Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  This sense of wonder is crucial to an understanding of Mompou’s style. (The philosopher Gabriel Marcel has written of ‘wonder as the beginning of all philosophy’.) It is as if he manages to capture the very perfume of a chord, for he is there early in the morning when the first bud opens. His reverence for harmony comes from the humble realisation that its beauty exists outside his decision to include it. Where Satie’s world tends towards a whimsical and sad isolation, Mompou is content to be alone precisely because of his absence of self-regard. His humility, paradoxically, enables him to write with a supreme confidence and assurance.

  While it would be impossible to claim that Mompou was one of the ‘great’ composers, it is equally impossible to classify him as second-rate; his voice is too distinct, his output too fastidious, his artistic intentions too perfectly achieved. Second rank is for those who aim for certain heights and fail to achieve them. In the light of Artur Schnabel’s quaint yet charming generalisation, ‘Mozart is a garden; Schubert is a forest – in sunlight and shadow; Beethoven is a mountain range’, perhaps Mompou is a window box. He is inside the room looking out, with the glass partly clear and partly stained. Indeed there is always an element of distance in Mompou between subject and object. The children’s games, the singing and dancing are seen and heard from the next street.

  Events are the froth of things, but my real interest

  is the sea.

  Paul Valéry

  Federico Mompou was born in Barcelona on 16 April 1893. His mother was French and his father Catalan, and he began musical studies as a child at the Liceo Conservatory in his native city. In 1911 he travelled to Paris to study piano with Isidore Philipp and Ferdinand Motte-Lacroix, and composition with Marcel Samuel-Rousseau. At the outbreak of the First World War he returned to Barcelona for a period of seven years and began composing in earnest. In 1921 he moved back to Paris, living there until his return to Barcelona in 1941, where he remained until his death in June 1987.

  In interviews published in Roger Prevel’s book, La Musique et Federico Mompou (Geneva: Ariana, 1976), the composer revealed some fascinating aspects of his character, which give us a glimpse into his personality more than any commentary could:

  What are your preferred places or cities?

  The solitude of all large towns. Barcelona and Paris where my dearest memories are preserved.

  What are your favourite pastimes?

  Contemplation. Meditation. The cinema.

  What is your main defect?

  Probably the one I’m unaware of … I would say that I have too little sensitivity for the physical sufferings of others … On the other hand I share to excess in the spiritual sufferings of others.

  Which qualities do you prefer in a person?

  Naturalness, sincerity, authenticity.

  Which are your favourite composers?

  Almost all, with the exception of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

  Which discs would you take to a desert island?

  Works of Chopin, of Scriabin. Some songs of Schubert, Schumann, Fauré and Poulenc.

  Which paintings?

  El Greco, Vermeer.

  Mompou also talks of a growing appreciation for certain composers he did not like at first: later Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartók, Berg and Webern (although he made the point that he considered the dogmas of the twelve-note system as such to be a useless hindrance to creative freedom). He did, however, have an interest in electronic music, which is perhaps surprising in the composer who, earlier in this interview, had declared, ‘Without my piano I can do nothing. I absolutely need contact with its ivory keys.’ This bond with the piano is significant, for Mompou was a great pianist (he was a virtuoso of tonal colour and rubato) and when we play his piano music we have to have this same affection for the instrument, grasping the chords, firmly or caressingly, as if we are taking the hands of a dear friend in a warm embrace.

  YOU

  call me the Rose

  says the Rose

  but if you knew

  my real name

  I would wither

  at once

  Paul Claudel: Cent phrases pour éventails

  It is difficult, and doubly redundant, to discuss the individual pieces of Mompou in great detail. The notes are too simple and the soul too complex for conventional analysis. The musical notes are few because the chaff has blown away. It is precisely in the mist beyond the boundary of perception that we begin to see the invisible, to hear the inaudible. With the gentle guidance of the composer we can touch this enchanted world, but we cannot grasp it.

  My recording focuses on the four sets of pieces written between 1917 and 1923 and explores the obscure and mystical world at the centre of Mompou’s output and language. The ‘sandwich’ sequence is not so much designed to present a varied selection of the composer’s music as to give these mysterious works space to breathe, to ‘exist’. The six Canciones y Danzas and six preludes are pieces of a more obvious expressiveness and melodic design and act like frames around the other works, highlighting their bizarre character, and allowing the aural palate to stay clean and receptive. I included the later cycle Paisajes (composed between 1942 and 1960) as it inhabits the same world and is a bridge between the early sets and the Musica callada (‘Music of Silence’) cycle, his major piano work in four books written between 1959 and 1967.

  Mompou wrote thirteen Canciones y Danzas for piano between 1921 and 1979 (plus one for guitar in 1972) and they are a richly varied collection. He described the idea behind this form as ‘a contrast between lyricism and rhythm, to avoid a collection of songs and another of dances, and also due to a natural logical coincidence with a form adopted by many composers’. He goes on to cite Liszt and Bartók in their rhapsodies, although Mompou’s ‘gypsies’ have considerably less of a swagger. These songs come from a more refined voice, and the dance steps are graceful and poised. In fact Wilfrid Mellers insightfully points out a certain affinity with Chopin’s mazurkas, not least in the wistful nostalgia for home that both composers felt living as exiles in Paris.

  The eleven Preludes were written between 1927 and 1960 and typically show the sweeter side of Mompou’s harmonic language. Notable among them are no. 1, originally entitled by the composer ‘A window with light’ and marked in the score ‘Dans le style romance’, and no. 6, for the left hand alone and one of the composer’s most unique and profound pieces – tender and private, passionate yet chaste.

  Cants màgics (1917) was Mompou’s first published work and is dedicated ‘À mon cher maître F. Motte-Lacroix’. These are ‘songs’ in the loosest, or perhaps ‘most primitive’, sense of the word (‘incantations’, Mellers calls them, describing the vocal lines as ‘pre-melodic’), and the marking ‘Obscur’ at the top of no. 2 has surely never seemed more apt. These spells frighten us not through their malevolence, but because we are transported to an unknown, prehistoric world. Here is Mompou’s most deliberate rejection of the cerebral complexity in much artistic thought of the period.

  Charmes (1920/21) continues in the musical dialect of Cants màgics but now strange signposts head each piece to illuminate our path of perception – although these mottos are more like the light of flickering candles in their obscurity. They are literally ‘spells’, which are conjured up for specific purposes: ‘to alleviate suffering’ … ‘to penetrate the soul’ … ‘to inspire love’ … ‘to effect a cure’ … ‘to evoke an image of the past’ … ‘to call up joy’. According to Antonio Inglesias, the composer had not yet met the poet Paul Valéry and did not know his poems of the same name, although these latter were published around the same time.

  Trois Variations (1921), in spite of the abstract-sounding title, belongs to the same family as the other cycles. After a ‘one- finger’ theme there follow three contrasting variations – ‘The Soldiers’, ‘Courtesy’ and ‘Nocturne’ – which are like a miniature anthology of the three musical styles of Mompou: the first is in his typical naive, primitive style, with its echoes of
Satie – these are children dressed as soldiers, not fighting men; the second is a suavely seductive waltz, which folds the theme in a succulently rich harmonic sauce – a reminder, perhaps, that Poulenc was a neighbour in Paris; and the third variation (originally called ‘The Toad’ and later ‘The Frog’ for some unknown reason) is akin to the mystical pieces, with its gentle, undulating accompaniment weaving a magic carpet of sound beneath the trance-transformed theme.

  In the two Dialogues (1923) the keyboard textures are more complex and decorative, and the mood is a little less solitary and interior – there is an attempt at conversation, if only with oneself. The score is filled with Satiesque asides: ‘expliquez … questionnez … répondez plus suppliant … hésitez’ and even, in the second piece, ‘donnez des excuses’. The Dialogues are rather atypical of Mompou’s style in their keyboard writing and in the slightly self-conscious wit of the score’s extra-musical indications. But they come at a point of transition for the composer, the end of an eremitic path, which, some twenty years later, he would return to with the composition of Paisajes, written for the pianist Carmen Bravo, whom he had recently met and who was to become his wife.

  The first two pieces of Paisajes (‘Landscapes’) were composed in 1942 and 1947 respectively and they are among the most visionary and distilled of Mompou’s entire output; the third piece was a later addition in 1960. ‘The Fountain and the Bell’ was written when Mompou had just returned to Barcelona after a twenty-year exile and it was inspired by a courtyard in the Gothic quarter of the city near the cathedral. However, this piece is not concerned with prosaic description as such – there are no water effects and only a solitary, muffled bell. Rather his interest is with the essence of fountains and bells: in philosophical terms, the substance not the accidents. Similarly in ‘The Lake’ (inspired by Barcelona’s Montjuic Park) he is removed from the ‘blueness’, ‘wetness’, ‘stillness’ or ‘storminess’ of the object; rather it is its ‘waterness’ that interests him. A bell is not so much one metal dome, ringing with vibration, but rather every bell ever rung – wedding, funeral, sanctuary or cow – with all their smiles and tears. Furthermore, it is that sense of distance again, of memory; we look past the lake, and it is the breath of the wind that has carried the bell to our ears. Bells are one of the principal ‘presences’ in Mompou’s music (his grandfather had a bell foundry, which the composer must have frequented as a young boy); yet they are not so much a call to prayer, as a prayer itself, an abstract orison celebrating a sacredness in the very quiver of the metal.

  The third piece in the set, ‘Carts of Galicia’, is contemporary with the first book of Musica callada and is almost atonal in its syncopated chord-clusters accompanying a twisted melody played ‘très lointain’. It is an experimental piece, a prototype for Mompou’s late style, and although his journey in search of a purer language might seem rather strained here (we are far from the unaffected lyricism of the Canciones y Danzas), there remains an integrity and a powerful sense of striving, of refining, which calls to mind a poem of St John of the Cross whose writings were the inspiration for the Musica callada cycle:

  Cuanto mas alto se sube,

  Tanto menos se entendia,

  Que es la tenebrosa nube

  Que a noche esclarecia;

  Por eso quien la sabia

  Queda siempre no sabiendo

  Toda ciencia trascendiendo

  The higher he rises

  The less he understands

  Because dark is the cloud

  Which illumines the night;

  That’s why he who knows

  Remains always unknowing

  Transcending all knowledge

  Stanzas concerning an ecstasy experienced in high contemplation, St John of the Cross

  I don’t love Bach

  During a long summer drive a few years ago, with the car radio as companion along the country lanes, some wonderful Schumann songs unexpectedly came flooding out of the speakers. After thinking how beautiful they were I was struck for some reason with the thought that I don’t actually love Schumann. I love his best works, and there are plenty of them to choose from, but I don’t like his less inspired pieces and I think that is the requirement for loving a composer as separate from loving his or her music. It may seem abstruse to draw this distinction but it’s not even about their personalities, in the way that some dislike Wagner because he was such a dislikeable man. It’s deeper than that.

  It’s time to come clean with an extreme personal example: I recognise with crystal clarity that Bach is a greater composer than Mompou, in the way that Rembrandt is a better painter than Rockwell. To put the two composers on the same level would be risible, and the Spaniard would be the first to be nonplussed with embarrassed laughter. Yet, I don’t get Bach, even while I understand his towering genius … but I do get Mompou. Perhaps it’s like friendship, we just like certain people and not others; we resonate with certain composers; we are touched by the cracks between their notes; their music has a ‘smell’ that seduces us, leading us willingly into submission beyond analysis or logic.

  A composer we love is one where we treasure even the dross, even as we recognise that it is dross. Tchaikovsky is one such composer for me. Maybe it’s the lack of dross in Bach that prevents me from feeling completely at home with him. Or the lack of mess. Or the lack of irresolution. Or the lack of self-doubt – although maybe I’m wrong about that.

  I don’t hate Bach

  The only way to avoid being misunderstood in print is to avoid writing anything at all. Soon after a version of the previous reflection appeared in print, with its aim to address a very specific point about whether or not a composer enters the bloodstream despite one’s recognition of their genius, a friend from America emailed me to say that he’d heard an announcer on one of the major radio stations there say, ‘Now we’re going to hear some music by the composer Stephen Hough hates’ – a loose equivalent of Hitler’s well-known, lifelong obsession with building synagogues. (Actually I can’t think of any composer I hate, although there are some whose music I do not choose to listen to.)

  Then in Ian Bostridge’s book A Singer’s Notebook I was chided for my apostasy because I do not find Bach ‘irreducible and indispensable’. I am ‘the inevitable exception that proves the rule’, he wrote. It would of course be ludicrous to call Bach ‘dispensable’, and my example comparing Bach to Mompou, also quoted by Ian, was hyperbolic and related to the way the few lines of a perfectly executed crayon sketch might touch our hearts more than Rembrandt’s Night Watch, but the issue I’m referring to here is something hidden, which shares emotional space in that same part of our souls as our consciences. It’s not open to argument or discussion because it is basically irrational – in the best, most imaginative, most creative, most ecstatic meaning of that term. I do not need convincing; I need seducing.

  Liszt I: the man who invented concert life as we know it

  That it’s over two hundred years since the birth of Franz Liszt seems like a misprint when you consider how his influence on the musical life of the twentieth century was as great as on the nineteenth. The man who was born within an echo of the harpsichord was the most important inspiration and influence on the creation and development of the modern piano. The man who grew up in a world where pianists played perhaps just one item on mixed concert programmes ended up inventing the piano recital (his word) – pianist as star, at the centre of the stage for a whole evening, in profile to a concentrated, adoring audience.

  One of the greatest composer–pianists, he was the man who habitually programmed music by other composers in his concerts. We tend to forget that as a general rule in earlier times composers either played their own music or it was not performed, and Liszt’s generosity to his colleagues has scarcely been equalled and never surpassed. Liszt was the man who pretty much created the idea of the masterclass – piano teacher as guru in a format attracting students from all over the world to travel to the heady, cigar-saturated rooms o
f Weimar and learn as much from absorbing the atmosphere as from memorising the formulae.

  He was a pioneer of the role of conductor as performer. Until Liszt (and later his son-in-law, Hans von Bülow), conductors generally raised a baton only for their own compositions, and they were seen as facilitators of ensemble more than as inspirers of a unified musical vision. And then there is the custom of playing from memory. Before Liszt, putting aside the score was considered to be a lack of seriousness, as if the performer were merely improvising; after Liszt, it became a fixed custom. Indeed, Liszt’s direct influence on over a century of concert life is hard to overestimate … and that’s before we’ve considered his importance as a composer.

  Liszt II: the man who invented modern music

  Liszt onstage, with dazzling fingers on the keyboard causing dazzling jewels to heave on bosoms in the audience, is the predominant image we have of this larger-than-life musician. But when he moved to Weimar in semi-retirement in his mid-thirties he began a far more profound and significant process of invention than pianistic acrobatics in fashionable salons.