The Concertgoer's Companion

The Concertgoer's Companion. By Antony Hopkins. Volume 2: Hoist to Webem. Pp. viii + 360. (Dent.) 1986. £15.

Antony Hopkins thinks that Hoist was "led off course" by a passion for extra-musical subjects but, in spite of this, he gives a good account of The Planets and writes well only when describing this sort of music. He is completely at sea with "the classics", to which he applies his passion for "absolute music", and thus he exhibits a curious dichotomy or inner split. This shows again in the context of Ives, where he has the highest praise for all the extra-musicality, here amounting to gimmickry.

Again we find this contradiction in the chapter on Liszt. Ignoring the outmoded cliché that Liszt wrote "much that was flashy and meretricious", Hopkins does full justice to the Faust Symphony. While he describes fairly well the relevance of the music to the subject—for example, of the opening theme: "its avoidance of any defined tonality; it is in a musical limbo, a symbol of a lost soul"—this is contradicted by uneasy asides here and there: "it would fire our imagination just as much if it were called by a completely different name"; and, of the first transformation of the second theme: "Liszt's interest here is to find out how the theme responds to this different treatment. He wants to see what its possibilities are used as a melody" (in case we should mistakenly suppose any relevance to the work as a whole or its subject). Then we go back to noting correspondences in the music to the story of Faust: "This isn't just a theme transformed but Faust himself transformed by Gretchen's beauty"; and "nobody can deny the intensity of feeling behind this music". Feeling is valuation and can arise only as a response to something real and vital. The very fact of Antony Hopkins's writing these books is a contradiction of his premise that music is "nothing but" a technical exercise, consisting of musical technicalities for their own sake, since in that case only musical technicians could have any interest in it, and they would be engaged in a singularly futile occupation. When Hopkins forgets or is forced to abandon this obsession he can write a very good description of the music, as he does here of the Faust Symphony. The Totentanz and piano concertos are also decently handled, though he puts in a reminder that, while he can appreciate thematic transformations in Liszt, he refuses to see them in Beethoven—in, for example, the fifth Symphony.

Likewise, in the context of Mahler, not even Antony Hopkins can very well talk about "absolute music", with the result that, apart from the occasional reproof that Mahler tends to rely too much on words, we get on the whole a very satisfactory and readable introduction to this composer, with descriptions of the Kindertotenlieder and the third and fifth Symphonies that make us want to go out and buy the music on tape or disc. Looking then at dos Lied van der Erde, Antony Hopkins gives a sensitive and cultured appreciation of this work that shows an entirely different side to his personality from that called forth by "the three Bs" and is surely a remarkable contrast! It seems that the association of words with music is an indispensable condition for Antony Hopkins as well as for Mahler.

Mozart, too, gets a readable introduction. While there may be some use in the kind of descriptions that follow of some of the piano concertos, in focusing the attention on the details, there is no use in the inveterate attitude that seems to regard all pre-romantic and non-vocal music in the vein of a Mickey Mouse film: "a harmonic impasse out of which the pianist tries to wriggle his way"—in the D minor Concerto—"The orchestra duly shows its approval". Phrases like "a neatly contrived modification" of a theme suggest that we are considering something like a display of figure-skating. There is, of course, no attempt at interpretation of a work as a serious artistic expression and as a whole, and its episodes seem to be taken as more or less inconsequential: "Once this pretty diversion is over. . .". The theme with which the D minor Concerto ends is "an enchanting tune in Mozart's wittiest vein"—to suit Hopkins's theory that the work has to end on a "joyous" note, "even to an untrained ear", whether or not this contradicts everything else in the Concerto. It does not do so to my ear, nor is the theme in the least bit "witty", while ending on a major chord does not suffice to cancel out the rest of the work. A trained ear is no use on its own, and it has to be linked up with the rest of one's faculties—a link that seems to be missing here.

This element of mindlessness and complete mystification in front of music is nowhere more evident than in the section on Shostakovich, where Hopkins successfully rivals the most obtuse of cultural commissars. To explain the appearance of William Tell in the first movement of the last Symphony he proposes "his own" brilliantly ingenious (even for him!) explanation—that Shostakovich couldn't think of anything else to say! The trouble is that one cannot recognize one's own reflection! Hopkins thinks that the line he quotes from the preceding work, which "seems to hold a special significance: 'What comfort for talent among villains and fools'", holds it only within the Soviet Union!

He does, however, hit on the idea of a cavalry charge in the fifth Symphony—indeed, this Symphony has a distinct atmosphere of War and Peace; but his description of "the second movement" I can in no respect identify, and it seems to be purely imaginary, with some foppery about "Beethoven dressed up as a Russian peasant" or the other way round. Nor can Hopkins make head or tail of the finale—he has forgotten about the cavalry charge detected in the first movement, which seems to have dropped from the sky, "for no particular reason" and with no relation to anything. Certainly, Shostakovich was no worse off with Zakharov and Zhdanov, and his later works of world pessimism could just as well have been written by a resident in the West.

The tenth Symphony, probably the most evocative of all Shostakovich's works, completely baffles Antony Hopkins. He is obsessed with hearing folk-music and peasants everywhere, and even the mysterious horn-calls in the third movement strike him as a waltz(!). The thirteenth Symphony (Babiy Yar) he considers "propagandist", and "we just can't take seriously statements like: 'He who gives them false change is a scoundrel'". It probably sounds too near home, and when it comes to obscuring, denigrating and trivializing for a generation the works of the greatest composers there may not be much difference between a fool and a scoundrel.

M.McM.