Malcolm MacDonald
I’ve derived a great deal of interest and profit from Reginald Nettel’s two articles on "Aspects of Brian" (Newsletters 21 & 22). I believe it has always been one of his chief aims to provide a framework for understanding the psychological basis from which Brian’s music sprang. We are all in his debt for the various steps he has taken towards this, most recently in "Aspects of Brian": as we are for his clear-sighted recognition that perhaps the main issue requiring exploration before any final evaluation of Brian can be attempted is the mystery of Brian’s Mind - or, more prosaically, the relationship of Brian’s conscious intellect to the creative forces of his unconscious.
(For example: in my studies of the symphonies, I am forever blithely pointing out developments, derivations, metamorphoses, correspondences and allusions in the motivic working, and perhaps I give too much of an impression that all these details were consciously calculated . I’m damn sure that a significantly large proportion of them were; I’m equally sure that many of them arose spontaneously, with no conscious worry on Brian’s part as to how they fitted as piece in the puzzle. This isn’t to suggest that at some times he "knew what he was doing", and at others didn’t: rather, that he "knew" in both cases, but that we have to widen our definition of "knowing". Brian’s approach was creative, not analytical. We have no means of distinguishing whether any particular motivic allusion, apart from the immediately obvious ones, is "conscious" or "unconscious". I simply see it as my duty to point out what is there in the scores, and how it seems to function in an overall process.)
I would, however, have liked to see Mr.Nettel further develop a subject which he just touches on at the end of "The Joker", and hints at obliquely elsewhere in the articles - though I have heard him state it directly in conversation: that Brian’s great creative secret was that he had learned to make use of his unconscious mind: that he could summon up his music, or at least the driving conceptions behind it, through meditation, often with a work of literature as catalyst. His role as an artist was to respond to, but also capture and channel, these outpourings from the psyche.
I can’t help feeling - though it’s a dangerous area, where I wallow in ignorance - that the second-hand post-Freudianism which serves, at least in this country, as the dominant psychiatric orthodoxy, is not going to be a great help to us in understanding Brian (apart, perhaps, from elucidating some of his obsessional neuroses). Freud, if I understand correctly, thought the unconscious was a nasty dark hole into which we repressed everything that gave us the horrors.
He didn’t have much idea of it as a fundamentally creative persona, in its instinctual fashion perhaps ‘wiser’ than our conscious intellect - whether because it may be in touch with all the inherited knowledge of our forebears, or because it simply remembers everything that our conscious minds have forgotten. Mr.Nettel describes how composers imbibe knowledge of multitudinous musical techniques and the great music of the past, and store it up in their "memory-bank", but their resources of inspiration may go deeper yet - they may emanate on occasion from the Collective Unconscious.
And it wasn’t Freud, the "father of psychoanalysis", who coined that familiar phrase. It was the man Freud stigmatized as his "errant son" -who as a result is still intellectually distrusted, little-read, and whose thinking is, in any case, much more difficult to grasp: because, unlike Freud, he propounded no dogma, passed fewer moral judgements, and spent his life exploring the contents of the unconscious which Freud believed himself to have adequately catalogued already: Carl Gustav Jung.
Now, if my grasp of Freud is sketchy, my understanding of Jung is probably even slighter, but I do know the following:
I. That while Freud evolved his psychology in the treatment of hysteria and obsessional neuroses (as Reginald Nettel points out, Brian was something of a prey to the latter), Jung’s insights into the unconscious stemmed from his work with schizophrenics (and while cautiously agreeing with Harold Truscott’s conclusion, in his essay on the Gothic, that Brian’s music contains a "schizoid" element - using the term loosely and unclinically - I think I would go further and hazard the opinion that certain aspects of Brian himself, his obliqueness, deviousness and secretiveness especially, may amount to clinically identifiable symptoms of a schizoid personality. I do not suggest that Brian was therefore "a schizophrenic" - I think that, like Jung, he possessed a strong enough ego to withstand a total mental collapse, and was able instead to capitalize on the experience in his creative work,).
II. That Jung was specifically interested in the creative aspects of the unconscious mind.
III. That Jung developed what seems, on the face of it, a far more sensible, pragmatic and informative method of dream-analysis than that practised by Freud. (I would be fascinated to see a really high-powered Jungian analysis of some of those dreams which Brian wrote down and which obviously meant a lot to him - especially the "Nuremberg" dream he recounts in "How the ‘Gothic’ Symphony came to be written": as Reginald Nettel points out, he needed no psychiatrist to tell him these were important communications from his unconsciousness. I’m not equipped to interpret the "Nuremberg" dream, but it seems numinous in the extreme.)
IV. That whereas Freud‘s one-sided emphasis on sexuality (itself the result, Jung thought, of Freud‘s own obsessional neurosis) makes his psychology especially relevant to people in the first three or four decades of their lives, Jung was more concerned with the continuing intellectual development and self-realization of people in middle and old age - the period in which Brian produced his most important works. Among contemporary psychologists, Anthony Storr - in no sense a blind follower of Jung - has come to the conclusion that Jung’s ideas are intrinsically more useful than Freud‘s for the understanding of the forces at work in a creative artist.
I don’t want to give the impression that I am trying to stir up some kind of academic contest between "Freudian" and "Jungian" interpretations of Brian and his music. I daresay that most people would find such a debate bewilderingly far from their experience of the works themselves. Mr.Nettel is quite right, too, to warn us away from any "doctrinaire" approach to Brian’s psychology. But insofar as I understand anything about Jung, he doesn’t seem to have laid down any fixed doctrine or dogma (indeed, he once said that he wanted there to be no school of "Jungians" to petrify his work), but to have developed a means of holding a dialogue with the contents of an individual’s unconscious, and of exploring the relationship, in that individual, between the conscious and unconscious minds .I think this could, ultimately, prove relevant to our understanding of Brian’s creative achievement.
But I have a different reason for invoking the name of Jung: namely a bunch that it may be possible to arrive at an overall conception of Brian’s work by a direct comparison between his career and that of the Swiss psychologist. During the years 1917-19, Jung himself went through a period of acute mental stress, with marked schizophrenic characteristics. His psychological disturbance seems to have had several different causes -a "mid-life crisis", the violent break with the father-figure Freud, guilt about this and about the complications of his marital life; also, he felt, the influence of the apocalyptic zeitgeist which presently broke forth throughout Europe in the shape of the Great War.
Recognizing his own danger, he decided to psychoanalyze himself, to seek a "confrontation with the unconscious", to "probe the depths of his own psyche". Through this long and painful process he arrived at the insights which he spent the rest of his long life refining and exploring in a vast body of writings, many of them of daunting density and allusiveness.
I have a strong conviction (guardedly expressed in my article on The Gothic in Newsletter 16) that Brian, at a slightly later date, went through a very similar experience. He seems to be telling us so, in language as plain as him habitual obliquity will allow, in "How the ‘Gothic’ Symphony came to be written" - a document of even greater psychological importance than musical or biographical. There are striking parallels, both in the possible sources and actual circumstances of him disturbance, too numerous to outline here. Of course, he did not psychoanalyze himself -he wrote music instead. His music of 1916-1927 tends to support this interpretation - perhaps from as early as 1915, if the lost "English Suite No.2" was really a set of "Night Portraits", exploring a world of darkness, complete with a "Witch Dance", as Kenneth Eastaugh suggests.
The ballet-sequences in The Tigers, with their strange symbolic figures, strongly suggest a deeper, metaphysical reality breaking through to the surface, and the whole opera can be understood as a funny but disturbing dream. Several of the songs written at or just after the end of the War, such as Defiled Sanctuary seem to spring from a real agony of mind. And The Gothic, the work about which Brian felt he had to "discover a solution to all its mysteries", seems to mark a seven-years’ "confrontation with the unconscious", at the other side of which Brian emerged as a different kind of composer from what he had been before. Doesn’t the Te Deum sometimes seem to have ripped the lid off the Collective Unconscious of Western Music, which pours forth clamouring and demanding an expression and a shape that the composer is hardly able to command?
What I’m trying to say here, I think - and it’s a view I’ve been gradually moving towards over several-years - is that The Gothic cannot be evaluated purely as a musical phenomenon, without a recognition that it constitutes a psychic one as well. (And maybe even a psychotherapeutic one. One of the means by which Jung eventually came to terms with his mental turmoil was to paint mandalas - circular quasi-abstract drawings symbolic of him inner state, whose shapes usually resolve into four quarters. Though the mandala seems to be ultimately Oriental in origin, Jung points out that it has been well-known in European art for millenia, and that it has a more familiar Western counterpart, the cross.
Could it be that we have arrived, by a very different route, at Paul Rapoport’s famous cruciform diagram??? I sympathize with anyone who thinks that I have at last gone off the deep end in mere fanciful speculation - but I find the notion of The Gothic as a gigantic mandala so picturesque that I can’t resist airing it just this once.) It is both more and less than a self-sufficient, self-consistent work of art - unlike the symphonies which followed. As I shall attempt to show in Vol.III of my book, Brian’s entire symphonic canon is suggested, in potentia, by the contents of The Gothic; the later works refine, extend and develop separate aspects of its encyclopaedic totality, with a greater degree of artistic control.
The motto from Faust on The Gothic’s title-page gives further cause for thought. Goethe, and his Faust in particular exercised a life-long fascination on Brian. On Jung also. It was Jung’s contention that Goethe, in his heroic adaptation of the Faust legend; had created a potent symbolic drama of the struggle of the artist (Faust) with the ungovernable forces of the unconscious (Mephistopheles). In the ‘On the Other Hand" column of the March 1939 issue of Musical Opinion Brian, writing as "La Main Gauche", published a short article about Goethe’s Faust which in general parallels Jung’s conclusions. Much more striking is the fact that some of Brian’s comments on Faust duplicate the phraseology he had used about himself in "How the ‘Gothic’ Symphony came to be written" (published four months previously): for instance, Faust is "seeking a solution to the mysteries of the unknown".
Perhaps this can extend our insight into the relationship between Faust and The Gothic; and possibly between Brian’s symphonies and literary sources of inspiration generally. I think I would take issue with Mr.Nettel when he says that "as time went on [Brian] found extra-musical ideas unnecessary and the later ideas became quite abstract". In some ways I believe Brian’s music may have become more, not less, programmatic. But the programmatic element became more profound, more absorbed into the drama of the symphonic structure itself; less concerned with pictorial illustration, more a matter of drawing universals from particulars.
The metamorphosis of Symphony No.2’s Gotz von Berlichingen programme into "Man [=Brian] in his cosmic loneliness" provides a useful metaphor for Brian’s own creative processes. Faust, Gotz, the young Goethe (Symphony No.7), Agamemnon (No. 12), Oedipus (No.30) - and who knows what other literary figures stand behind the intervening symphonies? - were, so to speak, lenses through which he could look into his own unconscious, and find out what of them lay within himself, and could be shared with others in other words he was aware of them as Archetypes - and it was Jung, of course, who coined that term, too.
Though many of Brian’s techniques of allusion and cross-cutting are precisely reminiscent of the "stream of consciousness" to which I used to compare his mature music, I now find that phrase too slipshod and novelistic. The structural, form-giving, symbol-creating power is too active in Brian’s symphonies. It may be more accurate to say that Brian eventually found himself writing programme-music of the psyche. And so do all composers, one way or another, it might be argued. Perhaps - there are certainly other striking cases (such as Schoenberg, who also capitalized in his music on a psychological crisis for much of his life, and who in his last years wrote that classic example of "psycho-logical programme-music", the String Trio) - but few have seen their role, as I think Brian may have done, to be that of cultivating exactly that uncharted field and expressing it in such fluid forms, their unexpectednesses in themselves suggestive of the functioning of the unconscious. Whence, perhaps, proceeds his music’s extraordinary potency, its capacity to shock, outrage or move its hearers.
© 1979 Malcolm MacDonald
See also Malcolm MacDonald‘s article Brian as Faust and The psychology of Brian – Robert Timlin
Newsletter, NL 23, 1979