Read on to discover why facing our own mortality reveals music’s most profound secrets...
Some decades ago, the Southbank Centre in London ran a concert series called Last Works, which did exactly what it said on the tin. It programmed music written by composers just before they died. As I recall, it wasn’t a crowd-puller. People don’t mind being reminded occasionally of their mortality. But several months of staring into the abyss of oblivion did seem a little morbid.
Much of the classical canon is about accepting our own mortality
Yet much classical music is about confronting death – and it’s not all written by composers facing imminent extinction. For every Mozart Requiem or Mahler Nine there’s a Dream of Gerontius or St Matthew Passion. These masterpieces portray the psychology surrounding death with acute empathy, yet written by composers in their prime.
And whether such pieces are written early or late in composers’ lives, their interpreters will be performers of all ages. Years ago, I watched the National Youth Orchestra rehearsing Britten’s War Requiem. The young players were concentrating so intently on the work’s formidable technical challenges that they seemed disengaged emotionally.
Suddenly Philip Langridge, the great tenor soloist, stopped singing and turned round to face them. ‘You do realise what this music is about, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s about the slaughter of millions of boys – teenagers, just like you.’ When the music restarted, it was transformed. The intensity level rose about 300 per cent.
Can we empathise at any age with music about death?
That set me thinking. As we get older do we respond differently to that vast canon of music dealing with mortality? Is it inevitably true that, as we journey through the decades, we are better able to interpret or empathise with a profoundly death-obsessed masterpiece such as Schubert’s Winterreise? Or do human beings possess such a flexible sense of empathy that we can relate to virtually any state of mind if it is evoked convincingly enough by a composer?
It’s a complex question. Because baked into some music dealing with death is a kind of theatricality that makes it easier for audiences to relate to it. That’s obviously the case with opera. You don’t need to be a jilted Japanese teenager to be profoundly moved by Cio-Cio-San’s suicide in Madam Butterfly, nor a Nordic hero to feel shivers down the spine during Siegfried’s Funeral March.
But it’s also true of certain concert works. When Verdi evokes the Day of Judgement with those echoing offstage trumpets in his Requiem, or when Mahler conjures up the chilling summons of the Grim Reaper with those hammer blows in his Sixth Symphony, those are also theatrical gestures – more like brilliant sonic effects than profound insights into our mortality. People of any age can understand that.
It's only as we get older that music about mortality reveals its full depths
On the other hand, I believe that it’s only when you pass into old age, or perhaps through some life-threatening illness, that certain pieces disclose their full depth. For example, two works by Schubert have always been on my ‘desert island’ list: the Quintet in C and the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony.
I thought I completely understood them, but three years ago, when I was diagnosed with something thought incurable (though that prognosis mercifully proved too pessimistic), I found myself listening to those pieces again and again. If I’d been playing LPs, I would have worn out the grooves. And it struck me that I was experiencing them differently because of my foreboding about my own future.
In the second movement of the ‘Unfinished’, those wispy unaccompanied violin lines now struck me as Schubert’s way of showing the fragility of life – existence hanging by a thread. The slow movement of the Quintet, by contrast, brought more hope. Those serene chordal progressions, penned by Schubert just two months before he died, seemed to speak of ‘peace at the last’, as Cardinal Newman put it.
With old age also come insights about music... and life itself
It’s an interesting coincidence that Schubert’s literary contemporary, John Keats, should also have devoted his last work, ‘To Autumn’, to a contemplation of how all living things mature, age and then pass. Embedded in that poem are two famous lines: ‘Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?/Think not of them, thou hast thy music too’.
That’s a wonderfully reassuring thought for an older music-lover. In 19 words Keats says perfectly what I’ve struggled to say in 750: that with the ailments and humiliations of old age can also come insights that reveal elusive truths about music – and much else.
