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Tuning Up - No. 3   March 2023

Introduction   

        

What should be the relationship between composer and audience? Should the composer’s personal spiritual quest prevail, regardless of the taste of the listener, or should the composer acknowledge that the audience may not share their subjective experience and seek some common ground? What is the effect of ambition, and the pursuit of fame and celebrity, in shaping the composer’s choices? In this article, musicologist Peter Davison explores these questions through the medium of Balzac’s Gambara, a short story about a composer whose idealism is slowly crushed by the cynical world that surrounds him. The story had a profound impact on Wagner and Schönberg, and through them on European musical aesthetics up to the present day.

It can be read HERE.

Peter Davison writes:  Much of my fascination for the music of George Lloyd stems from sympathy for his struggle against modernist orthodoxy in the period after the Second World War, when his accessible and tuneful style fell badly out of fashion. It has long been a puzzle to me why, during the twentieth century, many composers became so alienated from their audiences. In 2001, I even edited a collection of essays called Reviving the Muse, which explored this thorny subject in some detail. I stumbled across Balzac’s Gambara by accident and was immediately struck by how it accurately foreshadows many of the revolutionary developments in modern music, at once explaining their psychological origins and questioning their legitimacy.


Balzac’s Gambara:  
martyrdom, magic and the music of other planets

by Peter Davison         


Balzac in 1842




Among the most celebrated of French writers, Honoré de Balzac is best known for his epic series of novels The Human Comedy (La Comédie Humaine) which offers a forensic portrait of the pretences, struggles and disappointments of an emerging Parisian bourgeoisie. These voluminous texts are grimly true to life, but Balzac also penned stories exploring philosophical and theological themes. One such is Gambara (1837), an account of a gifted Italian composer living exiled in Paris just after the July Revolution of 1830. Despite his talent and great vision for humanity, Paulo Gambara is short of money because his idealistic worldview is consistently misunderstood by the society around him.

Gambara was originally commissioned by the Parisian journal, the Gazette Musicale, to promote Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots. The narrative is subtle and complex, raising questions about the nature of genius and how art-music is conceived and evaluated. Balzac approaches the subject from many angles. Gambara himself vacillates between wanting music to be a source of pleasure and a means of spiritual elevation. Meanwhile, an Italian aristocrat, Count Andrea Casorini, who wants to support Gambara, argues that Beethoven is the most progressive composer of instrumental music, able to convey the highest ideals. Rossini’s music, he asserts, is by comparison mere vulgar entertainment. Although Gambara considers himself a successor to Beethoven, he decides to defend Rossini’s delightful and memorable tunes. He reminds the Count of the debt German music owes to Italian musicians, berating him for his extreme opinions. Music, according to Gambara, should be a seamless blend of sensuality and intellect, feeling and form, spontaneity and structure.

Balzac describes the Count as if he is playing an operatic role. Foppish and insincere, his real motivation is to seduce Marianna, the composer’s beautiful and long-suffering wife. She adores her husband for his brilliance, even though he expects her to make all manner of sacrifices to sustain him. She must act as his lover, mentor, manager, breadwinner, muse and mother. Count Andrea’s financial generosity makes Marianna obliged to him. He has freed her from the responsibilities that have bound her to Gambara. Over the years her patience has worn thin, since her husband is unwilling to dilute his idealism to obtain publication or performances. Indeed, when Gambara plays his music privately at the piano, he soon loses touch with reality. In this instance, the line between genius and madness is particularly narrow.

There was no hint even of a poetical or musical idea in the hideous cacophony with which he had deluged their ears; the first principles of harmony, the most elementary rules of composition, were absolutely alien to this chaotic structure. Instead of the scientifically compacted music which Gambara described, his fingers produced sequences of fifths, sevenths, and octaves, of major thirds, progressions of fourths with no supporting bass,—a medley of discordant sounds struck out haphazardly in such a way as to be excruciating to the least sensitive ear.

After this puzzling scene, Balzac describes Gambara’s face as ‘radiant, like that of a holy martyr.’ We must imagine music so complex that it cannot be followed, and yet its details possess a remarkable similarity to the abstract play of intervals found in Debussy’s Twelve Studies for piano, a work written eight decades later.

Debussy Douze Etudes

 

As the story unfolds, time after time, the reader is struck by Balzac’s prescience. He anticipates the aesthetic debates that would first preoccupy romantic composers and then the radical modernists of the next century. At a key moment, Gambara is taken by Count Andrea to a performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s new opera Robert le diable (Robert the Devil), notorious for its spectacular musical and theatrical effects. The Count ensures that Gambara is intoxicated, stimulating his senses but blunting his intellect. The composer is initially transfixed by the work’s drama and sublime music - yet the next day, when he has sobered up, he considers the score a random sequence of worthless effects.



Overture to Robert le diable


By highlighting the conflict between Italianate light-heartedness and Germanic heft, between Robert le diable’s showy theatrics and Beethoven’s inward seriousness, Balzac anticipated the notorious polemic which Richard Wagner would launch against Meyerbeer, who was the doyen of French Grand Opera. Wagner had first visited Paris in 1839 to secure performances for his operas, unfairly blaming Meyerbeer for his lack of success. Yet, during his time in the city, Wagner did achieve some renown as an author of criticism and journalistic pieces, even writing a novella for the Gazette Musicale, the original publisher of Gambara. Wagner’s fictional memoir, A Pilgrimage to Beethoven, describes how a young composer arranges to meet his idol in Vienna. In 1841, Wagner penned a sequel, An End in Paris, chronicling the same young composer’s untimely demise. The narrator’s tone is despairing and surely owes a debt to Balzac’s Gambara.

Who knows what died in this child of man, leaving no trace behind? Was it a Mozart,—a Beethoven? Who can tell, and who 'gainsay me when I claim that in him there fell an artist who would have enriched the world with his creations, had he not been forced to die too soon of hunger?


Richard Wagner in Paris 1842 by E.B Kietz


By the time of his second visit to Paris in 1850, Wagner’s waning enthusiasm for Meyerbeer had turned to complete hostility. In his writings and public statements, Wagner now upheld the German music of Bach and Beethoven as the only true path, criticising the fusion of national styles and superficial effects which prevailed in Grand Opera. Of course, Wagner knew as well as anyone how to deliver a coup de théatre, and he had absorbed many eclectic influences. To that extent, his polemic was driven as much by grievance as any significant aesthetic differences with his rivals. Nonetheless, Wagner’s symphonically integrated music dramas possess a strong German identity, while also conveying a numinous quality largely absent from the works of his contemporaries.


Wagner’s fate continued to imitate Balzac’s art. The fictional Gambara composes a series of operas exploring religious themes, including one based on the life of Mohammed which is described in detail and performed at the piano by the composer. Gambara’s identification with the founder of a world religion, a prophet and a political leader, reveals his limitless spiritual ambition, while also reinforcing his status as an outsider, unallied to any single nationality, faith or musical style. He considers himself the Messiah of his musical generation, foreshadowing Wagner as a cultural phenomenon who himself had at one time planned an opera based on the life of Christ. It has also been suggested that the multi-opera concept of Wagner’s Ring Cycle originated from Balzac’s story.

Wagner, unlike Gambara, became unimaginably successful. It could so easily have been different, as he drove his first wife Minna to distraction with his infidelities and money problems. Yet, he was able to avoid Gambara’s fate due to his ruthless ambition. An unscrupulous personality, Wagner never denied himself anything if it furthered his creative vision. In later life, backed by Ludwig II of Bavaria and with a new wife, stolen from a trusted colleague, Wagner combined ambition and ideology, innovative musical technique and managerial skills, so that a cosmopolitan elite were soon kneeling before him. By contrast, Gambara’s neediness causes him to hesitate at crucial moments, succumbing to unrealistic fantasies and lacking the confidence to face the world around him.

Arnold Schönberg 1948,courtesy of University of South Carolina  


There are yet more historical resonances in Balzac’s story, as we move into the early twentieth century. The Jewish Austrian composer and theorist, Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), was an eager follower of Wagner and believed wholeheartedly in the supremacy of the German musical tradition. He was fond of referring to Balzac in his musicological writing, and he must surely have read Gambara. We know too that he admired another Balzac story, Seraphita, about the final days of an androgynous sage, during which he/she is transformed into a spiritual being who prepares to leave the material world. Seraphita’s experience concurs with the mystical theology of Emanuel Swedenborg (1682-1777), who claimed his prophecies were dictated to him by Christ. In the story, Balzac summarises Swedenborg’s description of heaven, where there is no time or space, nor any separation of the opposites. Instead, essences and ideas exist in static form, and the moral condition of the soul dictates proximity to the divine. From these metaphysical insights, Schönberg invented the rules of serialism. Because, in the transcendent realm, there can be no up and down, no backwards or forwards, a note-row can be reversed or inverted without losing its essential identity. Schönberg, like Gambara, considered that his most ambitious music existed in a purely spiritual dimension beyond the limitations of earthly existence. It was thus no longer bound by the rules of harmony, including such notions as consonance and dissonance. Gambara states:

My music is good. But as soon as music transcends feeling and becomes an idea, only persons of genius should be the hearers, for they alone are capable of responding to it! It is my misfortune that I have heard the chorus of angels and believed that men could understand the strains.

In 1933, while living exiled in Paris, Schönberg returned to the Jewish faith. 

He had always cultivated the persona of an Old Testament prophet issuing commandments from the mountain top, echoing Gambara’s identification with the Abrahamic tradition. Jehovah is not a compassionate God, but a God of judgement, jealous rage and harsh punishment. He condemns humanity’s weaknesses, creating a conflict in the human psyche between earthly needs and spiritual aspirations. It was a split Schönberg could not resolve, as his final unfinished opera, Moses und Aron (1932) reveals. Moses, the spiritually aloof prophet, struggles to express his esoteric truth, while Aron communicates naturally with the Israelites because his lyrical gifts appeal to their senses.



A decisive moment in Schönberg’s creative development was his symbolical release from the bonds of tonality which occurs in his Second String Quartet (1908), a work that emerged after the breakdown of the composer’s marriage. Its vocal finale is a setting of ‘Rapture’, a poem by Stefan George, which likens the experience of transcendence to breathing the ‘air of other planets’. At the movement’s opening, chromatic figurations seemingly float free of any harmonic root.


Finale of Schönberg's String Quartet No.2





After 1945, the German champion of the avant-garde, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) tried once again to create music from outer-space, poised at the console of his Cologne electronic studio, imagining himself in telepathic communication with beings from the Sirius star-system. Behind the science fiction is a persistent belief in the composer as a priestly magus, the manipulator of mysterious sounds who channels a metaphysical reality beyond ordinary human comprehension.


This relentless desire to create transcendental music reveals a parallel between our reaching for heaven and reaching for the stars. Modern space travel has made this latter feat possible, while advanced recording technologies have unlocked new realms of musical sound. We are reminded of Gambara’s claim that ‘whatever extends science enhances art’, a statement of faith in the creative potential of improved and new musical instruments, including his own Panharmonicon, a type of organ capable of reproducing the colours of the romantic orchestra and even the human voice. Balzac thus anticipated the invention of the electronic synthesiser which has empowered individual composers to create seemingly limitless sound-worlds, allowing them to travel to metaphorical planets of their own invention.

Karlheinz Stockhausen during a rehearsal in The Hague, 1982


A Faustian pact with science and technical innovation encourages the delusion that humanity can escape the restrictions of earthly existence, loosening our grasp of reality. The devil commands the material world, manipulating appearances and exploiting human fears to spread chaos. Perfect for the plot of an opera, you might think, and in Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, the plot concerns the recovery of order and truth. Robert’s father, the Devil, tricks his son into losing his beloved, then tricks him again into using magic to win her back. Truth, it turns out, is synonymous with faith in the Christian God who exposes the whole diabolical deception. But ultimately, the spider weaving this web of deceit is Meyerbeer himself. He cleverly underpins the unfolding drama with powerful musical rhetoric, and his audience is willingly seduced by the spectacle of heroic deeds and the glamour of the occult, including a titillating ballet danced by the ghosts of lecherous nuns.


Dance of the ghostly nuns


Theatre and music have long been used as means of emotional manipulation. A suitable musical accompaniment can transform even the vaguest narrative into metaphysics; a promise which must inevitably disappoint, since there can be no short-cuts to spiritual truth, love or beauty. Talented composers of opera have an instinct for theatrical effect, provoking boundless fantasies in their listeners, transporting them to alien planets that rob them of their earthly humanity. Yet such a rapturous response quickly fades, if a composer’s aim has not been to educate but to entertain, as Gambara himself discovers after hearing Robert le diable.


Even Wagner is not above suspicion. Debussy referred to him as ‘Old Klingsor’, the evil magician from his music drama Parsifal, while Friederich Nietzsche, once Wagner’s most devoted follower, came to believe that his former idol reduced listeners to an unhealthy hyper-emotional state.

‘Wagner’s art is sick. The problems he presents on the stage – all of them problems of hysterics – the convulsive nature of his affects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required ever stronger spices, his instability…all of this taken together represents a profile of sickness that permits no further doubt…’

Nietzsche eschewed Wagner’s bombast and intoxicating power, growing instead to admire the emotional realism of Bizet’s Carmen in which love and its actors are stripped of any idealisation. In truth, Nietzsche’s attitude towards Wagner remained ambivalent, paralleling Gambara’s equivocal response to Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. Are we deceived by Wagner, or is he revealing a hidden truth that challenges our mundane and conventional assumptions?

We must certainly be aware that intensity of musical expression is no guarantee of profundity. It is easy enough, after all, to confuse a strong visceral impact or an unusual sound with meaningful substance. If the senses are over-stimulated, and listeners are denied the formal limits associated with classical composers such as Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart, we are all too easily engulfed by sentimentality. But equally, if formalism is taken too far and, as in Schönberg’s serial works, music lacks a sensual dimension, what we hear stays forever beyond our grasp.

The story of Gambara concludes tragically, focusing our attention on a consistent theme of Balzac’s writing, that the price of ambition is the loss of love. Marianna, having eloped to Italy with the Count, returns to Paris to be with her husband. Her youth and beauty have faded, and she has been humiliated by the Count who has married a ballet-dancer. In the meantime, Gambara has been stripped of everything, fulfilling his desire for martyrdom. His scores are used as wrapping paper by local shopkeepers, while he and Marianna are forced to busk in the local park just to survive. People listen, but believe the music they hear is by Rossini not Gambara. And yet the couple now know that their love is genuine, if only because they have lost everything else. Balzac leaves us in no doubt that, despite a virtuous and respectable façade, bourgeois society is a theatre of illusion, a Grand Opera if you like, that fuels ambition and greed, exacting a high toll in human suffering. The Count’s betrayal of Marianna reflects a more general attitude - that one may speak of high ideals but still treat life as a game, in which love is an amusement and a woman merely a toy.


Is an idealistic artist any different if, by aspiring to boundlessness and unobtainable beauty, visions not of this world, he forgets human love and the attentiveness it demands? The stormy private lives of Beethoven, Wagner and Schönberg remind us that genius and the devotions of love are not easily reconciled. The lesson is a hard one for Gambara, reflected in his final utterance.

‘Water is a product of burning.’

Gambara’s desire to reach for the highest spiritual ideals, and his willingness to leap into the flames of his creativity, lead only to floods of tears, both his own and those of his wife.

© Peter Davison March 2023           

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Tuning Up No 2:  December 2021

 

The Origins of the Music Library and Archive

by William Lloyd

 

I began working as George Lloyd’s business manager and executive producer in 1988, after he was appointed principal guest conductor and music advisor to the Albany Symphony Orchestra in New York State. The orchestra had commissioned his 11th Symphony, and Albany Records (US) issued their recording of the work. Together with George, my wife Alison and I formed Albany Records (UK) to work with them. Following the success of George’s recordings released on vinyl LP by the Lyrita and Conifer labels, we were early adopters of digital recording and CD manufacture, and our new venture had a flying start. The magazine reviews were tremendous, the record dealers ordered often, and the broadcasters paid handsome royalties. This healthy financial benefit came about partly because George was very wary of signing up with a mainstream publisher who would have simply photocopied his manuscripts, then collected 50% of his broadcast and performance royalties. By keeping 100% of those royalties, we were able to finance two recordings a year, employing the country’s finest orchestras without the aid of private sponsorship or public grants.  Once the recording company was up and running, we established our own UK and international distribution operation and, as George became busier with commissions and recording projects, we took over the publishing and distribution of printed copies, from our home in the North of England.

 

Slough Library Shot 2 Web


The George Lloyd Society: Music Room and library.

 

When George Lloyd died in July 1998, Alison and I became curators of his musical estate and were suddenly responsible for his manuscripts and sketches, as well as master copies of tapes and scores, and back-up copies of everything, including the extensive biographical archive.  Our business operated from the cellar of our semi-detached cottage near Lancaster, together with a small (and slightly damp) office and warehouse in the next village. These were clearly inadequate to house all the archive material, not least the publishing masters and recording master tapes, which required temperature and humidity-controlled conditions.

We looked around for new premises and found a run-down 18th century farmhouse up in the hills near Kendal. It had several derelict buildings, an unsurfaced access track, ancient electrics and plumbing, creaking floorboards, and lath and plaster interior walls, but it was exactly what we needed. After selling our own house and George and Nancy’s 2nd-floor flat in Marylebone, we were able to buy the farmhouse and convert the old cowsheds into a purpose-built music library, warehouse, and packing room. We installed George’s piano in a large room which we could use for occasional concerts and refurbished the adjoining cottage as accommodation for visitors and guests. We worked out of another minuscule underground office, into which we squeezed two desks and a filing cabinet and, for the next 14 years, the orders were processed and packed on our dining table. At least we were up and running, and the George Lloyd Music Library and Archive was established.

In 2013, the centenary of George’s birth, The British Library purchased all George’s manuscripts, and his music had more broadcasts (and royalties) than we had seen in the previous 10 years combined, including a piece played at the Last Night of The Proms. With the sudden accumulation of funds, we converted more outbuildings to create a new and spacious office and stockroom, a recording studio with live room and control room, and installed a fibre-optic Internet connection. The CD stock was moved out of steel shipping containers in the yard into the warm and dry, and I suddenly had a desk almost as big as the old underground office, with a packing table the size of a small car.

What do we do?

Our day-to-day work falls into three main categories:  recordings, publishing, and the biographical archive, which involve sales and marketing, concert promotion, encouraging broadcasts and overseeing copyright agreements, while also keeping the many supporters of the George Lloyd Society up to date with our activities. 

 

Slough Library Shot 3 Web

 

The Music Library - Composer's copies, scores and orchestral material for hire and sale.

 

Thanks in part to George Lloyd’s uncompromising independence and his suspicions about the mainstream music-publishers who place the composer at the end of the queue, he retained 100% control of the income generated by his orchestral and chamber work. This has been essential to our survival, but it has also entailed 100% responsibility for the management and administration of the material.  Contracts with musicians, record companies, distributors and concert promoters must be negotiated and monitored, trade and retail orders must be processed, CDs stock must be produced, downloads and streaming must be organised.

Sheet music production is a significant part of our work - full scores, study scores and piano reductions, full orchestral sets, vocal scores, and solo parts. With the arrival of digital printing, the master copies, from which all sale and hire copies are made, have been scanned and collated so that a new item can be produced to order, in house, from the desktop.  The hard-copy masters are maintained as safety copies, and the entire library must be maintained in good order, each page correctly numbered and aligned, with covers and flyleaf, both as paper copies and as individual computer files.  Hard copies are printed, bound and shelved, and electronic copies are compiled and made available for download or sent by email.

A large symphony might have 400 pages in the full score, with another 400 in the smaller format study score, and 300 pages in the ensemble set, which usually requires multiple parts for the string section.  The choral works have another few hundred pages for a vocal score, and the three operas have a full score for each of three acts in each opera. I have never counted the total number of pages in the catalogue, but George Lloyd’s output included 3 operas, 12 symphonies, 7 concertos, 3 choral works and several chamber works, and I would estimate a total of about 30,000 paper pages of originals, with the same again in the form of library copies, making 60,000 pages in total to be maintained in the correct order. We are in the process of ‘engraving‘ (i.e. typesetting)  the music using Sibelius notation software, starting with the symphonies. When complete, this will increase the current 60,000 computer files by about a further 15,000.

The biographical archive comprises a dozen trunks full of correspondence, photographs, press cuttings and reviews, together with a few artefacts. The Emma Hamilton / John Betts violin probably takes pride of place, together with George’s Erard piano, two Cremona violins, conductor’s batons, and even the pens and inks which he used for composing.  Perhaps the most curious item is a single shoe, worn by the leading lady of his opera ‘Iernin’, from which, according to George’s diary, she and George drank champagne…!  

 

Betts Front 2

 

George never threw anything away, so the correspondence archive goes back to his schooldays and includes letters to and from various notables such as Henry Wood, John Ireland and Rutland Boughton.  With help from a researcher, under the auspices of The George Lloyd Society, we are slowly cataloguing and indexing each item in the archive, with a timeline which will form the basis of a comprehensive biography.  

The George Lloyd Society exists to raise awareness of George’s life, ideas and music. It does this by distributing occasional newsletters and by maintaining an informative website, so that much of the music and archival material is available on-line to the widest possible public. By promoting the music, we hope to increase the number of live performances and broadcasts, since these currently provide the main source of income for the George Lloyd Society.

The various collections and research materials are available to academics, performers, concert programmers and other music professionals, including any members of the general public who are interested in the life and work of George Lloyd. We welcome visitors to the archive, which is located a few miles from Kendal on the edge of the English Lake District. 

 

Please contact us if you would like to pay a call.  

 

 

William Lloyd   19th  November 2021

 

Library Scores Final

 

 

 

 Links: 

  Podcast No 2: The George Lloyd Music Library and Archive - origins, resources and purpose
  Article: Lady Emma Hamilton's violin - the story so far.

 


 

 

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Tuning Up No 1: September 2021

 

No 1: George Lloyd and music’s healing powers

by Peter Davison

 

As the drama of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic plays out, there is more discussion than ever about the therapeutic value of the arts, especially applied to our mental health. The evidence shows beyond question that the arts are good for our well-being. Music in particular has a unique capacity to soothe the troubled mind by helping us access long-buried memories, feelings and emotions, as well as providing templates that are able to give them order.