Biography’s unheard dimension

Biography is words. Personally, I hear words when I am writing rather than being focussed on their soundless written form — which is probably why I am less than 100% consistent in my presentation of the hieroglyphs on paper. I was delighted when a niece started reading my biography of George and exclaimed: ‘It’s just like hearing you talk!’

I think, though, that for most people reading a story is essentially an experience of the visual imagination rather than any other sense; in other words it is ‘eidetic’. I fear my book is not much of an olfactory experience, even though one can surmise that there was often a strong smell of cigarettes and brilliantine about George and I certainly hope readers live the pungency of the smoke he disappears into on p. 408.

It is even easier to under-hear music in a biography. I have many references to George playing the piano, but I am inclined to think the only times one almost hears him are when he explains (p. 45) that he is practising a piece by Grieg because he felt that if he played it to Kittie he would ‘talk through music right into your heart’, and when (p. 400) he plays Sibelius’s ‘Valse Triste’ on the troop ship taking him to the Dardanelles. I record that he had a piano in his room at Oxford, a piano in his room at Eastcote, one at Heathland Lodge and 42 Well Walk, played one on his cruise to Madeira in 1913, played duets with Basil de Sélincourt, etc etc etc, but I don’t actually generalise from that and state the obvious: music was probably as important to him as writing. I regret not having said that. At home, for instance, he would usually finish the day around 10.30 by playing the piano and Kittie would join him to listen. He may even have played the piano for Ballets Russes at some rehearsals when they visited London.

When you read the names of pieces of music in a text, there must be a temptation — unless you are a musician — to register them visually but not hear them, or not ask yourself at least what the impact of that particular work could be.

A prime example of this is the music played before and throughout performances of George’s production of The Seagull with Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1909:

Interval music for George’s production of The Seagull

Surprise has been expressed at the amount of music accompanying this production (one can work it out as at least fifty minutes), and theatre historians have known for decades what the pieces played were. Yet they have treated these pieces as merely ‘interval music’, music to settle the audience and get it through three ten-minute scene changes, or as an exotic attraction. It was assumed the pieces were a charming convention of Edwardian theatre, rather like ‘tea music’, but something of an obstacle to the ‘throughline’ of the theatrical experience and with no relevance at all to it. Alas, to think that means you have not heard the music in your mind or in any other form. The audience probably chattered through the pre-performance music, as was the Edwardian convention, and perhaps some did during the music between acts, but given the power of music at both conscious and subconscious levels, who can deny the mood-forming effect it had on them?

The first piece, which I have not been able to find a recording of on the Web, is from Auber’s comic opera Le Philtre, which was the prototype of one of the most popular operas of the nineteenth century, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. The fact that this opera was comic and concerned with love is utterly relevant to Chekhov’s Seagull, and it is difficult to believe that it wasn’t chosen by George and Alfred Wareing, the artistic director of the company, purposely to evoke that mood before the curtain went up.

Conversely, the violin solo played by George’s friend Albert Cazabon next was a foretaste of the modernity and dissonance (George called it ‘disjunctiveness’) that the audience could expect once the play got going:

The melancholy mellifluousness of the music played between Acts 1 and 2 was perfect for the approaching lazy, hot summer scene. It was one of the most famous movements of Russian music of the last forty years; one that made Tolstoi weep when he first heard it. Yet it was actually lulling its theatrical audience before the storm into which Act 2 moves.

Debussy’s ‘Andante’ and the polka from ‘Les Vendredis’ by Sokolov, Glazunov and Liadov were modern pieces, but not overtly dissonantal. They could reasonably be taken to have been chosen to set the balanced theatrical mood of light and dark in Act 3:

We do not know which of Tchaikovsky’s waltzes was played next. But the last, short piece hints with relentless intensity at the tragic turn the play will take for Nina and Treplev, its young heroes, in the final act:

So the music chosen to twine through George’s production of The Seagull was not irrelevant, but deeply relevant to the play’s action. You could only know that by hearing it, either live or in your mind’s ear. It was an integral part of the production, which since Stanislavsky’s work at the Moscow Arts we know George saw as an exercise in total design. Also, of course, the pieces I have quoted here were culturally relevant (although there are the two French composers, attention is drawn to the preponderance of Russian ones by the asterisks on the programme). There is no doubt in my mind that some of the remarkable success of George’s premiere of The Seagull in English was due to the play not being acculturated to Edwardian Britain but presented as a Russian artefact.

In Calderonia’s next post, John Dewey will introduce us to the person who did most to bring Russian music to Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. I am extremely grateful to John for his guest post and review.