Christopher Kettle, Larry Alexander
Some idle thoughts - Chris Kettle
Martin O'Leary's interesting comparison of some symphonies by Brian and Mahler (Newsletter 38) reminded me of a remark I heard seven years ago. In January 1975, still revelling from Das Siegeslied at the Alexandra Palace three months earlier, I went to hear Dr Robert Simpson give an illustrated lecture about Brian to the LSO Club. I was eager to find out as much about Brian as I could, and I was not disappointed; it was fascinating, and Dr Simpson left nobody in any doubt as to the utterly individual character of Brian’s music. I was surprised, then, that the chairman, in thanking Dr Simpson, said that he had enjoyed what he had heard of Brian’s music because it reminded him of two of his favourite composers, Mahler and Shostakovich.
This seemed a puzzling remark; it is easy to understand someone finding both Mahler and Shostakovich congenial, but Brian didn’t seem remotely comparable to either. The only superficial similarities I can think of are the common-ness in all three of march rhythms and fanfare figures, often highly inventively scored; and the use of (some would say reliance on) the sheer might of the orchestra to over-power rather than to enchant the listener. Mahler liked to use a much expanded orchestra, capable of a weight of sound which he used more sparingly and subtly than Brian, despite his fondness for dramatic gestures; Shostakovich’s orchestra usually sounds enormous, but actually is so only in the Fourth and Seventh Symphonies. All three composers make use prominently of a large percussion section; although the martial, battering sound of Shostakovich's percussion is closer to Brian, several of Mahler's dramatic or atmospheric percussion effects remind me of Brian: the famous crescendo in the Finale of the Second; the brief outburst which ushers in the coda of the first movement of the Sixth; the retreat beaten by "several side drums" in the first movement of the Third; and the fugitive passage in the same movement (a few bars before Fig.13) in which the first attempt to establish the march of Summer fizzles out. The percussion writing of the Fifth Symphony's funeral march also sounds to me quite Brianic; and there are many other in-stances to my musically inexpert ears - but I probably already deserve to be drummed off this particular field by Rodney Newton!
All three composers have a mordant and highly individual sense of humour. There may be some similarity between the prankish irreverence of some of Brian's early music and the satirical Shostakovich of The Nose; and there is something Brianish about a man who can produce a deliberately un-portentous Ninth Symphony. But the comparison cannot be pressed. We know that Mahler and Shostakovich were both men in whom high good humour could mask an essential introspectiveness; and in their music we sometimes sense that laughter and anguish travel along the same nerve. Mahler's ironic humour, or "hectic gaiety", often seem conditioned by the question which he posed in the opening movement of the Second Symphony: "Is it all a huge joke?". Laughter can distort; see, for example, a picture contemporary with Mahler's last phase - the Laughing Self-Portrait by Richard Gerstl (whose brief but violent impact on Schoenberg is made clear in Malcolm MacDonald's "Master Musicians" book), painted shortly before his suicide at the age of 25. I have come across none of this in Brian. His humour seems closer to that described by Robert Simpson of Nielsen: "The Sanguine man cares not a fig for the world; difficulties do not deter him, for he has never heard of difficulties; he is full of rude vigour and gusty laughter." Dr Simpson goes on to comment: "There have been very few genuine expressions of the Sanguine in music since Beethoven's 'unbuttoned' mood...Mahler occasionally tries but is too nervous." Brian is not always convincing when he adopts this tone; but there is a splendidly characteristic sturdiness about his laughter, even when he seems to be laughing things off. The intriguing thing about Brian and Shostakovich is, for me, the fact that they were faced with diametrically opposed situations as 20th century artists. Brian, after an auspicious start, had to contend with almost lifelong obscurity; Shostakovich was dogged by the problems of his public role as composer under a regime which never left him alone to write as he wished. He was too famous; and one wonders how Brian would have fared in his position, and how Zhdanov and his henchmen would have coped with the "awkward cuss". I imagine he would have given them no end of trouble; some symphonies - 4 and 15 for example - might well have earned him the judgement suggested by the critic Felix Salten after the first Vienna performance of Mahler's Third - "For that, the man deserves to be locked up for a few years". It is difficult to imagine Brian writing in the required vein of po-faced patriotism to reinstate himself in official favour.
It is probably no accident that the Shostakovich symphonies which I find most moving and powerful fit no traditional symphonic mould (and have in some cases been dismissed as formal failures), and are characterized by an emotional ambivalence or complexity which is irreducible to a simple statement: the 4th, 8th, 13th and 15th. These works show a very different personality from Brian's reacting to the world in which they both lived, and have a Mahlerian intensity of feeling whether the "subject" is war, injustice or personal tragedy - Shostakovich never seemed quite to shake off Mahler as Brian, early in his career, shook off Strauss. It is quite interesting that the Shostakovich Fourth was written at the same time as the Brian Fourth and the Vaughan Williams Fourth; all three are violent and disturbing works in a deeper way than the also contemporary Walton First, where the orchestra is required to perform with the agility and ferocity of a Muhammad Ali in his prime. The Shostakovich, especially the long first movement, is a vast and explosive melting-pot in which the 'ideas seethe in barely-controlled fury; the Brian delivers its blows with lethal accuracy and crushing force’. Of course, there was plenty of violent music about in the '30s, and earlier - Prokofiev, Varèse (whose possible influence on Brian has been noted, especially in the bombardment which shatters The Gothic), and so on back to The Rite of Spring; but the Brian is uniquely powerful. The dancing of Brian's Jews in the blood of their enemies is far more chilling, for example, than the allegro giocoso triumph of Walton's in Belshazzar's Feast; and whereas Shostakovich's war symphonies are graphic - especially the first movement of the Leningrad and the two scherzos of the 8th, which remind me of The Tigers and Das Siegeslied respectively - Brian's is prophetic. It is risky to tie music to events, unless the connection is obvious (as in the Leningrad); imagine trying to make something of the fact that The Rite of Spring anticipated the First. World War by a year! But Das Siegeslied seems to me to be a uniquely momentous work, delivering a message as timeless as it was timely.
We are all sick of statistics to show how extraordinary Brian was, but here are two more for the pile: had Brian died at Mahler's age, he would just have had time to finish The Gothic; and had he died at Shostakovich's age, he would just have finished Prometheus Unbound, having written no symphony since Wine of Summer (a symphonic tally one-third the size of Shostakovich's!). What a loss would have been there, and what might Mahler have been writing in the 1940s, or Shostakovich now?
Martin O'Leary pointed out the extreme contrast in the length of Brian and Mahler symphonies: most of Brian's are no longer than Haydn's or Mozart's, whereas Mahler's are nearly as long (and as eventful) as a film or a football match. Yet length can be an illusion. I can remember feeling a sense of satisfaction and full nourishment after curtain-raiser performances of Haydn 44 or 102; I would have been happy to miss the more "substantial" items which followed on each occasion. Brian is so demanding, and occasionally indigestible, that I can't imagine wanting to hear anything after one of his symphonies, except an immediate repeat performance. The natural analogy for a Mahler symphony is a journey - usually a long and absorbing one; Brian's are more like wrestling with a complex and knotty problem, where different approaches have to be tried, varied or abruptly dropped, and a solution is not always possible - at any rate, not a convincing one. There is an extraordinary density-in-economy; if Schoenberg felt "air from another planet" transforming his music, Brian seems to be trying to deal with matter from another planet. If, as Harold Truscott has memorably suggested, Brian's music went through a Black Hole in the third movement of The Gothic, this is perhaps a result: like matter on Jupiter, his later symphonies have a density which gives them weight utterly disproportionate to their size. The Gothic invites comparison to Mahler by its scale and heroic aspiration. Cardus, taking account of the imperfections of Mahler's Third, quoted Browning - "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp!" The same might be said in defence of The Gothic, if defence is needed. Brian takes as his motto famous words from that key Romantic work, Goethe's Faust (a copy of which was always in Mahler's pocket toward the end of his life); their sentiment is more starkly ex-pressed by Louis MacNiece (a translator of Faust) in The Dark Tower:
"A man lives on a sliding staircase – Sliding downwards, remember; to be a man He has to climb against it, keeping level Or even ascending slightly; he will not reach The top - if there is a top - and when he dies He will slump and go down regardless. All the same while he lives he must climb."
No redemption is offered here. "Immer strebend" "ever striving" - has become a grimmer business since the death of Romanticism and the new respectability of disillusion-ment and despair. Romanticism's death-throes come, if anywhere, in that grinding chord near the end of The Gothic. But not for Brian the late Mahlerian music of resignation, haunted by a sense of loss; rather a re-engagement of the enemy on new ground. For MacNiece, striving is still noble (though pointless); where Brian goes far beyond Mahler is his ability to gaze, Beckett-like, clear-eyed into the void, and write what he sees. At times in Brian I am powerfully reminded of the loneliness of the two tramps on the road in a terrifying and unfathomable universe in Waiting for Godot, or the suffocating darkness which encloses Hamm in Endgame, or Winnie buried up to her neck in earth in Happy Days. "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." The only course open to Beckett's characters is to "keep going" as long as possible - not to succumb; that phrase constantly recurs in Beckett's The Unnamable, which Berio married to the music of the scherzo of Mahler's Second in the central movement of his Sinfonia. That movement is about the closest Mahler came to what we would call "the absurd", the contemplation of existence as meaningless; and he turned from it with a "cry of disgust" towards his Romantic, quasi-religious apotheosis. Mahler had a horror of this kind of vision, which surfaces in several of his scherzos and culminates in the mocking laughter of the ape among the tombstones in the moonlight in the first song of Das Lied von der Erde; he struggled, sometimes frantically, to overcome or suppress it. Brian, in some memorable passages, seems able to confront it.
In the end we are left with the struggle. In Mahler's Sixth, the closest to Brian, it doesn't matter that "nought availeth", and no apotheosis is pasted on. The life-affirming energy with which it is waged survives its own extinction; the negative forces which appear to triumph are somehow neutralized; they lose their sting. For me, the best of Brian's symphonies, from The Gothic onwards, provide a similar exhilaration; which is one reason why, in spite of my own quite different standpoint as a committed Christian, they retain their power to absorb utterly, and to move.
© 1982 Christopher Kettle
Response by Larry Alexander:
Christopher Kettle's article on Brian, Mahler and Shostakovich in Newsletter 39, which was fascinating, intriguing stuff, calls for comment. To begin with, Kettle's initial reminiscence about the chair-man's remarks at the Simpson lecture, Brian's music having reminded him of his favourites, Mahler and Shostakovich: hardly the first time I've heard similar comparisons from certain music-lovers I've introduced Brian's work to. One friend, for example, immediately classified what I played of the pre-'48 Brian as "heavy into a Mahler trip" and what played of the post-'48 Brian as "very Shostakovich". Nor was he alone...but, I have to say, I found that sort of reaction on the superficial side, similar to what those who dislike, for example, rock music say when they say it all "sounds alike". Kettle is absolutely right when he indicates Shostakovich's extreme debt to Mahler on a stylistic level: his example of the Russian's Fourth Symphony is about as on-target as they come. Equally I could cite the second movement of Shostakovich's Fifth. Many times I have by accident found that scherzo playing on my car radio and, even though I know it backwards and forwards as Shostakovich, leapt to the immediate and ignorant conclusion that it was something by Mahler which had slipped my sieve-like mind.
But I am not sure that Kettle, obviously an appreciator of Shostakovich's scores, gives him his full stylistic due when it comes to the later work, especially the post-heart attack stuff (mid-'60s to 1975). It has to do, I think, with Shostakovich's relationship to the commissars throughout his career, with or without the testimony of Testimony which, if anyone has not read, they should. Kettle wonders how Brian would have fared with the Zhdanovs, speculating that he'd have given them "no end of trouble"...as Shostakovich did, albeit gingerly, with great trepidation, pushing, retreating, pushing, retreating. Until that heart attack freed him, freed him to write whatever he felt: what could they do to him, then?
Up till that point, however, Shostakovich always fell back into what I call his Mahler mode whenever he went "too far". We have to remember that the composer withdrew his Fourth Symphony not because it was too messy or modern for Stalin's tastes (to be honest, I'm not so sure the great dictator would have liked the piece but I don't think he'd have taken as much umbrage as he did, over it alone), but because of the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District. If anything in Shostakovich's oeuvre is non-Mahlerian, it is the original score to Lady Macbeth - maybe I'm crazy, but I hear more Bartók in it, more Stravinsky: it is almost, almost, a mainstream Parisian-school work. The proof of the contention is, of course, the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich's apology to the "proletariat" for being too "modern" and anti-socialist. As I said, there are times when I can't tell it from Mahler at all.
Later, the same thing. Shostakovich gets into trouble in 1948 with the "depressing" Eighth Symphony. So: no wonder the Ninth is deliberately light-weight...and no wonder the 10th is so Mahlerian (I won't even discuss the 11th and 12th, which make the programmatic Second and Third sound like the Beethoven Ninth). It's Shostakovich's gesture to the powers-that-be: so sorry, I got carried away, but I'll go back to being a good boy, you don't have to hit me. While the result may be to make the Shostakovich Ninth un-portentous in a Brian-esque way, the motivation doesn't seem to me to be at all the same, and that is a good example of the difference be-tween these contemporaries. Brian in his obscurity had the freedom to thumb his nose at convention precisely because no one knew he was there. Who could he insult or distress? The man didn't, as far as the musical establishment was concerned, exist. That which doesn't exist doesn't make waves, Perhaps if Brian were Shostakovich he would have made those waves, or perhaps he would have made just so many and then backed off, preferring, as Shostakovich preferred, to "keep going" in his own guerrilla-type way, hitting and running.
Conversely, incidentally, had Shostakovich been Brian, not too much would have turned out different in terms of attitude. Proof: what Shostakovich wrote in the last decade or so of his life, when his health gave him the same freedom Brian enjoyed from World War I on, whether Brian wanted to "enjoy" that "freedom" or not. Now the Russian could be bitter, snide, sardonic, acid... and honest. The Mahler influence is gone. I beg to differ with Mr Kettle on his 15th Symphony. While I agree with him that it is an utter masterpiece, that it has Mahler's intensity of feeling, it is not at all Mahlerian; not in the slightest, quotes from Wagner notwithstanding. What it is, is the kind of individual statement that of all other composers only Havergal Brian was capable of making, a kind of detached emotionalism that only comes from the rejected... or the dying. Mahler's emotionality was of a different sort, I feel: the Austrian was never resigned to anything, especially not the inevitability of his own mortality. Not even in the Cooke-completed 10th does he ever rise above the battle to give an objective comment. Shostakovitch does in his last quartets and in that 15th Symphony (the first movement is a "toy store" indeed:). Brian does from his 6th Symphony on. And maybe that's what the people who sense the kinship between Brian and Shostakovich hear, an extra-musical affinity as opposed to two composers who "sound alike".
Interestingly, one could more effectively trace Mahler's influence to almost the same Shostakovichian independence in another British composer, namely, Benjamin Britten who, like the Russian, goes from a heavy Mahler sound to a more aesthetic modernism not far removed from Shostakovich's. Compare the Shostakovich 14th, say, with Britten's 'Cello Symphony. I like an awful lot of Britten's work, although not nearly as much as I like Brian's - and I think it comes down to the fact that recognizing Britten's work on the basis of sound alone is not always a possibility, whereas it most certainly is in the case of Brian... and Dmitri Shostakovitch. Kettle touches on yet another influence on northern Europe-an music of the 20th century outside of the Stravinsky-Schoenberg circles: Denmark's Carl Nielsen. There is Nielsen in Brian, considerable Nielsen, in fact: the opening of the Sixth, much of the Eighth and 10th, Elegy - just around the time of Robert Simpson's discovery of Brian, the latter was taking what Nielsen had done and synthesizing it into his own sound, just as in Sweden Allan Pettersson was in his own special way (talk about composers and their influences: the neurotic Mr Pettersson is one hell of an example! There's Mahler and Nielsen and Shostakovich and... on and on. Pettersson, too, has a distinctive style, grating though it might be, overstaying its welcome as it often does - and evolved like the others into something utterly personal, losing the influences along the way.). I often wonder what Brian would have thought of Pettersson's gargantuan effusions: I'm not sure he would have reacted well to them and yet he might have come to a grudging sort of acceptance: "I might not like what he says but, well, he says it well enough...".
Going back from Mr Kettle's article to the editorial "diatribe" on recordings in Newsletter 39, the fact is that a large measure of the problem is not even the record companies but the public itself - and when I say "the public" I mean the knowledgeable, concert-going segment of society, that minority as compared to the population as a whole, just of Western civilization. A recent review of a Philharmonic concert in New York put the whole thing in a nutshell when it remarked that almost half the audience fled a fairly new 14-minute piece which was not dodecaphonic or atonal: they simply did not wish to experience that which was unfamiliar - it might bite them. Last year a Los Angeles audience hooted at the "Madam, Look!" movement of Shostakovich's 14th Symphony, walking out in droves because the sound of Russian-language laughter was so alien to them. A large number did it this year with the same composer's 10th Symphony even before Simon Rattle brought his baton down, not even wishing to try it on for size. Tonal works, both. Beautiful. Original. What we are fighting are closed ears, a goodly portion of the concert-going, record-buying public unwilling to listen to anything after Mahler; not because it can't be hummed but because to learn to like it requires a bit of effort. Part of the problem stands with the music critics, all of whom were, I'd say, academically trained to the point of brainwashing. In large measure they are all of a certain age and outlook on both sides of the Atlantic. Stravinsky is good, Shostakovich is not so good, Oliver Knussen is terrific, Havergal Brian is unknown. "Unknown" is its own re-ward as far as these taste-makers are concerned: there has to be a "reason" a composer is unknown, and that reason can only be that he has nothing to offer, nothing to say, no originality (that they can hear:) and even to sit through one piece is a time-waster. Well, you keep reading stuff like that week in and year out and you foster an attitude in the attendees. Unknown is no good, period. It goes with the feeling that most people have on the worth of any sort of material, be it music, art, or writing: if it isn't bought it isn't anything. If a large professional concert organization or a large professional record company is not willing to do it if it isn't of consequence... and even if they do make a tentative step does it matter if nobody wants it anyway? Thus the proverbial vicious circle.
I wish I knew a way to break the ring, but I don't. The letters I write seem to get me no real progress, only a kind of grudging acknowledgement. Yes, yes, but no thanks. Can't afford it. We'll talk to our guest conductors. What do they know? Have any of them ever sat down and listened to a tape or a record (if any) or asked for a score? Last January after a Pettersson concert in New York I conversed briefly with Sergiu Comissiona on the possibility of the American or Baltimore Symphony Orchestras performing any Brian. "Ah" he said. "Brian. The Gothic, yes!" But Comissiona isn't going to do The Gothic in Baltimore, or even in New York -and he also isn't going to do any other Brian work either. He's got his composer to champion in Pettersson... who had the great good fortune late in his unfortunate life to get himself the backing of no less than the management of the ABBA soft rock group in Stockholm.
This is what Brian needs: one conductor, one backer. An angel, to use the Broadway term, to publicize, to perform, to raise money and use his influence. Sir Charles Mackerras might have been that person, but I think he's to engrossed in Janacek at the present to really devote the time and commitment. Look among the young up-and-coming conductors, then: find the Levine or the Rattle or whoever who is attached to an orchestra and who has the programming clout, someone who doesn't just give Brian's music lip-service, but who really adores it and wants to promulgate it. All I know is that very few people in America, at least, were prepared sit through a symphony by that post-Wagnerian derivative, Mahler, until Leonard Bernstein (no less) got up one hour on network television and lectured and played excerpts. All of a sudden everyone involved with music wanted to hear more - having not given Mahler their attention, no, but Leonard Bernstein. That was the draw. Mahler was incidental... until Bernstein opened their ears. I cannot believe that, within a reasonable period of time, a well-known conductor won't come along to be Brian's champion, to do for Brian what Bernstein did (in America) for Mahler. On the other hand, the fact is that I can believe it all too well. Life is not fair, and Brian isn't the only good composer out there that no one of "importance" has heard.
© 1982 Larry Alexander
Newsletter, NL 39, 1982