ages of man as composer: What's left to be done?, The

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Goehr, Alexander

In his final lecture as Cambridge Professor of Music, ALEXANDER GOE HR reflects on late works, Balzac, and young composers

RECENTLY, I WAS PRESENT at performances of Symphonia by Elliott Carter. Symphonia (its full title is Symphonia sum fluxae pretium spei, which translates as 'I am a symphony of flux, a reward of hope') refers to a Latin poem, known as `The bubble' by Crashaw and consists of three individual orchestral compositions written and premiered separately over the last five or six years but designed as a single work. The composer celebrated his 90th birthday recently, and the Symphonia is not his most recent work; since its completion he has written, among other things, a comic opera in one act, no less. The components of this composition, then, were conceived and written down when the composer was between the ages of approximately eighty-three and eighty-eight at a time of life well past Biblical or Shakespearian maps of the ages of Man.

Other composers, contemporaries of Carter, have also written into extreme old age - Michael Tippett and Messiaen being the obvious names that come to mind. But, allow me a personal and temporary judgement: their final pieces, although full of felicities and fine moments, rather remind me of finer things they created earlier on than stand up as genuine new achievements. And this may be a reasonable way to think of old men's work. But compared with their work and allowing that the principal point of comparison is the age at which all three composers wrote rather than any stylistic or technical preoccupations in common, Carter seems to me to have created a genuine 'late' work; I do not feel that either of the others' contributions can fairly be described in this way.

What does 'late' mean here? It is not that common a category, nor is it inevitably connected with old age. We talk about 'late' Beethoven, 'late' Verdi (Falstaff was written in the composer's eighties), 'late' Debussy 'late' Bartok and 'late' Stravinsky; and, in recent painting, about 'late' Picasso. An exhibition of that name took place not so long ago. The various characteristics of all these 'late' styles are not going to be detailed here. But, put negatively, in each case the artist, while clearly the same man as he had been earlier on, seems to have jettisoned some of the elements of his work (and, in many cases, those which have been most admired - for example, the rhythmic vitality of middle-period Beethoven or Verdi and Debussy's tunes) in the interests of a greater indirectness or syntactical complexity, and only in the case of Stravinsky a move into what at first hearing (but only at first hearing) appears to be something quite new.

Coming away from Carter's work, some said `this is Carter's Images' (referring to the fact that Debussy's cycle also consists of three separate, though as far as I'm aware in no way interconnected compositions). Despite a conventional fast-slow-fast pattern - the last a scherzo rather than a finale, the work in no way resembled a symphony, even an 'Unfinished' one like Schubert's Eighth or Bruckner's Ninth - neither in its textures nor, as far as I was able to discern it, in the manner of its argument. To me it sounded, not similar but analogous to a 'late' Beethoven quartet (including the Grosse Fuge), leaner and sparer in basic conception than some of Carter's previous and possibly over-elaborate works, but spread out over the orchestral tessitura in an even way comparable perhaps to the way in which Cezanne attended to the whole of his canvasses in the last Mont St Victoire pictures.

I came away from the performance firmly convinced that what I had heard was quite special and something which in the future might be considered a 'great' work. (I am hesitant in saying this, because there's nothing I loathe more than the adolescent and commercial hype with which the BBC and the informed opinion of so-called cognoscenti makes works with which we are barely familiar into 'modern' classics and 'greats'!) But for all my enthusiasm for Symphonia, I cannot yet say that at every moment I felt the inevitability of what was happening. Carter is a master of long-term processes and these make their effect all right. But I did not hear memorable melody or striking harmony most of the time. In my enthusiasm and at the same time, mild disbelief, I was reminded of the description of the 'masterpiece' of Balzac's old artist who, unveiling it to his younger colleagues, acclaims his own work, saying:

You find yourself in the presence of a woman (he refers to the subject of his picture) when you are looking for a painting. The air is so true that you cannot distinguish it from the air which surrounds us. Where is art? It's gone - vanished!

But the perplexed younger man (Poussin in the story) doesn't see it. He says `the old soldier's pulling our legs. I can see nothing but colours muddled together surrounded by a mass of confusing lines and all forming a barrier of paint.' But

moving up closer to it, he saw in one corner of the canvas the tip of a naked foot emerging from the chaos of colour, tones and imprecise shades, a kind of shapeless mist; it was a foot, a delicious, living foot! They stood spellbound in admiration before this fragment, a fugitive from an inexplicable, slow, relentless process of destruction.l