The Liszt Report

The Liszt biography, by Oliver Hilmes, wasn't chosen because he's a favourite composer. He wouldn't make any Top 30 of mine, Top 50 I don't know. CD1 from the set of 9 by Jorge     Bolet was missing so the seller refunded half of the bargain price, they have their moments, some of it possibly a bit lyrically inconsequential but the dramtic parts are the sort of music best heard live.

No, the interest in the biography was the story and it doesn't let us down. It's possible that the family arrangements and succession of relationships and their difficulties dominate too much but they are the story. Having arrived at the episode featuring Olga Janina, the stalker who carries a revolver and poisons, I've stopped at a cliff-hanging phrase that, 

The worst was yet to come. 

Few give much credence to Liszt's time spent in holy orders which may or may not have been an unsuccessful ruse to gain employment in The Vatican rather than any renouncement of his very successful campaign of amorous involvements. And they went on throughout the family.

His daughter, Cosima, moves on in premptory fashion from her first husband to Richard Wagner but it's not always clear who, if any of them, are worthy of our sympathy as the Romantic age builds towards its greatest excesses. 

These are not 'ordinary people', most of them come with titles from the apparently vast ranks of European aristocracy, whether real or fake - Olga Janina was not the Russian countess she claimed to be. Liszt's daughter, Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein marries Prince Konstantin Victor Ernst Emil Karl Alexander Friedrich Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, for example. 

It would be more reassuring if any of the tremendous talent, money and appetite for liaisons made any of thyem happy for any length of time but Romantics, it seems, have even less capacity for happiness than any other generation of creative artists and determine to cause themselves as much anguish as they can conjure. In hoping for a roller-coaster ride of sensations and drama, Liszt's story lived up to all expectations as well as confirming the prejudice that Byron was only the first of many who were 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'.

Maggi Hambling: Nightingale night

 Maggi Hambling, Nightingale Night, Pallant House, Chichester, until April 27

It was good to find that the new Maggi Hambling paintings were in Chichester and didn't involve a more demanding excursion to London. I go whenever I can to see her exhibitions.

There was a time when she was most definitely a figurative painter but she's moved towards more abstract means as the decades have gone by. 

She's certainly no Vermeer, the paint runs down the canvas having been applied with more flourish than delicacy, perhaps. As in the previous waves and waterfalls, one finds what one can that has come about in the process. The crescent moon in the painting representing P.J. Harvey in concert is a deliberate act but the female figure one thinks one sees emerging from the sea is one of many things that are more sub-conscious. That painting is the most complex with its extended palette on a white canvas but for the most part the rest are on black, or dark, and predominantly gold.

Done after a night spent in woodland, these are spectral images, a bit Hallowe'en and reward much longer contemplation than most who come and go, not necessarily talking of Michelangelo, in order to achieve an effect that, in Room 4, could have become comparable to the experience of the Rothko Chapel. What one doesn't get except from seeing them in the flesh is the range of sizes they come in, from 30x25 cm in Nightingale Night XIII to Night of the Lotus Eaters at 198x226.

There may or may not have been a braying horse and a crippled giraffe in the latter and it's in the nature of the dripping paint that Portuguese Man'o'War are not uncommon. There might well be self-portraits lurking in the sub-text of others while Will Young is more readily recognizable than Leonard Cohen as the musical theme is extended from that of birdsong. We are told, also, that the vulnerability of the balance in nature and, thus, climate change are themes and maybe that comes out of the imaginings one has as to whether it is a fish or toad one has seen.

It is a captivating exhibition but it hepls that I attend with the intention of being captivated. But my devotion is such that I went as far as buying the limited edition print and so had plenty to think about, concentrating on conveying that home on the bus safely.

Dora Carrington is possibly the more major show in Pallant House at present, the first such for thirty years. She's no less bohemian than Maggi, a more vivid colourist, quieter and morte concerned with detail. While being Bloomsbury fringe, they were very much taken up with each other and not only one at a time. The bookish, ascetic Lytton Strachey puts in a number of appearances, most revealingly with some more frivolous behaviour in some home video footage.

Although self-effacing, her art has some of that Gwen John quality of craft and technique and only the unusual Spanish Landscape with Mountains, 1924, is really outside of her steady remit. That she shot herself in the head after Lytton's death, as in the last moments of Merchant-Ivory film, suggests more than it completely explains.

Lisztomania

 Lisztomania was one of those Ken Russell films from another age entirely and one hopes to be forgiven for thinking that the term originated there. But, no, it was coined at an early stage of Liszt's career when he was the prototype for the outlandish adulation accorded to superstar performers on a routine basis by now.

It was a recent Composer of the Week programme that encouraged me to avail myself of the biography by Oliver Hilmes. While the music biography shelves have the 'main men' - Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and Shostakovich (Bolan, Bowie, Lou Reed, Ronnie Spector), there is room to expand into and while Liszt is unlikely to ever been a huge favourite, he had a spectacular life.

His childhood replicates Mozart's in many ways with the early onset of genius, the tours arranged by his manager-father, the royal courts and aristocracy of Europe but, despite all that ongoing financial precariousness. That was largely solved by his relationship with the unlikely Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, impressive more for her intellectual aspiration, it seems, than her looks, especially given the charisma that brought such amorous success to Liszt. Her influence on him seems out of all proportion to what could reasonably be expected by such matters are not for outsiders to properly understand. Financial difficulties seem to have been successfully overcome when he lives in a castle with his own private wing furnished with instruments previously owned by Mozart and Beethoven.

It's a brilliant book written so clearly and so well organized that it makes for a captivating story whether one has an interest in composers or not and makes the reading experience much more enjoyable than Don Quixote did. By way of immersing myself in the subject to best effect, a box set of 9 CD's, the Piano Music by Jorge Bolet is on its way because I'll always take a bargain when I see the right one. By how much this will enhance Liszt's position on my list isn't obvious but it's stuff worth reading and a major turn up that he gets in ahead of Brahms. 

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Forthcoming at DGBooks,

Maggi Hambling in Pallant House, Chichester; Stewart Lee's books; The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckinghamby Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a few more concerts in Chichester and Portsmouth and then a review of a year full of highlights.

The Parnassian Ensemble in Chichester

 The Parnassian Ensemble, Chichester Cathedral, Nov 5

There's been some neat programming on Chichester's Tuesday lunchtime list this Autumn and nothing is more appropriate to November 5th than Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks.

The Parnassian Ensemble are two recorders, baroque cello and harpsichord. They began with Andrea Falconiero's account of La Follia with an air of minstrelsy. In The Tempest, Caliban remarks on the 'sweet airs that give delight and hurt not' and they could have been much of the music featured here as Gottfried Keller's Trio Sonata no. 4 was lissom and floated, the Parnassian's Allegro perhaps being more 'vivace' than their Vivaces, including in Gareth Deats's spritely cello, but we need not be too academic about it.

Vivaldi's Trio Sonata, RV 81, involved more conversation than interweaving between Sophie Middleditch and Helen Hooker's recorders, the Largo being sumptuously languorous with Gareth's gentle pizzicato.

David Pollock's harpsichord was behind-the-scenes continuo until Sophie and Helen had a few minutes to catch their breath and he played two Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, K.208 ambulatory with some longing or ache in its decorous stylings and K.212 much busier in its dash and zip through some scales. One might need to be towards the front rows of Chichester's long nave to fully appreciate the delicacy of these instruments as it is more properly 'chamber music' of some intimacy.

Even if baroque music is generic to the point of impersonality its emotional charge is often enhanced by its discipline. Telemann was, I understand, the big, box office name of his day but his reputation hasn't since quite taken on the epic proportion of Handel's. His Trio Sonata in G Minor ticks boxes and fulfils expectations but Handel and his personality exceed them. The Minuets from the Music for the Royal Fireworks were immediately the stand-out piece, followed by La Rejouissance which can't be translated into English any better than its expression in music. More of it wouldn't have gone amiss, with perhaps some Water Music in case of emergency if the pyrotechnics got out of hand. It made for a fine finale to what was mostly a recital of the utmost charm.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Part 1 of Don Quixote ends as if it was meant to end there. The only book that Dr. Johnson said he wished had been longer and that, presumably, includes Part 2 which is praise indeed.

The comparison with Hamlet begins with a comparison of their respective states of 'madness'. Hamlet's was an adopted disposition that may or may not have become the real thing while he was pretending but I tend to doubt it now having got some mileage out of the idea for 'A' level essays; Harold Bloom contends that Don Quixote is aware of his own delusions, which makes his story more layered than it would otherwise be.

One can choose between any number of interpretations in meta-fictions that become cubist with all the choices of ways into them. Satire brings with it different 'levels' of meaning. For me, we wonder 'what is the point' of the Don's quest to become a knight errant and we might decide it is the same as any of us trying to become what we'd like to be.

Perhaps what we are lies in what we aspire to be, however absurd that aspiration might be. Perhaps we are defined by the gap between that aspiration and how much of it we achieve of it. We are absurd to the extent that we still believe in such dreams despite all the evidence that we aren't achieving them.

At various times I've imagined myself as footballer, cricketer, cyclist, pool player and a variety of sorts of writer with only the most modest levels of success in any of them. I was absurd when I thought I was destined for any sort of greatness, even locally, in any of them but found some happiness in the involvement.

I don't particularly think we go to literature to learn lessons about life to make us wiser but prefer to think we enjoy well-made work. Happiness or enjoyment, however it comes about, can be the only point and that can be provided by literature and how it reflects us back at ourselves.

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Bob Harris takes over Sounds of the 70's this afternoon. He was in grave danger of losing this listener early doors with his emphasis on Americana, West Coast, rock and grisly old Whistle Test sessions but then put Al Green on. I think he'll need monitoring for his percentage of soul, Motown and disco but John Lennon's Stand By Me, on now, is perfectly alright.

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The success of my excursion to Newcastle, mainly for the purposes of Durham Cathedral, in the summer has led me to wonder about further such travel. I'm not in favour of travel in principle, mostly due to the vagaries of the available transport systems. Like Philip Larkin, I wouldn't mind going to China if I could come back the same day.

However, as with Durham, once a plan solidifies it becomes a sine qua non, a must-have and an imperative that demands doing. Nottingham is where I come from, still feel some attachment to - not having been since the early 1980's- and, like the Bee Gees in Massachuchets, 'something's telling me I must go home'. Such imagined significance in where one came from, some sort of worship of the past taken from fragments of memory, might be more authentic versions of 'who we are' than those Quixotic aspirations to what we want to be. And, having hardly even thought about writing a poem for most of this year, that sketchy archive of early memories served one up. 

It goes with Move Over Darling and Nativity that are from similar sources and I'd love to put it here but it might be saved for print in due course. I was identifying as a 'poet who doesn't write poems' but it ain't over til it's over and, not having been successful in finding any other identity, I'm denied even that. So, at the risk of dangerous levels of introspection, it is the expression of that nothingness that provides some either Sartrean or Derridian 'enjoyment' and that, if there is one, seems to be the point.  

More Cardenio, etc.

I will reach the end of Part 1 of Don Quixote shortly. That might be enough. It's all that Cervantes originally did but then he added Part 2 when somebody else took it upon themselves to continue it.

Perhaps the big news is that Cardenio's story could be Love's Labour's Won in Shakespeare's lost play because he does have a happy outcome.

More than that, though, Cervantes is 'modern' and deals in 'meta-fiction' in his pastiche of chivalric novels by referring back to his hack models, not least when the canon pronounces,

I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another.

Not all readers of westerns, thrillers, Mills & Boon or devotees of science fiction films will think that all the books they read or things they like are the same and they might even think that the sort of 'literary fiction' that I sometimes read could be accused of similar failings in as far as it's for it's own sake, nobody gets shot, there are no green monsters from other universes or the lonely spinster that lives in the Old Rectory doesn't end up marrying the dashingly glamorous man who arrives in the picturesque village. 

But Don Quixote does resort to routine cartoon violence on a regular basis. It is jokey, like that in Tom and Jerry, and one very soon doesn't take it seriously and so maybe it wouldn't satisfy those who want gun crime and murder as the staple diet of their entertainment. And yet they might. 'Realism' is not an easy idea in things that are accepted as fictional and so perhaps token violence is violence enough.

I don't think I need Part 2, though. I've got the main idea of it. It's probably better than I give it credit for. I've been reading it dutifully, not entirely against my will but I'd prefer to be looking forward to getting back to my book a bit more than I have been in recent weeks.