Rupert Christiansen

As the author of this wise, patient and delightful book wryly reminds us, Stephen Fry — who, of course, knows everything — has recently written F.R. Leavis off as a ‘sanctimonious prick’. The phrase is probably typical of the way that today’s literary intelligentsia caricatures this tragically lonely, embattled and complex figure. ‘Hairshirt paranoiac’ I’ve also encountered somewhere: it does the trick equally well. Does any academic under the age of 50 now treat Leavis’s map of English literature, let alone his values and judgments, as pedagogically viable forces?

Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. Kenneth MacMillan was once described as ‘the Francis Bacon of ballet’ — not an analogy that gets one very far, but there’s something in it. His obsession with victims, outsiders and extreme psychological states reflects the panic in his own tortured and alienated psyche. His choreography contains a lot of silent screaming: it brutalises the human body as much as it beautifies it. Sex in his work is presented as a violent compulsion — often a rape — rather than an ecstatic release or an expression of love.

The Triumph of Music, by Tim Blanning This is an often entertaining, occasionally illuminating, but cur- iously unsatisfying book, written by a distinguished historian of early modern Europe. Subtitled ‘Composers, Musicians and their Audiences, 1700 to the Present’, it purports to be a study of the ways that the art of music has increasingly come to dominate western culture. ‘Triumph’ is not, I think, the mot juste here; something more like ‘increasing ubiquity’ would be more apt. Professor Blanning is never dull or dryasdust: he writes with lucidity, grace and wry wit, and he clearly has a passionate enthusiasm for music.

Handel: The Man and His Music by Jonathan Keates Since 1985, when Jonathan Keates first published this exhilarating critical biography of Handel, there have been enormous advances in the study of the composer and his oeuvre — not least the publication of two major volumes by the doyen of Handel scholars Winton Dean — and the establishment of the Handel Institute. Such developments, along with a continuing increase in the public’s appetite for his music and the 250th anniversary of his death next year, more than justify this substantially revised edition of Keates’ book. For the paid-up Handel fan — and those like me who sometimes still need persuading — the result is an 18th-century mix of pleasure and instruction.

This magnificent edition of Benjamin Britten’s letters reaches its fourth volume under the auspices of a new publisher, the Boydell Press (despite subsidy, Faber simply couldn’t make it pay), and the first thing to say is that the standards of production, design and copy-editing have not suffered (misspellings of names such as John Lanigan, Roderic Dunnett and Geoffrey Willans were the only errors that I picked up), while the scholarly quality of the annotation continues to be quite superb — meticulous, imaginative, and illuminating.

‘Avoiding both the pigeon hole and the blackboard I have tried to trace a connecting line between the apparently diverse and contradictory manifestations of contemporary music,’ wrote the composer and conductor Constant Lambert in the preface to Music ho!, his marvellously breezy survey of modern music published in 1934. Some 70 years later, the New Yorker’s brilliant critic Alex Ross has tried to do very much the same thing, covering the broader canvas of the entire 20th century and a musical hurly-burly which can no longer be drawn into a single ‘connecting line’: Ross’ own preface talks instead of a disintegration ‘into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures’.

Peter Gay opens his survey of the culture of Modernism with a discussion of Baudelaire’s call to artists to draw their inspiration from contemporary urban realities, and closes it with some sort of ironic ne plus ultra, as Damien Hirst roars with laughter after a ‘pile of organised chaos representing the detritus of a painter’s studio’ that he presented as an installation is mistakenly swept into a bin bag by an innocent cleaner assuming it to be bona fide rubbish. In between, Professor Gay travels through 150 years of the history of the visual arts, literature and music. It must have been an exhausting journey for this distinguished Yale-based chronicler of the Enlightenment and German intellectualism, now in his mid-eighties.

Opera has fallen out of fashion as a recreation of our humanist intellectuals. Even when I was an undergraduate in the mid- 1970s, the tide was beginning to turn in favour of the vacuous verbiage of Bob Dylan, whose soi-disant genius was being forcefully sponsored by Christopher Ricks. Nowadays, I imagine high-table chat is more absorbed by gangsta rap than Khovanschina. But for the generations that span Isaiah Berlin and Roger Scruton, W. H. Auden and Susan Sontag, opera held powerful sway, with the focus on the complex case of Wagner, among the greatest of composers but a shit of a man.

The second volume of this superb biography opens in 1939, as William Empson returns to London after two years of high adventure and real privation in a China up against Japanese invasion. Resolved to do his bit against Hitler, he drops poetry and literary criticism to join the BBC’s propaganda operation, where he put his expert knowledge of the Far East to subtle use. George Orwell became a colleague and friend — both of them liberal leftists, albeit of profoundly different literary bents. At the BBC, Empson encountered the Amazonian figure of Hetta Crouse, a splendidly forthright and fearless South African sculptor, whom Haffenden aptly describes as a ‘seminal hippie’.