Edward Elgar and the significance of talent

The first two qualities a great composer needs are talent and technique; the first you either have or you don't, the second you can learn. But these two aren't enough - otherwise Saint-Saens and Glazunov would have been great composers, along with a host of other journeymen you've never heard of (and any musical biography like Michael Kennedy's Portrait of Elgar, which I've just finished, will mention in passing a host of half-forgotten names).

The third quality in this non-exhaustive list is the ability to write memorable and distinctive material - it's the quality of the invention, stupid. But there is a fourth quality which is equally a sine qua non, and it's a hard one to articulate. You have to have the right kind of personality; because ultimately its the kind of person you are that limits what you can achieve. Beethoven, for example, exhibits himself as someone with a vast emotional and intellectual range, passionate about humanity, nature and God, with a variety and range of output to match. This is also true of Mozart and Brahms. For other composers the situation is more complex. Mahler's range is much narrower, in my view, perhaps pithily summed up by the sentence, "I'm dying". This is also true of Shostakovitch ("Stalin was horrid to me") and a host of smaller figures. It seems to me that the true measure of the classical greats is not that they had so much talent, but that they had so much to say. When in the 30s Sibelius felt he had nothing more, he stopped writing. Nielsen died, but I suspect had a lot more to give. Berlioz could have gone on forever.

What about Elgar? The Worcester genius has, like Vaughan Williams, been criticised for nostalgia, but I think this is unfair. The Lark Ascending isn't about a dead bird after all, and Elgar wasn't mourning the disappearance of the pre-1914 world - much of his best work dates from before the war, Enigma from 1899, for example. But undoubtedly Elgar was a bit of a professional whinger. He whinged about his low social status, about the indifference of the British public, about the meanness of his publishers, the poor standard of performance he had to endure and about his health. He complained about America (when he was engaged on sell-out tours there to conduct his own music). He complained when a lesser-known composer's work was given equal rehearsal time to his own. He walked out of a dinner because the organisers forgot about his Order of Merit and put him on the wrong table. He was constantly threatening to give up music because of its indifferent reception (and this was a man given a knighthood and befriended by the King). Elgar's first symphony was given over one hundred performances in the year after its premiere; but that still didn't stem the litany of complaint.

These characteristics should, and do, tell us quite a lot about Elgar the composer. He is very very good at complaining, musically, and if one had to generalise about the tone of his work it would probably be fair to say that it laments that things are not as they should be. To be fair, this lament is often couched in music of the utmost beauty, subtlety and radiance; but there is quite a high proportion of lamenting going on. When you sit down to listen to a piece by Elgar it is rare to be surprised by the tone. This explains both the appeal of his music and the limitations of that appeal, and that's why my favourite Elgar pieces are the Introduction and Allegro (simple, artless, energetic, poignant, and as Kennedy says, amongst the best half-dozen string pieces ever written), and the Cello Concerto. The Concerto in particular, a late work given a poor first performance and slow to make its way into the repertoire, is a masterpiece, sui generis, unique in form, economical in proportions, terse, and balanced perfectly between haunted emotionalism and rumbustious high spirits. If there is a work which better demonstrates how to orchestrate a concertante piece I don't know of it - there is only one tutti (the last few bars), yet there is plenty for the orchestra to do; the instrumental writing is full of colour and variety, yet the soloist can always be heard. There is no wallowing in the emotion, and the music is for once with Elgar entirely devoid of sentimentality (for any artist a quality as seductively fatal as heroin).

If these pieces are the best of Elgar, it is partly because they contrast with the less-good, of which the worst is perhaps The Music Makers, a setting of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Ode by turns self-pitying and self-indulgent. I once played the fiddle in a performance of The Music Makers at the Barbican. Ted Heath was in the audience; I hope he enjoyed it more than I did. As Kennedy and others have pointed out, it's not Elgar's fault that the poem is so bad. It is however Elgar's fault that he chose to set it, and it is entirely in keeping with what we know about Elgar's personality that he thought the poem good.

For Elgar had another quality beyond the ones I've mentioned above. He thought (correctly) that he was a much better composer than most of his contemporaries; he was unrepentant about this, and unashamed about expressing it publicly; his musical personality was to a significant extent based around the failure, real and imaginary, of Britain and the rest of the musical world to give his talent its due. In fact the overwhelming majority of people sufficiently driven to call themselves composers would have given their right arm to have had a career like Elgar's, and his failure to realise this marks a failure to understand the world as it really is. And it is an artist's capacity for understanding of the world which is the ultimate test. A sense of personal entitlement can be a spur to effort, but carried too far into a composer's work it is limiting, and I personally think it limited Elgar.

That Beethoven, to give only one example, was a greater man may be seen not only from his refusal to bow down before the onset of deafness (an infinitely greater trial than anything Elgar had to put up with), but also the refusal to allow his affliction to dominate his work. Rather than greater raw talent or technique, it's the personality which this ability to rise above one's circumstances exemplifies that makes Beethoven a greater composer.

2nd past the post redux

Amidst all the excitement of the last few days - elections, United beating Chelsea, a terrible fire in one of my favourite places in Scotland - one rather surprising thing stands out. It is that of the four hundred odd voting areas in the UK only ten voted for AV.

I hoped AV would be rejected, and thought it probably would be, but this is a staggering statistic. Just as interesting is the location of these ten places. There is a rather beautiful map with the information on the Graun's website here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/may/06/av-referendum-results-map. And yes, those places are exactly where you would have thought they would be. Hackney, Camden, Lambeth, Islington, Haringey, Southwark, Glasgow Kelvin, Edinburgh Central, Oxford and Cambridge; in other words the places occupied by the highest density of Britain's great and good.

There are a number of ways of looking at this. One is that the great and the good are the best educated and most intelligent, which means that the lumpen majority (including me) is likely to have been wrong about AV.

Another is that the great and good are prone to wanting to change something for change's sake, and that, before signing up for it, the rest of us prefer to be convinced that a change will make things better.

Martyrdom - but not yet

I couldn't help thinking, on this sunny post-Osama bin Laden morning, that while ol' towel-head was a great enthusiast for martyrdom, this enthusiasm did not extend to getting in harm's way himself.

To be exact, for ten years after 9/11 he did his utmost to avoid confrontation with the Americans, conveniently keeping his own skin intact and thereby exhibiting an endearingly human, if somewhat hypocritical, desire to remain alive whilst urging others to get to heaven a.s.a.p. via the bomb-vest method.

Perhaps having four wives (and with power to add), Osama felt that he was already getting his fair share of virgins here on earth. Why the hurry to go upstairs?

Royal Wedding fever

Continuing its tradition of fearlessly tackling any subject, no matter how weighty, this blog now turns its attention to the Royal Wedding.

On 29th July 1981, the day Charles and Diana married, I was on holiday in Scotland. In the morning I went into Lochinver to send a postcard to a girl I was seeing. Sadly, I can still remember the card: two caricature Scotsmen looking up at a wall-mounted stag's head - "Did you get him in the Trossachs?", says one; "Nooo", the other replies, "right between the eyes".

It may well be that the uncanny ability to remember trivial information of this type was the kind of characteristic which led to her dumping me immediately on my return.

(My successor in the post was one of our lecturers in the Law department of Nottingham University; no doubt I'd have had to report him to the authorities for kiddy-fiddling in our more responsible times, but then I merely satisfied myself with running him out in the next staff-student cricket match. If you're reading, Louise, no hard feelings.)

Marriage was far from my mind then, and while my friends spent the day in the Culag Hotel watching Charles and Diana's big day, I went fishing. I felt a certain sniffy contempt for the Royal family.

Times change. I have now been married for nearly twenty years, and I quite like the monarchy. No doubt this is partly attributable to the rightward-sweeping tide that pulls most middle-aged people with it. My calculation is that Charles is an intelligent and cultured man, that his probable successor looks as if he is shaping up reasonably well, that the monarchy probably brings in at least the cost of the Civil List by way of tourist revenue, and that if we had an elected President instead we would be more likely to get a Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson applying than a Vaclav Havel or Nelson Mandela. If it's not obviously broken, don't try and fix it.

As for weddings, they are symbolic occasions in which, against all the evidence, two people embark on a journey (oh Lord, how I hoped I would never use that expression), a gamble if you prefer, one with emotional, financial and existential stakes, without any idea of the outcome. Weddings have about them the same atmosphere that must linger at the dockside when someone sets out to sail around the world, or at the airport departure lounge when mountaineers go off to try their hand at Everest: excitement mingled with trepidation.

I find weddings poignant events now. Thoughtful protagonists know that they cannot possibly know what the journey will be like; we observers, battle-scarred veterans of the institution, know that there is a further layer of almost Rumsfeldian ignorance beyond the grasp of the bride and groom. These people are innocents, signing up for something, good and bad, of whose reality they can have almost no conception. A Royal wedding carries the additional charge that the couple will form part of the distant cultural and political backdrop of British lives for decades to come; it pains me to adopt such an egregious cliche, but now I see why journalists write about "history being made".

So good luck to William and Kate. They will need it. My daughters will be glued to the TV tomorrow. I might go fishing.

trusting the John Muir Trust

"I told you so" are said to be the most unattractive four words in the English language. You might want to bear them in mind however when you read the following.

The John Muir Trust is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man.

A few years ago the JMT sent out a glossy circular appealing for money to - ostensibly - buy the Glencanisp Estate in Sutherland, then being sold by its owners, the wealthy Vestey family, beef barons and vendors of the infamous Vesta dried dinners so familiar from youthful camping trips. I have known the area for more than forty years and the idea of the JMT getting its hands on the Estate had a powerful appeal. However when you read the leaflet carefully, two things became apparent. Firstly, that the Trust had already parted with the money and was looking to refill its coffers, and secondly, that the Trust was not going to be the owner after all. The Estate had been bought by a local community foundation, and all the JMT would be getting was a seat on the foundation board.

I wrote to the Trust's then director, Nigel Hawkins, pointing out that since the JMT's relationship with its members was based on trust, it might have been better to be more open about why it was asking for money; that the JMT had taken a decision to put a lot of money into the Assynt Foundation without asking its own members; and that the JMT was making an assumption about the future conduct of the Foundation which might well turn out to be wrong. That is to say, the Vestey family, whilst not doing anything noticeable to restore the land to pristine condition, had at least not done anything to make it worse, whereas the Foundation was set up to act in the interests of local people, and their interests - jobs, amenities - might well turn out to conflict with those of this magnificent hundred thousand acre wilderness. A seat on the board could only offer advice and influence - things which could be ignored and overruled. A new private owner might well serve the interests of the landscape - which is irreplaceable - better.

To his credit, Mr Hawkins wrote back. His letter was emollient and reassuring, but ultimately unpersuasive. I still disagreed with the way the Trust had behaved, but there wasn't actually much else I could do. I can't say for sure when this correspondence took place, and I regret now that I don't have either my email or Hawkins's reply. Hawkins has now stepped down as director.

Every now and then JMT sends out copies of its Journal. In the most recent, something caught my eye.

"As (JMT and the Assynt Foundation) admit, it is a partnership that has not always run entirely smoothly, with differences of opinion on some of the Foundation's more commercially-minded plans for economic development. This led to the John Muir Trust stepping away from its seat on the Board of Directors."

Well who would have thought that might happen?

See first para for details.

Wishbone Ash not what they used to be shock

A post in the Graun's Notes and Queries section the other day about a "forgotten prog rock masterpiece", Wishbone Ash's 1972 album Argus, brought in the predictable replies from nostalgic hippies and took me back to the days when I sat in my study at school, loon pants at the ready, nodding appreciatively at the opening chords of Throw Down the Sword.

I searched for Argus on Spotify and was indulging in some Proustian moments when my son came in. "God, Dad", he said, "is this the kind of crap you had to listen to in the prog era?"

For the uninitiated (and like most initiations, this is one you probably don't really want to have), Wishbone Ash were a guitar-based four-piece from Torquay, and Argus was a sort of concept-album (a term which should have the cautious heading for the hills at top speed), on whose cover a helmeted centurion type figure wearing a cape looks out over a misty landscape, probably somewhere near Basingstoke. I never owned a copy, but it was ubiquitous amongst the record collections of my friends, and I can still hum bits of it now. Wishbone Ash did quite good business in the mid-70s, but were fading already when 1976 came and punk swept prog rock away.

In considering the pitfalls of nostalgia, you have to remember not just how bad a lot of the music of your youth now seems, but how bad a lot of it seemed even at the time. Whilst liking Argus quite a bit, I also knew that it was pretty naff. For one thing, the idea of a collection of rock songs that might have been sung around the campfire by Dark Ages warriors (had they only been possessed of Marshall amplifiers, a Gibson Flying V guitar and an electricity supply) required some suspension of disbelief. For another, although Wishbone Ash wrote some reasonable tunes, the band's lyrics are up there with Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak - "Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak / Somewhere in this town" (perhaps at the jail, chaps?) - teetering atop the pinnacle of bad songwriting.

"I thought I had a girl", sang bassist Martin Turner on Blowin' Free, their heads-down rock-a-boogie crowd pleaser. "I know / because I seen her". Pretty conclusive evidence, you may think. And elsewhere, "There were times when I stood at death's own door / only hoping for an answer", a piece of existential reportage that stood in sharp contrast to my own moments of teenage-angst, times when I stood waiting in the rain for the bus into Pontefract on a Saturday afternoon. "And there's a time", burbled Turner on Time Was, "waking up / and feeling down / it's when you have to pick your feet / up from the ground". Well I guess the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen has some less than starry moments.

Was anything good about Wishbone Ash? If like me you think the sound of the electric guitar played pretty loud is one of humanity's more compelling musical creations, the band provided a fairly hefty dose. Andy Powell, of the Gibson Flying V, was a competent riff-meister of the thousand-notes-per-minute variety. Throw Down the Sword, for all its portentous folly, opened with an ominous minor key ostinato over a snare-drum roll, and morphed into a stirring threnody that exalted at the same time as making your own life seem utterly mundane by comparison (a bit like Mahler then). Leaf and Stream had a beautiful pastoral lilt, borne along by the glowing tone of Ted Turner's back-pickup Strat. Warrior was a defiant stomp, which you could just about imagine being shouted out by hairy-arsed Saxons, huddled in a muddy round house looking out at the rain. Listen to the opening of Sometime World - the similarity to Television's classic Marquee Moon, a record of stratospherically higher stature, is uncanny.

Wishbone Ash are still going; or rather, there appear, curiously, to be two versions of the band going - one led by Martin Turner and one by Andy Powell. And they have both been playing Argus live, in its entirety. It must be a funny life, a bit like being a musical Ancient Mariner, keeping on playing half a dozen songs that briefly made you famous nearly forty years ago.

My son has been born too late. Aged 16, he yearns to be growing up in 1977 during punk's brief hey-day: a couple of weeks ago he went with friends to see Stiff Little Fingers, a band I saw play in Nottingham over thirty years ago, but who are still apparently doing the rounds, paying the mortgage. He is dissatisfied with pop music now. "It almost seems", he said, "as if it's like it was before punk, and we're just waiting now for punk to come and sweep it all away".

There's a moral here, but I'm not sure what it is. Listening to something that was new thirty years ago is a funny way of coping with the staleness of now. And if something comes to sweep it all away, it won't be punk, because that's already happened.

And even if it is swept away, don't imagine that's the end - it might well come creeping back one day, a bit older and fatter, playing live somewhere at a medium-sized venue near you.

More red noses

Policy madness has spread from Red Nose Day to the Coalition government. Hot on the heels of Comic Relief's wilful blind-eye turned to the damage done to Kenyan health-care by the country's doctors' exodus abroad - to the UK, amongst other places - comes news that David Cameron has given a couple of hundred million quid to Pakistan for new schools.

The obvious question here is whether the government should be giving money for schools to another country at a time when it is making cutbacks in its own education programme; Cameron would perhaps say that he needed to mend fences after his remarks to the effect that Pakistan has faced both ways when it comes to terrorism (a statement as undiplomatic as it was true); he might also point out that educating young Pakistanis away from the madrassas might lessen the chances of their turning to extremism (although our home-grown terrorists seem to be thriving amidst the further educational opportunities provided by Britain's universities); whatever, I doubt that a cost-benefit analysis has been done.

The other less obvious point relates to my recent Comic Relief post. A Pakistani MP I heard interviewed on the radio defended Cameron's gift, as you might expect. The interviewer, Aasma Mir, pressed the MP on why Pakistan couldn't pay for schools itself - after all it was a country with a lot of very rich people, in which corruption was rife and tax evasion routine; Mir might have added that it was a country which could afford a nuclear weapons programme. The MP blustered. What, Mir, asked, was Pakistan's top rate of tax? Amidst more bluster came the answer: 35%.

So there you have it. Britain, a country with a marginal tax rate of 50%, presently cutting its education programme, is funding schools in Pakistan, a country with a marginal rate of 35%.

Just as it might be better for the UK to train its own doctors and encourage Kenyans to practice medicine at home, perhaps it might be better for the UK to show Pakistan how to set up a functioning tax system.