Katy Hamilton

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Great Composer, over the course of their life, and however Great a Composer they are considered to be, is likely to write something that is actually not so very Great at all. Something a bit under par. Something you might even be able to describe, without much exaggeration, as Bad. Maybe they’ve chosen a real stinker of a text that just isn’t going to work as a song or opera, however much they chip valiantly away at it. Perhaps the opening melody of that sonata movement is just too dull to hold attention long term, for all the sequences and key changes that follow. Maybe they’ve created their own form which, lovely idea though it was at the time, is just too long-winded or repetitive to really work. Too slow. Too long-winded. Too dense. Too much too soon. Just… not very good.

We shouldn’t be surprised that these things occur. Composers are humans, and humans have off-days. And a really fantastic composition is, at heart, a spectacular balancing act. It will trace the perfect course between being over-developed and under-worked, between overegged melodrama and tedium, and so on. Also, composers like experimenting, and as any good scientist will tell you, sometimes the experiment has got to blow up in your face for you to know it definitely doesn’t work. The question is what you then do with the smoke-filled lab: clean it up quick before anyone sees, or take a few photos and write an article first.

So it’s one thing for a Great Composer to write something a bit dodgy at fourteen, and not have the foresight or judgement to realise that printing it is perhaps not such a great idea… and quite another for them to reach the ‘height of their powers’, like a sort of virtuoso Merlin, and send something to their publishers that turns out to be a musical damp squib. Or more specifically, something that not only turns out to be a musical damp squib at the time (his contemporaries just couldn’t see his brilliance, you know! he’s a genius through and through, and it took decades for others to realise how remarkable his works actually were) – and to remain both damp and squib-like in the eyes and ears of all who encounter it for the next few hundred years.

Photo by Luz Adriana Villa

Now and again, I am asked to write programme notes, or CD notes, or even give talks about, compositions that fall into this category. And it’s extremely difficult. But the difficulty doesn’t actually come from the piece itself: if the end result is a not-very-interesting symphony, or an opera that’s sort of lost the knack of being dramatic, unpicking why it doesn’t quite work is completely fascinating – and a challenge I relish. Not because I wish to get one up on the composer, but because how we define success in such cases can be anything from extremely specific to entirely nebulous, and trying to get to the heart of it, and articulate it, is a line of thinking I believe to be worth pursuing.

The difficulty, in fact, comes from saying out loud ‘this doesn’t work’, or ‘she’s written better songs than this one’, or ‘although it has some wonderful moments, overall the piece is not entirely successful.’ Because apparently, making such statements means any or all of the following three things: 1) I am bad-mouthing a Great Composer and we all know that Great Composers ALWAYS write things that are BRILLIANT, so I’m clearly an idiot; 2) I have absolutely no authority to say such things because I’ve never written a symphony/opera/ string quartet myself; 3) I’m only doing it because I’m a failed practical musician and this is some kind of sick revenge by trying to put down the works of others who have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

So I’d like to set the record straight, because I’m most certainly not the only person who is required to write about music that is sometimes a little under-par, and I rather suspect others might have the same problems as I do.

1) Great Composers are not Superman. Actually even if they were Superman, he messed up quite a lot of stuff. They might have needed to earn some extra cash and knocked out a couple of trite little tunes to pay the butcher’s bill this month. They may have had a commission deadline and a shortage of good ideas. They might just have suffered from a brief spell of bad judgement and put something in the ‘send to publisher’ pile that they meant to put into the ‘for burning’ pile. And that’s fine! The difficulty only comes if you then start from the baseline that because of their genius in certain works, you must expect to find it in all their works – that you attribute them superhuman status. And then you start publishing complete editions of their music, and wanting to record everything they wrote… and you go at it not because you want to trace the ups and downs, but rather because you want to treat the whole lot as a collection of holy relics which are perfect in every way. Chances are they won’t be. And actually, the mistakes and misfires will provide as many interesting and insightful things as the works that really are perfect.

2) You are completely right: I have never written a symphony, an opera, or a string quartet. I have also never made choux pastry from scratch, knitted a jumper or parallel parked a juggernaut. However, I would be prepared to wager that I could also express a not-entirely-invalid opinion on whether a plate of profiteroles tastes any good, whether a new pullover fits properly, and whether someone’s lorry-manoeuvring skills are liable to kill someone or demolish the car next to them. Knowing the technical details of how something works makes a big difference, of course: I’d be far less able to articulate specifics about the quality or nature of brushstrokes in painting than thematic manipulation in music, because I’ve never studied art or art history. I have done some composition, and quite a bit of performing. I am not without hands-on experience. And I have listened to, analysed and written about a vast swathe of music across hundreds of years. So I’m afraid I’m not buying the DIY argument.

3) This is the one that really baffles me. Why do you think I decided to pursue a career in writing and talking about music in the first place? It comes, of course, from the establishment of a hierarchy in which performers and composers are ‘better’ than all other people in music, and therefore all other people in music must secretly want to be performers and composers and are only not doing those things because they aren’t good enough. Sorry to disappoint: I love performing, but I have no desire to make a living doing it, and the same goes for composition. Words are my thing – and trying to find a way from music to words that makes sense, which is a difficult thing. I don’t spend my time writing about pieces in the embittered language of a jealous rival, whether they’re earth-shatteringly wonderful or not. And if something doesn’t work very well, I’m generally inclined to be sympathetic. What was this composer, this person whose work is almost uniformly on-the-button, attempting to do here? It doesn’t quite work, but they were clearly aiming for something… what was it? It’s like the greatest detective story of all time. Why would I want to be thumbing my nose and blowing raspberries? I want to know what they were getting at, to try to tease out the details of the way they were hoping to get there.

I offer all of this by way of explanation, ahead of a talk I’m giving this afternoon at the fabulous Oxford Lieder Festival on Schumann’s opera Genoveva. As an opera, Genoveva has its problems. I can assure you that a great many music historians have been far less generous about it that I am intending to be. But I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend that it isn’t problematic. The point then becomes to unpick its difficulties, attempt to understand them, and remember that ‘it doesn’t work’ is not the same as ‘it’s terrible’. There is some utterly wonderful music in Genoveva. And I have a theory as to why the balance is not quite right, why the characters seem a little too wooden, and the denouement a little underpowered. My theory is not ‘Schumann was an idiot’, or ‘I could have done better’, or ‘based on these problems we should never perform the work again’. Schumann was a genius who sometimes wrote things that weren’t absolutely perfect. That’s fine by me. But of course, if you want to know what my theory is… you’ll have to stop by this afternoon and say hello.