Yesterday I interviewed a wonderful composer. I
love interviewing composers. You can't get closer to the source of the art we love than you can by talking to the people who create it. Let's not forget, music is a human creation. Every note, squeak and silence is a choice made by a person with a pen - OK, these days it's someone with a Sibelius computer, but a choice nevertheless. We are fortunate to go and talk to John Adams, Judith Weir, Philip Glass and the rest - but certain others are no longer with us....so I've availed myself of a new-fangled invention to solve the problem. Here is my Dream Interviewee No.1.
He is ROBERT SCHUMANN. I visited him in my new Parsifal 3000 Travellation, in which time becomes space.
Dear Herr Dr Professor Schumann, it's a great pleasure to meet you.
Mrs Duchen, likewise, likewise. Welcome to Düsseldorf. I trust your extraordinary time machine gave you a smooth journey?
It was, let's say, an interesting experience...but I'm very happy to be here, in the Schumann family living room!
Excellent, dear lady - please have a seat, and Marie will bring in the coffee.
You are very lucky to have such a helpful daughter.
Especially for my wife, Clara, Marie, our eldest, is an angel from heaven. For the little ones, so is our friend Hannes!
I hear he comes round and entertains them by doing gymnastics on the banisters?
Haha, and more, and more... He's a young lion, you know, a veritable eagle whose music will soar into the future. Do you know him where you live, in the 21st century?
Do we know Johannes Brahms? Er, we do...
And how is he regarded?
Well, he is one of the all-time greats - we talk about the Three Bs, and they are Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
I knew it! I knew I was right. I enjoyed being a critic, unlike many others... I edited a magazine too, you remember? That was enormous fun, but hard work, always having to turn away people who thought they could write well, but never actually
read anything.
You have always been very literary, haven't you?
There is always music in good words. Without it, they will never rise from the page. Remember that, my writer friend! And there must be meaning in good music. It goes beyond the capability of words, but it must be there. Otherwise we will turn away from it and play music that does have meaning. After Beethoven our question is: what next? How can we possibly follow him?
So, tell me what was it like the first time you met Brahms?
Well, he turned up on our doorstep, unannounced. It was a few months ago, October 1853, and we weren't home, but Marie was, so there is a knock on the door, she trots along to see who's there and on the step is this boy of 20, blond hair, blue eyes, cheekbones and the rest of it, and she is quite impressed. He has a letter of introduction to us from Joseph Joachim, which he leaves with Marie. We read it and it sounds quite positive. Joachim, you know, is the leader of Liszt's orchestra in Weimar and a powerhouse, in his own cantankerous way, even though he isn't much older than Brahms himself. He played under Mendelssohn's direction when he was only Marie's age. We have known him for years, through Mendelssohn, and he sends Brahms to us and the young man just
arrives.
I think it was a happier experience for him to come to us than his visit to Liszt. You know what happened? Haha! He goes to Weimar and finds Liszt holding court, playing the piano to all his adoring acolytes. Brahms has been travelling all day and he is tired out. He sits at the back of the room, and Liszt plays the whole of his rather long Sonata in B minor - which, you know, is dedicated to me! - and Brahms does his very best, but despite himself he nods off. Not a good move.
So, he arrived on your doorstep and...
And I gave him some coffee and wondered what it was that was so special about this rather shy, squeaky-voiced lad. He takes out of his bag an enormous sheaf of manuscript paper covered in thick black scrawls, places it on the coffee table in front of me, then goes to the piano and begins a sonata and I nearly fall out of my chair.
I waited until a quiet moment - it's a noisy opening, the C major Sonata, because he is trying to write Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' - then I stopped him. He looked most distressed. He must have thought I didn't like his music. No, no! I wanted to call Clara, who was attending to her correspondence upstairs, and I told her: you have to come into the music room, right now, this minute. You have to hear this. She did so, curious, and there, in front of me, she gazed across that room and her eyes and Brahms's met for the first time.
Something about him shone. He sat at our piano and he just - shone. He lit the room as if we had raised a hundred candles above him and his clothes and skin were made of mirrors. Clara sat beside me and he began his sonata again. What a voice emerged from it - a giant personality, springing from its parent creator's head fully formed like Pallas Athene! Some would-be composers never find their voice. Others are imbued with it as if in the womb. After about half a minute Clara gave me one sideways glance. You know, I think, when you meet someone who is going to change your life.
Herr Doktor Professor Schumann, it is generous of you to speak about Brahms like this. I would like to ask you about your music, too, of course. Why the alter egos? Why did you introduce Florestan and Eusebius?
Why? That is an interesting question - they have been with me for so long that I can scarcely remember. I nearly became a writer. I used to write, in my youth - I wrote a few novels, but eventually I found music could take out more of myself, if that makes sense to you?
It does indeed...
I have, you know, a remarkably vivid dream world. As a boy I lived in dreams much of the time, and it became a habit. I don't draw much distinction between reality and what I know to be my dreams - because they become reality. That is how you create the world, through dreaming, through imagining.
Do you know Richard Wagner?
I do - a bumptious gentleman, isn't he? He has stolen a lot from my music, I understand, but what he does with it is supposed to be quite good.
Well, he once said - though I don't know if he's already said it - that imagination creates reality.
There you go. Nothing is new under the sun, no? So, to my friends, the poets. I was very young, of course, my father was a publisher and a writer, and the house was full of books. It was, too, full of pain. My sister died, you know. This boy I was could scarcely bear the loss - the weight of the world, of all adult grief, wrapped me closer and closer, like an instrument of torture. And I discovered the worlds of Goethe, Jean Paul and ETA Hoffmann. I would take their books and dive in, as if into a great blue mountain lake with whole universes beneath the azure surface, and there I would swim, free at last, with those worlds of discovery before me, my inner self becoming first one character, then another. I found Florestan and Eusebius in Jean Paul, and each was like me, though totally different. Therefore in them I saw two sides of one person. Human beings have many facets, every writer knows this - today I don't think it is so extraordinary.
But why create music based around them?
Not based around them so much as informed by them, I'd say. Why? Because it is enjoyable to do so. I said earlier that music must have meaning. But that meaning does not have to be weighty and frown-ridden. It might be, on occasion. Yet think of my Clara. She doesn't like it if I experiment too much. She says always: think of the people who play your music, think of the people who buy it. If you are too peculiar, too obscure, they'll choose something else instead. Where does that leave you? I am their puppet-master in the music, sometimes - Maester Raro, mediating between them. I might be playing at my piano - you play music, but you also play at music! - and I improvise, and I invent. The music might be tender, quiet, reflective, so a Eusbius creation; or my thoughts might be turbulent and impassioned, in the guise of Florestan. I am glad if people find this interesting, and it is a way of bringing literary allusion to one's work without having to set about the laborious process of actually telling somebody else's story in your own sounds.
We make quite a lot of this, you know...
Haha! Please feel free to make of my music what you will. I am merely glad to know that it has lasted so well.
Who did you know? Who were your favourite people?
My dear lady, I have to tell you, I have never had a friend, or missed a friend, like Felix Mendelssohn. What a man. What an artist. Nobody could resist his charm - not even my Clara! She used to flirt with him like never with anybody else, and in front of me! There was just...nothing she could do about it. Despite him being, you know, from another race. He was an Israelite. She was of a very sheltered background, my Clara, and she found this distinctly strange, even though he had apparently converted as a child and was indeed more a devout Christian than we ourselves. But perhaps it added to the fascination. Like the Gypsies. Nobody can resist them either. Brahms is transfixed by their musicians.
So, er, yes...so Mendelssohn was close to you?
His death was terrible. So young. Not even forty. I think he worked himself to death - though others say it was the demise of his sister that made him fall to pieces, others gossip that there was perhaps another woman, and still more say that there was a weakness in the family inheritance that caused them to have strokes too young. For us, left behind, the shock has been fearful. I dream of him often and I wake sweating, convinced I shall see him again, convinced that his fate presages something of my own. Clara tells me not to be silly, but the idea haunts me like the ghost of Felix himself...come along, my dear, let's have some more coffee, shall we?
A good idea, thank you.
And how long will you stay in Düsseldorf?
I
must go back to London today - but now that I know my Parsifal 3000 Travellation is so effective, please may I come and see you again?
Of course you may. You play my music yourself?
On the piano. Badly. I've played Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, Papillons, some of the Fantasiestücke, I've bashed through the first and last movements of the Fantasie, though I can't play the March, and at the moment I'm learning Waldszenen. It makes me cry every time.
Ahh. Then you know me better than you think.
