Talking about music

Many years ago I went to a “literary evening” at Blackheath and the guest was the writer (and former singer) John Amis. He had just published a compendium of things said about music.

In the Q & A I asked him, “In the end, what is there to say about music?”

“Have you read the book?" he asked, witheringly. 

Now, at last, I have a response. Mendelssohn wrote: “So much is spoken about music and so little is said. For my part I do not believe that words suffice for such a task, and if they did I should no longer make music.”

The genius of the adult Mendelssohn

To the Albert Hall on Friday for the all-Mendelssohn PROM concert given by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Mendelssohn has suffered through most of my lifetime for the mistaken belief that he was a genius as a child and teenager, but somehow lost it all as an adult. How wrong this is.

Certainly he was the most brilliant composer from a young age, even out-performing Mozart in childhood. But, as this concert showed so clearly, he retained his talent well into adulthood.

On Friday we were given two overtures – “Ruy Blas” and the more rarely performed “The Fair Melusine” – the Violin Concerto which the great fiddler Joachim described as “the heart’s jewel”, and his fifth symphony, the “Reformation". All of them were written in adulthood with an evolved, grown-up aesthetic, but no signs of decline.

So how did this reputation grow up? Probably it was the result of dreary, overblown performances. None of that was on view on Friday from the scintillating Leipzigers.

And how good to see a young Sydneysider, Tahlia Petrosian, among the violas. Is she the first Australian to play in that great orchestra since the teenage Alfred Hill in late 1880s?

Alfred Hill: Australasia’s finest composer?

How exciting it must have been for the sixteen year-old Australasian, Alfred Hill, to arrive in Leipzig to study violin and composition in 1887, able to observe at close quarters most of the greatest musicians and composers of that time – Brahms, Joachim, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sarasate, Bruch and Ysaÿe among them ‒ and within two years to be inducted into the legendary Gewandhaus orchestra.

Born in Melbourne in 1869, he was raised in Wellington, where he became something of a musical prodigy before going on to Leipzig to study at the Conservatorium. The training he received there was extremely thorough, but already Leipzig was felt by many to be living in the past, under the shadow of Mendelssohn and Schumann.

So how sad, later in life, to be deemed out-of-date and consequently ignored in one’s own lifetime.

Over the course of a long life, lived primarily in Sydney, Alfred Hill composed constantly, and, although he experimentally incorporated both Maori and Aboriginal motifs in his work, he never escaped from the late Romantic style he acquired in Leipzig. In the meantime, from the early years of the twentieth century, the musical world had become preoccupied with “modernism” – Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Schoenberg and the rest.

The consequence is that the bulk of Hill’s music languishes in various libraries in Australia and New Zealand, unperformed and unknown.

So kudos to Naxos and to the Dominion Quartet for recording all of Alfred Hill’s fine series of quartets for the first time. And to the DQ’s viola-player, Donald Maurice, for editing and publishing Hill’s fascinating Leipzig diary.

But there’s so much more to discover.

Exploring the “founding myth”

The school that I went to had an extraordinary musical culture which went back to the earliest days of its establishment as a boarding school in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1864, the pioneering headmaster of Uppingham, Edward Thring, was looking for a new director of music. The English composer, Sir William Sterndale Bennett, was commissioned by Thring to find him. He went to the place in Germany where he had studied, the Leipzig Conservatorium. There, amongst others, he asked the advice of the violinist leader of the Gewandhaus orchestra, Ferdinand David. David had given the premiere of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and was a close friend and associate of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.

Ferdinand suggested that his own son, Paul David, would be appropriate for this new post. Paul was just 25 years old with little or no English. He travelled to England in company with one of his father's most gifted pupils, Joseph Joachim, who was by this time already one of the most famous violinists in the world. (Joachim was to give the first performance of both Brahms’s and Bruch’s first Violin Concertos.)

Paul David inspired high standards of music at the school - a tradition which persists to this day. By no means an outstanding composer, nevertheless he was a fine violinist, and he wrote much music for the school. He continued to teach at Uppingham for some 40 years.

Joachim (above, by Adolph von Menzel), who frequently made concert tours in Britain, would always go to the school deep in the English countryside to visit his friend and to do some coaching. He even played in the back row of the violins in the school’s string orchestra. He had made his debut in England in 1844 playing the Beethoven concerto under Mendelssohn - and his final performance of this same work was given at Uppingham in 1905 at the opening of the new concert hall.

Fittingly, Paul David was succeeded as head of music at Uppingham by William Sterndale Bennett’s grandson, Robert, who continued to maintain and develop musical standards for a further four decades.

Among the many distinguished musical pupils who have emerged from the school are the folklorist Cecil Sharp, the composer EJ Moeran and the violinist leader of the Lindsay String Quartet, Peter Cropper.

When I work with established organizations who wish to create change in some way, I always encourage them first to re-examine their “founding myth”. So often it has a profound influence on the current situation, usually quite subconsciously. At Uppingham, it’s not so hard to find.