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A unique acoustic

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 24th September 2008

Robin Holloway on the unique orchestra layout that produces the Festspielhaus’s unique acoustic

Wagner’s ‘egotistic, sublime’ exclusivity goes against the English grain; and anyway the Festival at Aldeburgh, despite its function as launching-pad for Britten’s burgeoning output in many other genres beside opera, never (unlike Bayreuth) confined itself to the music of its composer-founder only. Snape Maltings needs to be versatile, suited equally to solo recitals, song, chamber music, oratorio, symphony and concerto, in a great variety of styles.

Comparison of appearance and atmosphere are highly suggestive. Bayreuth imposes its high culture upon a modest little ducal court and its populace. The building is absolutely new and absolutely modern, technologically advanced in its day, making no concessions to the surroundings that, in the end, re-orientate themselves around it. The Maltings venture is consciously ‘heritage’-bent; tactful and scrupulous with respect to its locality, refitting an old building, relict of a local trade that had withered away, using local materials and local skills in an ideological spirit of conservation that extends also to the surrounding flora and fauna.

Even where the two places overlap, the differences tell. Both are shrines, involving the elevation of an unassuming place in the middle of nowhere to a Mecca, obliging the faithful to travel, make sacrifices, live in accordance with the demands (sometimes, chez Wagner, inordinate?), before returning to reality soothed (or disturbed), improved, cleansed (chez Wagner, by pity and terror; and, sometimes, chez Britten too). And so to the complementary personalities: godlike grandeur (self-aggrandisement?) vis-à-vis humble self-effacement (which nevertheless, as we know from many a bad story invloved tyranny, manipulation and terminal cold-shouldering — ‘one of my corpses’, said the almost complacent celebrator of the Rites of Innocence).

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