Ruth Gipps in Cheltenham

There is more good news regarding Ruth Gipps, the hitherto unjustly-neglected British composer.  Her Second Symphony will be performed as part of the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday 6th July, 2019, at 7 p.m.  It will be conducted in the Town Hall there by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and played by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra — a later incarnation of the same orchestra in which Ruth Gipps played the oboe early in her career.  More details here: https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/music/whats-on/2019/cbso-and-alison-balsom/

It is wonderful that Ruth Gipps is now receiving the attention she deserves, and that her decision to stick to a traditional musical idiom, which cost her so much in her own lifetime, has now been vindicated, as a new generation of listeners discovers and delights in her music.  I am almost confident enough to start a wish list — a recording of the third and fifth symphonies, the première of her oboe and viola concertos, or a major London performance, such as her piano concerto at the Proms…

Here is the second symphony’s grand finale, from this year’s new recording of the symphony by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Rumon Gamba:

Update: Unfortunately Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla had to withdraw from the concert due to illness: Edward Gardner deputised, and Ruth Gipps’ symphony was replaced with Walton’s suite from ‘Troilus and Cressida’.  Never mind — another time!  Wishing Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla a swift recovery.

Update no. 2: Ruth Gipps’ second symphony is now due to be performed in  Birmingham’s Symphony Hall at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday 2nd October (https://cbso.co.uk/event/alison-balsom-plays-musgrave).

Joaquín Sorolla: Spanish Sunlight in London

The Return from Fishing (from the Wikimedia Commons)

For the past few months there has been more sunlight in one room at the National Gallery than in the whole of the rest of London.  It is light that has to be squinted into: dazzling Mediterranean sunshine, undiminished for being more than a hundred years old.  It drenched the coast of Valencia at the turn of the last century, yet its intensity was captured again and again by the Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923).  This year, the National Gallery has housed the first major exhibition of his works in London for over a century: ‘Sorolla: Master of Light’.

Clotilde and Elena on the Rocks (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastida_clotilde-elena.jpg>)

I cannot remember when I was last so astonished by the works of a single painter.   I am only a layman, but it seems to me that Sorolla was extraordinarily gifted, and that he achieved the Impressionists’ ambition: to capture light and motion, at least as well as any other artist of that movement.  It is from Monet’s own estimation of Sorolla, as the ‘Master of Light’, that the exhibition’s title comes.  Indeed, he seemed to be able to depict everything that light does: ‘Never has a brush contained so much sun,’ declared the critic Henri Rochefort.  In a single picture he could record its punishingly blinding intensity on red cliffs, and then the gentler glare of its second- and third-hand reflections, which softly and bluishly appear in his wife’s and daughter’s white clothes in a shady foreground.  He could recreate its bold invasion of a raisin-packing warehouse with a slab of exactly the right shade of yellow-white; he could depict its delicate illumination of a woman’s eye-lashes; he could paint its pearly coolness in church.  In vain does the viewer try to see how it all works by getting right up close to the picture: everywhere there are dashes and patches of colour which seem audacious or even rash, but which turn out to be exactly right, unerringly true.  The brush-strokes are deft and instinctive and simply beyond technique or instruction.  They are strokes of genius.

‘Sewing the Sail’ (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cosiendo_la_vela.jpg>)

Yet, to my shame, Sorolla was completely unknown to me before I heard (via Westminster Cathedral’s magazine ‘Oremus’) about this exhibition.  He is well-known in Spain, but I cannot understand why he is not better known in Britain.  His paintings ache with reality.  As the curators put it, ‘his pictures radiate the dazzle of sunlight on water, the heat of a sultry afternoon and the force of a stiff sea breeze.’  Amid the glittering sunlight, you can almost hear the paintings: the violent smack and slap of a billowing sail, the shrieks of children playing, the slosh and roar of the sea.  In one of the most stunning tableaux, ‘Sewing the Sail’, depicting a family mending the sail by which they earn their livelihood, the stunningly realistic rendering of so mundane an object as a terracotta vase actually made me feel slightly dizzy, to say nothing of the effortlessly lush and generous tumble of the sail’s canvas.  His eye was almost journalistic — indeed, one of the pictures shows his wife holding a camera — and many of the pictures depict a split-second, an instant, the twinkling of an eye, as if they were photographs.  They are often in the gerund, with their titles like ‘Sewing the Sail’ and ‘Packing Raisins’.  And he painted in the field, even building wooden platforms out into the sea to stand on with his easel.  Some of the details that he chooses to pick out are almost heart-stopping.  In ‘Packing Raisins’ the ear-ring of a young woman in the foreground can just be glimpsed: on closer inspection it turns out to be a tiny but unmistakeable point of brilliant yellow.  Somehow he could see the tiny particulars that go to make a place, a person or even a single moment — an impression — distinctive.

‘Mother’: Sorolla’s wife Clotilde and youngest daughter Elena.
(from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Sorolla_-_00324_-_Madre.jpg>)

His paintings ache with a reality other than the visual, too.  Beauty runs through his paintings: human beauty, and human dignity.  All through his paintings Sorolla affirms the nobility of his subjects.  There is his affection for his family: he plainly loved his wife Clotilde deeply, and his portraits of her depict a woman of shocking beauty.  In ‘Mother’, showing his wife and his newborn daughter Elena swathed in soft bed-linen, he created a picture ‘overflowing with tenderness’.  He also loved the landscape and traditional costumes of his country: the Hispanic Society in America commissioned some enormous murals depicting Spanish culture, the ‘Vision of Spain’, and he spent many years travelling around and working on this project.  And some of his other subjects, too, have a journalistic element (perhaps, if he had been born in our age, he would have been a photojournalist).  His portraits of ordinary life and ordinary working folk, and even social commentary, such as a monumental depiction of a dying fisherman, as if he were Christ being taken down from the Cross,  entitled, searingly, ‘And they still say fish is expensive’.  Then there is ‘Sad Inheritance’, an enormous picture of crippled boys being taken by a monk to bathe in the sea.   The dignity of his subjects, even amid suffering, poverty and evildoing, runs through all his work.

It seems to me that he had all the gifts of the true artist: the eye that sees, the heart that senses, and the hand that creates.  This is what the art of the twentieth-century could have been: observation, feeling, technique, in the service of truth and beauty.  I have needed two visits of over two hours each to feel I have done Sorolla’s works any kind of justice.  I know this is perhaps rather short notice, but if any readers are able to get there to see the exhibition before it closes on the 7th July, I would heartily recommend it.

‘Strolling along the Seashore’ (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joaquín_Sorolla_y_Bastida_-_Strolling_along_the_Seashore_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>)

Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha 2019: a week today

‘Jezu miłości Twej, ukryty w Hostii tej’ (‘Jesus, your love, hidden in this host…’) — Rzeszów, 2018.

Last year I wrote an article about the open air hymn concerts held every year at the feast of Corpus Christi in the city of Rzeszów in south-eastern Poland.  The ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ gatherings (the name means ‘One Heart, One Spirit’) draw tens of thousands of people from all over Poland and beyond.  There is a large choir, soloists and full orchestra, the fruit of a rich and energetic musical culture, and they sing richly-arranged versions of traditional hymns as well as newer music.  There seems to be a heightened, clear-sighted, prayerful atmosphere, along with a real sense of togetherness and harmony.  Last year’s concert had more music of a charismatic and evangelical flavour than has been usual, but there really does seem to be something for everyone.

I think it is a very good thing that these events take place.

This year’s concert will take place as usual on the feast of Corpus Christi: a week today, Thursday 20th June, at 1900 local time (1800 British Summer Time), and I imagine it will be streamed over the Internet, most likely via the website, jednegoserca.pl, or its official YouTube channel.

Whitsuntide and Sanity

Happy Whitsun!  This is the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit burst into the Upper Room, ambushing the disciples cowering there with tongues of fire and a rushing wind — and set the Church off on its great adventure.  We in Britain celebrate it rather feebly these days.  Eleanor Parker, author of one of the best blogs on the Internet, ‘A Clerk of Oxford’, has an article on the ‘lost holiday’ of Whitsuntide.  It was, as she puts it, ‘the time for fairs, Morris dancing, games, ale-drinking, school and church processions, weddings, wandering into the countryside, and generally having a good time’.  It is only very recently that this has faded away.  The Clerk gives a link to a newsreel film of Manchester’s grand Whit Monday procession in 1927.  It is almost unbearably evocative of that vanished solemn world of cast-iron, and trams, and Corporations.  The white clothes of thousands of children are startling amid the huge soot-blackened hulks of mighty civic buildings — a sight that is now impossible and even unthinkable, though, thankfully, the Mancunian Whit Walks continue to this day.   Even in the early 1950s, Philip Larkin could still observe, in one of his finest and best-known poems, the tradition of Whitsun weddings.  Did he guess how completely the sight he was recording was about to fade away?  Was it he, as much as anyone, who was ‘out on the end of an event / Waving goodbye / To something that survived it?’  For look at what has happened to Whitsun since then.  The holiday has had all its character and flavour rationalised and secularised out of it.  Where once, seven weeks after the moveable feast of Easter, we had Whitsuntide, with its fire and wind and its brass bands and ale, we now have merely a bureaucratically static day off, the ‘Late May Bank Holiday’ — yawn.  It is better than no holiday at all, I hasten to stress — but it seems so dull and flat, and it has lost us our bearings, the flavour of our season and our bond with the past.

It has occurred to me recently that the Thing, whatever it is we should call it — hardly a Spirit — the materialistic, individualistic, over-liberal, progressive secularism of our day, will founder in the end mainly because of its own sheer dullness.  We have done a pretty good job of disenchanting life.  What now?  The exhilaration of life lived only for the moment and for the self, day after day, with only earth-bound hopes and the vaguest beacons of transcendent meaning, can only last so long.  We cannot distract ourselves for ever from the question that never goes away: what will fill the chasm of longing within us?  We know that the world of the performance appraisal, and the retail park, and the ready meal, is ultimately an insult to the dignity and depth of the human being, a dignity and a depth which cannot be ignored or privatised without consequence.  We have lost the words and the gestures by which we once articulated the magnitude of birth or marriage or death, and compassed moments of particular joy or suffering.  Where are our feasts and seasons to illuminate the year, the occasions for majesty or solemnity, our resonant poetry and song, or a deep spirit of togetherness that does not rely on an opponent or scapegoat for its strength?  Where is our hope for eternal life?  We will soon recognise, with alarm, how truncated is our sense of history, how disenchanted our sense of place, how stifled our hunger after wonder, and how hollow the inheritance bequeathed to us by the spirit of secularism: boring art, boring ideas, bored lives.  Secularism will fail because it is boring.

And secularism will run out of steam, too, because of its fundamental pessimism about the human person.  This may seem a strange thing to say about a tide of thought with so much to say about self-esteem and self-fulfilment.  But I am sure it is true.  For instance, the idea that our lives can mean whatever we decide, though it sounds good at first, conceals a cold indifference, for it leaves us perfectly free to decide that it means little or nothing at all, and, since many of us sometimes need encouragement to find and pursue real meaning, it leaves huge numbers of people open to the clutches of nihilism.  And, more broadly, many currents of thought that have become prominent in Britain, especially since the 1960s, have relied on pessimistic, often cynical arguments.  We all know how they run: the answer to difficulties in marriage is divorce; the answer to crisis pregnancies is abortion; the answer to terminal illness is euthanasia.  The idea of quality of life is turned to ill-use, to the evaluation that some lives are not worth living.  St. John Paul II’s phrase ‘culture of death’ was not too strong an expression.  It can’t last for ever, and indeed it isn’t lasting.

Even in the last century, C.S. Lewis observed the difficulty that our culture has in aspiring to high ideals.  He lamented that people seem unable to recognise that ‘when B is better than C, A may be even better than B’, or that people prefer ‘thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better and best, or bad, worse and worst’ (‘Mere Christianity’, Collins, 2012, p.108).  So many people think that the Church, if it speaks against B, is condemning people to C, whereas it is really hoping for A for us all.  It is an irony that, even as it aspires to utopia, and even as it criticises the Christian doctrine of original sin, the secular world nevertheless seems to have resigned itself to the inevitability of certain evils.  The recent introduction of so-called ‘no-fault divorce’ into law has given us yet another chance to see this habit of thought at work.  The advocates of that idea argue that what they called ‘amicable divorce’ is preferable to an ‘acrimonious divorce’, as if anybody would suggest that conflict should be aggravated where it could be lessened.  But they take it entirely for granted that divorce is simply a fact of life, like illness or bad weather.  But what if — one might ask — what if we tried to avoid divorce as much as possible; indeed, altogether?  We have free will, and we can use it to keep promises just as much as to break them.  What if we encouraged husbands and wives to stick together in moments of difficulty?  Is this not why they once made their vows?  Should we not help them towards heroic reconciliation, with the help of family, friends or counsellors, anything that it takes?  Those in favour of the new law might scoff that this assertion is simply childish naïvety.  But is it rather childlike innocence, which is something quite different — and, what is more, since it is children who tend to suffer most from divorce, is it so misplaced?  Contrary to the egregious posters that appeared all over railway stations a few months ago, advertising a divorce app — with a phonily jolly message from a fictional Mr. and Mrs. Foster who have decided that ‘things really haven’t worked out and we’re calling it quits’ — ‘amicable divorce’ is a contradiction in terms.  The sundering of vows causes great suffering to all concerned; nobody arrives at that point unscathed by grief, and divorce carries no promise that things will not worsen (it is divorce, not marriage, that weaponises children).  By asserting that such things are commonplace, and should be the foundation of rights and laws, secularism belies its fundamental pessimism and hopelessness.  Meanwhile, though, the Church asks, quietly, and with that ingenuousness that will save the world: what if a vow actually means a vow?  What if chaos need not necessarily have the final word?

I say all this not to pass judgement on those who go through divorce, especially in today’s climate, but to give an example of the ways in which secularism abandons people in difficulty.  The Thing seems very adept at working out the lesser of evils, but pretty hopeless at aspiring to the greatest good.  It has worsened that startling lack of moral verticality that C. S. Lewis observed; a kind of Brutalist shoulder-shrugging style of ethics which lowers the ceiling of human love and self-giving, and which often assumes that heroism is unrealistic, that sainthood is fantastical, and that we can afford simply to give up too easily.  The result of all this is that we all settle for too little from ourselves and from each other.  So, one implication is that men don’t hold themselves to high enough standards of manners and speech; women therefore don’t believe men are capable of high standards and so don’t dare to expect them; and so both settle for less and less, and end up demoralised.  (Meanwhile, in the spheres of education or career, people often expect far too much of themselves, making all kinds of sacrifices for things which do not, in the end, determine their dignity).  And is there another reason why we settle for too little: that we do not believe in mercy?  Do we fear that to aspire to high standards in our lives is to set ourselves up for a fall from which we will never recover? How swiftly this idea leads to cynicism and nihilism — and again it is because there are questions which secularism doesn’t know how to begin to answer.

The Thing seems all-powerful just at the moment.  It has claimed the media, the mainstream and the momentum.  Worse, it holds considerable sway over the language, manners and customs of ordinary people.  But it will have to last another nineteen centuries if it is to outlast the Church and since, in the end, it is reductive, and boring, and it sells us short, and tells us that we are less than we are, that we are merely granules of egos, zooming about directionlessly until we are extinguished, I would not bet on its staying the course.  It is too cynical to understand heroism; too superficial to comprehend beauty; to shallow to nourish friendship.  Birth is beyond its understanding; death defeats it.  Our dignity cannot stand this for ever.  Ultimately, too, the culture of death must die.   

Secularism may not necessarily fail violently or dramatically, but when it does fail, as fail it will, the Church will still be there, with hope and pageantry intact, along with the year’s colourful wheel of feasts and seasons, the tongues of fire and the rushing wind.  We know that life matters beyond what we see, however hard we try to deny it; we know it has a meaning too deep for words and thought, and we sense the immortality of our souls.  Religion, properly practised, lends life the dignity that befits it, and the paradox is that this makes us joyful and light-hearted in spite of our suffering.  We will keep the feast of Whitsun as of old, and sanity will prevail.

Happy Ascension Day!

Happy Feast of the Ascension!

A fantasia on the 46th Psalm by  Edward Taylor (c.1646–1729), set to music by Gerald Finzi (1901–1956), and sung by the choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, under Andrew Nethsinga.

  God is gone up with a triumphant shout:
  The Lord with sounding trumpets’ melodies:
  Sing praise, sing praise, sing praise, sing praises out,
  Unto our King sing praise seraphic-wise!
  Lift up your heads, ye lasting doors, they sing,
  And let the King of Glory enter in.

  Methinks I see Heaven’s sparkling courtiers fly
  In flakes of glory down, him to attend,
  And hear heart-cramping notes of melody
  Surround his chariot as it did ascend:
  Mixing their music, making ev’ry string
  More to enravish, as they this tune sing.

Impressions from London’s March for Life

The March for Life begins, 11th May, 2019.

Something must have gone deeply wrong in our society, I thought to myself the other Saturday, if someone as wary as I am of political controversy feels obliged to go out demonstrating on the streets.  Yet here I was, swelling the numbers of the March for Life in London (11th May, 2019), having decided that I could not really, in good conscience, stay away.

Well, something has indeed gone deeply wrong in our society.  Maybe it has many causes, maybe we did not mean it, and maybe it is a new form of an old sin, but I think it is real, it is gravely dangerous, and it has got down into the foundations.  We have forgotten that children are gifts.  That is the problem: until they join the ranks of independent adults, we are no longer entirely sure what they are for; we worry too much about what they will cost us, and we fear their destabilising effect on the centre of gravity of our lives.

And we have a particular blind spot where unborn children are concerned.  It seems that we really would rather not think too much about them, for in our age of amazing material wealth and technological advancement, in which we profess to be civilised and compassionate, we contradict ourselves.  Even as advancement after embryological advancement clarifies the miracle of the child in the womb — the fingerprints at seventeen weeks, the heartbeat at twenty-one days, the dreaming at seven months — the disagreement about the morality of abortion jostles on unresolved.  Worse still, it is taking on an alarming new shape, and the tone of the discussion is deteriorating rapidly.  It is becoming plainer than ever that the attitude with which the Abortion Act was apparently passed in 1967 — a degree of reluctance, and a determination that abortion should be reserved for extreme cases only — is vanishing, to be replaced by a far more radical, far less circumspect current of thought.  Louder and louder voices are proclaiming the disturbing idea that abortion is not simply to be permitted with regret, but to be promoted positively, even celebrated, as a right or liberty of women.  As it is, nearly 200,000 abortions now take place in England and Wales every year, adding catastrophically to the current total of nine million in the fifty years since the Act became law — yet there are those who want Parliament to declare abortion available as a matter of course, without restriction, as the standard response to what they call an unwanted pregnancy.  And they know how to make themselves heard.

The March passes the headquarters of Channel Four Television

This appalling idea has gathered far too much traction among too many people with national responsibilities and influence, especially in Parliament and among the media.  And, all over the place, forces are at work promoting it far and wide.  It is this attitude, for example, which a year ago seems to have swayed the referendum on the Eighth Amendment to the constitution of the Republic of Ireland, repealing a clause which — this is a crucial detail — had explicitly given equal legal protection to the lives of mothers and their unborn children.  (Every time I remember the nauseating jubilation over the result of that referendum, especially the big supposedly-spontaneous party in Dublin Castle, which embarrassed even many on the pro-choice side, I feel sick in the pit of my guts).  Activists have the pro-life provisions of the law in Northern Ireland in their sights.  And it is not just a question of law, for the prevailing attitude of mainstream culture seems to be pro-choice.  At least, pro-choice sentiments in public life are expressed more vocally than pro-life views, and earn more fulsome applause from the fashionable.  But that does not necessarily make them right.

The tide may already be turning. The Catholic Church is probably the most prominent of institutions standing up for the unborn, but we are not alone.  What is more, science is our ally, steadily vindicating our convictions that human life begins at the moment of conception, that we must never wilfully destroy human life, that abortion is therefore never the answer to a crisis pregnancy, and that there is always another way.  Meanwhile, bitter experience is confirming, at considerable cost, that it also does great damage to women and is a grievous offence against their dignity.

A view backwards from the same position and at the same time as the picture above

The March for Life has for several years offered a way of making a visible sign of our wish to change things, and to promote alternatives to abortion.  Having been held in Birmingham for several years, the March moved to London in 2018.  I thought a great deal about it before I decided to join in, and paid very careful attention to its aims and flavour, but I found it entirely reasonable.  I know that abortion is a politically controversial subject, but I cannot really help that.  This matter goes deeper than politics, all the way down to the moral foundations of our society.  What do we really believe human life is worth, especially when it is inconvenient?  What does it mean when we hardly ever see any people with Down’s Syndrome these days, since nine tenths of them are eliminated before birth?  I am fundamentally convinced that abortion is a grave injustice, and that we must bring it to an end.  One small way of helping to do so, I thought, would be to join this peaceful, good-humoured demonstration, which is growing by the year.

The March for Life takes a reasonable position and tone, having enough confidence in the truth of its message that it has no need to overstate its case.  It says its piece calmly, clearly and joyfully.  It does not make any kind of swipe at women who have sought or undergone abortions, knowing that in the majority of cases they do so under pressure, or with insufficient guidance, and later regret what has happened: they are often victims as well.  There is general agreement that the main villains of the piece are really the abortionists and abortion providers (‘Say hey, say ho, Marie Stopes has got to go!’).  The March places its emphasis on the humanity and sanctity of unborn life, and on the importance of providing assistance in crisis pregnancies: in short, protecting both mothers and their unborn babies.

The aim of the pro-life movement is not to score a short-term political goal, or to achieve legislative changes alone.  The law is quite a blunt instrument if it is unsupported by the underlying culture: all it should ideally have to do is to set the seal on an existing way of doing things.  This is why we need to build an authentic culture of life, in which the irreducible dignity of the human being is universally and instinctively recognised wherever it appears, from conception to natural death — and in which children are understood and revered as gifts.   This will only be brought about by changing, or honing, the thought of ordinary people.  So, a change in minds and hearts is needed more than a change in the law: something trickier to bring about, but truer, longer-lasting, and better for the human family.

So there we were, a good solid crowd — of 5,000, we were told — processing around Westminster, up past Victoria Gardens and right into Parliament Square.  I have to say I rather enjoyed myself.  There was a remarkably uplifting and joyful atmosphere of goodwill and peace.  Maybe it was because many of the people there were, like me, not typical demo-merchants!  Or maybe it was because the fundamental message is one of peace and hope, raised in defence of the weakest among us.  I saw no placards nor heard any chants that I believed were anywhere near gratuitously offensive.  I did see all sorts of people, though — a transect of the whole country (and by no means all Catholics).  Some had evidently travelled considerable distances to attend: just in my section of the march there was the Scottish saltire, the flag of Lincolnshire, a placard reading ‘Exeter Students for Life’ and even the banner of the Gibraltar Pro-Life Movement.   I think it is important to note — particularly as far as this matter is concerned — that there were roughly equal numbers of men and women; if anything, women slightly outnumbered men.  Equally importantly, all ages were represented: many of our elders, plenty of young families — and easily over a thousand young people, students and other young adults, like me, in their twenties — including a huge number of young women, whose opinion on this matter has perhaps the most clout of all.  The pro-life generation was out in force.

A pro-choice counter-demonstration, perhaps seventy or eighty strong, appeared on the pavement of Victoria Street to liven things up, and when we came round to Parliament Square they were waiting for us again.  (Labour voters might like to note that Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, sent a message of support to these pro-choicers, rather than to the March for Life.)  They waved their bright pink placards and chanted and sang at the tops of their voices, but I like to think the March for Life had a quiet power to which they had no answer.  One interesting interaction, which I did not witness in person, can be watched on the Facebook page of the March for Life.  The pro-life presenter approached the pro-choice demonstrators and asked two of them — in a reasonable way — if they would like to explain their position to the camera.  And they seemed willing, but before they could speak, they were hastily dissuaded by several of their co-protesters: “Don’t do it, don’t do it!” one emerged out of nowhere to warn them.  So an important opportunity for dialogue was lost.

Pro-choice counter-demonstration in Parliament Square

Dialogue would have been very useful, because, in this matter, along with many others, I think there is a certain deafness and misunderstanding between the two sides.  We are not even locking horns properly.  And I honestly think that it is the pro-choice side, not the pro-life side, that closes itself to dialogue.  I think they suspect us of bad faith, and are afraid of speaking to us: they seem to think very little about our motives, and find it easier to dismiss us.  They are not particularly interested in the nuances of language, either.  Somehow or other they are missing the point: we are not, as they suggest, going around trying to impose ourselves on others because we have nothing better to do with our Saturdays.  We are really and deeply convinced that the unborn child is a child, and that abortion is wrong because it destroys this life.  I think, too — and this is not meant as a cheap shot — that the pro-choicers are afraid of the weaknesses in their own argument and lack complete confidence in their own position.  Recently I heard a pro-life speaker observe that the stakes in the battle are higher for them: if they are wrong, they have to apprehend the reality that nine million lives have been thrown away since 1967.  No wonder they dig their heels in and shout and scream.  They may have snappier slogans and slicker public relations, but we have authenticity, and that is the only thing that can carry the day in the end.

How do we deal with this?  Well, until we can reach the other side by words, we must show them by example and put our convictions into action.  As many of us already do, we should give to pro-life charities, or even volunteer for them, and ask our elected representatives what they can do to help.  Just as our pro-life principles lead us to stand up for any other poor and marginalised people, we should defend the unborn, without dismissing any of the difficulties that lead people to the abortionist’s door.

Obianuju Ekeocha, bio-medical scientist and founder
of Culture of Life Africa, addresses the assembly

That does not mean that we should dispense with words in the meantime, though, and there are certainly some very compelling speakers in the pro-life movement.  The March for Life was addressed by the biomedical scientist Obianuju Ekeocha, founder of the Culture of Life Africa movement, whose allusion to Wilberforce’s battle to abolish slavery was uncomfortable but apt, by Bishop Keenan of Paisley, and by a woman named Melissa Ohden who, incredibly, had herself survived an abortion procedure when she came into this world.  There was also a remarkable address by a couple who, in February of this year, actually turned up for an appointment at an abortion clinic, but changed their minds at the last minute and decided to keep their baby.

The media’s bias was somewhat dismaying: the march was simply ignored by the mainstream secular press, even though 5,000 is not an inconsiderable size for a march.  Channel Four Television, for instance, was completely silent even though we marched right past their headquarters — yet, the following week, for example, they reported on a march of 2,000 calling for action to protect the environment.

Thousands in Parliament Square

Belonging to the Catholic Church is not always easy, but that Saturday I was proud of our Church for its courageous witness, and grateful for all who joined the march and added to its atmosphere, including the Orthodox Christians for Life.  This, I realised, looking around at my fellow marchers, is the inheritance of Chesterton and Belloc and Malcolm Muggeridge, and of countless other bold defenders of human dignity in this country — maybe indeed Wilberforce himself.  This is where their work is carried on.  Here is the organised resistance to the culture of death, and — better still — the energetic, optimistic and confident builders of a new culture of life.

Happy Easter!

Wishing a happy Easter to all readers of this blog.

    Had Christ, that once was slain,
    Ne’er burst his three-day prison,
    Our faith had been in vain —
    But now hath Christ arisen.

from G. Ratcliffe Woodward’s hymn ‘This joyful Eastertide’

Wells Cathedral, Somerset, from the south-east.  April, 2018.

Good Friday

The clouds have gathered.  It is the year’s darkest day, and utterly bone-dry.  Today not a single Mass will be celebrated in the whole world.

Here is a fragment of Venantius Fortunatus’ hymn Pange lingua gloriosi: (not to be confused with St. Thomas Aquinas’ later hymn, which was inspired by this one), sung by Westminster Cathedral Choir.

Notre-Dame Stands

Well, we have a great deal to be thankful for.  The damage done to Notre-Dame Cathedral by Monday’s fire, though awful, and costing us the lovely nineteenth-century spire (in French called flèche, the same word as for ‘arrow’) seems not to have been as catastrophic as it all appeared.  The greatest relief to me, after the news that the fundamental structure was sound, was that the three rose windows are safe.  Safe!  Most of the medieval fabric is more or less all right, too, apart from several vaults in the transepts.  The high altar, the belfries, the organ, and the relics have also sustained only slight damage.  Perhaps my piece yesterday seems like an overreaction, but it wasn’t, really: it might easily have been very different.  That was the sight of impending total disaster.  The rose windows had a very narrow escape, and so did the belfries.  But for the extraordinary valour of the fire brigade — who acted at considerable risk to their lives, and even the extraordinary pictures only hint at their bravery — I think we all know it could have been the end.  

It has been a horrible shock.  But I am not the first to point out that good things have, very quickly and clearly, come from this episode of suffering.  Already, though nasty, it has had a purifying effect.  There are many of us who now have a much keener sense of our love for this cathedral — perhaps all the great cathedrals — and a keener love of beauty.  Perhaps many will ask themselves seriously why this is.  Perhaps we will come to rediscover the reason for which the cathedrals were built, and that can only do us good.  As it is, there has been a monumental outpouring of generosity and solidarity for the rebuilding fund.  And there are smaller details: the story of the fire brigade chaplain who rescued the Crown of Thorns, and there were the remarkably level-headed comments of a 22-year-old, of whom I might otherwise have never heard, who was quoted by the BBC.  And there was the extraordinary sight of people kneeling and singing prayers for France’s spiritual heart, the beloved church that stands on the island in the Seine where, even before the fullness of the Gospel was brought to France, God and man agreed to meet.

I think those prayers were answered.  The cathedral is still standing and we still have the rose windows — those are words to savour.  I suppose one thing I might have put differently yesterday was my lament that this was an age in which churches are destroyed, rather than created.  Well, now we have an opportunity to rebuild one of the greatest cathedrals of Christendom.  It is an opportunity to which only the long task of finishing the basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is comparable: the duty to make the gift of a lasting and glorious house of God to the generations to come.

Meanwhile, let us all uphold beauty and make beautiful things, however simple.  We cannot pretend any longer that we do not still love and need them.

Notre-Dame: The Price of Love is Grief

Thank God that the fundamental structure of Notre-Dame Cathedral has been saved from yesterday’s fire.  I imagine that it is in no small part due to the bravery of the Parisian fire brigade that it has been possible to type that sentence.  So thank God for them as well.

The problem with signing up to this business of the Christian faith is that it is accompanied by risks, such as the risk of cultivating a heart sensitive to all that is beautiful.  And the risk of loving: as well as loving people, loving the beautiful things in which they have expressed the deepest truths and which generations have preserved.  If you believe in such a thing as absolute beauty, then you cannot just shrug off the loss when beauty is destroyed.  It means unavoidable pain.

Pain and rage, because, in this age of destruction, this is yet another loss we cannot afford to sustain.  Why our Church, again?  That is not to wish destruction on anybody else, but we are on the ropes as it is, we on the ground trying to defend the faith we love.  Now we are confronted with a horribly symbolic sight, the incarnation of our fears: the material, as well as the spiritual, fabric of our Christian heritage going up in catastrophic flames, beyond our power to save.

Why France, whose sorrow never ends?  And why must this beautiful building be ruined, while every week a smug, ugly addition is topped out in our cities?  Have we not had enough destruction?  Why do sinners’ ways prosper? as Gerard Manley Hopkins paraphrased the prophet Jeremiah.  What does one do in an age in which churches are not built but destroyed?

Millions have stood or knelt in this mighty cathedral.  When I spent some time in Paris as a student, I was one of them, quite often taking advantage of the privilege of being able to come to Mass here, and otherwise I spent a lot of time under its roof.  Around the 850th anniversary of the laying of the cathedral’s foundation stone, I had the unforgettable experience of running my fingers over the new bells cast in celebration, when they were displayed along the nave before being hung.  Later I heard the tremendous sound they made on (I think) the first Sunday they were rung.

Worse grief is suffered all the time by people around us: the bereaved, the dying, the abandoned, the downtrodden.  And I know that the French, whether believers or secular, will show their mettle now as much as ever, and they will not be defeated.  But the gratuitousness of a blow from an unexpected quarter… It is for moments like these that we have the Psalms; their rage, their grief, their remonstration with God who gave us all things and to whom all things return.  And this is why we have Holy Week, to remind ourselves that we are not alone.

And this on the eve of Benedict XVI’s ninety-second birthday, for which I had meant to write a celebratory tribute.  A strange mixture of blessing and sorrow life is indeed.

‘La France pleure sa cathédrale’ on Padreblog: https://www.padreblog.fr/la-france-pleure-sa-cathedrale

But Men Made Strange

Today our parish’s Youth Choir sang for Palm Sunday Mass, and one of our hymns was My Song is Love Unknown: Samuel Crossman’s words set to music by John Ireland.  I am sure that this is one of the greatest treasures of English hymnody.  There is such coiled power in these deftly-crafted words; such truth in this effortless rhyme and metre.  Crossman (1623-1683) managed to mingle profound tenderness with plain speaking, sincerity with irony, remorse with mercy and great theological learning with directness.  The remarkable mood and accomplished craft, and the understated intimacy, remind me of George Herbert: every time I read the words, there seems to be something new to notice.  And, in spite of the disarming directness of Crossman’s first person, there is nothing embarrassing about it: he speaks in such a universal way that the song has lost none of its power in nearly four centuries.  Of course, it is also true that the mystery on which he meditates is undiminished:

 He came from His blest throne

 Salvation to bestow;

 But men made strange, and none

 The longed-for Christ would know:

 But O! my Friend, 

 My Friend indeed,

 Who at my need 

 His life did spend.

This Wikipedia article gives all seven verses.

The drama of Holy Week, which has been drawing near all through Lent, is upon us.  Last week all  the statues and crucifixes in church were veiled in purple for Passiontide.  (The shocking sparseness of churches stripped for Holy Week is another, hidden reason for our usual custom of decorating them).  Today we heard the account of the Passion read, entering into the joy of the Palm Sunday crowd, only to sprinkle our tongues with the same crowd’s later bitterness and sarcasm, and to be drawn into its mad obsession with Barabbas.  Now the stage is set: the clouds are gathering and, together, with apprehension, we enter into these mysterious, shadowy days.

A new frontier opened: an unborn baby’s heart

Last weekend the BBC News website carried this article about some remarkable developments that have been made in scanning the hearts of unborn babies.  It is now possible to produce such detailed scans of the heart — which, by the way, normally begins beating as soon as three weeks and one day after conception, and will beat 54 million times before birth — that three-dimensional models can be built and then used, for example, to pick up abnormalities in the heart before birth.  This then gives more time to make plans for treatment, and increases the chance of their success.

But I have to admit that it took me a while to absorb that information because I had been so distracted by the clip at the top of the article, showing the result of an MRI scan, and exactly what is going on when babies kick inside the womb… It is even possible to see the heart beating… a remarkable image.

Time and time again, science vindicates the pro-life cause.

‘Flying Scotsman’ and the Poetry of the Footplate

An enjoyable recent read has been Andrew Roden’s history of the famous locomotive Flying Scotsman (‘Flying Scotsman: the extraordinary story of the world’s most famous train’, London: Aurum, 2007).  No. 4472 has had many adventures since her construction in 1923 for the London and North Eastern Railway’s express fleet.  She was the first steam locomotive officially verified to have reached a speed of 100mph, and was the L.N.E.R.’s show-piece at the British Empire exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and 1925.  Her profile was also raised during performance trials against locomotives of the Great Western Railway.  And she hauled the L.N.E.R.’s elite London–Edinburgh express — also named the Flying Scotsman; the engine had been named after the train — on the first day that the journey was made non-stop, with the aid of an ingenious corridor through the tender that permitted a change of crew.  She had a narrow escape from the scrapman in the 1960s, but was rescued by Alan Pegler, a businessman from Retford, and since then she has been on tour to Australia and to the United States as well as hauling excursion trains all over Britain.  While in Australia, Flying Scotsman set the record for the longest non-stop run ever undertaken by a steam locomotive, 422 miles.  In 2004 the National Railway Museum purchased her for the nation, and from York she still goes out regularly on excursion duties.

It’s always the 1960s, isn’t it?  It seems inconceivable that such a locomotive could ever have been in danger of the cutting-torch, but in those strange times of fanatical modernism it really had been a possibility.  Flying Scotsman was actually omitted from British Railways’ list of engines to be set aside for permanent preservation.  Many of the modernising changes made to the railways in the 1960s were certainly necessary, and it is true that Britain’s continued reliance on steam was at odds with the scene on the Continent, where the Second World War’s targeted destruction had cleared the ground for a fresh start and the renewed development of diesel and electric traction.  But, in those days, something other than a healthy competitive spirit was abroad in Britain; something else drove the wholesale destruction; it was enough to give the vandalism an official, respectable veneer.  Something else bred the atmosphere of sheer cold-bloodedness that hung over the railways, and Britain in general, in the 1960s.  Maybe it was the fate of the railways that first made me aware, when quite young, that something deep must have gone awry in that decade.  Roden’s description of the end of steam locomotion in Britain gives a good impression of the mood of the times:

By the early 1960s, steam was starting to leave the stage.  The planned phased replacement of steam under the Modernisation Plan [of 1955] was becoming outright slaughter.  Already, thousands of serviceable, economic locomotives had been sacrificed, and as the new diesels entered service the scrapman’s hunger became a feeding frenzy.  In 1947, the year before nationalisation, there had been around 20,000 steam locomotives in service on Britain’s main-line railways (a figure that doesn’t include the many thousands of locomotives used by industry).  A decade later, there were still almost 17,000, although diesels were starting to make an impact in places, but that 17,000 would all be gone by August 1968.  It was extinction on a cataclysmic scale. (p.88)

New steam locomotives were actually being built as late as the year 1960 (the last ever built was christened Evening Star; names with such pathos vanished with the engines) but, within a decade, the abolition of steam traction was total.  Even Dr. Richard Beeching, the man notorious for his recommendation, eagerly adopted, that the least-profitable third of the railway network should be closed outright, cannot claim all the credit for this, as the modernising momentum had gathered before he ever became Chairman of British Railways.  But he did throw his weight behind the project; he certainly wanted steam gone.  Even the sight of the old engines directly contradicted the new image he had in mind for the railways (slick, dynamic, progressive, unfussy, etc., etc.), and he was apparently furious to discover that Alan Pegler had secured the right to run Flying Scotsman on the national network.  Indeed, Roden notes that ‘Beeching’s insistence that no other operating deals like Flying Scotsman’s should be concluded meant that by 1967 she was the only privately owned locomotive allowed to run on British Railways’ (p. 113) and, a year later, the only steam locomotive at all.  The revolution was complete.

But Roden does not linger unduly on the depressing episodes in the story.  This paragraph in particular, on the subject of the speed records chased and broken by steam locomotives in the 1930s, struck me:

It seems odd, in the face of today’s youth-obsessed society, that the drivers who broke the speed records were all in their fifties, and looked nothing like the daredevil speed demons flying aeroplanes at the time.  But, while test pilots needed cat-like reflexes and fearlessness, the express engine driver needed experience.  He had to know every kink in the track, every curve, every hill, every approach to every station, where the signals and signal boxes were, and the speed limits too.  On top of that, he also had to know how to handle his train in conditions from snow and ice to the track-buckling heat of summer.  Trying to drive a train really fast without this knowledge was to court disaster, and, sensibly, the railways kept to their tried and tested ways [in normal service].  (p.60)

It is easy to joke that since trains have no steering, they must be easy to drive, but this is far from the truth.  For one thing, the stakes are higher than with cars: the speeds attained are generally higher, the traction is more powerful, the weight of everything involved far greater.  Starting and stopping take much longer, and the ability to stop in a precise position takes a great deal of skill.  The most important difference between rail and road traffic is that, on the main line at least, it is not possible to drive a train simply by sight.  The braking distance of a train is far greater than a car’s — from 100mph it can be a matter of miles — so, usually far beyond what can be seen round the next bend.  The skill, then, lies not so much in what is seen from the cab, but what the driver knows.  Stations and speed restrictions have to be anticipated before they appear; by the time they come into view it is too late to brake.  This is why signalling involves ‘distant aspects’ — the single or double yellow signals which give advance warning of the absolute bar of a red signal.  The driver’s mind makes the journey ahead of the train itself.  What comes next?  What is the line speed, and for which route at which junction; is the gradient rising or falling, and how steeply; are we stopping at the next station?  Route knowledge is a thread of names and numbers that must be learned by heart, and then altered according to the composition, length and weight of the train, as well as the weather.  Given all this, it stands to reason that drivers must know, or ‘sign’ a route, before they can drive it.

The video below, especially the first minute, must give a good idea of what it feels like to drive a train.  This is a British Rail Type 4 ‘Western’ class (built in the 1960s, later class 52) going up Brunel’s famous stretch of line along the sea wall between Teignmouth, Dawlish and Starcross in Devon.  A lot happens in the first sixty seconds in particular.  Clearly there cannot be a second’s lapse in concentration.

Now imagine trying to do the same thing in a steam engine, with the boiler’s hulk blocking most of the view and smoke and steam getting into the rest, at night, in the rain, with grit and soot and Pentecostal wind and fire in the eyes and ears…!  This video shows the driver’s view as West Country class no. 34046 Braunton storms through Wimbledon in south London:

One final clip, this time from an extraordinary 100mph speed run made in the middle of the night of the 15th May 2017 by the A1 Peppercorn class locomotive 60163 Tornado — which is incidentally a rather a special engine because she is newer than she looks, having been built from scratch by enthusiasts between 1994 and 2008.  All the time the men on the footplate are reading the signals and making judgements about the road ahead.  Hear what is said at the end in praise of the driver: “He’s been doing a lot of concentrating”f… He has thought his way from Newcastle to York.

Is railway route knowledge almost the last thing we have left that resembles an oral culture?  If daredevil pilots and racing-car drivers were great improvisers and virtuosi, the drivers who brought their engines to high speeds were bards, seeing the way to triumph in the mind’s eye, and then translating it into reality.  And to this day we depend on drivers to remember their routes by heart.  It is all part of the hidden poetry of railways, which I believe is still inherent to them, even in this more prosaic age of diesel and electric.

Ash Wednesday Rondel

Wishing all readers a good Lent!

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Keep faith; be not afraid; keep Lent.
All grunged-up souls, all people pent
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast
Your needless sin aside at last:
Believe the Gospel and repent.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Keep faith; be not afraid; keep Lent.
The thirst and hunger will not last,
For by God’s Son, who underwent
the Cross, we know that we are meant
For endless life when pain is past.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

(D. Newman, Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 2018)

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

Cefn Llan, Aberystwyth, 15th October 2015.

To all who live in Wales and love Wales, Happy St. David’s Day!

Ruth Gipps’ birthday

Today (20th February) is the ninety-eighth anniversary of Ruth Gipps’ birth.  It seems a good moment to record some developments of the past year which, excitingly, seem to be reviving the reputation of this hitherto-undersung composer.

Firstly there was the United States première of her second Symphony, which the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra gave on the the 31st March last year:

Then there is the new recording of both the second and the fourth symphony, along with two other unrecorded pieces, by Rumon Gamba and the National Orchestra of Wales, issued by the Chandos label in December.

Her music seems to have appeared in several concerts in various places, as well.

It’s very exciting that more and more people are discovering and enjoying her music — I think it is proof that hers was a distinctive, authentic voice, and that her music was real music, wrought to last.  Her unashamed rootedness in the tonal musical tradition cost her dearly during her lifetime, but it has meant that her music has survived the tribulations of fashion and emerged fresh and sparkling for new generations to enjoy.  I am really hopeful that her approaching centenary will bring us opportunities to hear even more of her music.

Sympathy and Khachaturian

In almost everyone, it seems, there is always some curious hidden thing — a hobby, an interest, a skill or simply some aspect of their character — which, without necessarily contradicting their personality, would be hard for anyone not in the know to guess.  Almost everything about human beings resolutely defies the mere stock character (even as we still conform paradoxically and hilariously to stereotypes — which is another question).  For instance, I would never have guessed that the engineer Thomas Telford had been an enthusiastic reader and writer of poetry in his spare time, and toured the Lake District and Scotland with Robert Southey, nor that the composer Gerald Finzi had, in his spare time, saved several varieties of English apple from extinction.  I am often surprised and intrigued to discover unexpected truths about the characters and histories of my own friends (which, I add hastily, is not to say that they seem dull otherwise!).  ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think’: this is the feeling, to paraphrase Louis MacNeice, of the drunkenness of people being various.

And, in particular, it adds to the fascination of art and music to discover the biographies of creative artists.  Behind any artistic work there always lies a person with a complexity that is its own universe.  Of course, it is possible to enjoy beauty for its own sake, without rummaging too deeply in its origins, but because, through their work, we can almost befriend artists and composers, a certain curiosity about their lives seems entirely reasonable.  We want to understand the mind behind the hand that wrote the notes.

But what happens when this same human complexity seems to make things difficult and contradictory, rather than interesting? If some biographical detail tests our patience or tolerance, we find our natural instinct to friendship with the composer tempered.  Does this affect our enjoyment of the music?  And should it?  How far can we distinguish our musical sympathy from our moral sympathy?

Recently I have found my interest rekindled in the Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978).  A few years ago I heard his life featured on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week, and was surprised to recognise some of his music, though I hardly knew anything about him.  He is perhaps best-known for the Sabre Dance from his ballet ‘Gayaneh’, but he is also responsible for this well-known waltz (from his Masquerade Suite), and for the Adagio from his second ballet ‘Spartacus’, music which was later chosen as the theme for the television series ‘The Onedin Line’.  His concertos for piano and violin are also rather better-known, it seems, than the life of the man himself.  Donald Macleod, the presenter of Composer of the Week, certainly mentioned Khachaturian’s closeness to the elite of the Soviet Union.  But the extent of this involvement was made much more apparent in ‘Khachaturian’, an absorbing documentary of 2003 about the composer’s life and works by the American film-maker Peter Rosen.  This richly-produced film is full of archival footage, photographs, and interviews with the composer’s colleagues, relatives and friends, and has not failed to weave a lush soundtrack from his colourful music.  It is a sympathetic portrait, but also a candid examination of the entwining of Khachaturian’s career with the cogs of the Soviet political machine.

Normally a composer’s political persuasion would not have that great an effect on my enjoyment of music.  And about Khachaturian, too, there is plenty to say without having to go into politics.  Although he was born and raised in the city of Tblisi (then Tiflis) in Georgia and lived most of his adult life in Moscow, he was of Armenian descent, and it was from that culture that he drew inspiration for the melodies, rhythms and moods of his work.  He was unashamed of this heritage, and therefore an unabashed tunesmith: so much of his music has the catchiness, the immediacy, and the evocative and unaffected appeal of folk-music.  It is full of detail and little touches or dashes of colour: just one example is the delicious phrase given to a solo clarinet not far into the third movement of the violin concerto, just before the soloist enters, but there are many others.  Khachaturian’s cultural inheritance also led him to look Eastwards to experiment with harmonies and flavours even as he stuck to Western forms such as ballets and symphonies; sometimes it is possible to hear him trying to find a note too fine for Western semi-tones.  An interesting article by Paul Serotsky also discussed the Eastern idea of mugam, in which music is not built up ‘from individual notes in accordance with harmonic rules’ as in the West, but by the accumulation and interweaving of ‘pre-defined musical phrases to create a musical mosaic’: weaving together elements into a kind of magic carpet of sound.  For him, this has a powerful result: ‘certain parts of Gayne’ — Serotsky says, ‘— such as ‘Gathering of the Cotton’ or the ‘Lullaby’ — evoke a pervasive feeling of irretrievable loss, of something I treasure that is gone forever.’  In such quieter moods, Khachaturian is a master of lyrical enchantment.

One striking feature of Khachaturian’s music is a tendency to hang, or linger, or insist on a particular note or repeated phrase, trying it, testing it, pinning it down, as if to get at its kernel or prize out its secret.  In his melodies it is often not enough for a note or phrase to be sounded once… it must sound again… and again and again and again and again, three, or four, or a dozen times more than seems reasonable, but as often as is needed to give voice to the sustained surge of passion the music must express.  The most famous example of this impassioned repetition is probably in the ‘Sabre Dance’, where it appears ridiculously brashly and almost manically (the ‘Sabre Dance’ is surely a candidate for the most  garish piece of music ever written), but this habit of his appears less giddily in countless other places in his music: various numbers from ‘Gayaneh’, the violin concerto, the piano concerto, the third theme of the ‘Adagio’ from ‘Spartacus’, and in the muscular desolation of his second symphony, known as the Bell Symphony.  Hear how, in the funeral-march third movement of that symphony, while the strings are occupied with (as his English-language publishers Boosey & Hawkes put it) an ‘eerily arranged’ quotation from the Dies Irae, piano and harp insist icily and persistently on the single B natural in the treble.  They relent only to allow the full-throated trumpets to take it up and blast it home.  There is a strangely enthralling Soviet bleakness and angst about this symphony which has to do with the dark times in which it was composed. In 1942 the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of horrifyingly resounding success: Leningrad was besieged, the battle of Stalingrad seemed unwinnable; only months beforehand Moscow itself had very nearly fallen; the Red Army had not yet mustered its counter-attack.  Khachaturian called this symphony ‘a requiem of wrath, a requiem of protest against war and violence’.  It is not dissimilar to Vaughan Williams’ sixth symphony, in that it is music for those with no tears left to shed.

The Dies Irae quoted in the third movement of Khachaturian's Second, or ‘Bell’ Symphony

Musically, then, this was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve: Khachaturian’s music is romantic, emotional, tuneful and sincere.  Indeed, the musicologist Daniel Jaffé even places particular emphasis on his sincerity, calling him ‘one of the most straightforward and honest composers I know’.

This is where the question of complexity and variety becomes troublesome.  Of all the biographies of prominent composers, Khachaturian’s has a political dimension so total that it cannot be ignored.  He is spoken of as a Soviet-Armenian composer: this might seem odd when we think of his contemporaries Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev as definitely Russian rather than Soviet-Russian, say.  But it is hard to peel away the ‘Soviet’ label from Khachaturian because he himself embraced it so decisively.  He was very clearly enthused about the Soviet project in the early years, and he went on to rise far higher in the cultural ranks than he would have had to if he harboured any reservations about it.  According to his obituary in the New York Times, no sooner had he left the Moscow Conservatoire than he involved himself in the upper echelons of the Union of Composers, being elected two years later as deputy chairman of its Organising Committee.  And to all outward appearances he remained loyal to the USSR for the rest of his life.  There he is, in recorded concerts in the the 1970s, stepping medal-bedecked onto the conductor’s podium: there gleams his the Order of Lenin; there sparkles his Hero of Socialist Labour medal.  He appeared to be the ideal Soviet composer, and, as the pianist Sahan Arzruni has said, ‘he did absolutely everything right, as far as the Soviet ideology is concerned.’  Does all this detract from the sincere Khachaturian, the romantic Khachaturian, the catchy Khachaturian?  Well, it is hard to reconcile this portly grandee of joyless Communism with the vigorous Caucasian rhythms and melodies of ‘Gayaneh’ or the violin concerto.  And Khachaturian’s political side is not merely circumstantial context either, for the politics do find their way into his music.  ‘Gayaneh’ itself, for all its enchanting tunes, is the tale of a woman in a collective farm who deals with her (admittedly drunken and violent) husband by ditching him for a new lover, a Soviet commander who goes on to restore happiness in the community by his vigorous re-application of the Communist system.  This really is not my cup of tea.  And apart from that, what about ‘Poem About Stalin’?  Or ‘Ode in memory of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’?…   Not for me, thank you.

It may be that the public image really is a true manifestation of the man’s sincerely-held beliefs.  Perhaps wearing his heart on his sleeve did indeed mean pinning the Order of Lenin to his lapel.  It is true that he felt indebted to the October Revolution, which arguably opened up to him the social possibility of studying music in Moscow.  (He believed that he would otherwise have remained in Tblisi, untrained and unheard of.)  To rise high in the cultural elite of the new order, he might have felt, was to repay this debt in some measure.  And of course, composers and musicians have always felt the need to seek patronage in corridors of power.

But the nature of the USSR was in any case to subsume individual conscience into a political and cultural monolith.  It scarcely mattered to the system whether or not this was the real Aram Ilyich.  After all, his loyalty turned out to offer little guarantee of protection from the sting of its nasty side.  The greatest shock of his career, in January 1948, was to find himself denounced — he, Khachaturian, along with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, denounced by the Composers’ Union on the charge of ‘formalism’: the crime of composing music that was not in touch with the people, as Stalin had decreed it should be.  Khachaturian was reduced to a fulsome apology, and even agreed to be sent to Armenia for ‘re-education’.  His reputation was gradually restored, especially after the triumph of his ballet ‘Spartacus’ (1954).  But he had had a terrible blow and he cannot afterwards have been altogether the same person, nor quite the contented personage he seemed to be.

And, to go even further, was he the atheist the USSR wanted him to be, and he professed to be, in spite of the transcendence of the beauty and passion of his art?  Did he really mean his words in the Eternal City: “I’m an atheist, but I’m a son of the [Armenian] people who were the first to officially adopt Christianity, and thus visiting the Vatican was my duty”?  Or, on the other hand, is it true that, when his friend Tigran Mansurian asked him if he believed in Christ, he retreated behind a curtain and crossed himself?  Once we get to these questions we might feel perhaps that we are prying too far.  But the Soviet Russia’s sheer murkiness leaves almost nothing out in the open; there can be no answers without seeking or working them out.  “His opposition to the Soviet Union never appeared externally", says his nephew Emin Khachaturian, “He was a member of the Party.  He had a high post and a number of decorations from the Soviet system.  Perhaps deep inside his soul he, like thousands of others, understood the depravity of that system.”  But we cannot know now.

Embed from Getty Images

Aram Khachaturian conducting in the Grand Hall of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, 1972.

Yet, for all these doubts, I warm to this compromised man — for who in Russia, in those days, amid the ruins and the shattered commandments, apart from saints, martyrs and infants, was not compromised?  Perhaps, then, Khachaturian is not to blame for the political tainting of his life so much as the USSR itself and the circumstances of his career.  Perhaps it was simply the case that the one absolute was his music, and that he would do anything to protect it: if this meant consenting to its nationalisation the USSR, then so be it.   His music was at least preserved, even if this surrender to the state was to be so total that, to this day, and in spite of his enthusiastic adoption as a hero in Armenia and the exotically Caucasian flavour of his music, there remains a Soviet tinge to him.  It is just frustrating that he had to align himself with one of the least savoury courts ever held on earth.  One YouTube member, commenting on a recording of the ‘Gayeneh’ ballet, wrote: ‘I love this music so much — but I find it difficult to listen to without mentally seeing Stalin’s stupid face and wanting to punch it (just like the composer himself undoubtedly).’  That is one way of putting it.

It is both disconcerting and heartening to realise how well beautiful music can conceal our compromised humanity.  It is heartening because it proves that music can forge bonds between people who would otherwise have little in common: the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is one important example of this.  But it should also alert us to the risks of the Midas touch that artists have, as well as its glories.  They can make hallowed whatever they touch.  Music composed by agnostics can, quite in spite of intention, convert listeners to belief in God; and music written for the sake of flawed ideas can lend legitimacy to ignoble things.   It is given to artists to wield powers that far transcend themselves; they had better be careful what they consecrate.