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A perfect cadence

Stephen Pettitt

Wednesday, 26th November 2008

This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday.

This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday. At a time when far too many composers — more anxious about audience numbers than they are about the quality of the music they produce — have often compromised themselves in the cause of immediacy and accessibility, Carter has remained true to himself and to the tough, multilayered, multitextured, multicoloured language in which he writes, investing his always highly organised music with an overriding feeling of lyricism.

Age has, if anything, sharpened this extraordinary mind. He continues to compose. In fact the pace has gathered during the last decade. John Link, in a celebratory article published in the contemporary music journal Tempo, calculates that since he composed his first opera, the black comedy What Next?, in 1998, he has written three dozen new pieces, representing a third of his work list to date.

Although many of these late works are relatively slight and short, many are not. A substantial concertante piece for piano and orchestra, Interventions, was finished just last year, along with a clarinet quintet and several pieces for solo instruments. In 2004, he penned a short orchestral movement — the second piece of a three-movement suite, Illusions, commissioned for the Boston Symphony — which he called ‘Fons Juvenalis’. From such waters he must surely have drunk regularly and copiously these past decades.

Carter is a prime example of the phenomenon of the long-lived composer who finds himself at the peak of his powers as the unseen finishing post steals ever closer. But there are many other instances. Verdi finished Falstaff, his most brilliant, funniest and musically advanced opera, in 1893 at the age of 89. Vaughan Williams, the 50th anniversary of whose death we have so lavishly commemorated this year, finished his final, Ninth Symphony in 1957, the year of his 85th birthday. Again it breaks new ground, asks new questions. Richard Strauss wrote his Four Last Songs in 1948, and was working on an opera, Das Esels Schatten, when he died aged 85 the following year. Camille Saint-Saëns, 86 when he died in 1921, also carried on to the bitter end. A very different composer, Igor Stravinsky, lived until the age of 88. His last works were the pristine, austere Requiem Canticles and an unlikely, deadpan setting of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat, both written in 1966 at the age of 83.

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