Tim Mahon writes:
>There seems to be a great deal of "I think this is what the composer must
>have meant" in completing 'unfinished' works of late and I'm curious as to
>whether this sounds Holstian or Mathews-like!
My understanding is that Matthews isn't attempting to pastiche Holst.
According to the article below (from The Times, Tuesday May 2nd) Pluto
begins where Neptune left off.
Many writers have been knocking Matthews for 'completing' a work which was
never unfinished. Whilst I can understand Matthews' own ambivalence about
adding to a wonderful work by a composer he loves dearly, I think it is a
fascinating exercise and one that could yield surprising results. And
after all, it isn't as if everyone will have to perform The Planets with
Pluto.
Anyway - below is the Times article:
Holst is the latest composer to have had his work completed by another.
But, asks Richard Morrison, would he have approved of an eighth Planet?
STICKING YOUR NOTES IN UNFINISHED BUSINESS
After 80 years of perfectly adequate service in the world's concert
halls, one of the most popular orchestral works of the 20th century
has been "enhanced" with a new ending. Is that good or bad? Useful
or superfluous? A sincere and worthy homage to the original, or a
cheap publicity stunt?
Opinions have been sharply divided since it was announced a few weeks
ago that when the Halle Orchestra and its conductor, Kent Nagano,
perform Gustav Holst's mighty suite The Planets in Bridgewater Hall
next week, they will be premiering a new finale. Pluto has been
written by the English composer Colin Matthews at the invitation of
the Halle. "I had mixed feelings," Matthews admits. "The Planets
is a very satisfying whole which makes perfect musical sense." Quite.
So why tamper with it?
The obvious answer is that we now know of the planet Pluto's
existence, whereas Holst didn't when he was writing The Planets
between 1914 and 1917. But this excuse does not quite hold water.
The ninth planet was indeed discovered in 1930. But Holst didn't
die until 1934. If he had been concerned about the "completeness"
of his most celebrated work, he would have had plenty of time to add
Pluto to the existing seven movements (he didn't write "Earth" either,
because it didn't fit his astrological scheme). "I am certain that
he never once thought to write an additional movement," says Matthews
honestly. In any case, Pluto's status as a planet is looking a bit
shaky these days. If hard-hearted astronomers get their way, it may
soon be demoted to the rank of asteroid. So there is even less reason
to add it to The Planets.
Then there is the awkward matter of Pluto's eccentric orbit, which
means that it is sometimes nearer than Neptune to the Sun (as it was
for 20 years until 1999) and sometimes further away. So where should
it be placed in The Planets? The dilemma is made even more difficult
because Holst made Neptune one of the most memorable endings in all
music: an offstage women's chorus singing two chords over and over
again, then fading into a silence as deep as infinite universe itself.
How do you follow that?
Matthews believes he has the answer. "It would be pointless," he
says, "to write a movement that was even more remote than Neptune,
unless the whole orchestra were to join the chorus offstage." Instead,
his Pluto will begin while Neptune's last chords are still sounding.
It will also, apparently, be very fast in tempo, to reflect the
velocity of the solar winds, and then disappear "almost as if Neptune
had been quietly continuing in the background". So the knotty matter
of whether Pluto is further away than Neptune is cleverly left
unresolved. But of course Matthews's biggest challenge is to write
music that is worthy of The Planets. The work's reputation for
originality is, admittedly, slightly diminished these days, now that
we know what Debussy and Stravinsky were composing in the years
immediately before Holst wrote his masterpiece. Even so, it does
contain at least two of the most stunning movements in late Romantic
music: Mars, with its pounding militaristic rhythms (so evocative
of relentless carnage, yet written before the First World War had
started); and Jupiter, a rumbustious whirlwind from which emerges a
tune so noble, English and memorable that the venerable Elgar must
have doffed his hat in admiration.
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Why should any composer want to tamper with another's work, especially
if it is as much loved as The Planets?
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Matthews does at least have the right credentials for this daunting
task. As a student he helped the British scholar Deryck Cooke on
his masterly completion of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony. He
also studied with Holst's daughter, Imogen, who died in 1984. She
would have been "both amused and dismayed by this venture", he thinks.
Even more to the point, he has orchestrated Holst's song-cycle, The
Dream City.
But the basic question remains: why should any composer want to
tamper with another's work, especially if it is as much loved as The
Planets? Your answer probably depends on how cynical you feel. All
one can say for sure is that there is nothing new about the practice.
The urge to "improve", update or complete someone else's music dates
back at least to the Renaissance.
And all the best composers did it. Mozart spiced up Handel's Messiah
by adding startlingly incongruous clarinet parts. Mahler beefed up
the orchestration of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony because he felt it
didn't quite work.
Rimsky-Korsakov thought that he was doing his deceased alcoholic
friend Mussorgsky a favour by "tidying up" the latter's compositions.
Only now that scholars have reconstructed the original manuscripts
can we see that Mussorgsky's unaided work was infinitely bolder.
Similarly, nearly every conductor used to "adjust" the unusual
orchestrations of Schumann's symphonies, until Bernard Haitink's
recordings revealed that Schumann's scoring worked perfectly well
if you took the trouble to balance it properly.
So, in music at least, a friend in need can be a blinking nuisance.
And that applies especially to scholars who attempt to reconstruct
pieces left unfinished when a composer dies. In recent years this
trend has grown into a ghoulish industry. Music-lovers have already
heard such fictions as Beethoven's Tenth Symphony and Tchaikovsky's
Seventh. Schubert's Unfinished is unfinished no longer; at least,
not if you trust the instincts of a Hull music professor. Mozart's
Requiem has been completed more times than The Times crossword. And
a couple of years ago, Elgar's fragmentary sketches for a Third
Symphony were "elaborated" by the British composer Anthony Payne into
a performable work, even though the great man expressly forbade anyone
from "tinkering" with them - and in fact requested (with almost his
dying breath) that they be burnt.
I felt that Payne's completion was ethically wrong, but found myself
in a tiny minority, especially when Payne made such an accomplished
job of it. It's certainly true that we would be deprived of some
wonderful music if no unfinished works were completed after a composer's
death. Think only of Turandot, completed by Franco Alfano after
Puccini died (though Toscanini insisted on stopping the opera
melodramatically at the point where "the master laid down his pen");
or Alban Berg's steamy masterpiece Lulu - completed by Friedrich
Cerha secretly against Berg's widow's wishes, and performed after
she died. Or more recently, Alexander Goehr's Arianna, a delightful
new opera inspired by the only surviving fragment from a lost Monteverdi
stage work.
Of course The Planets is a different case; it was not left incomplete
by Holst. Nevertheless it's clear that Matthews can claim plenty of
distinguished precedents for his audacious addition. And, because
he has a lively musical mind, one is curious to hear the result.
Even so, I shall make two sour observations. The first is that,
before we start writing new endings to Holst's music, why don't we
explore more of the real stuff? Superb pieces like Egdon Heath, the
Hymn of Jesus and Savitri show the astounding breadth of Holst's
musical and philosophical imagination, yet they are rarely programmed
today. We have turned Holst into a one-hit wonder, which he certainly
wasn't. And the second? Well, don't you think it's a bit rum that
admirable composers such as Payne, Matthews and Goehr, who spend
decades in relative obscurity turning out beautifully crafted pieces,
find that the world only rushes to hear them when they rattle the
urn of some long-departed genius? It's as if, in the orchestral and
operatic fields at least, the only new music that our age is prepared
to celebrate is new old music. Sociologists, please discuss.
Robin Newton
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