Wagner’s music is charged with an incredible force of Eros. It is not the surface Eros of transient lust but the deepest Eros where soul and senses are awakened within the strain of primal longing. Tristan and Isolde is patterned with imagery of day and night. Usually in the world of the imagination, day stands for brightness, colour and goodness whereas the night represents the unknown, darkness and often evil. Wagner reverses this: day brings sorrow and night brings joy and rapture. This opera is a magnificent voyage into the Eros at the heart of the world; it is the call to life and creation that quickens the soul and captures the heart. When we enter the opera, forgotten sanctuaries open in the heart and neglected voices become audible in us. The magnificence of this music of Eros consists above all in the fact that it is a profound engagement with the other side of Eros, namely death. The glory of Wagner is the transfiguration of death and Eros in music. Wagner’s music has a profound, dark beauty that shores up against the great silence into which every life finally fades.
T
HE
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AUNTING
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EAUTY OF
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EETHOVEN
GREAT MUSIC IS NOT A MATTER OF GREAT IDEAS OR INTRICATE melodies. It is not about difficult phrasing or complex harmonies. Truly great music brings to expression the states of the soul. This huge nobility enhances the heart and opens the imagination to the deeper mystery and riches of being here. The human soul is tested and exposed by suffering and there is an elegance in the way great music explores suffering. Beethoven created music out of his own suffering. It is one of the loneliest ironies in the Western tradition that this magnificent composer suffered illness precisely when he had reached the heart of his gift. For him, who had gleaned divine music from the depths of silence, all fell silent. He became deaf. For someone like Beethoven, for whom life was music, it is unimaginable what pain this caused. He wrote about this torment in the famous ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ which was only discovered after his death:
I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness, when I at times tried to forget all this, O how harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing . . . Ah how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few surely in my profession enjoy or have ever enjoyed . . . But what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life . . . only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce . . .
When the first signs of deafness began, Beethoven responded with defiance. In the scherzo in the Ninth Symphony there is a wonderful evocation of the force that triumphs over destiny, and his Eroica or Third Symphony charts the great transition where his soul moves towards acceptance of and integration with his awful destiny. From that isolation of deafness he creates music of an immensely profound, divine and complex beauty. This new growth of soul comes to magnificent flowering in the last string quartets. From despair and forsakenness, he creates sublime and unforgettable beauty. Sorrow is transformed by tranquillity.
The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who loves Beethoven, echoes this when speaking of beauty: ‘Beauty, for me, is felt to be beautiful only when it is contrasted with its opposite, when we can also see the abyss, the shadow.’
M
USIC AND
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EALING
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‘I C
AN
S
EE DOWN ALONG THE
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USIC
’
I HAVE A FRIEND WHO IS A MUSIC THERAPIST. I HAVE SEEN HER work with a man who had had a stroke; he could no longer speak. I saw her last session with him where she sang and played in an attentive and accompanying improvised style. Within the emerging rhythm as she accompanied, anticipated and challenged him, both of them remained within the flow of the melody. He began to hum the music with her and ended up actually speaking. It was such a touching experience to see this person unexpectedly freed.
Music is often the only language which can find those banished to the nameless interior of illness. It calls out to the buried knowing in them, its rhythmic, lyrical warmth eventually freeing their frozen rhythm. She says: ‘I can see down along the music into a person – as though the music were a tunnel between them and me. Or to use another image: through the invisible hands of music I search for the person and the music can find them and bring them back. Only music can reach the trapped knowing within them.’
T
HE
M
USIC OF THE
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OICE
And you, who with your soft but searching voice
Drew me out of the sleep where I was lost,
Who held me near your heart that I might rest
Confiding in the darkness of your choice:
Possessed by you I chose to have no choice,
Fulfilled in you I sought no further quest.
GEOFFREY HILL, ‘Tenebrae’
EVEN WITHIN THE HIGH REFINEMENT OF CLASSICAL MUSIC THE human voice still creates the most touching and tender music of all. A beautiful voice raises our hearts and stirs something ancient in us, perhaps reminding us of our capacity for the eternal. Such a voice can claim you immediately even before you have time to think about it. I have often been at a music session where someone might be asked to sing and as soon as the beautiful voice rises up all noise and distraction cease and everyone becomes enraptured as the beauty of the voice brings out the music of the heart. When you hear a soprano like Joan Sutherland scale the highest mountains of Mozart, it takes your breath away, or Jessye Norman singing the Four Last Songs of Strauss. But why does exquisite song stir us deeply? Perhaps, more than any instrument, song can capture us because the human voice is our very own sound; the voice is the most intimate signature of human individuality and, of all the sounds in creation, comes from an utterly different place. Though there is earth in the voice, the voice is not of the earth. It is the voice of the in-between creature, the one in whom both earth and heaven become partially vocal. The voice is the sound of human consciousness being breathed out into the spaces. Unlike things of clay which contain themselves, the soul always strains beyond the body. A stone can dwell within itself for four hundred million years, take every sieve of wind and wash of rain, yet hold its Zen-like stillness. From the very moment of birth, consciousness is already leaking from our intense yet porous interiority. To be who we are, we need the consolation and companionship of the outside. Utter self-containment is either the gift of the mystic who has broken through to the divine within, or the burden of one who has become numbed and catatonic because the outside was too terrible. The human voice is a slender but vital bridge that takes us across the perilous distance to the others who are out there. The voice is always the outer sounding of the mind; it brings to expression the inner life that no-one else can lean over and look into.
Yet the voice is not merely an instrument, nor a vehicle for thought. The voice is almost a self; it is not simply or directly at the service of its owner; it has a life of its own. Its rhythm and tone are not always under the control of the conscious, strategic self. Each person has more than one voice. There is no such thing as the single, simple self; a diversity of selves dwells in each of us. In a certain sense, all art endeavours to attain the grace and depth of human mystery. There is wonderful complexity in nature and indeed in the world of artificial objects; yet no complexity can rival the complexity of the human mind and heart. Nowhere else does complexity have such fluency and seamless swiftness. Whole diverse regions within the heart can quicken in one fleeting thought or gesture. A glimpse of an expression in someone’s eyes can awaken a train of forgotten memories. The mystery of the voice lies in its timbre and rhythm. Often in the human voice things long lost in the valleys of the mind can unexpectedly surface. As the voice curves, rises and falls, it causes the listener to hearken to another presence that even the speaker might barely sense but cannot silence. Sometimes, without our knowing or wanting it, our lives speak out. In spite of ourselves, we end up saying things that the soul knows but the mind would prefer to leave unsaid.