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The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

The Misfits (Part 1 of 2)
1st June 2021

1st June 2021

It is, at least in the public imagination, the creative artist’s prerogative to be ‘different’. As with the ‘mad scientist’ of popular lore (Victor Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll...), the mad eccentricities of genius are the price to be paid for insights into the human condition and soul. In practice, the situation is rather more nuanced. Indeed, for most of the modern history of western culture, it has been the duty of artists to conform: to tailor their brilliance to the whims of patrons (the church, royalty, the nobility) and – since the opening up of ‘high culture’ to the bourgeois masses in the 19th century – to the changeable tastes of audiences. Few if any creative minds have made much progress in their profession without some sort of artistic compromise. Moreover, in music, as in other arts, we tend to think in terms of broad cultural periods – medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, post-romantic – or of larger geographic locale – the French clavecinistes, Italian opera, the German romantic movement, and assorted nationalist trends. Yet throughout music history, since the middle ages, there have been those who stood on the margins of such convenient generalisations, through varying combinations of personal quirkiness and sheer force of artistic vision. Such outsiders, unrepresentative as they may be, are always tremendously rewarding to investigate, and often repay the effort of seeking them out many times over.

One of the earliest of these ‘misfits’ was also one of the first composers whose name has come down to us, a German abbess from the Rhineland named Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Philosopher, visionary and poet, Hildegard also composed monophonic settings of her own texts, most notably her Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum. Since the modern ‘rediscovery’ of Hildegard’s music – thanks in large part to Gothic Voices’ ground-breaking 1981 recording ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’ – her soaring lines and divinely-inspired music have become enormously influential on modern composers of a more spiritual inclination. At the more recondite end of the spectrum, the composers of the 14th-century ars subtilior (‘subtler art’) composed polyphonic settings of often intense rhythmic and harmonic complexity, most fascinatingly so in the case of the elusive French composer Solage whose boldly chromatic three-voice rondeau Fumeux fume par fumée remains a challenge to performers and listeners to this day.

Perhaps the epitome of this intensely compromising treatment of polyphony is the late Italian renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1566-1613). Now best remembered for the murder of his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto, and for the increasingly strict penitential privations of his later years, he took the conventions of the renaissance madrigal and pushed them to ever more expressive extremes, so that the music of his later madrigals and particularly his liturgical settings of the Tenebrae responsories for Holy Week have a strikingly modern feel to them even now, earning the admiration of, among others, the elderly Stravinsky in his late serial period.

Gesualdo was able to take music to such bold extremes partly because he didn’t have to earn a living as a composer: it was more of an aristocratic hobby. For most composers through the renaissance, baroque and early classical periods, earning their keep was a primary consideration, meaning that any pushing of aesthetic boundaries was distinctly limited. Nor was personal eccentricity any guarantee of musical boldness or innovation: of JS Bach’s sons, it was the eldest, Wilhelm Friedemann who had the most wayward manner, yet his compositions very often pale in comparison to those of his younger brother Carl Philipp Emanuel, who for thirty years was court musician to Frederick the Great yet whose style was perhaps the most strikingly eccentric of all the exponents of the empfindsamer Stil (sentimental style) that flourished in German early classicism.

It was the 19th century, however, that saw the real emergence of the musical ‘eccentric’ as a cultural phenomenon, following the emancipation of musicians from ecclesiastical and aristocratic employment and the growth of the middle classes as significant consumers of art music. Conductor, composer, critic, theorist and compulsive chronicler, Hector Berlioz has come to typify the eccentric musician of the early romantic period, in thrall to the poetic geniuses of Shakespeare and Byron as well as to his own personal entanglements, which spurred him on to ever more extravagant (and vastly-scored!) flights of fancy and to some of the most blazingly innovative conceptions and orchestral innovations of the day. Other notable one-offs of the 19th century include the excessively deferential, devoutly religious and obsessive Anton Bruckner who, for all his musical debts to Beethoven and Wagner, nevertheless pushed the romantic symphony to new extremes, not just of length but of sonority, with scoring reminiscent of organ ranks that created a revolutionary ‘cosmic’ sound that none of his later imitators matched. His mania for revisions as well as his susceptibility to the criticisms of others, especially his own supporters, make his achievement all the more remarkable.

In Russia, meanwhile, it was a low-grade civil servant, Modest Mussorgsky, sensitive by nature and prone to bouts of alcoholism, who became the most strikingly original of the group of St Petersburg composers dubbed ‘The Five’ (or ‘The Mighty Handful’). Although his early influences were largely western, he more than any of his contemporaries carved out a distinctly Russian style in his music, whether for piano (Pictures at an Exhibition) or voice (Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina, Songs and Dances of Death), based partly on an acute awareness of the expressive potency of the Russian language, but also on a radical feel for texture and sonority that, as with Bruckner, led well-meaning colleagues to impose their own completions and orchestrations on his stunningly original creations. This was also the fate of the operas of a fellow-Slav, the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, another of music’s great originals, most of whose stage works had to wait 50 years or more to be heard and appreciated in their unadulterated original form. With Janáček, we enter the twentieth century and a period that both fostered and valued musical uniqueness to an unprecedented degree (think of the popularity of Mussorgsky’s works among post-World War II composers). It is a period we will explore at greater length in the concluding part of this short study.

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