Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music
Don Giovanni Captured – Performance, Media, Myth Richard Will
Chicago 312pp (hb) £36 Numerous books have been written about Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, but Richard Will’s volume is a new undertaking. Its focus is on recordings of the work – not just as a kind of ‘best recommendations’ exploration of what is a substantial discography and videography, but to back up his discussions of how performance of the opera has altered during the period of recording itself.
The evidence he considers starts from roughly 1900 in terms of sound extracts; from 1936, the year an early Glyndebourne production was set down in the studio, it encompasses complete recordings; then video evidence begins from the earliest film when Paul Czinner turned his cameras on Herbert Graf’s 1954 Salzburg Festival staging conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.
But in fact Will reviews successive interpretations of the work, its action and characters more widely even than this, exploring texts from ETA Hoffmann, Søren Kierkegaard and a host of other critics and commentators from the early 19th century to the present day, along with their changing views of aspects of the piece. The result is detailed and observant, and one doesn’t have to agree with every finding to be constantly stimulated by its ideas. George Hall ★★★★
Elliott Carter Speaks – Unpublished Lectures
Elliot Carter, Laura Emmery Illinois University Press 240pp (hb) £44 Note the title. This is Elliott Carter speaking, not writing: a distinction that quickly becomes obvious as readers wade through the opening pages of unchiselled sentences and general observations, transcribed from reel-to-reel tapes of lectures that America’s veteran modernist composer gave during July 1967 at the University of Minnesota. He was speaking partly from notes, partly impromptu, with ancillary help from chalked-up diagrams, audio excerpts and piano illustrations.
If his student audience laughed at a comment, the editor inserts ‘[Laughter]’. Nice to know (Carter indeed had a twinkling mind), but it’s not enough to make the text sparkle on the page.
What does help is when Carter gets down to specifics, with details about other composers, his own development and the crystalline complications of selected works, particularly his Piano Concerto. Mozart’s quick-changing textures are praised, so are Debussy’s ‘new kinds of sound’. Ives and Varèse are saluted, while Cage is given the boot, along with the 1960s fashion for aleatoric practices. Specialist readers at least will be comforted by the book’s frequent inclusion of music quotations, some of them pages long. Geoff Brown ★★★
Mrs Gustav Holst – An Equal Partner?
Philippa Tudor Circaidy Gregory Press 140pp (pb) £14.99 Isobel Harrison’s impact on the young, love-starved Gustav Holst, her future husband, was touchingly described by their daughter Imogen in the composer’s biography. But then Isobel disappears from Imogen’s narrative, and indeed scarcely appears in most Holst literature. Here, now, is her story meticulously researched and presented in Philippa Tudor’s highly readable biography.
If Isobel was not so musically literate as, for instance, Alice
Elgar, she nonetheless comes across as forthright (indeed, often blunt), warm-hearted and down to earth – qualities which usefully counterbalanced her more cerebral husband. She played a crucial role in assisting Holst with business arrangements, not least in 1924 when he had his nervous breakdown. Sadly, they became rather less close over time – Isobel made no secret of her dismay over Egdon Heath and her wish Holst would ‘get back to his old style’ – and Holst found greater solace and understanding from friends such as Vaughan Williams. Still, their surviving correspondence (a good deal of it published for the first time) makes clear Gustav respected and solicited Isobel’s opinion on practical matters, and their devotion remained through to his untimely death. Daniel Jaffé ★★★★★
Trio of Devotion
Christopher Morley Brewin Books 62pp (pb) £6.95 Composers’ love lives are a hot topic for music writers: Jessica Duchen recently explored the identity of Beethoven’s beloved (Immortal), Mary Despenser imagined the relationship between Maurice Ravel and Sidonie-gabrielle Colette (Au Fou Indeed), and now Christopher Morley focuses on the not-quite ménage à trois between the Schumanns and Brahms.
Trio of Devotion is a semi-fictionalised account of Clara and Robert’s relationship, and the impact of their one-time protégé. Historical context is Morley’s strongpoint, but this slim volume is let down by the bedroom encounters between our musical heroes that turn a promising premise into fan fiction. Descriptions such as ‘Their mouths joined in a kiss which lasted for all eternity... Robert leaned over towards her, perhaps a little rough in his impatience to possess her, but Clara was ecstatically oblivious,’ are worthy of Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Brahms’s inability to ‘perform’ is also included in cringe-worthy detail.
However, with proceeds from the book going to the Gwyn Williams Bursary Fund to support young violists, let us simply consider it a guilty pleasure. Claire Jackson ★★