The ghost variations in the machine
On Robert Schumann, Jelly d'Arányi and the Nazis; plus Sunday roundup and Sundaynightis highlights for next week. May contain concertos
Slightly later than usual post today because I’ve been heading home from Oxford, where I gave a pre-concert talk last night about the Robert Schumann Violin Concerto. Its roller-coaster story was the basis of my novel Ghost Variations, which came out ten years ago, but is now out of print because my publisher went bust, hey ho.
This concerto was Robert Schumann’s last completed orchestral work before his final collapse into mental disintegration in February 1854. After he died, in 1856, Breitkopf prepared a complete Schumann Edition; Clara Schumann had to decide which of his unpublished works to include, and together with Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim she decided to leave it out. They thought it showed signs of his illness - though it may simply have been too painful a memory.
The manuscript sat in the Prussian State Library until 1933, when Jelly d’Arányi and her sister Adila Fachiri started receiving “spirit messages” via a “glass game” asking Jelly to find and perform it. She made enquiries and a Swedish diplomat friend who was visiting Berlin went in and discovered it in the wrong file - under “Joachim”, not “Schumann”. The Nazis got wind of it, the British secret service apparently got wind of it too, and soon Jelly found herself in a race to give the modern-day premiere, in which her competitors were the youthful Yehudi Menuhin on the one hand and, on the other, Joseph Goebbels.
Ghost Variations was about tipping points: the world tipping into fascism, Schumann into incurable illness and Jelly towards the end of her career (she had been injured in a car crash in the Netherlands in 1934, which left her increasingly prone to problems). It was a dark time and the concerto seemed to symbolise it all.
And yet…the concerto also symbolised the backlash. This work itself defeated those who tried to conscript it for propaganda purposes. It is not heroic, triumphal, the “great German Aryan concerto” that Goebbels intended to replace the banned Mendelssohn in people’s affections. Mendelssohn’s is gloriously sane, eminently hummable and enormous fun. Schumann’s is introspective, vulnerable, problematic in terms of both the music’s energy management and its technical demands, and structurally original (his treatment of the cyclic theme is particularly interesting). It did not fulfil the demands of what I used to find myself mistyping as the “Ministry of Progapanda”.
They even got the publishers to make changes to it - unknown to them, carried out by persona-non-grata Paul Hindemith - but the concerto still hit back. It finishes with a grand polonaise. Hitler invaded Poland two years after the first modern-day performance. He was ultimately defeated. Was the concerto’s rehabilitation really symbolic? Or prophetic?
Tipping points can work both ways. Ten years on, perhaps we are at another; and perhaps it can turn in a new direction which might ultimately bring regeneration and hope, if we are very, very lucky.
A lot of people last night asked which is my favourite recording of the Schumann Concerto. It’s this one: played in 1938 by Yehudi Menuhin (Jelly never recorded it, sadly), with the New York Philharmonic conducted by John Barbirolli.
I’ve been reading…
Mostly the news. And listening to it. Progress on the tapestry is good while hearing Alistair and Rory on The Rest is Politics, or the cutting-edge discussions of ‘Maitlis’, Lewis and friends on The News Agents. What a week… If Andy Burnham does become PM, by whatever means, he’ll be our seventh in ten years - the kind of lunatic turnover you would expect in…well, other places.
Quite why Starmer is regarded as the most unpopular PM of modern times is beyond me, because it was the lot before, those ultra-libertarian ideologues, who parted company with reality and landed us with impoverishing, straitjacketing Brexit, the ‘Liz Truss effect’ (crashing the markets), plus the Covid-19 bungling that led to the senseless deaths of around a quarter of a million people. That’s why we voted them out. The largest parliamentary majority on earth could not have turned the resulting mess around in two years flat. Still, Starmer’s personal brand seems tainted beyond repair by L’Affaire Mandelson, so that is that.
Good luck to Andy Burnham, because if he doesn’t succeed, heaven knows what happens next.
I’ve been writing…
A couple of interviews for The Strad’s August edition: first, the fascinating and inspiring composer and violist Brett Dean; and next, the firebrand cellist Alban Gerhardt re his latest recording, the Elgar and Dvorák cello concertos, which was released yesterday.
Alban has a particularly wonderful anecdote about his childhood as the son of a Berlin Philharmonic violinist. When he was a small boy his father would sometimes take him along to rehearsals and put him in the choir seats in the Philharmonie, from which he had an excellent, head-on view of the conductor. It was often Karajan. His father hated Karajan, he says, so he hated him too. I can just picture the Grand Maestro conducting his rehearsals with a scowling child eyeballing him over a miniature score.
Read the rest in The Strad when it comes out in a few weeks.
Sundaynightis: three highlights for the week ahead
• Speaking of cello concertos, on Wednesday 24th, the OAE is back at the Southbank Centre recreating Brahms’s last concert in March 1897. It opens with the composer’s Fourth Symphony and after the interval Steven Isserlis plays the Dvorák Cello Concerto, before the evening concludes with Haydn’s Symphony No. 73, ‘La chasse’. Maxim Emelyanychev conducts. More here.
• Guess what? Another cello concerto! On Thursday night, 25th, a new Cello Concerto by Roxanna Panufnik is premiered at St George’s Hanover Square. It’s called Orfeus: To Hell and Back. The soloist is Jonathan Swensen, with the Orpheus Sinfonia conducted by Thomas Carroll. Roxanna has had a whole summer of concertos: her double concerto for oboe and cor anglais, Lunar Solar, has just had a double premiere in Liverpool and Warsaw and there might just be more in the works, but I couldn’t possibly say.
• On Friday 26th, Tom and I are off to Bavaria for a week of cultural runaround. We are at Schloss Elmau for two nights hearing Leif Ove Andsnes and then Grigory Sokolov, no less. A few nights later we’re at the Bavarian State Opera to see Die Walküre conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. I’ll report back.