The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993

The Devil Prefers Mozart

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. Best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, he wrote more than sixty books of fiction, non-fiction and autobiography, as well as classical music, plays, film scripts, essays and articles.

Burgess was born in Manchester, England and grew up in Harpurhey and Moss Side. He was educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He lived in Malaya, Malta, Monaco, Italy and the United States, and his books are still widely read all over the world.

Paul Phillips is the Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies and Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is the author of A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, published in 2010, and essays on Burgess published in six other books, including the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange. He has conducted many Burgess compositions including numerous first performances and the premiere recording of Burgess's orchestral music, released by Naxos in 2016.

also by anthony burgess

available from carcanet

Collected Poems (2020)

The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism,

1961–1993 (2018)

Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems (2002)

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Carcanet

Alliance House, 30 Cross Street

Manchester, M2 7AQ

www.carcanet.co.uk

Text copyright © Anthony Burgess 2024

The right of Anthony Burgess to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

The right of Paul Phillips to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN: 978 1 80017 309 5

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Part I

MUSICAL MUSINGS

1. The Writer and Music

2. Shakespeare in Music

3. Music at the Millennium

4. Punk

5. Why Punk Had to End in Evil

6. Musical Autodidact

7. A Mystery and its Monument

8. Turning the Handle

9. The Well-Tempered Revolution

10. Tuned to the Future

11. The Ruination of Music

12. Food and Music

13. The Mystery of Melody

14. Introduction to Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano

15. Blest Pair of Sirens?

16. The Devil Prefers Mozart

17. Beatlemania

Part II

COMPOSERS AND THEIR MUSIC

18. Pearls Before Swine

19. Handel, not Händel – A Tricentennial Tribute

20. Handel Homage

21. Good Gluck

22. A Professional Music-Maker Beloved of God

23. Notes from the Deep

24. Anthropomorphically Analytical

25. Music of the Spheres?

26. The Ninth

27. Strega in Do Maggiore

28. Cosmos and Cosima

29. Richard Wagner

30. Ring

31. His Objects Were Sublime

32. Native Wood-Notes

33. Elgar non è volgare

34. Gentlemen v. Players

35. Mister Delius

36. Startalk

37. In Tune with the Popular Soul

38. Unravelling Ravel

39. I Hear an Army

40. Engaging the Sensorium

41. Stravinsky’s Potent Spirit

42. A Great Lady

43. A Berliner on Broadway

Part III

BURGESS AND HIS MUSIC

44. Symphony in C

45. How I Wrote My Third Symphony

46. A Writer and Music

47. The Making of a Writer

48. Musicalising Ulysses

49. Blooms of Dublin

50. The Guitar and I

51. A Few Words about a Guitar Concerto

52. Concerto Grosso for Guitar Quartet and Orchestra

53. The Aïghetta Quartet

54. Concert Introductions

55. The Twenty-Four-String Guitar

56. Petite Symphonie pour Strasbourg

Part IV

PERFORMERS AND PERFORMANCES

57. Britten, Adler, Jazz

58. Beethoven Violin Concerto

59. Britten War Requiem

60. Reflections on a Golden Ring

61. Enjoying Walton

62. The Vocation of a Virtuoso

63. The Prince of Percussion

64. Highly Vocal

65. Performers: A Necessary Evil

66. Anybody Can Conduct

67. Hand to Mouth

68. John Sebastian – A Personal Reminiscence

69. A Conductor with a Talent for Resurrection

Part V

OPERA

70. Introduction to Don Giovanni and Idomeneo

71. The Music is the Message

72. When Music Does the Talking

73. Sounds and Settings

74. A Librettist’s Lament

75. Coloratura Work Amid the Archive

Commentary

Text Sources

Bibliography

Index

Dedicated to the memory of

Richard Taruskin and Kevin Jackson,

inspiring mentors and friends

The Devil Prefers Mozart

Introduction

Anthony Burgess’s brilliance as an essayist and passion for music are united in this collection, the most complete compilation to date of his writings on music. The Devil Prefers Mozart comprises seventy-five chapters of essays, reviews and letters plus the occasional interview or transcription. Approximately a tenth of the entries are published here for the first time, with most of the previously published items drawn from the Observer (16), The Listener (9), The Times (2) and The Times Literary Supplement (11), the New York Times (4) and New York Times Book Review (1), as well as the Independent, the Guardian, the Spectator, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, the Musical Times, Classical Guitar, High Fidelity and a few other publications. Several essays were published in Italian translation in Corriere della Sera (8) and in French translation in Harmonie-Panorama Musique (2) or its successor, Harmonie hi-fi conseil (1). Except for the omission of ‘Shaw as Musician’ from One Man’s Chorus, whose content overlaps with ‘Tuned to the Future’ (since both are reviews of the same edition of George Bernard Shaw’s music criticism), all essays on music previously published in Homage to QWERT YUIOP (But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?) and One Man’s Chorus are included in this volume.

The book is structured in five parts, with the chapters in each (except Part II) arranged more or less chronologically according to when they were written. Part I, Musical Musings, is a varied assortment of writings on topics ranging from Shakespeare in Music to Punk to Beatlemania. Part II, Composers and Their Music, is arranged by composers’ dates, from Claudio Monteverdi to Kurt Weill. Part III, Burgess and His Music, comprises a varied assortment of essays, articles, letters, programme and liner notes, plus an interview. Part IV, Performers and Performances, and Part V, Opera, consist mainly of essays, articles, and reviews. The commentary at the end of the volume aims to contextualize each chapter with pertinent background information.

Conjoining entertainment with education, Burgess’s prose sparkles with wit and erudition. Many texts are on his favourite subjects: Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, opera, his own musical compositions, and the relation between words and music. There is an emphasis on British composers – especially Elgar, Holst, Walton and Britten – and authors especially connected with music, such as Shakespeare, Shaw and Joyce. We are reminded of (or first learn about) composers such as Cowen, MacCunn and Mackenzie; entertainers such as Gracie Fields, Bombardier Billy Wells and Tony Hancock; and films by Charlie Chaplin, Ken Russell and Luchino Visconti. Of particular interest are the essays, reviews and letters related to those musicians whom Burgess knew personally – John Sebastian, Larry Adler and Yehudi Menuhin – and the references to and exchanges with the music journalist Hans Keller, who got under Burgess’s skin like no one else.

My acquaintance with many of these texts dates back to my research in the late 1990s and early 2000s for A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, in which many of them are cited. Since the publication of that book in 2010, evidence has emerged that contradicts certain autobiographical myths that Burgess propagated for decades; Simon Johnson’s landmark archival research, cited in the commentary on Chapter 47, The Making of a Writer, is of especial importance, setting the record straight about the ‘Beautiful Belle Burgess’. The scores of numerous Burgess compositions that were considered lost when A Clockwork Counterpoint was published have been located since, including the Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in G Minor (1945); Concerto for Flute, Strings & Piano in D Minor (1951); Rhapsody for Bass Tuba and Orchestra (ca. 1991); and two pieces for harmonica and guitar composed for John Sebastian (1972). While detailed musical description and analysis of these works would exceed the scope of this volume, most are mentioned as they relate to particular writings.

Burgess has his quirks and shortcomings. He is certain that when Lady Macbeth urges the Thane of Cawdor to ‘Screw your courage to the sticking-place’, she alludes to the tuning of a lute (which may not be the case) and that there’s a von in Hans Richter’s name (there isn’t). Beethoven did not include so-called ‘Turkish music’ (extra percussion beyond timpani) for the first time in his Ninth Symphony, François Habeneck was not conducting Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini when he took out his snuffbox, Leopold Stokowski was not originally named Stokes, and Cathy Berberian does not sing ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ on Stravinsky: The Recorded Legacy. But such minor lapses (which are all identified and explained) do not greatly diminish the overall pleasure of this book, which combines interesting subject matter, strong opinions and stylistic elegance in a way meant to appeal to a wide range of readers interested in music. And then there are the words! The Burgessian vocabulary encompasses such terms as theodician, multiguous, parthenogenetical, stichomythia, quinquennium, apodemoniosis, and apothaneintheloish. These are defined in the notes, but readers who recoil at such sesquipedalian extravagance may want to head for the exit now.

A word about style. The reader is kindly asked to accept this book’s stylistic inconsistency as an unavoidable consequence of the way it straddles both sides of the Atlantic. While most of the writings in this collection were written for the Observer, The TLS, The Listener and other British publications, a sizable number were published in the New York Times and various American periodicals. As a result, most of Burgess’s writings accord with British usage while some follow American spelling and style.

Burgess’s idiosyncratic style presents challenges to the editor. He frequently breaks up compound words like ‘someday’, ‘forever’, and ‘concertmaster’ into two words yet omits the hyphen or space in compound words such as ‘middle-aged’ and ‘double bass’, rendering them instead as ‘middleaged’ and ‘doublebass’. Often there are different forms of an expression – for example, ‘finger-click’ (in The Observer) and ‘finger click’ (in Homage to QWERT YUIOP) – in different versions of the same text. In all such cases, I have exercised my best judgment in choosing which form to include.

Most titles in the typescripts are underlined (like Ulysses) while in newspapers like the Observer or the New York Times, they are often indicated by quotation marks (i.e., ‘Ulysses’ or Ulysses). For uniformity, titles are consistently rendered in italics (Ulysses) unless quoted from a letter or cited within a quotation. Aïghetta Quartet is spelled throughout this volume with two dots over the ‘i’ even though the diæresis is often omitted in the source texts. Misspelled proper nouns – like Infante (not Enfante) in the title of Ravel’s Pavane in Chapter 38, and Stéphane Grappelli (not Stephane Grappelly) in Chapter 62 – are corrected without comment, and names that are repeatedly rendered inaccurately, like ‘Hans von Richter’ and ‘Frederick Cowan’, are corrected throughout. When original typescripts are unavailable, one cannot know if Burgess wrote German nouns like zigarettenpause (Chapter 60) in lower case intentionally or if an editor was responsible. In such cases, these terms are capitalized as they would be in ordinary German usage.

Notes are used primarily to explain obscure literary, cultural and historical references; to identify correspondences with Burgess’s life and work, especially his novels and music compositions; and to point out connections between different parts of this book. On the assumption that most readers possess prior knowledge of classical music, notes are not provided for most of the well-known composers and performers mentioned except to comment on particular aspects of a work or individual.

The Devil Prefers Mozart is both a compilation of Anthony Burgess’s dazzling music journalism and testimony to his lifelong devotion to music. If one dates the beginning of his sixty-three-year-long involvement with music to his revelatory hearing of Debussy’s Faun around 1930, then the writings in this collection, dating from 1962 through 1993, neatly cover the second half of that period while recalling musical memories from decades prior. In sum, this volume is – like most of Burgess’s books – part biography, part autobiography, part history and part fiction.

Paul Phillips

9 September 2023

Acknowledgments

Since my research on Anthony Burgess extends back more than twenty-five years, it is virtually impossible to acknowledge everyone who has provided assistance along the way but essential to begin with the late Liana Burgess. If she had not granted me access to her late husband’s papers, materials and music compositions in 1997, this research could hardly have begun. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin furnished critical early support by awarding me an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship in 1999, with Dell Hollingsworth and Lisa Jones providing exceptional assistance with the Burgess archive that the Ransom Center had just acquired at the time. The International Anthony Burgess Foundation and its first director, the late Professor Alan Roughley, were also essential, as were numerous individuals at the Université d’Angers associated with the Anthony Burgess Centre, notably Professor Ben Forkner, its first director, and archivist Valérie Neveu. The librarians at the Orwig Music Library at Brown University also provided vital assistance during those initial years of research.

The recent work that led to completion of this volume would not have been possible without the support and assistance of Andrew Biswell, Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, and former Deputy Director Will Carr, who both provided key documents from the IABF archive for this collection and assisted the project with vital information and encouragement. I wish to acknowledge Tamar Barzel, Head of the Stanford University Music Library and Archive of Recorded Sound, and her wonderful team, which includes Ray Heigemeir, Vincent Kang, Nathan Coy and Benjamin Bates, for their support, and my Stanford colleagues, including Stephen Hinton and my dear wife Kathryne Jennings, both of whom provided very helpful suggestions. Generous assistance was also provided by Sarah Sussman (Curator of French and Italian Collections and Head of the Humanities and Area Studies Resource Group of the Stanford University Libraries); John Shepard (Curator of Music Collections at the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, University of California-Berkeley); Sarah Horowitz (Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, and Head of Quaker & Special Collections) and Katherine Hong of the Haverford College Libraries; and Professor Steven Cox (Curator, Special Collections & University Archives, Pittsburg State University). For assistance with translation, I gratefully acknowledge Veronika Schubert, Enguerrand Horel, and Giancarlo Aquilanti, and for her help in bringing this book to publication, I offer my sincere thanks to Georgia Glover of David Higham Associates.

I am extremely grateful to Jeremy Menuhin for granting permission to print letters written by his father Yehudi Menuhin, and to the Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust for granting permission to print writings by Hans Keller. Additionally, I am especially grateful to Simon Johnson for granting permission to include material from his unpublished monograph ‘The Beautiful Belle Burgess: A Biography of Elizabeth Burgess – The Mother Anthony Burgess Never Knew’. Thanks to his meticulous research, there is now a clear distinction between fact and fiction in Anthony Burgess’s accounts of his maternal family history.

Finally, I wish to thank Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press for publishing this book, and editors Andrew Latimer and Maren Meinhardt for their important contributions. I am extremely grateful to all of them for their advice, assistance and support. Much effort has been expended to make this book as informative and accurate as possible, and free of mistakes, but for any errors that remain, I bear sole responsibility.

Abbreviations

ACC A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess (Phillips)

HQY Homage to QWERT YUIOP

LW Little Wilson and Big God

SCW Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (White)

TMM This Man and Music

YH You’ve Had Your Time

NOTE

Citations that occur in both This Man and Music (1982) and the Irwell Edition of This Man and Music (2020) are indicated by ‘TMM’ followed by a pair of page numbers or page ranges separated by a slash, as in ‘TMM, p. 23/43’ or ‘TMM, pp. 18/38-39’.

Part I

MUSICAL MUSINGS

1. The Writer and Music

I have been thinking about the musician as hero since reading John Wain’s new novel Strike the Father Dead.1 Jeremy, Mr Wain’s hero, is a jazz pianist – or so he tells us. I used to be a jazz pianist myself, and I was not always convinced that Jeremy was doing much more than going through the motions – as though acting the part in a film with a dubbed sound-track.

The musician as hero has attracted a number of novelists, but it used to be the great romantic composer instead of the jazzman – Lewis Dodd, for instance, in The Constant Nymph.2 I have never been really happy about Dodd’s Symphony in Three Keys, since the whole point about a tonal symphony is its key unity. But Margaret Kennedy always seemed to me like the lady in Oscar Wilde who didn’t care a bit for music but was extremely fond of musicians.3 The appeal of the great romantic composer is not his talent but his temperament, and this is true even of the biggest novel ever written about a composer – Jean Christophe, by Romain Rolland. The hero is all storm and stress, an amalgam of the personalities of Beethoven and Wagner, great lover and fiery revolutionary. There is not much room left for mere music.

The fact is that much of a composer’s life is sheer physical drudgery, and that is no subject for the romantic novelist. The writing of an opera or symphony is extremely hard work, and only one novelist has been willing to show it – Thomas Mann. His Doctor Faustus is the only novel of any importance which has created a really credible composer. His name is Adrian Leverkühn, and we are not merely told of his greatness, it is demonstrated to us: his works are closely analysed; we can almost hear them. And the smell of ink, the long agony of orchestral scoring, is built into the book.

There is no important English novel about a musician, though there have been several good ones – Stanley Middleton’s Harris’s Requiem, for instance.4 It has taken a long time to break down the tradition among English men of letters that music is an inferior art – a sort of mindless literature, sound without sense. I think Dr Johnson, who was tone-deaf, helped to create this attitude. Shakespeare would not have understood it; Shakespeare knew music from the inside. Only a man who had actually tuned a lute could make Lady Macbeth say: ‘Screw your courage to the sticking-place’.5

Robert Browning rehabilitated music by making it a pretext for demonstrating his own brand of nineteenth-century optimism, but Samuel Butler was the first English novelist to take music seriously. As with Shakespeare, we get music from the inside. Since Butler, only two important novelists working in English have really put music into their writing – James Joyce and Aldous Huxley. Joyce, in the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses, comes as near to a genuine synthesis of literary and musical techniques as seems humanly possible. Huxley, as he has just demonstrated again in Island, knows everything, but his musical insight and erudition are really formidable. Again, it is music from the inside – the accidentally added seventh in the piano improvisation of Crome Yellow; in Antic Hay the fingers of Gumbril, which learn Emily’s body as they once learned a Mozart sonata.6 It was Huxley who showed, in Point Counter Point, how fiction could be musicalized.

I still think that the novelist has much to learn from musical form: novels in sonata-form, rondo-form, fugue-form are perfectly feasible. There is much to be learnt also from mood-contrasts, tempo-contrasts in music: the novelist can have his slow movements and his scherzi. Music can also teach him how to modulate, how to recapitulate; the time for the formal presentation of his themes, the time for the free fantasia.

In a general sense, though, the practitioner in words should be interested in a cognate art: he should know where literature ends and music begins. Swinburne did not know this: he tried to make his verse do a job that music could do far better. But of Swinburne this story is told: for a joke, somebody played Three Blind Mice to him on the piano and told him it was an old Florentine air. ‘Ah yes’, said Swinburne when it was finished, ‘it evokes the cruel beauty of the Borgias’.

The Listener, 1962

1As quoted in ‘Did You Hear That?’. The first sentence continues, ‘said Anthony Burgess in The World of Books (Home Service)’

2In The Constant Nymph , a 1924 novel by Margaret Kennedy, two cousins fall in love with a young composer named Lewis Dodd. After he marries one of the women, the younger one dies of a broken heart.

3A reference to Lady Fermor in Oscar Wilde’s short story ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime: A Study of Duty’, in which Monsieur de Koloff, the Russian Ambassador, tells ‘poor Lady Fermor, right out before every one, that she did not care a bit for music, but was extremely fond of musicians.’

4Renowned for his perceptive portrayal of provincial life and the lives of ordinary people, novelist Stanley Middleton was a co-winner of the Booker Prize in 1974 for Holiday . In Harris’s Requiem  (1960), Thomas Harris, a coal miner’s son and classical composer, writes a requiem after his father’s death to honour people who have been forgotten and neglected.

5While this may refer to the tuning of a lute, another possible explanation involves animal slaughter. In the OED, ‘sticking place’ is defined as ‘the point at the base of the neck of an animal where the knife is thrust in, either to slaughter or bleed the animal; the lower part of the neck or throat’. The earliest citation, from Foure bookes of husbandry by Conrad Heresbach (transl. Barnaby Googe), predates Macbeth by four decades. The term may also refer to a crossbow, in which a wooden screw is turned to pull the string taut. When the screw cannot be turned further, it is at the ‘sticking place’ and ready to be released. The expression could refer to any or all of these.

6In The Pianoplayers , dedicated ‘To Liana, che conosce tutta la scala cromatica dell’amore’ (To Liana, who knows the entire chromatic scale of love), Burgess would employ a similar theme: ‘A Female Body… is not just a pleasing shape with a hole in it. It is more like a musical instrument made of flesh and blood that has music waiting inside it but only for properly trained hands to coax out.’ The Pianoplayers , p. 93

2. Shakespeare in Music

Shakespeare in Music, edited by Phyllis Hartnoll

London: Macmillan, 1964

Dr Samuel Johnson, that Berlin Wall of taste, may be taken as the patron saint of all literary men who lack a musical ear and somehow glory in lacking it. The ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which began in the Age of Reason goes further than the art of literature; it cracks up the whole corpus of art, turning a former continent into a number of islands. Since Johnson’s day, the right ear has gloried in not knowing what the left ear is doing. It comes as a shock to some writers to be told that the arts of literature and music are cognate, and that you cannot successfully practise one without knowing the scope and limitations of the other. Swinburne, lacking this knowledge, tried to make his poetry a kind of pure music. Richard Strauss, with a kind of neurotic perverseness, made his music a sort of impure literature. To go back to the world of Shakespeare, in which the distinct but germane functions of literature and music were instinctively but perfectly known, is to encounter the life of a lost Eden, the air healthy, the food wholesome, no walls up anywhere.

John Stevens’s essay – the first of the four that make up this admirable book – concerns itself with music as an aspect of Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare is, naturally, in the foreground, but it is salutary to be reminded that his virtues, in awareness of the function of music as in everything else, are great but not unique. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus must strike many a musician as a ready-made libretto (strange that no British composer has set it as it stands), with its arias, duets, ensembles, antiphonal Good and Evil Angels, sung exorcism scene, Seven Deadly Sins ballet, dances of devils, chorus commentary. There is something in the very blank verse of early Elizabethan drama – the cut-and-thrust of stichomythia, the binding of one line to the next with an echoing word – that suggests a near-musical heredity (were Seneca’s closet-dramas perhaps not intoned rather than spoken?). Apart from all this, the Elizabethans knew precisely when and how to make music serve a dramatic end, the place for hautboys and the place for the ‘broken consort’, the delicately judged need for song or chorus, and Shakespeare, first among his peers, excelled here as in everything.

But there is something else in Shakespeare, something qualitatively different from the mere expertise of his fellows, and that is an apparent intimacy with, as it were, the two outer ends of music – the physical process of its making, the metaphysical significance of its make-up. When we hear Lady Macbeth telling her recalcitrant lord to ‘screw your courage to the sticking-place’, the reference is evidently to the tuning of a lute, the small agony of a delicate technical act. The Pythagorean disquisition in The Merchant of Venice is well known, though its curse on the unmusical has been ignored by too many. Ulysses’s speech on the necessity of order in Troilus and Cressida uses the image of the untuning of a string, and one cannot doubt that this was no mere conventional trope – Shakespeare physically heard the untuning and in it was aware of the unholy jangling of what had been the music of the spheres.

But Shakespeare’s musicianship has been made most evident to the world in the sheer craft of his lyrics (Charles Cudworth gives us an exhaustive historical survey of the settings of these). I doubt if the eagerness of three centuries of composers to make songs out of Shakespeare’s words has had very much to do with mere reverential duty. Schubert heard the lyrics, and the music came. Jazzmen like Duke Ellington and Johnny Dankworth are too busy for bardolatry.1 Shakespeare is a god, but he was also a man of the theatre, and he knew which words would set and which would not. Simplicity – even conventionality – of theme, variety of vowel and diphthong, concentration on voiced consonants rather than unvoiced – these are the big lyric secrets. Sometimes, as in ‘Take O take those lips away’, meaning goes under and is not greatly missed. Once, in Pandarus’s dirty song in Troilus and Cressida, the sound of orgasm only comes to shocking life when we hear the setting: it looks like mere harmless nonny-nonny on the page.2

*

Sometimes setability spills over from the functional lyric to the blank-verse speech. Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music (‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank’) joins Johnny Dankworth’s very interesting ‘If music be the food of love’ in drawing words away from context, diminishing Shakespeare by enclosing him, however exquisite the result. Parry’s setting of John of Gaunt’s dying speech does what many political orations do with that great metaphorical catalogue – sets up an unfortunate confusion in the ear of the listener who remembers how the speech ends: ‘... Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, / Like to a tenement or pelting farm’. How far should composers work in Shakespeare’s service and how far merely use him?

This is the area where the book is of most interest. Write incidental music for Shakespeare’s plays (songs or entr’actes) and there is the possibility that it may be swallowed up in the shadow of his mountain. Only those songs with the most general of themes survive in the repertory (like Quilter’s or Warlock’s or Schubert’s): here the composer can assert himself. How many sets of incidental music are now heard in the concert-hall? After Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music one can think of little, and even with Mendelssohn, as Roger Fiske reminds us here, we have less a true theatre overture than a symphonic poem. Sonata form is scrupulously fulfilled, but with subtleties of variation in the recapitulation section which suggest a pictorial aim (Bottom’s ophicleide under Titania’s fairy-music). The great Shakespearean orchestral scores have nothing to do with the theatre, but they have, in a miracle of transference, a great deal to do with Shakespeare. There aren’t many of them. Berlioz’s Queen Mab Scherzo is an exact musical equivalent of Mercutio’s speech, not an ideal accompaniment for it. The composer touched that area of the mind which antecedes either words or music: here he met Shakespeare. I am glad that Dr Fiske spends so much space considering the greatest Shakespearean orchestral work of them all: Elgar’s Falstaff. This astonishing symphonic poem achieves the ultimate penetration. The form is literary in that it follows the Falstaff story (though the two brief interludes reach a dimension no purely verbal art could touch); the themes themselves derive from that pre-articulatory region where the image trembles between music and poetry. Music is an international art, but only an Englishman could have composed Falstaff.

Yes, you will say, but don’t we have Verdi? Winton Dean’s remarkable essay on Shakespeare and Opera must convince most of us that we only have Verdi because we have Boito, and his account of the transmutation of Othello into Otello (a miracle of a libretto if ever there was one) illuminates the whole problem of turning great plays into great operas. Mr Dean’s survey makes us gape with horror and wonder: the ineptitudes, the misunderstandings, the butcherings – can such things really have been? I said earlier that Faustus will set to music almost as it stands, but Shakespeare’s length and complexity renders music supererogatory as well as (if we can achieve the music at all) calling for the expansiveness of a whole Ring for a single play. The librettist’s job is to render down existing greatness into something potentially great, to concentrate on a structure equivalent to, but different from, that of the original, to provide opportunities for the poetry which is now music but himself to eschew anything like the verbal intensities which are strongest when they are spoken. Can Shakespeare’s words be used in a libretto? Only when they carry a minimal poetry, as in Holst’s admirable At the Boar’s Head. Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is all Shakespeare (though Shakespeare shifted totally to a fairy’s-eye-view), yet this is a young and unbuttoned bard whose poetry is more decorative than expressive. The comedies, though not all that easy, are easier than the tragedies, and if we want an operatic Hamlet or King Lear (though this must be a near-impossibility) we must look for a new Boito.

That this is a useful book, as well as an eye-opening and provocative one, is attested not solely by the comprehensiveness of the descriptive and historical treatment but by the catalogue and composers’ check-list that fill the last 80 pages. It is a worthy contribution to the quatercentenary celebrations, and it is not only for musicians but for all who consider themselves lovers of Shakespeare, whether their starting-point be the study, the theatre, or the critic’s laboratory. A great artist throws his beams on every human endeavour. The sundering waters are dried up, and the islands are revealed once more as limbs of the total continent of art.

The Musical Times, 1964

1In ‘Song and Part-Song Settings of Shakespeare’s Lyrics, 1660–1960’, Cudworth writes, ‘Johnny Dankworth, too, has added to the repertory of Shakespearean jazz with various settings, including a very attractive If music be the food of love, as well as a vocal version of part of Duke Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder.’ Shakespeare in Music , p. 87

2Act III, sc. 1 (lines 120-5):

These lovers cry ‘O ho!’ they die,

Yet that which seems the wound to kill

Doth turn ‘O ho!’ to ‘Ha ha he!’

So dying love lives still.

‘O ho!’ awhile, but ‘Ha ha ha!’

‘O ho!’ groans out for ‘ha ha ha!’ – Hey ho!

3. Music at the Millennium

That we should respond with a special kind of fearful expectation to the year 2001 more than to any other in the future – except perhaps 1984 – can be explained partly by the glamor of a certain Kubrick film. The year 1000, according to our Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, was to be a time of great prodigies, full of sin, murder, and anti-Christ, and presumably 1001 was to be no better. Yet 1000 and 1001 turned out to be very much like 975 and 976. People attach mystical significance to numbers to such an extent that terms like ‘millennium’ and ‘chiliastic’ imply a quantum leap change in the whole structure of human society.

This is all nonsense, of course. We’re twenty-five years away from 2001, and, if what has happened in the past quarter-century is any guide, we’d be unwise to expect to enter a world of fable, especially in the arts. The arts don’t truckle to time. The arts have their own in-built notions of pastness and futurity. I have on my desk now a copy of Wyndham Lewis’ Blast, a magazine that lasted two violent issues. When I show it to young people and ask them when they think it was produced, they usually say 1951 or 1960 or 1969. They are surprised when they see the real date: 1915. Give to a wholly innocent ear some bars of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (1912) and then a chunk of Stravinsky’s 1959 atonal writing (say, the pieces for piano and orchestra).1 If there is a time-response at all, it is as likely to reverse history as to confirm it. For me, in music and literature alike, the period 1912–39 is much more futuristic, more 2001-ish than anything that has come after.

Before considering the hellish question of what sorts of music will be available for the year of 2001, we ought to glance at and then push out of the way the new audio-technical wonders we can expect. Stereophonic recording and reproduction is already giving place to quadriphonic, as though man had four ears. As a sort of musician, I have always been doubtful about the value of such marvels, but this may be my age showing. I had my first formative musical experience in 1929, when I heard Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune on a homemade crystal set; nothing since, for me, has been able to touch that old black magic. I clung to an HMV acoustic phonograph until I went to Malaya in 1954, there to find the tropical heat deforming my short-play records, turning them into licorice saucers. Like everybody else, I became a high fidelity man. I am not, however, all that impressed by music that bounces all around the room like a ball or – to put it another way – antiphonalizes from speaker to speaker. The spatialization of music, which is what today’s audio experts are concerned with, has something to do with the primacy of the eye that is central to our age. Music jumps from ear to ear like a live thing: you can almost see it. Videor, ergo sum.2 I need not, as Mr. Chips used to say, translate.3

Along with the refinement of the techniques for reproducing music, we may expect, by 2001, an increased difficulty on the part of the ear itself to cope with these refinements. The acoustic irony of the near future will be merely a grosser version of what we find surrounding us now. Muzak in restaurants, airports, even government buildings is desensitizing the general capacity to take in musical sounds as meaningful statements. When we are sufficiently, though gently, nagged, we no longer take in nagging as speech. The diminishing of musical sound to a permanent whisper is complemented, at the other end of the scale, by its augmentation to a level undreamt of even by Berlioz. The amplified guitar group can be, to my generation, an experience that touches the threshold of pain. But a younger generation takes the new sound level for granted and, conceivably, hardly hears Muzak at all. When Hans Keller interviewed some plentifully haired but not very talented pop musicians on television, he apologized for not being able to accept their loudness easily: ‘I was brought up on chamber music.’ The response was aggressive and derisive: ‘Ugh, we bloody well wasn’t,’ or words to that effect. By 2001 we shall have, without doubt, a generation unable even to hear chamber music.

On the other hand, I have the utmost confidence in the capacity of some of the young to master traditional instrumental techniques and to bring them, by the end of the millennium, to a point that would leave a resurrected Liszt and Paganini gasping with disbelief. The musical talent currently available in America, especially in traditional ensemble work, is incredible. Whether the technical expertise is matched by musical understanding is another question. The language of music, lauded and prized for its ability to transcend mere verbal language and to act as a sort of world auxiliary of the emotions, is a frail and subtle thing, and its qualities are not easily transmitted either by great executants or great teachers. The language of the music of, say, the classical era owed a good deal to instrumental limitations that the composer accepted and tried to exploit. Trumpets and horns could do little more than hammer out a tonic and dominant, but Mozart made a glory out of this inarticulateness. In the near future, if not already, trumpets and horns as sprightly as clarinets, double basses as swift and sonorous as violas, will dissolve the physical obstacles of art that the composer used to delight in exploiting.

And what stretched strings and air-filled cylinders cannot do, synthetic sounds are already learning to do with frightening efficiency. I think, however, that disenchantment with synthetic music-makers is already on its way. It’s all too easy, this Moog-musicalizing; easy because the parameters of the admissible and inadmissible are hard to define.4 No art should ever be too easy, and the easiness of the musical art – for the lowlier talent – began when the barriers between consonance and dissonance went down and, indeed, the chromatic scale was democratized. What was artistic agony to Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern is a cinch to their followers. What I predict we will see, or hear, coming about in 2001 are the beginnings of a synthesis that has nothing to do with Moogs.

Various ways of composition are available to the composer today. He can use a style generally diatonic, with chromatic trimmings – a style, that is, that acknowledges a hierarchy of notes of the traditional European scale and pays some kind of homage to a key-center. This mode of composition has its most blatant exponents among the pop practitioners and the writers of film scores. ‘Serious’ composers are frightened of keys and major and minor and modal scales. However, as musicians like Darius Milhaud showed, this traditional kind of music could be sophisticated, made apt for ‘seriousness,’ by multiplication of key-centers in the kind of composition known as polytonal. Polytonality was so marked, however, by Milhaud’s own personal method that to use it seems all too often like creating a Milhaud pastiche.

There remains what Schoenberg bequeathed and Stravinsky eventually yielded to – serialism. But is serialism enough? Even Schoenberg seems to have thought not.5 When art develops, it should ‘enclose’ what goes before, as Beethoven encloses Haydn. The looked-for synthesis of the end of the millennium is a composer of personality strong enough to create an individual language out of the century’s three main heritages – the diatonic, the serial, and the polytonal – without the aid of literary texts. One makes this last condition because the urgent formal need of the music of the future is the development of structure analogous to Beethovenian symphonic structure: musical argument at length, intellectuality manifesting itself structurally, not doctrinally. Perhaps the most considerable of contemporary composers, Luciano Berio, is still able to create at length only when he has the prop of the extramusical: text, noise, and quotations from others’ music.6 Music does not need language, any more than language needs music.

Generalization is never enough. Let us present a practical scenario for a composer of 2001. He is commissioned to write a piano concerto.7 He has a free hand, all the instrumental resources in the world, a virtuoso performer capable of anything. Because a concerto imposes a particular relationship between a soloist and an ensemble, our composer is not at liberty to use the pianoforte in a ‘concertante’ way, making it a mere part of the orchestra. Because a concerto demands a considerable degree of exposition of technical resource, or showing off, he has to think in terms of duration greater than that, say, of a Webern vignette. Twenty minutes? Thirty? Because of the variety of pianistic modes to be exhibited, there must be a variety of styles, rhythms, and tempos. Our composer will, whether he likes it or not, end up with the ‘natural’ alternation of slow and fast or active and contemplative. He may end with the traditional three movements or the Brahmsian four. If he feels, so shackled, that he is truckling too much to the past, he ought to reflect that he is confusing tradition and ‘nature’. We all have to submit to the basic rhythms of the body, of the seasons, of the alternations of mood that are built into the human psyche.

If he is wise, our composer will not disown the traditional ‘romantic’ orchestra merely because Strauss or Elgar used it before him. No composer has to use three flutes, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, double bassoon, and so forth, but he might at least consider, before disrupting or jettisoning his woodwinds, that here is God’s plenty. The orchestra is the end-product of a long and painful evolutionary process, and it asks not to be disowned because it belongs to the dirty ‘past’, but to be used in new and individual ways. It can bear subtraction (as in Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande, where the woodwinds go), and it can bear addition (electronic effects, the typewriter of Hindemith’s News of the Day, the nightingale of Respighi’s Pines of Rome), but never wantonly, out of mere puritanism or the desire to shock.8

The composer must now think out his themes – always with contrast in mind. There may be contrasting themes, or there may be contrasting aspects of the same theme: it seems that we are, by nature, committed to a sonata view of a theme or a variational one. There is no reason why he should apologize to the world for thinking in tonal terms, to begin with. The introduction of a polytonal element thickens the plot, introduces argument, and can lead the way naturally to the conversion of a tonal theme into an atonal one:9

I needn’t say that the aesthetic value of the work will depend less on the techniques used than on the power of the composer’s personality to express itself in highly individual statements – but always within the framework of a piece of music essentially ‘extrovert’, public, even blatantly designed for display. Such musical personalities are at present frequently shackled because of fear – fear of being vulgar, obvious, outdated. Perhaps 2001 A.D. will, musically, be less a time for odysseys into the new than a beginning of synthesis, upgathering what the past has had to offer and seeing how a limitless musical language can be put together out of the fragmented dialects lying around us. Joyce’s Ulysses is an exercise in the use of ‘total’ verbal language. We need that kind of achievement in music. But why should we have to wait until 2001?

High Fidelity, 1976

1Movements for piano and orchestra (composed 1958–9). Burgess would have heard this work performed live the previous year at the premiere of his Third Symphony. See Chapter 44 Symphony in C .

2I am seen, therefore I am – a play on Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum : I think, therefore I am.

3The phrase ‘haec olim meminisse juvabit’  (literally, ‘someday it will be a pleasure to remember these things’, or, metaphorically, ‘one day we’ll look back on all this and laugh’) from Virgil’s Aeneid occurs in Aeneas’s speech to his fellow Trojan warriors after they’ve been shipwrecked following the Trojan War. In James Hilton’s 1934 novella Goodbye Mr. Chips (later adapted into the 1939 film), the Classics teacher Mr. Chipping says ‘haec olim meminisse juvabit –  of course, I need not translate’ upon receiving a retirement gift from his students.

4Bob Moog created the first commercial synthesizer, which he introduced in 1964. Wendy Carlos popularized it in 1968 with the hit album Switched-On Bach , which featured Carlos’s arrangements of Bach compositions performed on a Moog synthesizer, and subsequently with the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange , Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation of Burgess’s 1962 novel. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, numerous rock bands, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, had used the Moog synthesizer on recordings or in live performances.

5Schoenberg returned to composing tonal music toward the end of his life.

6Sinfonia, perhaps Berio’s most famous work, is a multi-movement orchestral piece that incorporates musical quotations from dozens of composers (including Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio himself) and text from writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Samuel Beckett and others, which are vocalized (spoken, whispered, shouted) by eight amplified voices.

7At the time that he wrote this article, Burgess was composing a piano concerto of his own – Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra in "E ♭ , a 33-minute work in three movements completed on 1 July 1976.

8Pines of Rome (1924) was the first orchestral work to utilize recorded sound – a specific recording of a nightingale that is played in the third movement.

9The ‘tonal’ version (top line) in the musical example is closely related to the main theme of the second movement of Burgess’s piano concerto:

4. Punk

The word has been with us quite a time. To Shakespeare, a punk was a prostitute. In America, it changed its sex and was regularly used to designate worthless and vicious young hoodlums. In present-day very much non-Shakespearian England it has become adjectival and vague, denoting rubbishy. Attached to various kinds of underart, it snarls an underdog defiance: I’m cheap, filthy, a social reject, but by Christ I’m fackin prahd of it. This pride in a verbal badge of inferiority is very British and, I think, not well understood in America. The Kaiser called the British forces in Flanders ‘a contemptible