IN MEMORIAM: Nicholas Maw

Musical Times, Autumn 2009 by Whittall, Arnold

(born Grantham, 5 November 1935; died Washington, DC, 19 May 2009)

31 August 1962 was the date when a prescient historian could have been persuaded that contemporary music in Britain would not evolve in just one direction but would take strength from the intricate interplay of contrasting and even conflicting aesthetic impulses. Nicholas Maw, whose Scenes andar�as was first performed in its first version on that date, showed that at the age of 26 a composer inspired to resist the seductive turbulence of post-tonal modernism, and the abrasive tendencies then embodied with such flair by Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, could create a no-less intense alternative, ambitiously conceived to avoid the obvious dangers. Any young British composer rejecting radical expressionism in the early 1960s risked turning into a Britten imitator, just at the time when Britten's own significance was widely seen as on the decline: or, even worse, into a Tippett imitator, just at the time when that composer's stock was steeply on the rise.

Maw avoided both these fates. He was no more a Little Englander than Birtwistle, Maxwell Davies, or other contemporaries like Alexander Goehr, Hugh Wood and Richard Rodney Bennett. Like them, he was sceptical of the academic conventions of the time, though equally suspicious of the technical mechanisms that promoted the stricter kinds of serialismi and seemed inimical to the lyrical warmth and rethinking of romanticism that were to determine Maw's own most personal achievements. Respectful of classicism without being neoclassical, unsure whether the well-meaning promptings of teachers - Lennox Berkeley in London, Nadia Boulanger and Max Deutsch in Paris - were more a hindrance than a help, Maw continued into the 1980s to pursue an ambivalent association with English institutions and European enterprises, living in both city and country but fully at ease in neither. To this extent, it was fitting that he found the greatest domestic and personal stability in America, where he finally setded in 1984. He didn't belong there either, but it at least provided an appropriate degree of encouragement while also supporting the level of anonymity in which he could continue to work, as long as his health permitted.

Just as all his work up to 1972 was a preparation for the 96-minute orchestral Odyssey, eventually completed in 1987, so his other magnum opus, the opera Sophie's choice, evolved over an eleven-year period between 1991 (when he first saw the movie and read the novel) and 2002 (the Covent Garden world premiere). Odyssey is the apotheosis of the symphony as epic quest narrative, though its goal is not the delineation of a Utopian, new-found land, rather an abstract image, not overly romanticised, of an unusually spacious, stable environment. It is surely no accident that its ending associates itself with two great late-Romantic perorations, of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben and Elgar's Second Symphony, both in Eb major, and both redolent of a deep sense of fulfilment within which traces of sorrow and loss nevertheless resonate profoundly.

Odyssey (an LSO commission which soon broke the bounds of the dimensions originally requested) fulfils the technical promise of Scenes and arias while distancing itself from the early score 's highly personal eroticism, thereby absorbing the lessons of Maw's other finely-crafted instrumental epic, Life studies, completed just as Odyssey was being conceived. Maw composed a few shorter works during Odyssey's protracted gestation - La vita nuova for soprano and chamber ensemble and the String Quartet no.2 are probably the finest - but only with the decision to embark on Sophie's choice did he dare to return to the genre of his two much earlier operas, One man show and The rising of the moon, in a doomed attempt to exorcise the traumas associated with those experiences, and to pursue the grand ambition (not that he ever formulated it thus) of transcending the exalted yet unspecific love story embodied in Scenes and arias by tackling a very 20th-century amour fou.

Sophie's choice was a hugely ambitious enterprise, and could only seem hugely misguided to those aghast at the prospect of a sure-fire popular novel turned Hollywood blockbuster (Meryl Streep's finest hour) transmogrified into Grand Opera. After Odyssey's sublime generalities, the sordid, melodramatic verismo of Styron's saga, which even stooped to making psychodramatic capital out of Auschwitz, seemed the supreme failure of taste, enough to set Adorno and Paul Celan spinning in their graves. As the turnof-the-century Samuel Barber (some suggested) Maw even lacked a Menotti to do a decent professional job on the libretto. So one can understand those who prefer to concentrate on the finely-crafted instrumental works of the later years - the Violin Concerto, Piano Trio, Third Quartet, Violin Sonata - and leave the last opera to one side. But those wishing to see Maw whole must refuse to follow that line. The opera makes sense, and hits home, as everything Odyssey is not, and most things that Scenes and arias is not, either. For all its expansiveness, the drama (in a distant echo of Maw's beloved Wo^eck) projects the utter fragility of the lives and feelings of those involved, especially Sophie herself. It might well work best as an opera that should not be staged, after the model of La damnation de Faust. And that would make it as positively genre-transforming as Life studies and Odyssey had been.