Music and Movement

It was track 10 on disc 4, the slow movement of Sonata no.33,  that suddenly went a bit further and was replayed a few times before moving on to disc 5.

Haydn is perfectly good company throughout but that music moved into Bach. Perhaps Haydn could have written like Bach all the time but Bach had done that and his job was to write like Haydn. In the meantime, he teems with ideas and, having found another theme, does what he always does with it. It's never dull, it's great either as an accompaniment to reading or to concentrate on with one's whole attention. The Complete String Quartets can take 25 discs, the Symphonies 33. One might wonder if we have world and time enough to listen to them all before wondering that he had enough to write them. It is to the great credit of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven that their elite group of composers still isn't infiltrated by Haydn, or Brahms, Schubert, Josquin, Buxtehude or Shostakovich but that's nothing for them to be ashamed of.

But whereas Haydn can be relied upon to be Haydn, one of our greatest contemporary composers, Errollyn Wallen, is more various. She recognizes no musical boundaries but that means that some of her pieces are likely to suit more than others. The Cello Concerto and In Earth, from Purcell, are C21st masterpieces and her album of songs is powerfully entirely different again and so I was bound to make a point of tuning in for her opera, The Paradis Files, on Saturday night.

One day we might arrive in a paradise where 'disability' wasn't such an issue that the point needs making that all the cast in some way identify as disabled but it's not yet been made sufficiently irrelevant. Other such 'woke', non-binary or diverse points were made in an extended prologue. Maria Theresia von Paradis was an C18th composer who was blind. I diligently lasted about 45 minutes but have the broadcast saved on the Virgin box and so can return to it. I am more of a Mozart and Puccini man when it comes to opera - nowhere near resilient enough for Wagner and even finding Shostakovich plenty and so Errollyn might have gone beyond my comfort zone with this but I watch and wait for any further discs from her.

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George Eliot's Essays go onto the shelves in a blaze of glory. What sense, what acumen, would that she were living at this hour. Yes, I'd read enough of theology to miss the later pieces on that but shouldn't have been surprised that even the poems were worth having, in particular the Brother and Sister Sonnets, some sort of template for The Mill on the Floss.

But if moving from Haydn to Errollyn's opera was a stretch, finishing George left me looking for my next move. I do have time and I really ought to make the attempt one day, there's no time like the present and so the library catalogue shows two guides to Finnegans Wake which the heroic, 'beautiful librarians' can fetch out of the store for me, and we will see how far we get.

Up to page 12 so far is the answer in an outdoor session that was more of a pleasure than a dutiful chore. It's not impossible. One has a sense of what is being suggested and endlessly extended. The nain question was what percentage of it was I appreciating. I'd be glad of 25% and would think that worthwhile. But what percentage of any work do we 'get'.

To so thoroughly comprehend any work that we 'get it' 100% would make it recondite. We shouldn't even completely understand our own work.

At Lancaster, 1978-81, Head of the English Dept was Prof. David Carroll, a fine, liberal patrician who had edited the variorum edition of Middlemarch among other work on George Eliot that made him pre-eminent in his field. He probably had at least a 95% grasp of George Eliot but I don't suppose he imagined he knew it all, or wanted to.

Contemplation of the 'mystery', or the unknown, seems to be part of the weird attractiveness of religion which is subsequently bolstered by a celebration of 'faith', which is to say, no, we haven't got the foggiest idea but that's what makes us so certain. 

That is the most dubious self deception, a surrender to bewilderment and an abandonment of all reason in favour of magic.

The magic is the bit we haven't yet explained to ourselves and could be what keeps literature and all art compelling, why we can return to the likes of Mozart, Tamla Motown, Chagall, Rembrandt and Elizabeth Bishop time and again and not tire of them. Once they became 100% explained they would have all the life of a legal document. 

Religion is literature, if only it could accept itself as such. It is wildly imaginative, potentially spell-binding and rich in its invention. It wouldn't have caught on otherwise. But whereas literature accepts that it is a partial attempt, religion sees itself as the big answer.

It would be all over if it was but it isn't all over, is it.