The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  But to return to my own loss of cultural faith. As I said, it began with that momentous damned recording, actually right there in the studios. It was an unashamed bid for commercial success, an attempt to hijack Beethoven 4, to annexe it so that Sidonie Kleist’s account would be required listening. There’s a very principled British recording company which even now likes to record with a single microphone and in one take if at all possible. In other words it’s committed to the inspiration of performance, fluffs and all, on the grounds that the idea of a definitive recording is absurd and one might as well aim for unity and spontaneity. Well, our approach to Beethoven 4 was the polar opposite, pretty much Gouldian. There were microphones everywhere. Groups of instruments were individually miked. The real performance took place afterwards, with balance engineers turning up this and fading down that, splicing in a note here and redubbing there until the final mix (sixty-four tracks, I think someone said). The result was nothing like what the conductor had heard or I’d played. What, come to that, did it have to do with Beethoven’s concerto which until then I’d deeply loved since childhood? Forget integrity of performance, inspiration of the moment: all that was left of them was stray clumps of notes, odd quavers and minims drifting in the dead studio air like fur after a dog-fight. So all this prompted my question, which goes unanswered to this day: Where is the composer’s voice? Or where the soloist’s? (And have you ever wondered, as you whistle your bit of Mozart in the supermarket, whose performance it is? You’re not a musician? So how did you know what tempo to adopt? Is it an average of all the recordings you’ve heard or is it your Soul up there on an inner podium?) In any case, the true voice behind my publicity shot of the fiercely individual artist gutting fish was neither Ludwig’s nor Sidonie’s but the record company’s: a thin, opportunistic character utterly lacking in intellect but perfectly capturing the sound of the times. As soon as I realised this I was horrified. The paradox was perfect. This up-to-the-minute new account of Beethoven 4 was already dated, and me with it.

  Instead of becoming angry with myself I became glum, and reading the critics enthusing over my playing in subsequent concerts and recitals made me glummer still. It seemed I could suddenly do no wrong even though my playing was unchanged. ‘Sidonie Kleist’s deft touches of dry humour’ – what could it mean? A memory lapse in a Mozart concerto I was playing in London ought to have been pounced on as at least a lack of concentration. It was in the first movement recapitulation and I found myself inadvertently trying to drag us all back into the dominant again, locked into a cycle of repetition I couldn’t break. I floundered for about five measures, hoping to make my F sharp sound like an interesting piece of chromatic intensification instead of the leading note of a now-unwanted G major. Did the critics notice? Did they hell. ‘She just never puts a finger wrong’ (S. Times). And even if she did never put a finger wrong, so what? What has playing the right notes to do with playing them correctly? ‘Even her wrong notes sounded right’ would satisfy me for an epitaph if someone would only say it in time.

  It’s all a farce.

  One can’t be a professional musician for long without becoming a cynic. There’s the industry and there’s the marketplace, and that’s about it. People rely on critics to tell them which recordings to buy, what fashion, what image. How can they rely on their ears when even most critics couldn’t tell Pavarotti from Carreras in a blindfold test, let alone Arrau from Barenboim? Cars, detergents, Pharmaceuticals, artists.

  It’s hot. Outside the window there’s a constant sullen roaring like an immense forest fire, a landscape ablaze. From where I’m sitting I see orange smoke drifting across a bald blue wash into which slender white rectangles thrust up their unequal tops. Framed in the window they look like a bar chart, statistics of an indefinite economy or an uncertain future. I get up and walk over and there are the new tower blocks jostling up and down the hillside. The smoke is dust from excavators gnawing away at rock, from trucks dumping sand and cement. The roar is of a city recycling itself and expanding, mixed with the vast exhalation of Kai Tak airport throwing up its haze of burnt kerosene and airplanes which drone at steep angles between the apartment blocks like leaden darts. I’ve little faith that it’s all going somewhere. It seems to me as securely locked into frantic repetition as my own concertizing, our cultural treadmill. If I can’t (or won’t) speak or play then I must break with what no longer needs to be said and played. What does it mean to go on and on playing the same music over and over again? What does it really mean?

  Hotel bedrooms.

  And now a nunnery. They’re called Intercessionists because they believe in a figure they describe as Our Lady of Perpetual Intercession. At any time of day or night, year in, year out, there are two nuns at prayer in the chapel. They do it in shifts. Mother Ignatia explains that it’s a tenet of their faith: as long as there’s someone somewhere on earth remaining in contact with God then the lines to redemption remain open and it can all go on. But if for a single instant that contact between God and humankind is broken (a backward, wistful glance towards Hades, a chance hiatus like one of those lulls in conversation at a dinner party), then we’re lost and Satan’s meat. That’s why there are always two nuns, in case one of them has a heart attack or a stroke. So a constant thin smoke of prayer rises from the chapel downstairs and outside the airplanes can keep taking off and the buildings going up, concerts can be given and the world turns. They’re very reassuring, these tribal magicians, these shamans who labour on everyone’s behalf to keep the sky from falling, whose spells so successfully bid the sun rise and set. It’s a kindly thought to use such prodigious power so beneficently.

  The question is, will it one day strike Mother Iggy too, this awesome moment which silenced me? Why mightn’t it suddenly overwhelm her, the sound in her own ears of the same words endlessly repeated until nothing but emptiness remains? I’d played at being Orpheus for two movements before looking back, and the world stopped. Music froze, a pillar of salt, a boulder of loss. There was no going on. I’d looked back and seen that everything I was belonged to the past. We’d all of us simultaneously – orchestra and audience – reached the end of our culture.

  After my first week here, or maybe month, Mother Iggy asked me if I’d like to play something for the Sisters, a nice Mozart sonata perhaps? This was after the Hammond organ experiment so evidently hope springs eternal in her moviegoer’s breast. I managed a small scream, the only sound I’ve uttered since the concert. How else was I to tell her how sick I am of our Mozart sonatas? ‘Our’ because of the way we’ve appropriated them; because what he wrote isn’t what we play. Oh, the notes are probably the same but the eighteenth century heard something quite else. It was a different world with different ears. What once had the freshness of innovation has now hardened into a sacred fossil, an icon, a plaster putto, a consumer artefact which can never now transcend itself no matter how tricksily played.

  That’s true of all art, of course. Same for Shakespeare, same for Dante. What they really meant is forever lost to us. They’ve become medieval incantations heaved in a technological age. Time to break with this thumb-sucking, this churning round and round of the same great creaking prayer-wheel. That was then; this is now. No looking back. Devise a new language to talk. New things to say, even, instead of heaving our contemporary sighs into ancient deflated bladders until they take on a semblance of what we think is eternal. What needs to be said today isn’t like anything which needed to be said before. We’ve never been on the lip of extinction until now. And who brought us to this calamitous point? Not just science or greed or the autoworkers of Detroit but the Holy Family, Michelangelo and Beethoven too. They’re all part of it. But don’t worry: new geniuses will invent new fantasies for us to believe in, other truths to bring us to our knees or fill our eyes with astonished tears. So have confidence, good Mother. Satan will no more take over your phone network than a new barbarism will rush in to fill the space left by Beethoven.

  It is I, Orpheus, w
ho speaks. It is I, Sidonie Kleist, who can tell you that after a certain amount of fun with the Bacchantes and the strong drink etc., which brings oblivion, Orpheus gave up the lyre and became a pirate. This is not well known. He lived rough and saw much. He took what he fancied and left what he didn’t and had a fine, long, unencumbered life. Now and then he wondered how Euridice was doing down there in Hades and reflected that she’d been quite a canny, headstrong girl and probably had life with the Furies pretty much psyched out. The former lyrist had been a reflective sort of fellow, which was one of the reasons for choosing a piratical career since his new colleagues were refreshingly disinclined to the backward glance. But eventually Orph the morph worked out what had really been pretty damned obvious all along: that he’d looked back on the road out of Hades quite deliberately in order to be rid of Euridice. We’re constantly changing and eheu! he’d outgrown her. He’d played a lot of lyre and he’d outgrown that, too. All legends have domestic origins which become lost. So he kept absolutely silent about the whole thing, never joined in with the shanties in the fo’c’sle and otherwise successfully transcended his former self.

  There’s a lesson here for us all.

  Farts and Longing

  ‘IT’S YOU‚ isn’t it?’

  I’m probably destined to blurt this whenever I meet him, in a mixture of sheer surprise, pleasure and pride. Pride, because I’m the only person he’ll talk to – or so he claims. This amounts to a privilege so singular that in a way I’m a genius myself on the strength of it, if a passive one. On the other hand I now have a far better idea of the hollowness and relativity of the very notion of ‘genius’, so I hardly ever use the term now except mockingly. Come to that, mockery is something I’m well acquainted with, obviously. But how could I have kept silent? When I described my first conversation with him I was treated with the indulgence due the disturbed: yet one of the details I recounted did finally percolate through to the world of scholarship and occasion a good solid discovery. Naturally the scholar concerned attributed it to his own insight rather than to my article which I know he’d read. Never mind, I thought. There’ll be another time.

  To know this is still no preparation for when it happens. On this latest occasion it was evening and I was nursing a beer and watching Malta’s desert-hued rocks turn rosy. A huge flattened sun was cautiously lowering itself into the sea like a courtesan easing her buttocks into an over-hot bath. The holiday crowds had mostly shuffled off the beach to shake the sand from their towels on to hotel carpets and anoint each other’s smarting shoulders in preparation for the disco. A tall black man approached my solitary table. He was gorgeously dressed in tribal robes whose provenance I couldn’t guess. In my mind I confused him vaguely with all the Libyans who came shuttling through Valletta from Tripoli, often wealthy families heading for Harrods or the London Clinic and reduced by a capricious embargo to undertake the first leg of their journey on a ferry. He bent so that his pale blue headdress came below the edge of the Martini umbrella. I noticed he was holding a thin journal of sorts rolled up in one hand.

  ‘I’m Tom Abandanaya,’ he said. ‘From Lagos, actually. Would you mind if I joined you?’

  ‘Er … no, of course,’ I said with the fretful courtesy of an Englishman taken by surprise. ‘Sit down, by all means. Can I offer you a beer? Or maybe you’re …’

  ‘A Muslim? No, I’m a lapsed everything. A beer would be fine.’

  The waiter poured it, grinning into the sunset as the rosy foam climbed the glass.

  ‘I’m sure you won’t mind my asking,’ I began when we were on our own again, ‘but, well, why choose me in particular?’

  ‘Do you mean you still don’t know me?’ asked the magnificent Mr Abandanaya.

  I gazed at the yellow sleeve of his robe, at the sumptuous black skin of his muscular forearm. Something slipped into recognition.

  ‘It’s … it’s you, isn’t it?’

  And, of course, it was. Once the identification was made the robes, the black skin, the stature were all guise rather than disguise, as if this time around a fragment of DNA had changed its place and coded for a trivial and superficial difference. When I’d first met him he still looked like his portraits: short, pop-eyed and with the famous lobeless left ear which also lacked the inner whorl the rest of us have, evidence of the gene his own youngest son, Franz Xaver, inherited.

  ‘Forgive my slowness,’ I said. ‘Last time you were Portuguese.’

  ‘So I was. It’s a sad business. I can no longer remember who I’ve been. The first time was the most vivid of all, of course. Since then each one’s been quicker and less memorable than the last. Now I’m – he frowned at the rolled–up magazine by his beer glass ‘– a Nigerian heart specialist attending a conference. Tomorrow morning I give a paper on a possible link between benign Plasmodium malaria and mitral valve stenosis.’

  But I can skip the rest of the preliminaries, except to say that he will only ever talk about things he wants to. It’s no good trying impertinently for record-straightening details of his first life unless he feels like offering them. There is still something of the old mercurial quality in his manner: the intelligence which alights for as long as it’s interested or diverted by things it can make interesting. It was never an intelligence which suffered fools, and lately it seems increasingly overlain by a melancholy which doesn’t so much slow his mind as provoke quite bitter reflections on what has been done to his reputation. Somewhere in the middle of all this must lie the unbroachable topic of what became of that extraordinary gift. Maybe one day he will talk about it, maybe not. Meanwhile, I shall simply render the Maltese episode in dialogue fashion, as verbatim as I am able and as untainted as possible by my intrusive literary style.

  Self: What brings you back this time, fury or despair?

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:

  A bit of both. Why can’t I just let it go, after two hundred years? After all, it’s just sounds to me now. I can remember every note but it’s no longer quite my own music. I suppose an airline pilot might recognise every feature of a landscape he regularly overflies without feeling possessive towards it. Just a general fondness for a familiar part of the planet.

  S: You’ve never been reduced to philosophy before.

  WAM: Each time I sink lower. I’m a bona fide towering figure of Western culture. No, I’m universal. I belong to them all. ‘He belongs to us all,’ they say. I ought to be enchanted that people still listen to me, overwhelmed by their adulation. But it’s constantly spoilt. I keep thinking, ‘Yes. Thank you very much but that’s not quite it. You’ve got it slightly wrong …’ It makes no difference, though. Since people profess this fascination with so-called creativity you’d think they’d want to be more accurate about it. Instead of which they just wrap it up in new myths. God help us now my fellow medics have started in. It’s my fault for mocking them in Così fan tutte. Obviously they’re striking back. What’s that smell?

  S: Where?

  WAM: Everywhere. Especially … Yes, here on the table.

  S: Smells to me like someone’s sun-tan lotion.

  WAM: I noticed it as soon as we landed. You can’t get away from it here. In twenty years’ time no-one’ll remember it.

  S: Should they?

  WAM: Isn’t there a craze for historical accuracy? Historians dig out records of ordinary folk instead of crowned heads and asses in uniform. Historical novelists try for evermore vibrant realism. Archaeologists reconstruct daily life in Roman forts or Neanderthal caves. Architects insist on hand-cast glass when re-glazing a Queen Anne mansion. They’re all on the track of the authentic: what people did, how they did it, what they saw, what they read, what they listened to, what they ate and what they wore. Yet practically nobody knows the first thing about what they smelt. And those who do haven’t yet worked out how much of the rest of life the sense of smell affects. Politics. Economics. Sex. Religion. The olfactory history of Europe’s almost a complete blank. And so it’ll remain unless you record the det
ails yourself. So go on, write down that Maltese beach resorts in 1993 smelt ubiquitously of sun-screen lotion. It’s a particular ingredient, too. Not being an industrial chemist I can’t identify it. My nose tells me it has something in common with that nicotine-flavoured gum doctors are supposed to urge their smoking patients to chew. A horrible smell, nearly as bad as the real thing.

  S: Okay, smell noted.

  WAM: It’s not irrelevant, as you’ll see. More beer? It gives me the runs, always did. I’ll probably have to crap on the beach as they do back home.

  S: Back home?

  WAM: Nigeria, Portugal, Austria, wherever. Don’t forget I’m universal. At least I’ve come provided. I’ve brought my own paper. This. This is a learned medical journal such as we doctors occasionally feel obliged to flick through. I found it at the conference yesterday. Someone had left it in the canteen. British Medical Journal of late last year. Respected organ. Oh, talking of respected organs, do you think I might be justified in wondering about my ex-countrymen doing a roaring trade in a kind of chocolates known as Mozart Balls? You do? Me too. We’ve still got tribes back home who’re not above eating the genitals of some foe they’ve slain so they can incorporate his strength. Back home. Obviously the canny Viennese have just updated the old doctrine of Transubstantiation … I can’t remember, are you a Catholic? At just about any hour of any day, someone somewhere in Central Europe is munching one of my balls. It’s enough to give any man pause for thought. Oh, right, the BMJ. Read it yourself. Read it into the record.