Classical visions

The origins of electronic music lie in the creative imagination. The technologies that are used to make electronic music are a realisation of the human urge to originate, record and manipulate sound. Although the term electronic music refers specifically to music made using electronic devices and, by extension, to certain mechanical devices powered by electricity, the musical possibilities that these technologies have opened up are a recurring theme in literature, art, engineering and philosophy. But it was not until the turn of the twentieth century, when electronic and electromechanical instruments started to become a physical reality, that certain forward looking musicians began to turn to the new possibilities already imagined by others.

Francis Bacon's celebrated description of a modern sound studio is one of many examples of such a creative imagination. The New Atlantis, written in 1624 and published in 1626, was a utopian tale of mariners in the southeastern seas who were shipwrecked upon an island containing a model civilisation, in which science and spirituality found union. The ‘sound-houses’ passage is one of a series of descriptions, given by the island's governor, of its various knowledge resources and houses of learning.

To most of his contemporaries Mahler was known first and foremost as an operatic conductor. He was active in this sphere from 1880 to 1910, reaching the heights of the profession. That he always wanted to be free of the routine of the theatre and to conduct concerts is perhaps not surprising, given that all his mature compositions involve concert orchestras; but, since there were few independent concert orchestras, like most conductors in Germany and Austria Mahler was obliged to earn his living mainly in the opera house.

Mahler's model for the concert conductor was exceptional in all senses: Hans von Bülow, who had not held a regular operatic appointment since he left Hannover in 1880. Bülow was a fine pianist who championed the late Beethoven sonatas and gave the first performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, was Wagner's chosen conductor for the premières of Tristan and Die Meistersinger, and later a friend of Brahms. Mahler wrote to Bülow after one of the latter's concerts with the Meiningen Orchestra when it visited Kassel in January 1884, asking to be taken on as an apprentice; but Bülow replied curtly and coldly and when choosing a replacement assistant in Meiningen in 1885 preferred to recommend his inexperienced protégé, Richard Strauss, over either Mahler or Felix von Weingartner. Later, in Hamburg, Bülow would recognize Mahler's gifts as a conductor, though not as a composer and, apart from the occasional performances he gave in Prague and Budapest, Mahler's first real opportunities as a conductor of the symphonic repertoire presented themselves in Hamburg when he deputized for Bülow in December 1892 and took over the ‘Bülow concerts’ with the Hamburg Philharmonic after his death in February 1894.

Ulisse has repeatedly turned to song to express his growing optimism – with Minerva, with Eumete, with Telemaco, and in his defeat of the Suitors. His confrontation with Penelope, so long awaited by him and by us, will be different. Resourceful Ulisse will not attempt to reach her with music, but with speech, the mode of expression she herself had adopted, we imagine, ever since his departure. Monteverdi takes special pains with Ulisse's speech, mustering his most carefully controlled eloquence. Here, notably, Badoaro's libretto is adequate to the task; the composer adds very little, content to exploit rhetorical emphases – parallelisms, repetitions, enjambements, images – already built into the text.

In a series of brief speeches, each countered by Penelope's stolid denial of her feelings and refusal to trust her senses, Ulisse enlists all his powers of persuasion, an effort marked, among other things, by repeated attempts to dislodge Penelope from her fixation on D, symbol of her faith – he moves several times to A, finally to G. He presses his suit with wide-ranging, strongly shaped melodic lines, extended phrases and expressive harmony. Her resistance, in contrast, is expressed in speech-like music of narrow compass placed low in her range, short phrases, strongly cadential harmony, and uniformly slow harmonic rhythm.

Playwrighting can be a more sociable art than its popular image might imply. Perhaps the isolation of the writer's role is its most obvious feature: Hare himself writes of realising, at the end of the 1970s, 'what more intelligent writers know from the start. I remember thinking: “Oh I see. I'm alone.”' He reflects on the provisional nature of relationships with other theatre makers, such as actors and directors. Yet if it was during the 1970s that Hare had most sought, as he puts it, 'to reconcile some kind of group impulse with the task of writing individual plays', this openness to dialogue continues to be evident in his work, particularly in more recent theatre writing.

Perhaps because of its frequent, though by no means inevitable, association with collective authorship, the idea of playwrights working in ‘collaboration’ (whether with each other, or with an ensemble, or with others) can sometimes be associated with notions of artistic compromise or of inept ‘theatre designed by a committee’.

If one wishes to understand the attitude to their craft of British poets of the mid-twentieth century, the influence of T. S. Eliot, both in his poetry and his criticism, is one of the most important facts to consider. This is true even where that influence is mediated or qualified, but in the case of William Empson it is direct and avowed. Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and The Structure of Complex Words (1951) are developments of Eliot's shift away from 'personality' and 'emotion' towards the discovery of feelings of which the identifiable components of the poem were the only true gauge. A more proximate influence on Empson's thinking was his Cambridge tutor, I.A. Richards, but Eliot lies behind Richards too and is a more pervasive point of reference for poets.

The revolution that Eliot wrought in the reading and criticism of poetry can best be illustrated by a compilation of assertions from the essays collected in The Sacred Wood. In the best-known of these, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919) , he states that 'The poet's mind is . . . a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.' The word 'compound', in evoking a scientific analogy, suggests that 'impersonality' which Eliot lauds in the essay, and this consorts well with another implication: the poem becomes an object - a variegated object, compounded of different elements, but an object nevertheless.

Music at the Ducal Court of Mantua in 1590

Early in 1590, the most probable date at which Monteverdi entered the employment of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, the Palazzo Ducale offered an environment wherein music was cultivated under three distinct identities. One was the duke's personal cappella of clergy and choir, maintained within his entourage to discharge his obligations as the orthodox and dutiful master of a great Christian household. It has long been considered that Monteverdi's engagement at the Gonzaga court was exclusively as a secular musician, but a new appraisal of the documentary evidence indicates that this is rather a misapprehension. He was recruited to the central musical department of the household, the cappella (chapel). Whatever that term was to come to mean in future times, in Counter-Reformation Mantua under the devout dukes Guglielmo and Vincenzo it could only maintain its historic signification as the household department to which the duke committed the ordering both of his personal daily devotions and of those conducted in his name. Thus, in 1589 the staff of his cappella comprehended personnel both sacerdotal and musical: a principal chaplain, four priests (of whom three were also fully qualified as singers), a maestro di cappella (the director of music, since 1565 the composer Giaches de Wert), and ten adult male singers.

'It is only now . . . that I realise, almost without noticing, that for some time my subject as a playwright has been faith', Hare has written. This has never been more true than for Skylight (1995), Amy's View (1997), My Zinc Bed (2000) and The Breath of Life (2002) - works that, as Richard Boon has observed, 'show a steady progress towards increasingly “private” plays'. Issues of faith are notoriously difficult to deal with on stage, and as a means of approaching them Hare began experimenting with what he himself has called 'stage poetry', a form that enables him to take his audiences to the heart of his characters' spiritual lives without sermonising - in fact, without necessarily using language at all. Besides explaining the themes of these important plays, this essay will unravel the mechanics of Hare's 'stage poetry'.

Precise identification and detailed knowledge of the spaces, both indoor (rooms, theatres, churches) and outdoor (gardens, courtyards, public squares, towers) in which individual musical works or whole repertories were performed, or for which they were conceived, should be essential for study of the production, composition and performance of music in any age. The realisation of this objective, however, often turns out to be impossible because of gaps in documentation or remodelling of the places concerned. The presence in this Companion of a contribution specifically devoted to the spaces in which Monteverdi's music was heard, and for which he composed during his employment at Mantua, demonstrates how such an approach, once only vaguely acknowledged, has in recent years become a recognised methodology. Monteverdi himself, speaking of the madrigals in his Fifth Book (1605), reminded its dedicatee, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, of the many times in which he had heard them ‘in his royal chamber’ before they were published, as if himself to spur us on to this final, interdisciplinary frontier of musicological research.

An investigation of the relationship between music and spaces for music during Monteverdi's Mantuan years runs into various problems. The configuration of the Gonzaga palace today consists of numerous buildings added over the centuries to the original medieval nucleus, which faces on to the Piazza Sordello (formerly the Piazza San Pietro). Various individual buildings have been joined together to form inner courtyards, gardens, galleries and elevated walkways, resulting in the complex structure of a palace ‘in the form of a city’ (Baldassare Castiglione) which is still visible today, albeit partially demolished and rearranged.

A fore-word

It is 1979, and Amy is in conversation with her partner, Dominic - a journalist-critic, soon to be television producer - and her mother, Esme - an actress of the old school who will, by 1995, her stage career on the slide, be playing Nurse Banstead in a television soap. There is possibly a political significance in the fact that David Hare should open his play in the very year that Margaret Thatcher first ascended the Westminster throne, but, given the play's foregrounding of a live theatre/television debate, it takes on a more personal significance when it is realised that the year is immediately bookended by the first broadcasts of two of the only three original plays directed by him for television: Licking Hitler (1978) and Dreams of Leaving (1980). Furthermore, when it is remembered that the first of these existed in an effectively symbiotic relationship with his stage play Plenty (1978, and in 1985 released as a self-adapted film), it is apparent that the nature and potential of the different mediums was very much a current preoccupation.

The ‘greatest’ and the ‘most personal’

Whenever Mahler had completed preliminary work on a new composition he lost no time in letting friends and relatives know about it. Attributes he would thereby bestow on his works are revealing – and in such cases Mahler was certainly not sparing with superlatives. ‘It is the most significant thing I have done yet’ was for example his assessment of the Finale of the Second Symphony. He called the Third Symphony ‘my most individual and my richest work’. Whatever the degree of understandable enthusiasm resonating from such comments, it was rare for Mahler's judgements to be final. He appeared to sense each new composition as having reached a yet higher stage of development, successive completed symphonies always seeming his best to date.

There are only two notable exceptions to this. In order to express the aspirations and significance of the Eighth Symphony in words, during its composition in 1906 he wrote, ‘Just imagine the universe beginning to ring and resound. There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns circling above.’ He upheld the judgement that it was his ‘greatest’ work even when writing his important and substantial later works. At the beginning of October 1909, two months after the draft score of the Ninth Symphony had been completed, he called the Eighth ‘my most important work’, and in the summer of 1910 he spoke once more of his ‘greatest achievement’. Mahler bestowed a similarly positive, if subtly diering, attribute on the work which immediately followed: Das Lied von der Erde.

'British society needs not to abolish its institutions, but to refresh them. For, if not through institutions, how do we express the common good?' So wrote David Hare in conclusion to the Introduction of his 1993 book Asking Around, in which he provides an account of the mass of research out of which he produced the trilogy of plays - Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War - which was for some the signal theatrical event of the 1990s. These were plays in which, through a forensic dissection of the operations of the Church, the Law and the Labour Party respectively, Hare offered a panoramic and fiercely critical view of the state of the nation in the (as it turned out) final years of a period of Conservative government that had begun in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Great Britain. Taken as a whole, they present a picture of a divided country run by an intellectual elite, inward-looking, self-regarding and concerned only with the preservation of its own power and status; an elite that has surrendered moral leadership and social responsibility to the vagaries of market-force economics. The institutions over which it presides, insofar as they function at all, do so only because of the continuing goodwill and hard work of those isolated individuals, usually at or near the bottom of the pile, who 'do the dirty work'. As a character in Murmuring Judges puts it, 'Let's hear it for the guys who keep turning up' (p78).

In 1904 the Prussian Ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Weimar sent an anxious report to his masters at Wilhelm II's court in Berlin. It concerned the promotion of ‘modern’ artists like Gaugin and Rodin by the Director of Weimar's Grand Ducal Museum for Arts and Crafts, the homosexual connoisseur, soldier and diplomat, Count Harry Kessler. For the Ambassador, Kessler's modernism (something which inspired ‘the known aversion of His Majesty the Emperor and King’) was comprehensible only as a form of sedition on the part of ‘intriguers’ with partisan interests; ‘an artistic opposition’, he concluded, ‘can, at times, easily lead to a political [one]’. It is small wonder that in 1918 this same Kessler, otherwise known to music history as co-librettist with Hofmannsthal for Richard Strauss's ballet Josephslegende, would adopt striking language in the exercise of his later war-time position (following harrowing active service) as Cultural Attaché to the German embassy in Switzerland: ‘The propaganda war has become through the engagement of the Americans more vehement and complicated. They have more money, we have the craftiness of our Jews, which I put into motion, and our more precise work. Every moment in life, every individual, becomes the battlefield of enemy parties. Nothing escapes politics.’