GROSSE FUGE, part one. Aged sixteen I heard a Bach cantata and my interest in posh* music was born. Two years later, triggered by literary cross-currents (I read more widely then), I bought Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge string quartet and discovered music could be rather more than la-la-ing along with broad memorable tunes.
Analogies are as fatal to music as to physics but LvB’s late quartets are like having the irritable bastard telling you personally what matters. They are not for everyday. They’re for the foreground not the background. Some, especially the Grosse Fuge, don’t initially sound musical although the themes – as with GF – are often quite simple.
Let the superb Takacs Quartet, whom I heard in their infancy, be your perfect guide.
Plutarch says I mentioned the GF on the top deck of a London bus forty years ago. I don’t remember but I’m pleased he did. Here it’s the key to one of his previously unpublished poems.
How to keep cheerful
Adjust with care, the instructions in the handbook say,
For misalignments and breakdowns can occur,
Where balanced wheels are expected to engage and play,
Where the seesaw race begins, the dim, obsessive chime,
The winding up and unwinding of the spring.
Within the escapement’s clutch, the seagulls scream
Notes of survival and the constancy of loss.
Yet yeasts ferment and prompt in the memory
How the Grosse Fugue’s galloping colloquy goes
Further than sense can go, where laughter’s the lingo:
Swifter than intelligence, deeper than instinct,
You won’t know sad from glad then, or need to know.
Pick up this theme: even if our revels all are ended,
A crack in the wall will open like an estuary,
And spread its waters where oysters have long bred
And wading birds among the reeds tasted the sea.
Plutarch
*Posh. Substitute for detested “classical”.
Analogies are as fatal to music as to physics but LvB’s late quartets are like having the irritable bastard telling you personally what matters. They are not for everyday. They’re for the foreground not the background. Some, especially the Grosse Fuge, don’t initially sound musical although the themes – as with GF – are often quite simple.
Let the superb Takacs Quartet, whom I heard in their infancy, be your perfect guide.
Plutarch says I mentioned the GF on the top deck of a London bus forty years ago. I don’t remember but I’m pleased he did. Here it’s the key to one of his previously unpublished poems.
How to keep cheerful
Adjust with care, the instructions in the handbook say,
For misalignments and breakdowns can occur,
Where balanced wheels are expected to engage and play,
Where the seesaw race begins, the dim, obsessive chime,
The winding up and unwinding of the spring.
Within the escapement’s clutch, the seagulls scream
Notes of survival and the constancy of loss.
Yet yeasts ferment and prompt in the memory
How the Grosse Fugue’s galloping colloquy goes
Further than sense can go, where laughter’s the lingo:
Swifter than intelligence, deeper than instinct,
You won’t know sad from glad then, or need to know.
Pick up this theme: even if our revels all are ended,
A crack in the wall will open like an estuary,
And spread its waters where oysters have long bred
And wading birds among the reeds tasted the sea.
Plutarch
*Posh. Substitute for detested “classical”.