Richard Sykes writes to me in response to my question (following
the Schubert Project at the Oxford Lieder Festival): "Where were all the students in this great city of
learning...?"
Roger, have you read A Clockwork Orange? Alex, reformed by
the drugs and aversion therapy to which he is subjected, finds that his musical
tastes have changed:
"It was like something soft getting into me and I could not
pony why. What I wanted these days I did not know. Even the music I liked to
slooshy in my own malenky den was what I would have smecked at before,
brothers. I was slooshying more like romantic songs, what they call Lieder,
just a goloss and a piano, very quiet and like yearny, different from when it
had been all bolshy orchestras and me lying on the bed between the violins and
the trombones and kettledrums. There was something happening inside me, and I
wondered if it was like some disease or if it was what they had done to me that
time upsetting my gulliver and perhaps going to make me real bezoomy."
I rather suspect that this is Burgess reflecting on his own
experience of evolving musical tastes and the ways in which we experience some
musical revelations only as we age. Certainly that was my experience with
Lieder. As an Oxford undergraduate I loved "classical" music, and
attended concerts in the city. But I would not have seriously considered attending
a Lieder recital. Now, in my late 40s, something has happened inside me, few
things give me more pleasure, and I love to slooshy Lieder in my own malenky
den and in Oxford's malenky concert hall too. In years to come, I'm sure some
of those students will, too.
So good
to be reminded of the extraordinary polymathic Anthony Burgess, who regarded
himself as both composer and writer, although his compositions have rarely been
given airtime.
I came to lieder rather earlier than Richard Sykes – in my early twenties ‒ but if
I’d been a student in Oxford before connecting with the genre, I’d have missed
out too.
My own
epiphany came when I bought Saga’s 1966 recording of Janet Baker singing
Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. Still essential listening. Here she is with
pianist Martin Isepp in Schubert’s ‘Der Musensohn’:
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