Culture

For a patriotic German in the decades before Bismarck, Britain’s power was an object of envy. But there was one thing, at least, that you could always hold over the Anglo-Saxons on their foggy little island. On 1 January 1837, Robert Schumann sat down in Leipzig to hear a new piano concerto by the 20-year-old William Sterndale Bennett. ‘An English composer; no composer,’ commented his neighbour, smugly, before the music started. Few 19th-century German music-lovers failed to point out that the land of Shakespeare had somehow failed to produce a single really significant composer since the late 17th century. We know how that story ended; and if you want to explore the flowering of the British musical renaissance, it’s never been easier.

Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that familiar, scowling face. ‘Genius before Elton. Radical before Prince. Iconic before Bowie’ proclaimed the posters for the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender, and apparently there’ve been complaints about them, which probably means that they’ve got the tone about right. Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Beethoven still has a way of driving all the right people round the bend. US campus musicologists have called for his music to be suppressed (you’d think that champions of inclusion would support a year-long celebration of a disabled composer, but it seems not. Wrong chromosomes).

‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried to sell tickets for the Op. 9 string trios. Even Mahler, the blockbuster concert phenomenon of the past four decades, has his limits. Audiences love him, sure. But in 2011, when several orchestras performed complete Mahler cycles, the limits of that love became embarrassingly clear. The Second and Eighth symphonies — roof-raising choral spectaculars — promptly sold out. The gentle Fourth and the knotty, reconstructed Tenth: not so much. As for his songs, forget it. Well, that’s lieder for you.

In the summer of 1878 Johannes Brahms finally succeeded in growing a beard. It was his third attempt. ‘Prepare your wife for the grisly spectacle, for something so long suppressed cannot be beautiful,’ he wrote to a friend, and by all accounts he wasn’t wrong. Clara Schumann pleaded with him to shave it off. She’d have remembered Brahms as the golden-haired 20-year-old who had arrived on her doorstep in September 1853, glowing with genius; in the words of her husband Robert, ‘a young blood at whose cradle graces and heroes stood guard’. For modern listeners, though, the beard has long since conquered — as if, like one of Philip Pullman’s daemons, it somehow embodies Brahms in his gruff and hairy definitive form.

This year marks the centenary of a pianist whom London orchestral players nicknamed ‘Ashtray Annie’. Only at the keyboard did she have a cigarette out of her mouth. Annie Fischer (1914–1995) was one of those female pianists who, despite their spinsterish appearance, possessed far richer imaginations than splashy male virtuosos. Clara Haskil and Marcelle Meyer also come to mind. Of the three, only Haskil — a physically frail Romanian celebrated for her purity of line — is today given the recognition she deserves: Pope Francis recently named her as his favourite Mozart pianist. Meyer, who as a young woman played for Debussy, had a technique of such refinement that she could liquefy trills and arpeggios without any loss of accuracy.