Towards a Sublime Top 6

 Richard Bradford's The Odd Couple was unsavoury and not very sublime. The meticulous detail with which he sets out the lives of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin is impressive but it only serves to demonstrate how deeply unimpressive people they were, as so many self-serving right-wing men of the old school were and still are.

I've only ever read Lucky Jim of Amis's novels which wasn't much more than 'of its age' alongside the likes of Billy Liar, Hurry On Down, Room at the Top and maybe Alan Sillitoe. It gave him instant celebrity status which seemed to carry him the rest of the way while, as Bradford has it, his subsequent novels were tools of self-analysis, or possibly even recrimination, as he worked he way through a seemingly endless succession of women that he couldn't help himself with. That was as much of an affliction as his later loss of interest in the whole she-bang, as it were, as if he was burnt out or maybe just disgusted with the enterprise. He's not easy to like and nothing Bradford said about his other books made me want to read them but a passing reference to Al Alvarez might yet lead me to look at his accounts of the period.

Larkin will always be a slightly more nuanced case, at least on account of his fine poems. His selfishness is increasingly difficult to forgive, especially after John Sutherland's recent book, but it is in part understandable given that it was largely part of a strategy of self-defence, of a 'private' person who valued his solitariness as well as being unable to help himself having three girlfriends at once in a duplicitous way as compensation. 

The questions remain why literary biography only uses the work to illuminate the darker corners of the lives rather than vice versa and why some of us can't help ourselves either in feeling a need to read it. Because it's there, I dare say.

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Somewhat more sublime is the new arrival Laurenzi, La Finta Savia, Arias, which came out of The Early Music Show's account of how Monteverdi's L'incoranazione di Poppea might not have been written by him. Here we go again with the Shakespeare Authorship question except they might not have been so concerned about exactly who wrote what in those days. It makes such a difference to us now that a painting attributed to Leonardo will be worth millions until someone suggests it was done by somebody else and then it's worth only tens of thousands.

Laurenzi was 52 years younger than Monteverdi but maybe the old maestro was getting his students to do his work for him. He is readily added to my battery of obscure composers and La Finta Savia doesn't seem to be available in anything more than this disc of arias that includes the very sublime duet from the end of Poppea, Pur ti miro. Surely anybody who had written that would want their name on it.

But the impulse to make a list often comes from wanting to include such a thing on that list and thus inventing a list for it to go on. So, Top 6 Sublime Vocal Pieces, not needing to give it too much thought-

Reynaldo Hahn, A Chloris

Josquin des Prez, Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem

Francois Couperin, Lecons de Tenebres

Dietrich Buxtehude, Klag-Lied

Robert Morton, Le Souvenir de vous me tue

Errollyn Wallen, In Earth

 

That wouldn't be a bad start to a Desert Island selection but might need Wig Wam Bam by the Sweet and Walk Away Renee by the Four Tops to offset the melancholy.