Music and my life, part six...

(Note: thank goodness for Keris, who was able to retrieve this for me after I stupidly overwrote it with part seven)

TWO CRAZY KIDS

Let's talk about Sergei Rachmaninov.

He was already an accomplished composer when he wrote his First Symphony, which you can read about here if you can stand the musicianese, or if not just scroll down to the buttons and listen to the samples. The one from the fourth movement might seem familiar to you if you're of a certain age; part of it was used as the theme to the documentary programme Panorama on the BBC for a long time. I first heard it in that context, and wondered if it was part of a larger work or specially composed. I liked it a lot.

In fact, I love the whole symphony. It's a gigantic love song to Romanticism, with all its billowing and flouncing, its passions and tantrums, its courage and its stoicism and its openness, and the end of the final movement is a battle and double death scene that I have never heard equalled. You can hear the moment when one of the combatants looks down in horror at the blade embedded in his ribs; the moment when the victor, turning away wearily toward the throne he has won, suddenly feels his dying victim's hands around his neck, choking the life out of him; the moment when they both fall finally to the ground in the shadow of the throne and the light slowly fades on a scene of barbaric tragedy.

Or maybe it sounds to you like someone drinking lukewarm coffee out of a Thermos. I don't know. I only know what it sounds like to me.

Anyway, the point is that the symphony's first performance was not an unqualified success. The conductor may have been drunk, the orchestra was certainly under-rehearsed, and at least one fellow composer tore into the work with entirely unjustified venom, blathering about the ten plagues of Egypt and a musical conservatory in hell and all sorts of piffle. (Cesar Cui, that was. Heard of his music lately? No, neither have I.)

Sergei took it hard. He stopped composing for years, and eventually had to undergo therapy to give him the confidence to compose his superb Second Piano Concerto, and everything thereafter. And now, since some diligent souls reconstructed the score of the First Symphony from the orchestral parts, we know what a wonderful piece of music it is, and we can say Phooey to Cui (or Pfui to Cooee, if you prefer) with utter impunity.

FLASH FORWARD EIGHTY YEARS...

Mike Oldfield's not a happy bunny. He's still grieving for his mother, who died in 1975 after years of mental problems and drug addiction, and even though Ommadawn did okay, he's sensing a gradual shift in the attitudes at Virgin. They're in the process of reinventing themselves as the Sex Pistols' label, and his latest work, the cerebral and abstruse Incantations, isn't going down well with the bigwigs. He loses his inspiration and becomes acutely depressed.

Enter one Robert Fuller, going at the moment under the possibly somewhat fanciful name of d'Aubigny, and his Exegesis seminars. These derived from Werner Erhard's "est" training sessions, and from what I've read the idea was to gather your hapless victims in a room, deny them toilet facilities and chairs and other amenities, and more or less berate, belittle and browbeat them till they underwent "personal transformation." Whether this technique is reliably effective seems to me a question on a par with whether torture is a reliably effective method of obtaining information. My answer in both cases would be "no." And I would go further and say that I would rather die in my untransformed state than undergo such a process, much less choose and pay for it.

But...there is, I suppose, a statistical chance that a prisoner undergoing torture will choose "telling the truth" as the means to make it stop, and likewise it is a measurable possibility that someone reduced to a quivering jelly by a bunch of posturing sadists will emerge at the other end a more balanced and stable personality. Certainly Mike Oldfield believes to this day that the seminar did him good, and who am I to argue. At the time, though, it seemed to me, reading the interviews he did afterwards, that it had turned him into a different person in much the same way that being kidnapped was supposed to have done to Patty Hearst; he seemed brittle, strident and unpleasant, not at all a person who could have written the music that had so enraptured me. And I believe to this day that his music suffered; it was over a decade before he produced anything of the standard of Tubular Bells, and he's spent a lot of time since retreading that particular ground, trying with varying degrees of success to do it again. At the time I thought "well, he may be happier, but it's killed his talent." I was fortunately wrong about that, at least.

BUT HOW SELFISH OF ME

Why did I not think "well, it's killed his talent, but at least he's happier"? Oldfield has made it explicit in his autobiography that his best music, even in his own opinion, has always arisen from bad times in his life, from angst and depression and panic attacks and going through a very personal hell. How dare I require that of him?

Well, I don't, of course. If he had written nothing else after Ommadawn I would always have been grateful for those first three albums. Even the stuff he did after the seminar, QE2 and Platinum and so on, is streets ahead of most of the music being produced at the time, and the world is enriched thereby. Whatever peace and stability he's found, by whatever means, is richly deserved. You have to remember that at the time all this happened I was still an obnoxious little squit myself, though by now aware of a need to transcend my squitdom and evolve into something better.

Help was on the way for that. In the meantime, this has got very po-faced and solemn. Maybe we can do something about that in part seven...