It is one of Kenneth Tynan’s most-quoted observations. After seeing the first night of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in May 1956, the mustard-keen young critic could not contain his enthusiasm for John Osborne’s play. ‘I could never love anybody,’ he wrote, ‘who did not want to see Look Back in Anger.’ On reflection it says rather more about Tynan’s eagerness to be recognised than about the play’s merits, but the phrase has entered the language.
From this distance Look Back in Anger does not look particularly lovable. It was important, certainly, in the sense that there were English plays before, and after, and they were not the same. Tynan was the first man to spot Osborne’s talent, and wanted others to know it. He loved the idea of the play, what it represented, so we can forgive his enthusiasm. But really it is Tynan’s tribute to himself.
The old show-off had a point, though. There are works of art so rich that one could not easily love anybody who did not love them. Yet they are not always the obvious works. Some masterpieces — King Lear, say, or the Missa Solemnis — compel viewers and listeners to keep their distance. Beethoven, in particular, is self-consciously great, in a way that Mozart and Schubert are not. But there is no point claiming that you could not love anybody who did not love Mozart or Schubert. Everybody loves them, or should. Wagner, in this context, is best avoided.
In literature one may be in awe of The Brothers Karamazov, but one loves Fathers and Sons. Indeed, of all novelists, Turgenev may be the most lovable. One may admire Thomas Mann, but one loves Stefan Zweig. Doktor Faustus is the work of a genius, but a cold genius. Beware of Pity goes straight to the heart. To be fair to Mann, so does Felix Krull, the delicious novel that remained unfinished on his death.
Among the poets it is easy to recognise Eliot’s greatness, rather more difficult to warm to his work, apart from Four Quartets, which is clearly the finest poem written in the English language in the last century. For many of us, who like to quote from it at the drop of a hat, Four Quartets is part of a personal mythology. For others, we must acknowledge, it is simply too abstract. Housman is another matter. Like Haydn in music, if you don’t get Housman, you are missing out on what makes poetry worth reading. As Eliot is reputed to have said, ‘We should all write like Housman — if only we could.’
Of the painters, Rembrandt, like Beethoven, can be forbidding; Velázquez less so. The artists that one loves without qualification are Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Hals, Lawrence, Corot, Cézanne, Matisse and, if your tastes cross the Rhine, Lovis Corinth. Above all is Chardin, whose work, though limited in range, restores one’s equilibrium. Looking at a Chardin, all seems right with the world.
There are no prizes for knowing which dramatist inspires the most tender feelings. ‘Whenever Anton Pavlovich enters a room,’ wrote Gorky, ‘it is as if a baby deer has just trotted in.’ Chekhov moves audiences like no other, for, like Schubert, he alternates between major and minor keys without any kind of emotional manipulation. Schubert, Chekhov, Chardin: each artist seems to represent his art more truthfully than any other. None adds unearned weight. None strives for profundity. It is there, glowing, in the work.
What fun this is! Double Indemnity, All About Eve, Singin’ in the Rain, His Girl Friday, A Canterbury Tale; Ella’s ‘Early Autumn’, Sinatra’s ‘Here’s That Rainy Day’, Bennett’s ‘Country Girl’; Ellington allowing Sweets Edison and Johnny Hodges to trade licks on ‘Wabash Blues’, Bill Evans taking apart ‘But Beautiful’ and then putting it back together, Julia McKenzie singing ‘Losing My Mind’, Arcadia, The Whitsun Weddings, The Go-Between (book and film), The Great Gatsby, Scoop, Anything Goes, Sweeney Todd, ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’. I don’t think I could love anybody who did not open their heart to such wonderful gifts.
However, there is one piece that stands apart. Composed, unusually in three movements, between 1914 and 1918, when Europe was a bonfire, Sibelius’s fifth symphony speaks to my ears like no other. Clearly, it speaks to other ears as well, because it is his most widely performed symphony, and may well be the greatest of the seven he completed, though we are talking here of a man who composed only masterpieces.
Even now not everybody gets Sibelius. In this country we have always understood his music: Vaughan Williams famously dedicated his own fifth symphony (and what a work that is) to the Finn, ‘without permission’. But in Germany, astonishing though it sounds, he is still regarded as a Nordic delicacy, and in France, one of the supreme musical cultures, he is hardly performed at all. Last year in Vienna, when the mighty Wiener Philharmoniker deigned to perform the second symphony, a work as familiar to English audiences as Brahms 4 and Dvorak 9,
Esa-Pekka Salonen, the conductor, had to restart the first rehearsal because the players fell apart in the second bar. They didn’t know it, and they didn’t want to know it.
Let us remain indifferent to continental indifference, for Sibelius 5 is a work of beauty and nobility that grows with each hearing. Its opening horn call conveys an eerie atmosphere, and the first movement suggests the thawing of a Finnish landscape. People tend to describe Sibelius’s music in elemental terms but that is because it is rooted in the earth, water and air of his native land. There is no getting away from it.
In the second movement, as in so much of Sibelius, the strings and woodwind appear to be playing in different symphonies, which adds to the sense of mystery. Then, at the opening of the final movement, comes a moment of sheer magic on the horns. The theme came to the composer, he said, after a flock of swans had circled his house and then ‘disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon’.
Here, in the ‘swan hymn’, is a sudden burst of rapture. It expresses the bounty of nature, and the joy of creation. Sibelius found composition a burden. In the last three decades of his life, before his death in 1957, he was silent. He even burned the manuscript of an eighth symphony. Weighed down by his reputation as a national figure, he turned to drink, and waited for the end. Yet in the horn call of his fifth symphony, amplified in the closing bars by the trumpets, he wrote a secular blessing that calls to mind Auden’s request to St Cecilia, the patron saint of music: ‘Come down and startle composing mortals with immortal fire.’
With the swan hymn, and the widely separated six chords that finish the symphony, Sibelius finds the fire to complement all that earth, water and air. There is no ambiguity here. It is a triumphant conclusion to a work that, if played by musicians who understand it, will remind listeners why people become musicians in the first place. It is majestic.
In his short story ‘The Silence’, Julian Barnes describes Sibelius as an old man, all passion spent, but still waiting for the swans and the cranes to reappear. ‘You stand on a hill and from beyond the clouds hear sounds that pierce the heart. Music — even my music — is always heading south, invisibly.’ The fifth symphony of Sibelius pierces the heart all right. I could never love anybody who did not love it.
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