That time of year

Easter is derived from Eastre, the Teutonic goddess of Spring. It is also related to oestrogen, the hormone which I believe deserves equal and regular commendation. Vive la difference!

I mention this because Easter is a season I - an unbeliever - have always responded to. I'm sort of reassured that its existence pre-dates Christianity. Obvious really, the theoretical end of Winter and a backing-off of the central heating. But it's more than that. I drove VR to art on Good Friday and the traffic seemed subtly changed. There was less of it and other drivers, enclosed in their metallic bubbles, seemed remote, even contemplative. How fanciful I am but I can't help it; Easter was in the air and in the sky.

There are musical associations with Bach in a dominant mood. Twice on successive Maundy Thursdays I covered the St Matthew Passion for the newspaper. The Easter Oratorio (note the odd CD sleeve, above) is less well-known than the Christmas Oratorio but even without hearing a note you can imagine the triumphant noise. After all Bach once wrote a cantata celebrating coffee; imagine his reaction to something reckoned to be rather more big time.

In my youth Easter was an opportunity to resume rock-climbing - a solemn moment for fanatics.

The event that marked the start of Irish resistance to English colonialism is referred to as the Easter Uprising. Not that the Irish needed that as encouragement. This year its centennial is marked.

Me? I seem to sense vibrations, paradoxically mixed with tranquillity. Oh, and there'll be a bread-and-butter pudding tonight based on hot-cross buns. All the senses are involved. No need for bunny rabbits or those disappointing chocolate eggs full of nothing.

Sixty years and he's bedded in

It's Maundy Thurday. The Queen hands out money to the poor, or some such. I've never read it up, it doesn't interest me. For me the day resonates for quite another reason.

I've posted about it before and I ask you to forgive me if you remember. You could say Maundy Thursday widened my world.

I was working in the fifties at Bingley, West Yorkshire, as a hack reporter. Long hours covering the sort of events dealt with at length in weekly newspapers: court cases about child molestation, school speech days, early and late shows put on by the Chrysanthemum Society, gymkhanas, church annual meetings, amateur dramatics. And music.

On two Maundy Thursdays, a year apart, I was assigned to write about performances of Bach's St Matthew Passion  at Bingley Parish Church. I was aware of Bach. I owned an LP of Albert Schweitzer playing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the organ in Gunsbach in Alsace ("The organ is out of tune," noted The Gramophone in its review). I can't pretend either performance overwhelmed me; the process more resembled laying down mulch on a garden in Spring. But something, I think, was born on those two Thursdays.

Gradually Bach's distinctive voice sang out to me over the decades and it is now impossible for me to imagine being without Vengerov bowing the Chaconne on an unaccompanied violin, DF-D as one of the soloists in the Christmas Oratorio, any of four pianists doing the Goldberg.

The experience came full circle last year when we heard Sir Simon Rattle with the CBSO doing the St Matthew in Birmingham. An identifiable thread in an ill-directed life. How important? Perhaps the equal of my right foot. I could hobble but it wouldn't be pleasant.

A short break from gardens

Yesterday music was the concern of our guests – Relucent Reader and his missus. When we dropped them at their hotel on the outskirts of Cheltenham (under the shadow of GCHQ) at 8.30 pm they were due to freshen up and take a taxi to a concert starting at 9.30 pm. A day or two earlier in their impossibly tight schedule they’d managed to squeeze in some Bach at St Martin-in-The-Fields (north-eastern corner of Trafalgar Square, London)

The RRs from Virginia, USA, were touring grand English gardens and we picked them up from Blenheim (Nearly a Snafu; the adjacent town of Woodstock has TWO gates to the Blenheim estate.) I had grandiose plans which included a tour of mid-Wales but geography and a drum-beat deadline reduced this to a trot round Hereford Cathedral (the chained library – both RRs are librarians – and Mappa Mundi were closed) followed by tea chez da Ponte, a meal few of our acquaintances, or we ourselves, have experienced.

RR has a highly individual blogging voice which is heard all too rarely, knows about technology, books and much more, and years ago noticed Works Well via a chance reference to the American composer Charles Ives. In the end, I suppose, it was conversation that mattered; raising our voices over that of the satnav lady he and I set the world to rights as did Mrs RR and Mrs LdP behind us.

The bottle was a kind memento of their visit and a revelation that Virginia has gone in for viticulture. The grape, petit verdot, is a late ripener in Europe and tends to be added in small amounts for extra tannin, colour and flavour,  especially with cab sauv. However it ripens more reliably in the New World and emerges as a wine in its own right.

Better than main-lining Côte Rôtie

Propulsive Bach. Glenn Gould, mumble-singing as he hammers away at the English Suite causing my knees to jig up and down, my fingers to break away from the computer keyboard and attempt – vainly – to drum out arpeggios on my bare wood desktop, my heart to give in to all this musical gaiety and convert it into stuff that goes straight into my brain making me spryer and younger than I have any right to feel. I’m writing Blest Redeemer and closing in on 100,000 words; Gould’s Bach forces me to attempt the impossible and match my word creation to his impish, agile fingers. I used to think music would distract me from writing but its very accessibility on the computer hard disc means it can be as comforting as sucking a humbug and as transformational as gin. After all if I can work in the company of the former cantor of Thomasschule in Leipzig and German Royal Court Composer to August III, that’s high-flying company and some of it’s going to rub off now and then. And even when the piano shifts into a more reflective, less demonic tempo I still have his image in my frontal lobes, benign but clever, tea-towel wig down to his shoulders, waiting for the English Suite to end so that he can try – for the hundredth time – to explain that the chromatic scale isn’t really all that hard and I’ll be a better person – A better writer? – once I understand. And as my creative wellsprings put Judith, Zara and Mabel into the order that Blest Redeemer demands there’s this mental left-hand accompaniment pushing up via vibrations in my rotating office chair and I’m calling him Joh instead of Maestro because he’s so damn familiar and he’s been with me most of my life. 

The voiceless plea

The only imaginative work that tackled the WW2 death camps satisfactorily was the nine-hour documentary, Shoah, famous for excluding historical footage. Otherwise it has to be music. Not voice because singing emphasises the human source. Not the simulation of recognisable emotions like sympathy because these risk grievous failure. It must be abstract music, on a remote yet parallel course, and it must imply: this is our other side.

As I struggle with the novel unproductive impulses delay me. Gosh it’s ages since I heard Bach’s Chaconne. A piece for unaccompanied violin; the most inaccessible he ever wrote. Two (perhaps) bars of one voice then two bars of the other, over and over. After thirteen minutes of jagged alternating fragments the two lines are remembered as continuous and interweaving. Calling it a masterpiece trivialises it.

The clip starts with snow falling on modern-day Auschwitz. In a corridor in one of the huts Maxim Vengerov launches into the opening, his violin shouting hoarsely. He emerges from the hut, concentrating, still playing, walking beside the wire fence with those overhanging lights resembling metal snowdrops. Somewhere, off-camera, he assumes an overcoat and a carelessly tied scarf; there’s snow on the ground and Auschwitz is cold and wind-swept.

The violent music continues, its seriousness inarguable. Vengerov now wears fingerless mittens so that the chaconne’s intentions are not traduced. Hunched, implacable, he walks along the railway line, then back, out through the archway, crosses over the line, his shoes black and shiny. By now the Bach is everywhere, perhaps saying “This! This!” Then it ends, because everything ends. The early seventeen-hundreds crying out universally to the nineteen-forties.