Andrew Ford: The Shortest History of Music Old Street Publishing 234 pages, 45 images Reviewed 21 October 2024
Global musical history digested into just over 200 pages; Ford's book deftly manages the compression whilst bringing out a wide variety of over-arching themes and influences, well beyond the conventional Western classical history
Creating a coherent history of music has always been a tricky business and in the last fifty years, as classical music expands in various directions, it has become trickier. The historical view of musical development in classical music has had to be replaced by intersections, influences and just plain oddities. But more recently, the sheer notion of a history of classical music has changed.
Contemporary composers draw influences from a range of musics, and those accustomed to living in non-European countries reflect a whole range of other classical musics. How do you refer to contemporary composers and their influences without drawing in a history of the other musics in the globe?
This is a challenge, different countries have different conventions and Western classical music's heavily rule-based, written language is only one way of defining things. It is relatively easy to talk about 16th century European classical music if you have the manuscripts and treatises, but it is far harder to do justice to the music of another culture where the entire musical structure is based on oral tradition.
The Australian composer, writer and broadcaster Andrew Ford has decided to have a go and in his The Shortest History of Music he attempts to cram a coherent history of music into just 210 pages. The book is published by Old Street Publishing as part of its 'The Shortest History of...' series with subjects ranging from China, to Democracy to Sex to Economics.
Andrew Parrott: The Pursuit of Musick: musical life in original writings & art c1200-1770; Taverner
Andrew Parrott's The Pursuit of Musick: musical life in original writings & art c1200-1770, published by Taverner, is a somewhat deceptive book. Its substantial size and generous illustrations seem to suggest a coffee table book, but Parrott's name as the author implies deeper scholarship and you might think it a book of his collected writings. Both ideas are wide of the mark. It is rather an amazing book, full of deep scholarship but without a single word of Parrott's own its 544 pages, apart from the Introduction.
Instead, it is an exploration of music and music's place in society over 500 years looked at through the words and images of contemporaries. In his Introduction, Parrott explains that the book arose originally from a commission for an 'Early Music' book, but that he struggled to bring together original images and modern text. Finally, he dropped the modern text; what we have is a consideration of music using the images and words of the time.
One of Parrott's themes is that music during the period of consideration, roughly 1200 to 1770, is more varied and more surprising than might first be thought. And what better way to explore than to read what others had to say about it. His net is cast very wide indeed, so for instance to take just one section ('Virtues & Vices' within Voices), there is Verelst's portrait of Handel's soprano, Anna Maria Strada, and writings by Jacopo da Bologna (c1350), John Dowland's 1609 translation of Ornithoparcus (1517), Hermann Finck (1556), Giovanni de'Bardi (c1580), Christoph Praetorius (1581), Bacilly (1668), J-J Rousseau (1753), Conrad von Zabern (1474), Zacconi (1592), Tosi (1723), Mattheson (1739), Quantz (1752), Francesco Bagnacavallo (1492, writing to Isabella d'Este), Zaarlino (1558) and John Evelyn (1685).
The images are as fascinating as the text and of course, the truism that a picture is worth a thousand words comes to mind. Some I was familiar with, others not - Charles II's private music, ten-year-old Mozart playing whilst Princesse de Conti had tea in Paris. Images of music and performance, performers and theatricality, manuscripts and documents, that all tell us a little about how people thought about music at the time.
The foreign language texts have all been translated, whilst the English texts are left unmodernised. There is a full image list at the back of the book, but full bibliographic information for the texts is held on the Taverner website along with the original language texts.
Simon Banks: Opera: The Autobiography of the Western World; Matador Books Book Review, 29 November 2022
Most histories of opera begin with Renaissance Italy, make their way through the various incarnations of the Baroque, move to Classical Vienna and then explore Romanticism in all its guises before attempting to define what opera is in the 20th and 21st centuries. But Simon Banks takes a different view in his book Opera: The Autobiography of the Western World(Matador Books). He explores the way the operas of a particular age have reflected the age's obsessions, politics and world views.
He points out that over its 400-year history, opera was one of the dominant entertainment forms of its ruling elites, often making opera in the listeners' own images (after all, they were usually paying for it). As Banks puts it in his introduction, 'the operatic repertoire lives on as an astonishingly eloquent record of how the modern West changed its mind on key political, religious and social issues over four centuries', and he sees the operatic repertoire as a living record of the Western world. So, this isn't a book on the history of opera, it is a book about the history of the Western world or more specifically the cultural and political attitudes of the Western world as reflected in one of its favourite art forms.
The topic is possibly one that might be completely indigestible, so Banks' solution is to create 36 chapters grouped into three parts, New answers to timeless questions, The Modern West breaks free from the Middle Ages, and From despotism to pluralism. Each chapter takes a specific historical era or idea, 'How did it all start', or 'Religious Fanaticism' or 'Philip II and Elizabeth I (1550-1600)' and then lists operas from different eras that treat the same, or similar, subject matter and see how they shed light on changing attitudes.
Elaine Thornton Giacomo Meyerbeer and his family: Between two worlds; Valentine Mitchell
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 28 September 2021 A book which steps back from Meyerbeer the composer to place him in his family and society context, looking at what it meant to be part of a distinguished German Jewish family
Born in Berlin, trained in Germany and Italy, a friend and fellow student of Carl Maria von Weber, an almost exact contemporary of Giacomo Rossini, a composer who helped to reinvent French grand opera, one of the most performed composers of the 19th century. There is much about Giacomo Meyerbeer that is fascinating, but the above list omits something very important. Meyerbeer was born to a distinguished Jewish family in Berlin and throughout his life remained true to his Jewish faith.
Elaine Thornton's book Giacomo Meyerbeer and his family: Between two worlds from Valentine Mitchell places Meyerbeer firmly in context. This is not so much a biography of the composer as a group biography of Meyerbeer and his family. And quite a family it was, his parents played a significant role in the development of Jewish people's position in Prussian society, whilst many of Meyerbeer's brothers were distinguished in their own right. Whereas a conventional biography of Meyerbeer the composer takes us to Italy and then to Paris, Thornton keeps the book firmly anchored in Germany. Meyerbeer might be travelling but it is clear from his own writings that he retained incredibly strong personal links both to family and to Berlin.
We begin with Meyerbeer's Jewish ancestors in Berlin and end with his own death, and throughout there is an exploration of the whole family. Born into the Beer family in Berlin, Meyerbeer and two of his three brothers would achieve fame, Meyerbeer as the first Jewish composer to achieve world wide fame, Wilhelm as an amateur astronomer who, with a colleague, produced the first accurate maps of the surfaces of the moon and Mars, and Michael as a talented playwright whose early death robbed him of a chance to see whether he could develop on his early promise.
Franz Welser-Möst From Silence: Finding Calm in a Dissonant World; Clearview Books
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 3 August 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) A thoughtful, poetic yet trenchant meditation on the music and its role in today's society
Conductor Franz Welser-Möst's book From Silence: Finding Calm in a Dissonant World is not quite an autobiography, though it is autobiographical in a sense as it is the conductor's meditations on the role of the conductor seen through the prism of his experiences. Written with Axel Bruggemann and translated by Christine Shuttleworth the book is published in the UK by Clearview Books.
It is a very poetic book, Welser-Möst takes a considered and thoughtful view of his craft, there are strong opinions here but also a feeling of the more mystical elements of music making. We begin in silence, with a profoundly serious car accident that Welser-Möst had when he was 18. And throughout the book, the sections on the conductor's craft are interleaved with meditations on types of silence, from the meditative to journeying up a mountain.
Welser-Möst's narrative interleaves his own personal development with passages about the role of the conductor and of music today, so that each time the young Franz moves on the older one thinks about what this means. There are trenchant views here, particularly about the role a conductor might play and the wider role of music in the light of his experience heading up the Cleveland Orchestra.
'I must confess that I sometimes feel like a stranger in this loud and euphoric world, in which so much is dealt with on the surface and so little in depth'.
David Faiman Giacomo Meyerbeer: The deliberately forgotten composer; Gefen Publishing House
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 20 October 2020 Star rating: 3.0 (★★★) A popular introduction to the composer's work which casts light on the way anti-Semitism affected his reputation
The case of Giacomo Meyerbeer is a strange one. One of the most popular composers of the 19th century (perhaps the most popular in Paris), his music fell out of favour in the 20th century alongside most of the operas of his almost exact contemporary Gioachino Rossini. But with the post-war Italian bel canto revival, there was no parallel Meyerbeer revival. The 2018 production of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots at the Paris Opera [see my review] was the first new production there since the 1930s, yet between 1836 and 1936 the company gave over 1000 performances of the opera.
The new book from David Faiman, Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Deliberately Forgotten Composer published by Gefen Publishing House, is a deliberate attempt to explore the reasons why Meyerbeer fell from view.
At the core of the book is a valuable summary of Meyerbeer's life, career, and operatic works, something that is badly needed. Whilst there is plenty of learned coverage of Meyerbeer (notably Robert Ignatius Letellier's writings), there is little in the popular line. Faiman provides a very effective summary, extensively quoting the composer's contemporaries to give us a sense of how highly regarded Meyerbeer and his music were.
We also get a handy summary of the operas and whilst many will at least know of one or two major operas there are plenty of others!
Helmut Deutsch Memoirs of an Accompanist (translated Richard Stokes); Kahn & Averill
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 5 October 2020 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) Frank and witty, the Austrian accompanist's memoirs celebrate a career spanning 50 years
The accompanist Helmut Deutsch sees to have gradually developed on the international scene. Whilst his most recent London appearances have included recitals with Jonas Kaufmann and with Mauro Peter, his autobiography Memoirs of an Accompanist, makes it clear that this has been a slow and steady career, encompassing some 50 years and over 100 singers.
The memoirs were first issued in German in 2019 as Helmut Deutsch, Gesang auf Händen tragen. Mein Leben als Liedbegleiter, and music lovers will be pleased to see the book's English incarnation published this year by Kahn and Averill in a translation by Richard Stokes. Rather impressively, no ghost-writer is credited, these are his own words (albeit filtered through the elegant and lively translation by Richard Stokes). One of the German reviews quoted on the cover refers to the book's humour and intelligence, so clearly the translation has captured the original well, as the book as both illuminating and funny. Deutsch's humorously clear-sighted view of his career is offset by a vein of seriousness, so the book is both and engaging read and a candid picture of what it is to accompany at the highest level for such a long period of time.
The Tchaikovsky Papers; edited by Marina Kostalevsky; Yale University Press
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 20 June 2018 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) Family letters from the Tchaikovsky archive, never published in English before and revealing illuminating intimate details about the composer's life
This volume, The Tchaikovsky Papers - unlocking the family archive from Yale University Press (edited by Marina Kostalevsky and translated by Stephen Pearl) contains a selection of letters which are published complete for the first time in English and which only appeared in Russian in 2009. It is strange to think that such a cache of letters could be sat in the archives at the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky State House-Museum in Klin without being well known. But since Tchaikovsky's death, biographers have often taken a somewhat selective view of the composer, both Modest Tchaikovsky and Soviet biographers, in their different ways, were keen to promote their own image of the composer. So, as Marina Kostalevsky explains in her introduction, various topics touched on in the letters have made biographers uncomfortable, such matters as Tchaikovsky's monarchism, his adherence to the Russian Orthodox tradition and most notably his homosexuality have caused the letters either to be ignored or to be published in distorted form. This new volume enables us to glimpse different aspects of the composer's intimate life.
There are three groups of letters published in the volume, correspondence between Tchaikovsky's parents from 1833 to 1851 (16 letters in all), letters from Tchaikovsky's former governess Fanny Durbach written after the two had got back into contact in 1892 (12 letters in all) and Tchaikovsky's letters mainly to his brothers Modest and Anatoly from 1869 to 1892, plus a single letter from 1851 (58 letters in all). There a selection of Tchaikovsky's musical jokes and souvenirs, plus key documents from Tchaikovsky's official record, from his birth certificate to his will and documents relating to his death. There is a wide variety of information in the letters, but what makes the volume the most intriguing is the freedom with which Tchaikovsky refers to his homosexuality, and his amorous adventures.
'I've always wanted to fart higher than my arse. I wanted to be the number one composer not only in Russia, but in the whole world'
Peter Webster Church and patronage in 20th century Britain: Walter Hussey and the Arts; Palgrave Macmillan Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 10 April 2018 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) A look at how Walter Hussey came to commission such a remarkable range of major 20th artists for the church
Walter Hussey, sometime Rector of St Matthew's Church Northampton and then Dean of Chichester, is an important figure in 20th-century art and music. Hussey was responsible for commissioning such figures as Benjamin Britten, Edmund Rubbra, Leonard Bernstein, Lennox Berkeley, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Marc Chagall and many more. Peter Webster's book Church and patronage in 20th century Britain: Walter Hussey and the Arts in Palgrave Macmillan's Histories of the Sacred and Secular series provides some remarkable illumination as to how this striking body of work came about.
The book is not a biography, it is, in fact, an academic study of both Hussey and the role of the arts in the mid-20th-century church of England. But anyone who is interested in learning more about the creation of Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb and Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms will find this a fascinating and illuminating read. Webster writes easily and engagingly so that the book has a far from academic tone about it.
Webster explains early on on the book that Hussey's surviving papers, whilst extensive, do not always provide the ability to look into Hussey's motives, partly because he rarely kept copies of his own letters. Importantly for a book which endeavours to put Hussey's artistic endeavours within the context of the 20th-century church, Hussey has effectively left little information about his devotional beliefs, or given a detailed theological basis for his commissioning activity.
Webster does a great job in following the history of Hussey's activity and putting it in the right context. Hussey's commissioning was not simply as a patron, but as church patron and the art was intended to sit within the liturgical atmosphere of the church. Apart from Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, all the music that Hussey commissioned was intended for performance during a church service, it had to fit in. Similarly, works of art, like the two Graham Sutherland pictures, the Henry Moore sculpture, the John Piper tapestry and the Marc Chagall window, had to fit into a church environment elicit the right response from the churchgoers.
O Sing unto the Lord; Andrew Gant; Profile Books
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on Jan 9 2017 Star rating: 4.5 An engaging and engrossing history of the music in the English Church
O Sing unto the Lord by Andrew Gant, on Profile Books, is described on the cover as a history of English Church music, and it is just that. Gant takes the story from the very beginnings, when we know very little, through the medieval period, the glory days of Tudor polyphony, the Reformation and the founding of the Church of England right through to the present day. Gant is well placed to write the book, he is has directed the choirs of The Guards' Chapel, Worcester College, Oxford, and Her Majesty's Chapel Royal, as well as lecturing in music at St Peter's College, Oxford and finding time to compose.
Gant takes a roughly historical approach to the subject, starting at the beginning and finishing off with the present day. In his Preface he talks about the way that church music is embedded in the British psyche, with football fans singing chants to the music of hymns. But the subject is too huge to be comprehensive, and within each time period, Gant concentrates and certain key individuals and events, to create an image of the whole.
The big advantage of the book is that is is certainly not simply a brisk canter across the great names of British church music. Gant has a real interest in what everyone was doing. Up to the events of the Reformation this is relatively straightforward as the smaller abbeys and priories emulated the larger ones. But after the Reformation there is a fracturing, and here Gant reflects this. For each era he looks at the Chapel Royal and the great names, but then casts his eye over the cathedrals and then the parish churches.
Robert Schumann's Advice to Young Musicians Revisited by Steven Isserlis; Faber and Faber
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on Sep 23 2016 Star rating: 4.5 A modern humanising commentary to Schumann's timeless advice
It isn't so much a bringing Schumann up to date, in fact much of Schumann's advice is both timely and timeless, but providing a modern interpretation and humanising touch. There is a wit, charm and wisdom to Isserlis's comments which means he really does bring this rather daring enterprise off.
Isserlis has re-arranged Schumann's aphorisms into chapters, On Being a Musician, Playing, Practising and Composing, and then adds a short chapter of his own advice on these topics. The whole makes sense as a modern commentary on Schumann, but it also provides a very practical guide to being a musician in the 21st century.
Cookery a la carte; David Steadman, Melvyn Tarran; The Choir Press
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on Aug 22 2016 Star rating: 4.0 Anecdotes, pictures and recipes from members of the D'Oyly Carte opera
This delightful new book Cookery a la Carte, issued in a limited edition by the Choir Press, is a collection of recipes provided by members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company over the years. Based on a collection started by a former chorus member, the selection of recipes has been expanded and edited by David Steadman and Melvyn Tarran too over 100 entries.
But the book is much more than a recipe book. Presented very much as a scrap book with a page or two devoted to each person, there are biographical sketches, anecdotes and pictures (many of them historic) in addition to the recipes. You are warned that many of the older recipes have not been tested, and many are provided in facsimile of the original hand-written ones, which can make something of a challenge when trying to read them.
The book started out as a collection presented to D'Oyly Carte chorus member Joy Garland when she left to get married, a collection which she continued expand and this has been further expanded by the editors David Steadman and Melvyn Tarran into the present volume.
Karen Henson; Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteeth Century; Cambridge University Press
Reviewed by Robert Hugill
on Aug 31 2015 Star rating: 4.0
Fascinating account of opera singing in the late 19th century, focussing on four key singers and the physicality of their performances
The late 19th century is often regarded as a low-point in operatic singing, the singers falling into a gap between the last generation to work collaboratively with composers (such as Giuditta Pasta with Bellini), and the 20th century singers whose career was defined by the recording process. But I have long been fascinated by such figures as Celestine Galli-Marie who created the role of Bizet's Carmen, about whom a great deal of myth and legend as accumulated, and Jean de Reske whose repertoire ranged from Gounod's Romeo and Wagner's Tristan (in the same season). So I was eager to see this new study in Cambridge University Press's series Cambridge Studies in Opera, Karen Henson's Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteeth Century in which she explores opera singing in the 1880's and 1890's.
Baritone Victor Maurel and Verdi
Starting from Verdi's phrase 'not singing' ('che ... non cantasse') which he used about Lady Macbeth, Henson looks at how singers were hemmed by a generation of composers who expected to have a greater degree of control over exactly what the singer did, and so the singers expressed themselves in other ways. By exploring in detail four singers of the period (along with eight 'supporting cast'). Karen Henson looks at how singers used physicality as a way of personal expression. This wasn't naturalism as we think of it, but an emphasis on physicality. The four singers in question each had a major relationship with a contemporary composer, though judging from contemporary reports none of the four had spectacular voices. It was in their physical acting, their presence (singing physignomically in Henson's phrase) that they expressed the drama of the music. The four singers are baritone Victor Maurel who created Iago in Verdi's Otello and the title role in Falstaff, mezzo-soprano Celestine Galli-Marie who created the title role in Bizet's Carmen, soprano Sybil Sanderson for whom Massenet wrote a number of roles including the title role in Thais and tenor Jean de Reske who played an important role in singing Wagner.
Sybil Sanderson
as Massenet's Esclarmonde
Writing about such singers is difficult, Karen Henson has had to do a great deal of archive digging, and has to rely on contemporary descriptions. For much of the time she is not addressing the subject directly but what she terms 'prowling around'. A case in point is Wagner tenor Jean de Reske who converted from a baritone, yet still sang Gounod's Romeo and Wagner's Tristan. Karen Henson has to rely on unsatisfactory descriptions and has to make an educated best guess as to what he sounded like.
This is very much an academic book (Karen Henson is Associate Professor at the Frost School of Music, University of Miami), and her writing style reflects this in not always being the easiest of reads, and to appreciate the arguments you have to read copious quotes from contemporary descriptions. But it is worth pursuing, the arguments and information are completely fascinating.
Celestine Galli-Marie as
Bizet's Carmen
Though Verdi denied Victor Maurel a part in creating the roles that he premiered, Maurel's profoundly actorly approach clearly had a strong influence on the composer. Karen Henson starts with Victor Maurel's assumption of a major French role, Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet, and then the first French performances of Aida to discover how Victor Maurel approached roles and comes to a strong conclusion about his importance to Verdi's later composing career.
Celestine Galli-Marie's role in creating Carmen in Bizet's opera is the stuff of legend, but Karen Henson argues that it was not naturalism/realism that the singer brought to the role but a sense of theatricality. This was based on her background in a performing family (her father was an opera singer, her sisters performed in operetta and cafe-concerts), and a history of intervening visually (costumes, gestures) in the way characters were performed on stage. Interestingly, Celestine Galli-Marie seems to have had quite a light voice, so by the time you have read Karen Henson's chapter on her the image of a Carmen with a rich dark voice and heavily realistic acting is well and truly scotched.
The soprano Sybil Sanderson had a long relationship with Massenet (he had a tendency to become enamoured of female singers and write roles for them). With Sybil Sanderson, Massenet not only wrote the music but seems to have influenced (controlled?) her visual image including numbers cartes de visites. Whilst it is easy to think of Sybil Sanderson as a purely passive receptacle, Karen Hansen argues for her far more active involvement in the visual presentation (of photographs and of the operas).
Jean de Reske as
Wagner's Siegfried
Polish tenor Jean de Reske came from a theatrical family, both his brother Edouard and sister Josephine were singers. He is the only one our quartet for whom an aural record exists, a distant shadow on a Mapleson cylinder from the New York Met. Jean de Reske started out as a lyric baritone and then retrained as a tenor. This re-training seems to have involved not developing power (as happened with heldentenor Lauritz Melchoir who started as a baritone), but in creating flexibility in the voice's upper register. He never seems to have had a superb voice, but he succeeded in being able to suggest the necessary lightness of Gounod's Romeo, whilst also singing Wagner. He brought seriousness to this, and it is in the actorly details, a sense of the words and declamation that he impressed. You sense that some passages were almost spoken and he certainly does not seem to have had a voice which could ride the greatest tide of the orchestra. Other commentators refer to being able to hear the pitch! Partly this is in response to the fact that in the 1890's, Wagner's operas were regarded as being forbidding and unperformable and Jean de Reske played an important role in internationalising performances, combining elements of both German and Italian traditions along with an emphasis on non-musical elements.
Karen Henson concludes the book with a short look at the careers of Emma Calve (the second Carmen), Victor Capoul Jean-Baptiste Faure, Marie Heilbron, Paul Lherie (the first Don Jose), Paole Marie (Celestine Galli-Marie's sister) and Jean de Reske's siblings, Edouard and Josephine. The result is to provide a fascinating patchwork of image of how singers of the period made their mark in both singing and 'not singing'.
I doubt that this book is the last word on the subject, but it is certainly a fascinating contribution to the debate about singers of the recent past. It is a wonderful corrective to the rose-tinted spectacle view of early performers. Reading Karen Henson really makes you think about what those audiences in the 1880's and 1890's actually heard and saw, and how much control the singer involved had.
Jean de Reske recorded at the Met in New York in 1901 on a Mapleson Cylinder.
George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends; Ellen T Harris; W.W.Norton & Co
Reviewed by Robert Hugill
on Jan 13 2015 Star rating: 5.0
Handel through his friends; new light on Handel's life and career through looking at the lives of his close friends and the society in which they lived.
A balanced biography needs to mix the public and the personal, combining the subject's public deeds, creations and reputation with their personal life and a degree of background colour. With creative artists, their creative works can often be an indicator to their personal life, but with George Frideric Handel it is different. Few of his major works can really be tied to a sense of his inner life, and we completely lack any documentation for his personal or inner creative life. In biographies, what we are left with is a mixture of reportage, surmise and background colour.
Ellen T Harris has been taking a different approach, rather than encompassing the whole monument of Handel's life she is taking it in sections attacking it from different sides and gaining information by looking at his interactions. Her book Handel as Orpheus viewed Handel's stay in Italy through the prism of his Italian cantatas. And the book gave us some surprising insights, the theme running through it was very much about Handel's sexuality.
In her new book George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends (published by W.W. Norton & Co) Harris takes Handel's London friends and teases out a remarkable amount about their lives and how they interacted with Handel. Lacking essential knowledge about Handel's daily and personal life, she rightly thinks that we can gain a lot of information by examining the lives of those closes to Handel. The result in not a biography, but more of a voyage round Handel's life. Harris terms the book 'An intimate portrait of Handel's life and inner circle, modelled after one of the composer's favourite forms: the fugue'. Her approach is broadly thematic with the same characters cropping up in different ways throughout the book and with George Frideric as the main theme.
After an Introduction and Before London, there are then chapters on Politics, Patronage and Pension, Commerce and Trade, Music at Home, Marriage, Wealth, and Social Status, Ambition, Law, and Friendship, Making and Collecting, Religion and Charity, Sickness and Death, Wills and Legacies. As the chapters cover overlapping time periods, each has a timeline which covers the events relevant to that chapter.
Paul Spicer Sir George Dyson: His Life and Music; The Boydell Press
Reviewed by Robert Hugill
on Dec 23 2014 Star rating: 4.0
Important biography of a neglected 20th century composer and theorist
Sir George Dyson
Sir George Dyson's life-story could read as a prime example of a working-class Yorkshire boy made good. Born in Halifax, son of a foreman blacksmith, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and became a noted composer, broadcaster and distinguished administrator. Principal of the Royal College of Music at a tricky time in its career, he worked with the Carnegie Trust and helped found the National Federation of Music Societies.
If, 30 years ago, you had mentioned Dyson you would have been lucky if someone remembered Isobel Baillie's recording of the Wife of Bath's aria from The Canterbury Pilgrims (see below after the break a sample), though ex-RCM students might comment on his sales from the RCM collections and re-organising of the ladies lavatories.
Dyson's major works have now appeared on disc and we can appreciate his English, yet distinctive voice. A conservative composer, but an open musical thinker; in print and in lectures he made an important contribution to the dialogue with contemporary music.
Quite how remarkable he was comes over in this comprehensive new biography from Paul Spicer. Sir George Dyson, His Life and Music (Boydell Press) is indeed a very thorough book combining Dyson's life, with much contemporary background plus analysis of Dyson's works threaded through the narrative.
The great English tenor Walter Widdop (1892 - 1949) is perhaps not as well known nowadays as his contemporaries, such as Heddle Nash (1894 - 1961) and Isobel Baillie (1895 - 1983). This is probably because Widdop made few recordings after 1930. But Widdop was one of the few English singers to have an international career before the Second World War and made a remarkable leap into being a Wagnerian tenor with very little experience. I have long been aware of Widdop and his recordings, but had little other information. This little book, compiled and edited by Michael Letchford, helps to remedy that situation. There is a short biography by Val Parker as well as a short memoir by Widdop's daughter Veronica Bott, plus Tully Potter's article about Widdop's recordings, a memoir of Widdop's teacher by one of his other pupils, a complete list of recording sessions and a wide selection of original press reviews of Widdop's performances.
Walter Widdop as Siegfried
Widdop was born near Halifax and left school at 14. He seems to have been a strong personality and is one of those people around whom stories accumulate. But his biography is relatively short and you have to read Val Parker's short but informative biographical essay in conjunction with Tully Potter's excellent survey of Widdop's recordings to get the fuller picture. Widdop's recording career effectively came to an end in the 1930's, just at a time when he was developing as an artist. He was singing right up to his death in 1949 (in fact he sang Lohengrin's Farewell the night before he died), but we have little in the way of aural documentation for the last 19 years.
Potter attributes this to the fact that Widdop was quite a direct and outspoken man, who may easily have offended someone in the record company. This may be true, but Widdop's contemporary Isobel Baillie, in her autobiography, talks of how many English singers were dropped by the record companies in the leaner times of the 1930's; her own 'period in the wilderness' only ended in the late 1940's.
Opera in the British Isles might seem a rather sparse subject in the period 1875 to 1918. Britain was notoriously described as the land without music, even the revival of the native tradition of composers did not include a strong vein of opera. Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, who himself composed a substantial body of operas, did not include the subject at the Royal Academy of Music. In this new book from Paul Rodmell (lecturer in music at the University of Birmingham), Opera in the British Isles, 1875-1918, the author aims to find what was happening operatically. The results are somewhat surprising both in the number of performances, the access people outside London had to opera and the number of new works performed. Rodmell demonstrates that there was s significant amount of opera going on, albeit of a rather variable quality.
The book is part of a series from Ashgate Publishing, Music in 19th Century Britain, which seeks to explore the wealth of music and musical culture of Britain in the 19th century. To explode the myth of the Land Without Music.
Rodmell's book is thematic rather than strictly historical. He starts with a survey of opera in 1875. The year was chosen as start date because it was the year of the first London appearance of the major touring company Carl Rosa Opera, the inauguration of the project for a new National Opera House on the Victoria Embankment and the definitive establishment of the operas of Wagner in the repertory. Carl Rosa Opera was important as a significant company playing London in parallel with Covent Garden. The opera house project was an unfeasibly idealistic scheme, but one which helps to articulate the Victorian's concern with a national style in new operas. And Wagner, of course, represents an important step in the modernisation of the operatic repertoire.
Poet Richard Morris and his daughter, the artist and designer Hatty Morris, joined forces to produce an illustrated poetic re-telling of the story of Wagner's Ring Cycle (see my review). Now they have followed this up with another, this time produced One Crazy Day: the story of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Richard Morris's verses telling the story of Mozart's opera are complemented with illustrations by Hatty Morris and Sayaka Takeuchi.
Richard Morris in his introduction sketches in the historical background to the opera. But as the opera is based on a Beaumarchais play, he also adds the very necessary pre-history from Beaumarchais' earlier play The Barber of Seville. He has written the poetry in terza rima which uses three-line stanza's with complex chains of rhymes. This gives the verse an onward, flowing quality as the middle line of stanza rhymes with the outer two lines of the next stanza. It also successfully avoids a rum-ti-tum quality in the poetry which would not sit well with the plot.
Scraping the Bottom is a follow up to Christopher Gillett's previous book Who's My Bottom, charting the further adventures in the life of an itinerant operatic tenor. Gillett has a nice eye for the telling anecdote, and the book combines reportage on various engagements in Montpelier, Paris, Amsterdam and Milan. Part of the joy of the book is that Gillett reveals the everyday tedium and anxieties of life as a singer, working in opera houses away from home, struggling with rented flats, foreign cultural habits, recalcitrant coffee makers, operatic managements and conductors. Whilst we might suspect him of exaggeration for effect, in fact that rather Eeyore-like view of things tallies which what I have heard from other singers. Spending your life in foreign climes, struggling with the vagaries of operatic managements and transport arrangements just isn't particularly fun.
Like his previous book, the story is written as a patch work of anecdotes, threaded together on a narrative. This time the narrative concerns the imagined glamour of an opera singers life, which Gillett seeks to puncture, but the second half develops further as he gets asked back to La Scala, Milan of Peter Grimes and rehearsals turn eventful. But the book isn't just about what happens on stage, there is a great deal of mooching about and dealing with life on the road. Gillett is able to be amusing about this, but he makes sure that we never take this for granted, pain is often round the corner: when working in Montpelier, Gillett has to deal remotely with his teenage son having an accident.
This new book is firm in its confident credentials, with 'Definitive' in the title. Music: The Definitive Visual History is from Dorking Kindersely so we can expect a high standard of presentation and plenty of images, all this in a substantial coffee table sized book running to 400 pages. There are a lot of images here. The editorial team is pretty impressive too, with Robert Ziegler as consultant and a 15 person authorial team including Malcolm Hayes, Nick Kimberley and Tess Knighton.
The book is divided into eight sections, Early Beginnings, Music in the Middle Ages, Reniassance and ReformationThe Baroque Spirit, The Classical Age,Nationalism and Romance, Music in the Modern Age and Global Music. The last two take up around half of the book, and Global Music covers both classical and world music since 1945 so that this isn't a history which is skewed towards classical music. The only area which is not specifically covered is folk music, though this is implicit in some chapters.
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