition for the calmer waters of academe in the late 1850s.
There’s an excellent recording of the Sextet, coupled with the Nonet, on the Bayer label. As a performance, I much prefer it to a widely praised new recording by Les Vents Français whose pianist Éric Le Sage is far too timid. ‘Men!’ I hear Louise crying from beyond the grave.