My mother died, aged 97. Born in the late 1920s, she saw the Crystal Palace burn and the flaming sky around St Paul’s Cathedral in the middle of the Blitz. Her father was at Jutland in 1916. Her mother handed out the carbon paper (remember that?) in the Citadel, the underground bunker from which Winston Churchill directed the war. She loved music but wasn’t a musician. A man sitting behind her in the Wigmore Hall, after I’d sung a particularly gruelling account of Benjamin Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (written in 1945, after Britten had visited and played at Bergen-Belsen), asked if I had got my “passion” from her. Definitely not, she amusedly replied.
The end of history predicted at the fall of the USSR proves to have been a mirage and as we enter upon an age in which fragile European hopes of peace and security seem to have evaporated, her experiences—about which I talked to her far too little—have a renewed resonance for me.
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Before the funeral, I went to Guangzhou, China. Extraordinary to think that within my lifetime the huge upheaval of the Cultural Revolution took place, but that I can now go and teach keen Chinese students how to sing Schubert; listen to young Chinese musicians play Mahler (fabulously, under the direction of Daniel Harding and advised by a posse of superb players from great international orchestras such as the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics); and sing Britten’s Nocturne for string orchestra and seven obligato instruments (some of those same mentoring players). At the centre of the Nocturne is a terrifying setting for strings and solo timpani of Wordsworth’s account, in “The Prelude”, of sitting in his room in Paris, shaken to the core by the horrors of the revolution, racked by insomnia and night fears:
I thought of those September Massacres,
Divided from me by a little month,
And felt and touch’d them, a substantial dread:
…And in such way I wrought upon myself,
Until I seem’d to hear a voice that cried
To the whole City, “Sleep no more.”
At those last words, the singer stops singing and simply declaims, shouts, screams, whatever. What was it Zhou Enlai was supposed to have said to Henry Kissinger when asked about the impact of the French Revolution? “Too early to say.” Turns out, disappointingly, that Zhou was talking about 1968 rather than 1789. Lost in translation.
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On a much less exalted plane, I’ve just broken one of the cardinal rules of my profession—can you really call something as fly-by-night as singing a “profession”?—and rather enjoyed it. I was performing some Lieder in a peerlessly beautiful Belle Époque theatre in Paris, the Théâtre de l’Athénée, with a new pianistic partner, the splendiferous (sometimes I just run out of sensible superlatives) Piotr Anderszewski. What a joy! We played Schumann, Dichterliebe and Liederkreis op 24, both sets of poems by Heinrich “Harry” Heine, who died in exile in Paris in 1856. In between, Piotr played Bartók’s Bagatelles, a set of strange, fugitive piano miniatures written in 1908, harmonically experimental, spiked by “rusty shards of folk melody” as the New Yorker’s music critic, Alex Ross, puts it.
Now, here is the shameful admission: I read the reviews. Something very nice in Le Point (a sort of French Newsweek) and something very nasty in an online Belgian magazine, Crescendo. Problem number one: musicians aren’t supposed to read reviews. They certainly never admit that they do. Problem number two: they shouldn’t reply to criticism. I replied. Problem number three (not my problem): the reviewer thought that Dichterliebe and the Liederkreis were not by Robert Schumann but by Johannes Brahms. Cue apoplexy.
Other elements of the review were randomly and annoyingly inaccurate (the hall was full, not empty; the applause was, apparently, enthusiastic) but what licensed my firing off to the reviewer and editor a furious email was the idea that you can, at the same time, misascribe a legendary work to the wrong composer and set yourself up as a judge. The magazine corrected the misattribution—without comment—and I received no reply.
Over the years, I’ve accepted the Wildean axiom (from The Picture of Dorian Gray) that “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Reviews are part of the merry-go-round of publicity and, in these days of the decline of the so-called legacy media, any review is welcome. I’ve been amused by snarky reviews: the late Michael Tanner’s view of my Idomeneo—“Ian Bostridge looked and sounded nothing like his normal self, a welcome relief”—or the late Anthony Holden’s view that neither I nor Dmitri Hvorostovsky would “jangle the glands of either gender”. I can’t speak for myself, but as far as I know, the much-missed and superlative Siberian baritone was the object of Tom Jones-levels of enthusiastic fandom, if not quite of the knicker-throwing variety.
But finally, on my Facebook page, I let it all out. And, to my surprise, no post of mine has ever been so viewed or commented on, with all but two of the comments sympathetic and supportive. It’s a funny old world, as somebody said.
