Music Lessons: Seven Composers and What They Taught Me
By Stephen Johnson
Notting Hill Editions. 208 pages. £15.99 ISBN 978-1-912559-87-9
Reviewed by Tony Roberts
Stephen Johnson’s Music Lessons is an autobiographical work about
confrontation and catharsis through music. In a series of chapters he addresses
seven classical compositions, each of which has illuminated his challenging life
journey. There are works by Bruckner, Rachmaninoff, Bach, Lili Boulanger,
Wagner, Sibelius and Beethoven.
Johnson is a broadcaster, a veteran of radio and television documentaries, an
authority on classical music and a composer, one who clearly has a visceral as
well as a scholarly connection with music. He is the author of books on
Shostakovich and Mahler. His understanding has been enhanced, as we learn late
in the book, by an ‘unusually retentive memory’, which allows him ‘to play back
whole symphonies in my mind, long before the days of the cassette Walkman.’
Music Lessons
has a purpose beyond giving a harrowing account of a life challenged by a
dysfunctional upbringing, breakdown, bipolar disorder, suicidal impulses and
autism. He wishes to show, by example, ‘how powerful and benevolent a force
music’ can be in a life. He shares Nietzsche’s wisdom that, ‘Without music, life
would be a mistake.’ Johnson’s view is that those who face despair, with music’s
assistance might ‘discover that life is not a mistake. There is meaning,
waiting to be found, though the journey may be long, arduous, and at times
perplexing.’
How is this meaning to be found? For Johnson: ‘Struggling in a sea of wild,
shapeless feelings, we can discover through music that apparently overwhelming
feelings can be given form: that they can be transformed aesthetically into an
object we can contemplate.’ And this is how Music Lessons proceeds.
I feel the need to stress here that Stephen Johnson is the professional. I am
only a tourist in his worlds, musically, geographically and emotionally. He has
reached deep into chaos and despair in life and music. I have generally been no
deeper than quiet introspection or mild elation in the presence of the latter.
But for those like himself, his mission, his ‘deepest wish’ in the book, is to
suggest that music can offer therapy, ‘the possibility of hope, and of meaning’.
Others, who simply enjoy the beauty and rigours of classical music and are not
so challenged by personal demons, are rewarded with the author’s insights into
the lives and compositions of some of the finest composers. He is for instance
memorably pithy in his remarks on composers: ‘the music shifts from the
exquisite tendresse of Fauré …into the bare, cold, death-haunted world’
of Debussy. He travels widely and describes what he sees. At the Bach Birthplace
Museum in Eisenach, for instance, Johnson visits a reproduction of Bach’s work
room and explains, ‘The clavichord was a perfect instrument for an
eighteenth-century composer in a family home —expressive, with an easy light
touch , and virtually inaudible at anything more than ten feet’s distance.’
The first of his life-changing experiences here was in response to Anton
Bruckner’s Symphony No 8 in C Minor. In his excellent book on romantic age
music, The Beloved Vision, Stephen Walsh wrote of Bruckner‘s work, ‘His
symphonies are grand, cyclopean structures, made out of large musical paragraphs
that develop slowly through a series of terraced climaxes, rather than by the
classical method of organic interweaving of motifs.’ Johnson, whose Music
Lessons is often more conversational in tone, captures something of this in
a simple image when he describes them as ‘symphonic boa-constrictors’.
He devotes some attention to confirming the intelligence of this
Beethoven/Wagner-inspired composer who has often been presented as something of
a rustic, intuitive caricature. He uses the atmospheric simile, ‘His approach
‘on one level, was rather like that of a medieval cathedral architect, pacing
and staking out the proportions before a single stone is laid in place.’ The
moment of darkness in Bruckner which Johnson singles out occurs near the end of
the symphony’s last movement, with ‘The anguished question on the brass, the
motific breakdown that follows, the final scant fragments on flute and
timpani—then that silence.’
Rachmaninoff, like Bruckner a periodic depressive, is a very popular today.
Early in his compositional life he was famously prey to insecurity and, as the
author reminds us, was creatively paralysed by the reception to his First
Symphony in St. Petersburg in 1897. He became a popular performer, despite the
lugubrious appearance (‘a six-and-a-half-foot scowl’, according to Stravinsky).
His best loved work, always in a minor key, is suffused with a nostalgic
bittersweet memory of the pre-revolutionary Russia from which he came to his
American fame. It is the melancholy of productions of Chekhov plays.
To Johnson he is the composer of an ecstasy that acknowledges its roots in
gloom. Writing on him, he foregrounds the twentieth century suffering that the
nation endured. This he combines with his own fond experiences of Russian
friends, his thoughts on the Russian soul and his time there, including the
success of his Behemoth Dances at the Moscow Conservatory.
The relevance of Rachmaninoff’s music to the author is in its ability to
acknowledge and embrace sadness, to achieve a kind of happiness. What
particularly appeals to Johnson is the fifth movement of the unaccompanied
setting of the Russian Orthodox ‘All-Night Vigil’ and in it the prayer from St.
Luke, the canticle ‘Nunc dimittis’ (beginning, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy
servant depart in peace’). And what moves the author is the moment when, while
voices are singing two soft, undulating chords, a solo tenor suddenly soars. He
asks, ‘How is it possible to lament and soar ecstatically in the same breath?’
In his Bach chapter Johnson is interested in finding ‘the soul of the words’,
following a remark of Martin Luther, that only theology and music could ‘quiet
and cheer up the soul of man’. The St. Matthew Passion is an ‘astonishing
half-dramatic, half-meditative retelling of the Easter narrative’. It is also
one in which Bach recognised his achievement. According to Christoph Wolff in
his Bach biography, ‘No document affirms his musical position more tangibly than
the calligraphic fair copy he prepared in 1736 of his “great Passion” — the
revised and expanded version of the St. Matthew’s Passion —a personal
statement made by the fifty-one-year-old composer that the work truly
represented the pinnacle of his career and was, in general, an unequalled
musical monument.’
What is important here, beyond that, is that in concert Johnson had the
experience of hearing in Jesus’s last words, God’s own despair. This moment has
stayed with him: ‘God has committed himself, not just to understanding human
frailty, suffering, doubt and despair, but to actually embodying them, living
them.’
Lili Boulanger, a daughter and sister of composers, died in 1918 at the age of
twenty-four. Her admirers included Fauré and Debussy. For Johnson, her life is
inspiring and heart-breaking, since ‘grief, loss and a sense of unappeasable
longing are themes in her work from early on’. He considers her setting of Psalm
130, ‘Du fond de l’abîme’ (‘From out of the Depths’). On one occasion the music
communicated particularly powerfully with him.
Sitting in his work room in the garden more recently, the author played a
YouTube version of her psalm setting, with Yan Pascal Tortelier and Ann Murray
as the contralto soloist. In one passage Murray sings of forgiveness and hope.
He finds little hope. Instead he likens it to the experience of his childhood,
to a child beating at a locked door. Ultimately, however, he is given the sense
of the ‘good’ despair that the theologian and philosopher Kierkegaard once wrote
of. Peace, he recognises, can ultimately come from acceptance of one’s
situation, and he credits Boulanger for helping him begin to see and accept
that.
Each of these chapters recognise Johnson’s own important life-relationships
along with the pieces of music. In perhaps the most moving remembrance of
Music Lessons, he turns to a formative influence, that of his father’s
sister, Betty, whose musical guidance and ‘uncomplicated, unambiguous love’
saved him from despair, when his mother and father were too emotionally distant,
too self-involved to recognise his needs.
Wagner’s sacred Christian drama, Parsifal, was described by Nietzsche as
‘a work of malice, a vindictiveness … an outrage on morality’. And Charles
Osborne (The Opera Lover’s Companion) has written of this anti-Semitic
work, ‘The opera stands as an uncomfortable reminder that art and morality are
really not on speaking terms.’ On the other hand, the Nazis were reportedly
unsure of it. To them, the work’s compassion and non-violence seemed to vitiate
its power. For Johnson, Wagner is more than simply ‘the egoistical proto-fascist
of popular mythology’. He also exhibits ‘the skill of a master psychotherapist,
and that’s why he matters, bastard that he is’.
The Parsifal moment that the author is most touched by occurs at the high
point of the opera’s Second Act and, unsurprisingly, it involves Johnson’s
memory of his negative relationship with his mother, as well as an uncomplicated
one with his selfless father-in-law. In the character of Parsifal, he identifies
a moment when the youth responds to the Grail messenger Kundry’s kiss and ‘is
shocked out of his “self-forgetting” numbness, and ‘sees, really sees for the
first time, and his heart burns with compassion’. The author recognises the
epiphany. Having experienced compassion in his father-in-law, the example showed
him the way to open himself a little and to want to understand what he could
rescue from the memory of his relationship with his parents.
Jean Sibelius was yet another tortured genius. His life was blighted by
alcoholic excess, guilt and fear of failure, while underpinned by the
Nietzschean belief that adversity is a measure of strength. His music is
greater, being full of nature’s grandeur, elemental and epic. The author’s
admiration for Symphony No 5 in E flat major is an early one. While
acknowledging its popularity —the swans and the ‘sun-centred images’ —he also
responds to the angst in the work which connects with Sibelius’s agony at the
time of his throat tumour. He dwells also on the Fourth Symphony —my own
fatalistic favourite —which he recognises as containing ‘some of the most
desolate and disturbing music Sibelius ever wrote.’
In this chapter we learn also of Johnson’s meeting with and love for his wife,
Kate, whose loyalty has grounded him. Ultimately Sibelius brings both dark and
light: dark in the ‘tense’ pauses which he equates with ‘absolute nothingness’
in the Fifth and yet light from ‘the understanding that life, nature, is a kind
of miracle’.
Sibelius admired Beethoven for his ‘ethical spirit’, rather than technique. And
his one opera, Fidelio, we learn, is also not without its critics.
Despite the beauties and popularity, it is often considered suspect in the vocal
writing and also dramatically. Johnson’s last self-examination is through the
opera, with its apt tale of rescue by a wife’s love. What the author focuses on
here are the opening bars of the Quartet from Act 1 and particularly those
‘touchingly empathetic string harmonies’.
At one point in the book the author’s uncertainty emerges: ‘What am I struggling
with now, as I write? What emotion might I be trying to foist onto somebody
else? I have a horrible feeling that it’s my own rage.’ Yet he has sustained
himself throughout with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and, particularly, Dostoevsky who
has taught him, ‘We must not deceive ourselves; we have to face our own
darkness, take responsibility for our destructive impulses, if we are ever to
become whole human beings’. On the redeeming side: love, the lesson of friends,
listening and reading, all have taught him compassion and that ‘love is the soul
of music’.
Those for whom Music Lessons is written will hopefully derive some
support, even some self-understanding. For other readers, it is rewarding as the
painfully honest testament of a courageous and wounded man healing.