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Friday 5 December 2008

Remembering Mellers

Robin Holloway remembers Wilfrid Mellers

Much from those earliest Scrutiny essays, gathered into Studies in Contemporary Music, remains significant for their pioneering prescience: on Mahler, Fauré, Koechlin, the late works of Debussy (instrumental in reversing a previous tendency that perceived only decline). The subsequent full-length study of François Couperin broke new territory both scholarly and critical. Music in a New Found Land, the epilogue to Man and his Music, gave its title to his next, working the brief coda at full length; a book that, again, retains pioneering importance whose infectious enthusiasm has not diminished over the years, though accurate scholarship, as of course composition itself, has moved on.

After this, Mellers’s eccentricities, always latent, began to prevail. They vitiated sizeable volumes on Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, VW; and crept into smaller monographs on Poulenc and Grainger, as well as the copious essays and reviews occasionally gathered into collections. A sort of blithe British battiness, giving hostages to parody (often self-parody) at best; at worst, to detraction. Which opens up the question of his own composing — undoubtedly for him the core of his existence; as undoubtedly for us, voiceless, hapless in amateurish mediocrity. Of course the living insights into real composers grew from genuine creativity; there’s a comparison with the stillborn music written by great conductors and pianists, wherein interpretative depth is benignly assisted by the very effort of pushing the stuff of the art around: misguided but not misconceived.

It’s the writing on, not of, that matters. The range, the generosity, the huge desire to put over and share, all remain; whatever the reservations, the balance is positive. And grateful! This tiny man with the bubbly adenoidal voice — Leavis himself used to be reminded of Mickey Mouse (or was it Donald Duck?) — possessed the charisma of a Holy Fool who, at bottom, was not foolish at all. His death leaves an incommensurate hole: the world of music goes a paler shade of grey without Wilfrid Mellers.

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