A shimmeringly good start to the Debussy centenary

A Christmas present to make you feel grown up

In this centenary of the death of the great French composer Debussy, one thing is assured: there will be no shortage of recordings of his works.

If Debussy has never quite been my favourite composer, he’s been hovering not far away from the top of my personal pantheon since around 1980. I had embarked on A’ level music studies at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School and one of the first works that we were introduced to was Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.

It was a Deutsche Grammophon recording, with Herbert von Karajan wielding the baton and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra providing the gorgeously lush sound that stunned this then teenage listener.

It was the start of love affairs with all four component parts of that musical equation.

My mother, whose own classical music appreciation largely went little further than Handel’s Messiah (played every year as we put the Christmas decorations up) and Gilbert and Sullivan, was delighted in my interest and happy to buy me albums at Christmas and birthday.

The mantra was established instantly: DG, Von K, the Berlin. Most arrived on cassette, since I had one of those handheld ones that I later took to college. Such tech has gone the way of all flesh, but my vinyl recordings still survive – including one of those joint Debussy-Ravel programmes that seem to have been the light-classical norm for years.

In a general sense, I always loved DG covers – and still do: so much cleaner and brighter and more modern than those that, for instance, had a reproduction of a painting of an eighteenth-century street because it was a recording of something or other by Mozart. And while of course I would not wish to suggest that I am swayed by covers alone, I do still think that DG produces the classiest covers around, even when they’re predominantly artist portraits. 

Before the centenary got underway, DG had released Seong-Jin Cho’s new collection of piano works, Debussy, comprising Images I and II, Children’s Corner and Suite bergamesque.

In January, this was followed by Daniel Barenboim’s heavily-touted Claude Debussy, with a programme of Estampes, Clair de lune (from Suite bergamesque), Le plus que lente, Elégie and Préludes, Book 1.

Since the composer is standardly described as an Impressionist, it’s easy to think of his work in terms of paintings rather than the literature that was his inspiration. It was a poem by Mallarmé that gave birth to Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, for instance.

But it can be difficult not to see pictures in the mind’s eye when listening to his work. To be honest, I don’t think that counts very high on a list of problems.

On a different note, I have made the mistake, for some time, of treating music as background – something to play on headphones when working so as to aid concentration – and forgotten the value of setting aside time to really listen.

This weekend, I decided to actually sit down and pay attention to these two new discs.

Now Cho is new to me, whereas Barenboim is an established household god who I have had the very great joy and privilege of seeing play live.

The programmes are different – except for Clair de lune. Both are wonderfully meditative: a proper listen is seriously de-stressing stuff.

I have no preference over that one shared piece. But there is something in Cho’s playing that is so subtle, yet utterly devastating.

The thing I kept thinking of when listening was, ironically, not in his programme – Le Cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral), which is is the tenth piece in Préludes, Book 1. Yet it is what I thought of, time and again, while listening to Cho.

Barenboim is wonderful, with the contrasts that you would expect, but there is an ethereal, shimmering quality to Cho’s interpretation that takes the breath away – that’s if you’ve not already found tears streaming down your cheeks.

I was constantly half-thinking of light on rippling water – and yes, of submerged buildings.

In this year of Debussy, these two have already set the bar very high. Get/stream both, if you can. But if you have to choose, go for Cho and then invest the time away from anything else, simply letting yourself be drawn in to the utterly beautiful music and this quite extraordinary performance.

And one can only hope that this is indicative of the quality that we’ll be treated to over the coming months.

Wagner and me

It’s difficult to know when it started, my relationship with Wagner. And no, I don’t mean the X Factor entrant.

It’s been there for a while, most often hovering in the background, but occasionally hoving into clearer view.

First, it was only in the vaguest outlines, formed from a CD of The Other Half’s, a collection of overtures and preludes, together with the famous Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, although I really didn’t ‘get’ that at the time.

With Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil, the first piece that grabbed my attention was the overture to Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.

Oh, what a glorious thing that is – and the resolution still sends me somewhere a little different.

On our trip to Berlin, four years ago, a visit to the Philharmonie to see the same orchestra, under the baton of Simon Rattle, moved me further on again.

After the world premiere of a piece by Matthus Sammer, the rest of the concert was highlights from acts II and III of Götterdämmerung. The singing bits didn’t really grab me, but the orchestral sections left me gasping, as though a g force had picked me up and shoved me back into my seat to hold me there, in rapt attention.

As we left the concert hall, The Other Half asked how I was: “Just trying to teach myself to breathe again,” I managed to reply.

A year or so later, we caught a televised version of a Covent Garden production of Das Rheingold. Now I had a sense of the music and the theatricality combined.

The next stage – although not quite immediately – was the purchase of a Ring cycle: Solti with the Vienna, since that seems to be regarded as the best. When you're going to splash a lot, it pays to research first.

Off and on in the intervening years, I have made limited efforts to start listening to it, but never got very far.

And then, because the nature of some work I’m presently doing means that I need to block out anything else, yet still have a good half of my mind free, I put it all on my iPod and started from the beginning.

We’d not quite caught the very opening of Rheingold, and when I heard it – the 30-second single note; the rumbling of the Rhine as it builds from the source – I was stunned.

And suddenly, listening to one of the operas with no outside interference, the vocal passages changed. In context, they made sense and were far more ‘musical’ than I had previously understood.

Over coffee a few weeks ago, I observed to The Other Half that there was something daemonic about the music (I use that spelling quite deliberately). Yet at the same time, I’'s almost religious. That is – religious without the religion.

I know that it affects people differently, but it gets me right in the gut. And I suspect that that is, in large part, why people feel either wild love with or detestation of it.

Bach, for instance, wrote beautiful music, but it doesn’t ravish you emotionally. Wagner's music can do precisely that.

I don’t think he’s entirely alone in that: there are passages of Beethoven that, played in a certain way, have a huge emotional power.

A few months before we attended that Berlin concert, we were lucky enough to catch one of Daniel Barenboim’s nights at the Royal Festival Hall when he was doing the entire cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas.

I’ve loved old Ludwig since I was introduced to his music at school, but I had never seen or heard it preformed in such a way.

The huge hall faded away and it became something utterly and entirely personal. This was not Beethoven the Polite, this was Beethoven the Passionate, Beethoven the Angry, Beethoven the Inflamed.

In general, we seem so often to treat ‘serious’ music ... well, rather too seriously. But that night, with Barenboim (a Wagner fan, incidentally), the music was given back life and a soul, complete with deep, dark depths.

But back to the extremes that only Wagner provokes.

Just yesterday, on the forum part of a serious national newspaper, someone observed that “no right-thinking” person could like it.

Some of the comments in favour were every bit as over the top.

What other composer has ever triggered such extreme responses?

Of course, much is made of Wagner’s own anti-semitism and the Nazis’ love of Wagner.

My perfect role?

But with the former, do we so damn Milton, say, for his support of Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland or Debussy for being inclined to domestic violence?

And the works themselves are hardly riddled with it – unlike, say, the racism and anti-semitism and sexism of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Yet who suggests we should forgo 007?

There are great ironies in Hitler’s adoration of Wagner. Let's take the Ring cycle: one of the key themes of that great arc of a story is that of the destructive nature of power and the search for it. Hardly the stuff of the Third Reich.

Indeed, in a slender volume entitled The Perfect Wagnerite, first published in 1898, revolutionary Fabian and erstwhile music critic Bernard Shaw expounded a theory of the Ring as being essentially socialist in nature.

Now it’s a downright irritating read in many ways – essentially for Shaw’s incredible ability to be patronising and pompous – but it is an interesting thesis non the less.

And even if one doesn’t go the whole way along that analytical route, it certainly suggests that the works are far removed from how we have come to imagine them through the prism of national socialism.

Not that the extreme negativity about Wagner is new or dates from after WWII – far from it.

In Buddenbrooks, first published in 1901, Thomas Mann has the church organist refusing to accompany Gerda in playing Wagner. It is morally repugnant to him.

There's an irony here too: in effect, it was being considered, by some, to be 'degenerate' – decades before the Nazis used 'entartete' as their excuse to ban and burn and persecute.

So we’re back to personal responses.

German romanticism – of which Wagner can be viewed as the apotheosis – has elements of a death wish about it: a longing for oblivion.

That culture was still around well into the 20th century – Brecht’s poem from 1919, Ballade von den Seeräubern (Ballad of the Pirates), is a perfect example.

And Wagner goes further, reaching for many his most troubling level in Die Walküre, with the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, even though they know they are brother and sister.

I wonder if all this – the death wish element of German romanticism in general and of Wagner’s pushing back of conventional boundaries in particular – prefigures the beginnings of an understanding of psychoanalysis and an imaginative experimentation with exploring the deeper parts of the human psyche?

As the hold of formal religion diminished, and as philosophy – and German philosophy was hugely important in this period – moved toward something more existential (we see this explored at length in Buddenbrooks), then these darker aspects of human nature were being explored in a different way, outside the safety of conventional religion.

They reach their high point in the 20^th century, in philosophical questioning of whether the act of suicide is our only real possible act of free will.

Yet nobody seems to view such angst as though it was a contributory factor in later genocide.

Further, it seems inaccurate to me to characterise this fascination with death as being somehow entirely secular.

It’s hardly far away from western Christianity, which has spent centuries creating a worship of death and suffering: not simply in the figure of Christ crucified, but in so many of the martyrs of the church.

Think only, for instance, of all those painted representations of St Sebastian, erotic even in his suffering; dotted with arrows yet gazing ecstatically at the heavens, knowing death will come soon and transport him somewhere better.

The issue, then, seems to be partly the decline of religion, which can be seen to allow such sentiments and musings. And these were opportunities that Wagner, among many others, took.

But moving on, his influence is as wide-ranging as it is possible to be.

We owe him a debt of gratitude for so many things, from the decision to dim auditorium lights before a performance to, some would say, stream-of-consciousness literature (Joyce, Woolf etc).

And that’s without even beginning to name all the composers who were themselves influenced by his work: Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Berlioz, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg … it’s a very long list.

It’s easy to forget that his influence moves into the realms of popular culture and not just ‘high art’.

Wagner was the first person to use a leitmotif: a recurring theme, often very brief, that appears throughout a work to suggest something particular to us.

So forget the ‘Tristan chord’ and think 1975, Stephen Spielberg and a score by John Williams. Think Jaws and think boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom … a leitmotif, and one that everybody knows, even if they haven’t seen the film (me).

And that’s without mentioning how authors such as Thomas Mann took up and used the leitmotif in a literary sense.

But to bring this back to where we began.

I hope to see a Wagner opera – in the flesh – later this year.

But the weekend’s viewing of the New York Met’s latest production of the power of this Das Rheingold left me in no doubt of his extraordinary genius.

And tdoay, on this 200^th anniversary of his birth, I find myself more and more drawn to both listen more and learn more.

Yet even for an apprentice acolyte, there is a sense of stepping into unchartered territory, because with Wagner, everything is about the personal response. And that is always going to involve an feeling of risk.

Going right back to the beginning of this piece, I mentioned the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Now, until very recently, I had not got caught up in this particular piece.

But then, as I was warming to it, I came across YouTube footage of a clearly dying Von Karajan conducting a concert performance, with the great Jessye Norman singing.

And if you needed any convincing of the almost orgasmic (le petite mort?) infectious nature of Wagner’s music, then here it is.

At the end of this extraordinary performance, Karajan – haggard and having had to sit in order to conduct – slips off his stool; takes Norman’s hands and kisses them.

There – right there – is death and love and beauty, bound up between reality and art.

And like so much else in Wagner, it is intoxicating and awesome and frightening and alluring all at once.

Little wonder then, that his music has, legendarily, driven people to madness.

And little wonder that, even today, he divides opinion more violently than any composer before or since.

* For further reading, I heartily recommend Bryan Magee’s very short, but wonderfully written, concise and utterly fascinating Aspects of Wagner.

Beauty in different places

It was just gone 11.20am on Saturday morning and the train was hauling itself out of London. There was Wembley on the right, with Norman Foster's already-iconic arch towering over the skyline.

All those times I passed it and uttered a silent prayer to the gods of football for City to make it there. There was no need for the same prayer on Saturday: we have been, seen and conquered and, if I couldn't get a ticket for last May's FA Cup final victory, at least I was there for the semi win over United.

Saturday itself was the first act of live worship this season, with the visit of Wigan. It continued a mightily impressive start to the term – with a brand of football that really is beautiful on the eye and likely, on occasion, to take the breath away.

I’m still expecting someone to wake me up – and I’ll be on a train to somewhere like Scunthorpe.

So I'm long enough in the tooth as a City fan not to take anything for granted. Things have changed enormously, but there is still a little niggle in the back of my mind, a tiny gnawing doubt that says that we, the club that was famously described as being able to win cups for cock ups, can still do exactly that.

As the train got under way I listened to Beethoven's sonatas for piano and violin. Beautiful.

It's probably ridiculously juvenile, but the juxtaposition of football and 'culture' always tickles me.

It's amused me to wonder what people have thought when, after clocking my football shirt, they'd notice the title of a book that was slightly beyond Janet & John.

Not, I hasten to add, that anyone can hear the Beethoven.

I'm not the only one who has such thoughts, either. A colleague, who is a season ticket holder at Arsenal, was telling me only the other day that she regularly used to go to a match on a Saturday afternoon and then to the English National Opera to see whatever was on there.

And it amused her to wonder how many other people enjoyed such a combination of entertainments.

Even in the 21st century, it seems that we compartmentalise culture - so that we find the idea of a football fan loving opera too as rather odd.

In Italy, of course, opera has long been popular across society's boundaries - not least Verdi, who has long been linked with the Risorgimento, that country's unification movement.

And opera there was also accessible across the social spectrum, unlike in the UK, where it's still often viewed as an elitist form of culture.

Back in 1996, when England was hosting the European Football Championships, I had travelled to Liverpool to report the match between Italy and Russia. My main memory of a less than scintillating encounter was seeing Gianfranco Zola for the first time; the little man getting his foot impossibly high to bring down the ball that then seemed utterly glued to his boot. Such instant control.

But the journey back to London was memorable for being chaotic. One train had been cancelled, so most of the fans were backed into a single train.

Seat reservations were useless unless you were lucky enough to find your seat before someone else with the same number.

I was ticked off by a very young policeman for swearing at one point, and I started the journey standing until doing something very unusual for me and flashing my press card at the train manager (who was trying to hide from the chaos) and demanding that I sit in first class, together with the half a dozen fans whi were also standing in the same corridor.

Press cards have their uses.

But in the coming days, it emerged that a train from Glyndebourne, bound for the capital one night, had been held in order to wait for a business bigwig or two who had been at the opera.

Football has long been known as ‘working man’s ballet’ – the apotheosis of male working-class culture in a country that effectively kept the plebs well away from high art – just as the cult of amateurism in sport was simply a way of keeping working people away from many other sports.

Now, it’s not been quite as simple as that for some time: in the north, for instance, women have attended football for a long time.

And post-war equality opened up opportunities not simply to see art, but also to participate in it. A blossoming of film, theatre, music and architecture all benefitted from the greater social mobility for working people.

But football’s audience has changed again in recent years, as the cost of going to matches has risen. There are good and bad points about this: personally, while I can look back on going to matches in run-down stadia with only one loo for women, I don’t have any sense of rose-tinted, misty-eyed longing to stand at the bottom of a terrace (me being a short arse) and see streams of piss bubbling down between my feet.

The view I have when I go to City games allows me to really be able to watch the game, unhindered.

On the other hand, as with an increasing amount of things, many ordinary people are being priced out of attending. That’s not just about football, though, but about a far wider cultural change that’s been taking place in Britain – and England particularly – for the last 30 years, and to even skate the surface would take a lot more words than you want to read here and now.

But for me at least, to be a football fan doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate opera (or Beethoven) – and visa versa.

In Amadeus, Peter Schaffer portrays Mozart as a musical genius with more in common with Sid Vicious than was entirely in keeping with the polite society of his day. I have little problem imagining Mozart attending football matches as an Ultra.

Beethoven was an awkward sod. So were many other composers – and countless authors and painters and sculptors etc.

For their work to be co-opted by respectable society is rather amusing really. Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but I wonder sometimes how much some of those who spend small fortunes to be seen at, say, the Royal Opera House, really get of what they see.

And sometimes it’s difficult not to feel that art has, in the UK at least, been largely neutered to make it polite.

A couple of years ago, I saw Daniel Barenboim play some Beethoven piano sonatas at the Royal Festival Hall. All alone on the stage with his piano, it was Beethoven as I’d never seen or heard preformed before – but Beethoven as I suspect it was meant to be: wild and angry and full of Romantic passion and energy.

The vast auditorium flashed away and it was as though I was the only one there, watching something that was as close to its original intent as to suggest I'd been thrown into some time flux and the pianist and composer had become one. It was magnetic and magnificent and deeply intense.

Like music, football is the personal and the public combined. And on Saturday, what I saw was art made flesh. And like the Beethoven, it took my breath away and left me with a sense of awe.

They are not so far apart as some would suppose and as some would like to suppose.