It was a bright morning and I won three and drew one to improve my chess rating somewhat over scrabled eggs for breakfast. An unfinished string quartet by Schubert played on the wireless. But it had clouded over and was raining a cold rain when I went to leave home so I went back in, exchanged jacket for coat and put on a less flamboyant hat. The bus ride, on the prized front seat of upstairs on a double decker, affords fine views of that section of coast from Farlington marshes to Bosham.
Simon Watterton began with a Robert Schumann Arabesque that began with rolling lyricism before ending more dreamily. Simon helped me out there with the word 'melting'. The piece set the tone for quiet endings and also Simon doing much of this job for me because he provided a very useful synopsis of the Beethoven Sonata in E flat major, Op. 7 before playing it. At least if I use some of his words, it saves me thinking of any and they will be more accurate.
The first movement is virtuosic and technical, Beethoven newly arrived in Vienna aged 26 and ready to impress. The 'soliloquy' of the second, Largo, con gran espressione, loses all sense of time (time itself, I'm sure, rather than tempo). I wouldn't say that Simon overdoes the 'con gran espressione', ever, but finds a balance between the stormy Beethoven and the delicate, making a coherence of the two rather than a contrast between them. Beethoven, it might seem sometimes, is either producing a storm, one is brewing or is in abeyance. But that is to wilfully ignore how gentle and kindly he was, too, and it was explained that as a young man he was always in love and it was before he had quite so much to rage against.
The third is a good-natured minuet and the fourth confounds expectations with a languid finale rather than the grand endings of so many symphonic movements that are telegraphed from so far out.
Not having yet put away the Brahms and Beethoven Violin Sonatas acquired after a previous visit to Chichester, it's not going to be easy to defer a visit to Amazon to check out Complete Piano Sonatas for there is another inexhaustible source of wonder that should be on those front room shelves.
Further Schumann was the Romance Op. 28, No.2 that Clara asked to be played to her on her deathbed to remind her of Robert. It is a profound and smoothly ardent song made all the more so for the story attached to it.
The Fur Elise is no mere Bagatelle but a popular classic that one can too easily take for granted. Familiarity can make one forget to listen but such pieces aren't popular classics by accident, it's because they are tremendous. Having just read that Beethoven book, one is still left with the scruffy, difficult, absorbed, suffering towering genius but we might remember artists at their beginning and throughout their careers. Recent programmes on television on Picasso and Cilla Black made the point, for me at least, that the early work that establishes a career is as significant, if not more so, as the later work. The same can be said of Bob Marley.
Simon was a great guide and sensible, and sensitive, interpreter of these pieces and I was very glad to be there to hear them when it had looked as if I might be in Luton talking about something considerably drearier today.
On the way back I opened my Montaigne essays. I had been led to them by an essay by Graham Swift but began to doubt if he would live up to the widespread acclaim for his sense, humanity and reason. I've been let down by recommendations before and even if I'd read bits and pieces of our European friend before, I wondered if I'd like him.
He's absolutely fine, finding release from ideas like fear, mortality and everyday anxiety with a commonsense, homemade but astute philosophical approach. 'Release' must be what we are looking for, and hopefully get, from art, not only from the likes of Beethoven sharing his with us but the likes of Simon coming to Chichester to deliver it.
Art is all there is but it might not be enough, as the poet says. Sometimes it's plenty.
