The First Night of the Proms
Anthony Burgess celebrates the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts.
The new season of BBC Henry Wood Promenade concerts will be broadcast live from the Royal Albert Hall (and other venues), commencing with the First Night of the Proms on Friday 18 July — a concert including Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture (also known as ‘Fingal’s Cave’) and the Violin Concerto in D Minor by Jean Sibelius, performed by Lisa Batiashvili and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Other highlights of the season include Simon Rattle conducting the Tenth Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich, and Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, originally commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein in 1930. The Last Night of the Proms, with its traditional closing medley of British music, will take place on Saturday 13 September.
Throughout his life, Anthony Burgess was a keen listener to the Proms, especially during the years of his voluntary expatriation in Malta, Italy, France and the United States. His own music was well known to audiences on BBC Radio 3, following the broadcast of pieces such as Blooms of Dublin and the Shakespeare ballet suite, Mr W.S.
In this essay, written for the Listener in 1988, Burgess looks forward to a season of musical excitements, and he reflects, in particular, on the relationship between words and music, which also formed the theme of his non-fiction book, This Man and Music, published in 1982.
‘Blest Pair of Sirens?’ by Anthony Burgess (1988)
I take my title — except the query — from John Milton, who apostrophised voice and verse as holy seducers and ‘pledges of heaven’s joy, sphere-born harmonious sisters.’ In Milton’s time, and in all the time before it, music and liturgy, or music and lyric poetry, went together in the sense that the meaningful art gave meaning to the meaningless one. Music, however we like to associate it with nameable moods and emotions, means only itself, which is as good as saying that it means nothing. If, in the old pre-symphonic days, you wanted to compose music unassisted by the crutch of words, you were limited to fairly short forms — the dance, the air, the fugue. The mass, the oratorio and the opera could be lengthy because the words ensured that they were, but it was only with symphonic form that music could stand on its own — wordless, telling no story, concerned only with a pure sonic argument — and do so for a length of time impossible to Purcell or Bach. The symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner take length to the limit. Sonata form perhaps spent itself with those masters, and music seems to have found it hard to breed a self-referring form that should supersede it. Probably if Hector Berlioz had not been overwhelmed by Harriet Smithson’s Paris performance as Ophelia on 11 September 1827 (the year of Beethoven’s death) the hybrid known as the symphonic poem would not have so speedily arrived. For the Symphonie Fantastique pays a perfunctory service to the form that Beethoven seemed to have exhausted: it has sonata elements — first and second subject, development, recapitulation and so on — but it is really a symphonic poem in five cantos. Romanticism in music, finding symphonic form too ‘classical’, had to go back to literature.
This year’s Proms seem to be acknowledging rather lavishly the debt that music owes to the sister art. Haydn, true father of the symphony, appears with only his No. 44 and No. 101, and both of these have subtitles — ‘Trauer’, or funeral, and ‘Clock’ — which, for those who cannot take their music neat, anchor at least some of the notes to the world outside. Richard Strauss does far better with seven items, of which only the Metamorphosen can be termed unliterary. Schönberg’s three pieces all have literary referents; Walton has two Shakespeare suites; Britten brims with poetry. This is to say little of what is actually sung, not just played. Debussy’s only orchestral contribution — the music for D’Annunzio’s Martyrdom of St Sebastian — bows down to words, and the Prom planners are so keen to accommodate the vocal Debussy that they give us the early Blessed Damozel. Delius is present with only the highly secular Mass of Life, balancing Verdi’s Requiem, which at least sounds secular, mourning for Manzoni in greasepaint.
The wealth, if not preponderance, of music with literary associations raises the old question of what precisely music can do with literature. Richard Strauss thought music could take literature over: there is no need to read Cervantes when you have the key items of Don Quixote presented in the orchestra far more succinctly than in the original words. But if those ‘Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character’ were played titleless, would the newcomer to the music even have an inkling as to what it was really about? Like the banal barrel-organ theme of Mahler — which Freud explained to the composer between trains — would the clichés on the viola suggest an external programme or merely sound like motiveless parody? The listener needs the title taken from the book, but he needs the book as well.
Symphonic poems always have to assume that the listener is at least as cultivated in literature as the composer. It is useless to take in Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini without knowing that the music is meant to be two large helpings of hell with a couple of sinning lovers between them. If nobody really wants to hear the same composer’s Manfred, it is because nobody knows Byron’s poem. I have never heard Hamlet, nor do I greatly wish to, but I can guess what Tchaikovsky’s music is like — generalised action and atmosphere but no soliloquies, something that would serve equally well for the ur-Hamlet or The Spanish Tragedy. There is, I think, only one symphonic poem that transcends its literary — or in this instance sub-literary — origins, and that is Till Eulenspiegel.
Music can convey atmosphere but not narrative facts — except in the widest, most cinematic, way (here the hero hurries on horseback; here he savours dawn on a mountain-top). There is an attempt in this year’s Proms to see how three very different composers convey the atmosphere of a dramatic work that has been saved for the stage only by being musicalised. Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande has become Debussy’s. It is to be done, semi-dramatically, at the Proms, as is Sibelius’s music to the play, a humble servitrix to the verbal content. Schönberg’s symphonic poem, lushly late-romantic and sometimes very loud (I remember the composer at a pre-war rehearsal asking: ‘Is the bassoon to hear?’ It was not to hear: the trombones drowned it) is there to remind us that we can learn little of the flavour of a piece of literature from its musical translation. Only the words can, clinging sometimes like fingers to the ledge of audibility, convey the primary intention. There is no lack of verbal audibility in Debussy.
We shall hear what Strauss thought of Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zarathustra (whose opening has virtually been taken over by 2001: A Space Odyssey), and how Nietzsche confirmed Delius’s atheistic vitalism in A Mass of Life, but the two Nietzsches are hardly compatible. The framers of the Prom conspectus are making a good deal of the literary inspiration behind many of the works to be performed, but the inspiration is really not much more than pretext. Shakespeare or Byron or Goethe may start a composer off on his exploration of themes and sonorities, but there will not be much of the poet left at the final double bar. There are, I think, only two items, both Shakespearean, which provide a literary stimulus as well as profound musical satisfaction. They are both entitled Falstaff. Elgar’s symphonic study makes too much of Sir John the knight, as opposed to the Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, but it is astonishing that we should be aware of the knight at all, the slim page too, and know that we are in a Worcestershire orchard with him and Justice Shallow. This work is a very curious miracle. Of the Verdi-Boito Falstaff one has to say first that it transcends its origins in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Boito could not, of course, have written the libretto at all without the cumbersome bardic farce (which we can, if we wish, believe that Queen Elizabeth ordered Shakespeare to write, much against Will’s will), but a joint genius produced a Sir John who can be related to the rounded round figure of Henry IV. What is happening in the orchestra qualifies the buffoonery of the stage. This is another miracle. Why that grey-bearded Vice should be behind two of these is a question for Maurice Morgann, and he is long dead.
This year’s Proms, in their yoking of two arts, will help to disabuse some of us of the notion that the sphere-born harmonious pair are, when brought together, equal in their sirenian seductiveness. But the music will always swallow the literature, grateful for it as a note-weaving pretext. Setting words, it will reduce them to sound without much semantic content. Music needs literature, but the reverse is not true. Not even Falstaff needs any music except the Cheapside waits, though he will hear in it proof that he is the cause of wit in others. Post-Beethovenian music cries out for a scaffold. Literature graciously accords it, then gets on with its own job.
Copyright © International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 1988.
Find out more
Listen to the First Night of the Proms on BBC Sounds.
See our online exhibition, The Music of Anthony Burgess (Burgess Foundation website).
Listen to the Burgess Foundation podcast, in which Christine Lee Gengaro talks about Burgess and music:
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