Flaubert, Zola, Brahms, Bach

Emma Bovary was good company third time around. There would be an essay, perhaps, placing her between the dreadful Becky Sharpe and the honourable Dorothea Brooke. I've never had any time for Becky since an appalling mark I got for a compulsory essay on Vanity Fair that I really didn't want to do whereas George Eliot is high on my list of preferred novelists. Dorothea, like Maggie Tulliver and others seems to me central to a theme in which tremendous early potential is compromised by circumstances in adult life and not fully realized. Madame Bovary has aspects in common with both of them, superficially, but perhaps she does everything superficially, her expectations are never to be satisfied and her fate is written into that DNA.

The library then provided me with Zola's The Masterpiece, the setting of which seems to be that of La Boheme but the outcome may or may not be. But also I finally got around to a biography of Brahms in the short account by Hans A. Neunzig. There's a lot to be said for short versions. Too much detail might be highly
scholarly but can be exhaustingly exhaustive, too, s once proved with Walter Sickert.

Brahms is easy to sympathize with - introvert and serious and developing a tendency to brusqueness as a result. Perfectionist to the extent that he destroyed a lot of work, he wasn't the only one to feel himself in Beethoven's shadow but he did as much as anyone to emerge from it. He and Wagner were at odds on musical issues so it's no problem to take sides on such. 

The book is more character study than analysis of the work, which is fine, covering his infatuations - which went beyond Clara Schumann- and friendships. It does, though, leave a few questions largely alone, though, like where the wonderful Fourth Symphony came from. And, as can happen in such stories, the protagonist goes from struggling status to superstar apparently by osmosis. In this case it seems the publication of some Hungarian Dances made him popular and it did no harm that he was in demand as a pianist and did not live by composition alone. 

Last year, at a local piano competition, the adjudicator related how teacher of his when young had met Brahms when old which is one of those degrees of separation which seem to put us in touch with monumental names. 

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I've introduced a Bach Complete Works label here to report on it from time to time. I'm glad to find that Helmuth Rilling's vast undertaking is well regarded and a good point is made that 'authentic', original instrument editions can be over fussy which he isn't. I don't think it's too much of an issue.

What one notices, beginning at disc 1, with BWV 1, is that those catalogue numbers are not chronological and 1 was written in his fortieth year and that the first known composition is possibly BWV 992 so we can't use catalogue numbers as any guide to early/late questions of dating as we sometimes can with opus numbers.

Cantata no. 22, the chorale finale, was an early entry into the notebook as a find but today, after eight discs of cantatas, I thought it better to go for variety and mix up genres to obviate any chance of too much similarity. And so to something Im not familiar with, some Lute Suites. Lute music mainly sounds like lute music, almost irrespective of its composer but on second hearing maybe these aren't quite the same as Sylvain Weiss, the lute composer of choice. Like the harp, the lute sounds fresh and clear and clean whatever it plays and dour old Bach, however inventive and passing joyful he might be able to be, has flute music to be taken into consideration as evidence of his 'complete and utter artist' status. 

I officially don't ever need to buy any more discs ever again but when I'm next in Chichester, which might not be soon, I will have to go back and see if the Complete Mozart, Schubert and Scarlatti Sonatas are still there. If the Oxfam Bookshop customers have any eye for a bargain they surely won't be.