A case of Taisez vous!

We all tend to show off when writing. And novels provide a huge opportunity. Having scanned my novel, Blest Redeemer, in draft Plutarch asked if I wasn’t overdoing the French phrases? Was un mauvais quart d’heure (literally: a bad quarter of an hour; idiomatically: an unpleasant experience) necessary given that the scene wasn’t set in France? I agreed and substituted.

In 1921 they did things differently. Aldous Huxley’s novel, Crome Yellow, is not only stuffed with unexplained French (and Italian) material but includes several untranslated stanzas of a French folk song. Did readers simply skip these passages back then or were they all polyglots?

My second novel, Risen on Wings, is set in France and the French language is one of the characters. In revising the MS recently I displayed all the French in italics and now the pages have an accusatory look. Suppose it had been set in Russia? Perhaps the book will go down well in Bordeaux.

BEETHOVEN’S violin concerto is a violent, heart-wringing piece of music. Mrs RR and I heard it yet again recently, with the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons directing the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and another Latvian, Baibe Skride (a woman), sawing the fiddle. What was unusual was Skride’s comparatively limited dynamic range (ie, softest to loudest) which meant that many melodic lines ended very, very quietly.

And very beautifully. However she was lucky in her choice of venue. Symphony Hall in Birmingham, a modern building, has wonderful acoustics and this was the first of many concerts I’ve heard there that proved this claim without doubt. Allowing us to appreciate Skride’s solid tone down there pianississimo. Even better it discouraged those with chronic lung disease from showing their prowess. 

That very vocal sound

HOW CAN YOU TELL? part three.

Judging a violin performance. A violin has a range of nearly four octaves which – believe me – goes from very deep to very high. The bow’s function is obvious, otherwise notes are created by stopping the four strings with the finger tips against the 27 cm long fingerboard (usually ebony). There are no frets (raised bars as on a guitar) to indicate the stopping points and the process gets harder as the notes rise in pitch because the stops get closer and closer together.

An imperfectly stopped note is blurred and the violinist’s intonation is said to be suffering. It happens to famous players. Reviews of Yehudi Menuhin’s later recordings regularly referred to faulty intonation though his interpretations might well be praised. Critics are less forgiving about the intonation of younger players these days and most of us can expect to hear sharply defined notes when the violin is being played staccato – ie, where the notes are separate and not blended together

There is of course no substitute for familiarity with a piece, especially works for the unaccompanied violin. And especially with Bach. Some works attempt the impossible. Denied the left-hand accompaniment to a melody that a piano allows, composers for violin sometimes write chunks of melody alternating with chunks of accompaniment and expect the listener’s ear to “combine” these two voices on what is essentially a one-voice instrument. It works but it helps if you are aware that this is the aim.

Think of the violin as a voice rather than an instrument. Are you being “sung” to?

In violin concerti keep an eye on the first violins (to the left of the conductor) and especially the leader. Their reaction may indicate a great performance by the soloist.

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.