The last of 2009’s remarkable concatenation of musical anniversaries was celebrated — if that is the word — by Radio Three on New Year’s Eve with a chat show in which each of the four great composers was allotted a defence by a noteworthy music lover, backed up by live phone calls for a brief, impromptu telegram, illustrated with well-chosen extracts from their works, subjected to dissenting discussion, and eventually put to the vote at the hands of the anonymous mass of listeners.
The last of 2009’s remarkable concatenation of musical anniversaries was celebrated — if that is the word — by Radio Three on New Year’s Eve with a chat show in which each of the four great composers was allotted a defence by a noteworthy music lover, backed up by live phone calls for a brief, impromptu telegram, illustrated with well-chosen extracts from their works, subjected to dissenting discussion, and eventually put to the vote at the hands of the anonymous mass of listeners.
To do the event justice, invidious competition was largely avoided. It’s not a race between Purcell, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, wherein the third eliminates the last, the second the two below, the winner the other three. All four survived in their own right. Yet there was a slight feeling of diminution, a whiff of glee at the revelation of limits, sighting the feet of clay. Some pieces of evidence for the masters’ weaknesses were amusing: the wimpish gentility of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words when not from the top drawer of his elegant bureau, the wicked florilege of Handel’s florid vocal writing at its most routine. What one missed was a more searching attempt to encapsulate the four very different composers: in themselves; and in the light of each other. Let me make this attempt retrospectively.
Purcell, lord of strangeness, whims of fancy and daring, freakish were they not so consummately controlled by his wonderful sense of harmonic and linear direction; one of the most brilliant setters of words in all music, responsive to every shade of meaning, every intonation, inflection, quantity; with a natural genius for the stage, woefully stultified by the immature and provincial theatrical culture of Restoration London, pouring lavish riches into the dodo of semi-opera and the dead duck of royal and other occasional odes; fully realising himself only in miniature meditative Fantazias, save for the magnificent body of music for the Church.
Without him, Handel’s comparable output wouldn’t be what it is. Purcell’s choral writing provides the basis for all Handel’s work in English. Which, not being his first language, displays little or nothing of the native master’s resource and subtlety, whatever the magnificence of the foreigner’s musical inspiration and the resonance of his rhetoric. The genius of Handel is plainness: Beethoven called him ‘the master of us all’, instancing the vast discrepancy between the apparent simplicity of the means and the sublime effects they give rise to. A complete opposite, then, of Purcell’s perpetual surprise and astonishment in the small: Handel deals in the large, often with overwhelming power.
Haydn certainly owed the late harvest of Oratorio, Cantata, Mass, to his experience of his predecessor’s power, as encountered on his London visits in the 1790s. But the core of Haydn is something else — purely instrumental thought, in abstract genres; cerebral, constructivistic, argument-making, journey-taking; now cheerful, witty, faux-naïf (but don’t be fooled!), affecting; sometimes venturing (while never losing touch with these) into intensely private places of inner reflection that reveal the secret visionary at the heart of the man of the world.
And Mendelssohn? He, too, in the Oratorio written for England, owes audible debts to Handel’s; and his mature string quartets, uniquely in the Romantic epoch, retain something of Haydn’s urbanity and conversational clarity of texture. The true Mendelssohn — the unique area of sentiment and sonority he brought into being — is absolutely unbeholden: the tender delicacy of colour combined with impeccable formal skill whereby he rendered land- and seascapes, the scattering of leaves before the wind, the fairies and lovers and courtiers (and not forgetting the braying ass) of Shakespeare’s enchanted dream-play.
I’ll not try to adjudicate: only to discriminate! Purcell died young (36), leaving the sense that he was poised for yet greater; Mendelssohn also died prematurely (38) — but one feels that he was weary and spent; Handel and Haydn both lived to a ripe age (74 and 77 respectively), their enormous harvest gathered in in full. But the four are incommensurable artistically as well as biographically. Let’s not ‘choose’: rather, treasure them all for just exactly what they are.
Now for 2010 — Schumann, Chopin, Mahler…. Watch this space!
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