Zola, Bach, Gioia

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Having read that The Masterpiece was Zola's most auto-biographical novel I spent most of it trying to map the life of the painter, Claude Lantier, onto Zola's in this fictionalized account of later C19th art movements with particular reference to Impressionism. And without much success. Lantier is ahead of his time, devoted to his art, but not understood and increasingly ridiculed. Eventually I flicked through the Introduction in search of help and found that Sandoz, the novelist, is the Zola figure and it became a bit clearer.

Certain passages in novels immediately suggest themselves as significant. Those passages that some readers highlight. In The Masterpiece, regarding Lantier, there is,

so he preferred the illusion he found in his art, the everlasting pursuit of unattianable beauty, the mad desire which could never be satisfied. He wanted all women, but he wanted them created according to his dreams

- and that, is what effectively kills him in the end. One has the feeling that it might, as in New Grub Street where the artist devoted to his art, uncompromised by the demands of the market, suffers similarly.

If the novel is a commentary on its times with the agendas of Naturalism, the 'Open Air' school and the reception of Impressionism, when art was of wider interest to the public, it is prescient in some of the aspects it presents of the art market now and the relationship between artists and collectors, say Damien Hirst and Charles Saatchi, and how fashions and demands prevail. It's an excellent book, as those by Zola tend to be, and even better once one reads it from the required point of view.

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Another relevant aphorism concerns whether or not one can have 'too much of a good thing'. 172 discs of the Complete Bach make for a paragon example to consider.

About 15 discs in, certainly the mind boggles to think there are about 157 to go of these outrageous outpourings. But already, during something like the piano English Suites, one wonders if so much can only have been produced by a machine and some lesser Bach was AI before its time. Perhaps one can have too much of a good thing if that's all one has because excellence becomes the 'new normal' whereas one can hardly have enough of it when it's broken up by different things, not even necessarily lesser things.

I'd already done that by abandoning any plan to go through the discs methodically, being in sections s they are. So I jumped forward from the sacred cantatas, avoiding such favourites as The Well-Tempered Klavier, the Cello Suites and the Sonatas and Partitas. A keyboard concerto turned out to be the sublime Violin Concerto but the Bach Collegium Stuttgart are crisp and immaculate throughout. The Harpsichord Concertos, BWV 1063-65, are all wild exuberance and effervescent floribunda. The Anna Magdalena Notebooks are full of the sort of tunes that led to the Lover's Concerto by The Toys, ahead of the Inventions but not the Well-Tempered set. There is a sense that sometimes he's delivering exercises whereas at others he's doing his best work.

But, no, it would be madness to play 172 discs of Bach while listening to nobody else's music. It doesn't do it any favours, like those people who I remember some years ago, one of who listened only to Handel and The Magnetic Fields and another who read only Larkin. I can see why one would be tempted but it reduces not only the work but one's view of it.

Still, now with my library holding the 'complete' Bach, Buxtehude, Chopin and Satie, I'll need them to survive the dread height of summer with its school holidays and lack of local lunchtime concerts until September,

when the reviewing situation will be reviewed. I continue to fear for the language and its resources. It does offer infinite combinations of words but the thesaurus itself doesn't go on forever and describing music is heavy on adjectives. I'm always glad of one I've not used before but there's only so much to be said about composers and performers that one's heard a few times before. Still hugely enjoyable but I don't think the young gunslingers, sent by the NME to follow the latest vogue band on tour, reviewed every night. 

But Chichester Cathedral's Autumn programme looks promising as do a few inviting dates in Portsmouth and if I didn't do that what would I do. One can't keep moving on from things without finding other things to replace them.

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But the world is resourceful. If my writing and reading of poetry has reached a low point it's not because I've read it all, it's because I'm not aware of what further things to read. Not much of what's being written now, not The Faerie Queen, not Dryden or Pope, all of which the dutiful student ought to know about.

So I was glad to hear R4Extra's Poetry Extra repeat of a broadcast featuring Dana Gioia. Familiar from Rebel Angels, the 1996 anthology of New Formalism, it was useful to be pushed back in his direction, establish that he's male and hear how to pronounce his name - Dayner Joyer. 

The New Formalists were retro in the 1990's, embracing metre and rhyme against the high fashion of free verse with Timothy Steele as a prime exemplar and J.V. Cunningham as the godfather from the previous generation. Dana isn't quite as insistently tight and metronomic as they are but he's clearly one of the good guys. His books aren't easy to find in the UK and so the 99 Poems, New & Selected is coming all the way from America and although he's not the future, I'm not sure how much I want to know about the future when the past can still reliably provide.