Barry Forshaw writes: I noted of Jessica Duchen’s Beethoven novel Immortal: ‘One of the most astute commentators on classical music in the UK today weaves an utterly convincing narrative from the discovery – after the composer’s death — of a love letter in his handwriting addressed only to his “Immortal Beloved’’.’ So it came as no surprise that Duchen’s Ghost Variations was equally beguiling – and this time possessed a bifurcated appeal. As well as being catnip to lovers of serious music – with a violin concerto by Robert Schumann at the centre of the narrative – it also functions as a highly efficient genre piece. As the pianist András Schiff put it, the novel ‘reads like a thriller, yet it’s also a tribute to great music and musicians’.

Duchen’s latest offering continues her unbroken run of elegant and winning music writing, celebrating a legend of British musicmaking, Dame Myra Hess. The timing for this new volume is pertinent, as it is 50 years since the last biography of the pianist, and it may be that there is a whole generation of music lovers who do not know how essential the Dame was to the making of music in the British Isles in the war years – and the book’s subtitle, ‘National Treasure’, could not be more a propos. Duchen traces Hesss’s career from spirited young woman to iconic mature figure, heroically keeping the spirit of music alive in turbulent times and achieving massive international success. Her National Gallery concerts which she maintained throughout some of the most punishing of London’s air raids are the stuff of legend, and even those familiar with the pianist’s remarkable life will find much that is new here, as Duchen has had access to previously unpublished material from Hess’s letters and diaries. As with the best music books, there’s the perfect synthesis here between a celebration of the music that defined Hess’s career (notably her beloved Beethoven) and her generous, sometimes unpredictable personality. There are powerful sections on how Hess aided refugee musicians from countries under the heel of the Nazis to relocate to Britain. And there is humour, too, such as a reaction to hidebound critical responses of the day to female pianists (‘The critics can drown in their baths (if they take any)’).

Once again Jessica Duchen has demonstrated that she, like her heroine, is a jewel in the crown of the British music scene.

Myra Hess, National Treasure is published by Kahn & Averill

Barry Forshaw

For classical music aficionados of a certain age, their introduction to the music of Edward Elgar would very likely to have been via the matchless recordings by the conductor Sir Adrian Boult. These readings were classics of the gramophone – and it really was the gramophone then, before the advent of compact discs and streaming. (Fortunately, these classic performances have mostly found their way onto the new media.) One wonders, though, if younger listeners will be familiar with these men who clearly belong to a different and distant age – as the jacket photograph of Nigel Simeone’s excellent study of the relationship and working methods of the two men shows, demonstrating how close a lost earlier age was for both musicians with their imposing period moustaches. But for those listeners privileged to have heard Boult conducting on stage, it was clear that the dividing line between performer and composer was being elided in the most impeccable of fashions. Boult’s precise and measured conducting (so different from the flamboyant style of such musicians as Leonard Bernstein, another Simeone subject) atomised and characterised Elgar’s music, but never at the expense of excitement and exhilaration when required (a function that Boult similarly performed for another great British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams – and the relationship between the latter and Adrian Boult was also the subject of a Simeone study).

Nigel Simeone, one of the UK’s key commentators on serious music, has long specialised in 20th-century music, and his writing combines impeccable scholarship with a genuine elegance of style that makes the text as pleasurable as it is informative. This new study of the relationship between Elgar and Boult is an essential purchase for anyone interested in one of England’s greatest composers. Whether you regard Elgar or Ralph Vaughan Williams as topmost in the echelons of British composers, it’s essential reading. And if it’s the latter composer, you should also have Simeone’s book on RVW on your shelves.

Edward Elgar and Adrian Boult by Nigel Simeone is published in February by Boydell Press.

With THE MUSIC BOX ENIGMA, R.N. Morris has created a crime novel with special interest for lovers of music. It’s December, 1914. In Hampstead, North London. The Hampstead Voices are rehearsing for a concert to raise funds for Belgian refugees. When the choirmaster is found murdered, DCI Silas Quinn is called in to investigate, aided in this case by a local special constable who has a unique interest in secret codes and music – Sir Edward Elgar. Morris writes: ‘When I discovered that Elgar had indeed volunteered as a special constable in Hampstead in the early months of the war, I realised that I absolutely had to put him in a Silas Quinn novel. His presence naturally suggested a musical setting and theme. I don’t sing in a choir myself, but I have often thought that a choir is a good milieu for a murder story because of the internal politics, the intense relationships, the rivalries and jealousies you find in any large group of people coming together in a creative endeavour.’ (Publisher: Severn House)

Barry Forshaw writes: There was a time when the composer Mahler was something of a specialist taste, admired by the cognoscenti but whose music was much neglected since his death, despite such advocates as Bruno Walter. How times have changed! Mahler’s name is now a guarantee of box office success in concert halls, and his own, much-quoted dictum, ‘My time will come’, has proved prescient. There have been many books on the composer (with important contributions by Deryk Cooke and Michael Kennedy), but Steven Johnson’s new volume is unique, concentrating on the composer’s mighty Eighth Symphony (the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’), setting the piece and Mahler’s work in general within the context of the world and society he lived in. This is a book written with both passion and scholarship that will send listeners to the composer afresh.

Stephen Johnson talks to Classical CD Choice about his mesmerisng New Mahler study:

One of several surprises that came out of writing this book was the realization that quite a lot of my private reading over the past thirty years had been preparing me for this. Notes I’d scribbled in the backs of novels, philosophical, historical and psychological books turned out to be invaluable, as well, of course, as many of the musical sources I’d been consulting over the years. As well as loving the music of many German and Austrian composers during the late-18^th – early 20^th centuries, I’ve felt the pull of German language poetry and fiction, and of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for a long time. I’ve also read a great deal of and about Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. Research trips to Vienna for books and radio documentaries have added a great deal of background, making me realise just how much the music, literature and thought that emerged from Vienna owed to its prevailing culture, its history and even to its geography.  

But something else became clear to me only after I’d finished the book and sent it off. It may seem crass to talk about being a ‘beneficiary’ of the twentieth century’s tragic Central European Jewish diaspora, but I think that’s what I am. Jewish friends and friends of friends were vital early influences, and I remember hearing Hans Keller talking about and introducing Schoenberg’s Second Quartet at the RNCM as a life-changing experience – I’d cycled 20 miles there and back to hear him, and it was worth it! But I realise too how much that astonishing German-Jewish and Viennese-Jewish enriched and enhanced the artistic and intellectual life of this country – something we’re in danger of losing now – and that Mahler’s idea of ‘German-ness’, the notion of a humanist tradition stemming from Goethe, Kant and Beethoven that transcended narrow nationalism, was something that mattered to me greatly. The Eighth, in its complicated, sometimes self-contradictory way, is a colossal monument to all of that.

Stephen Johnson’s The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 is published by Faber

The Lark Ascending by Richard King

Vaughan Williams’ exquisite orchestral tone poem The Lark Ascending has become comfortably Britain’s most popular piece of classical music, seeing off a variety of once better-known works. This is notably ironic, given that the composer was for some time almost a prophet without honour in his own country, but his pre-eminence as arguably Britain’s greatest symphonist is no longer such a radical thought as it once might have seemed to be. But is the composer and his music emblematic of this country? That’s part of the premise of Richard King’s fascinating and cogently argued new book which takes the composer of his music as a starting point for a discussion of notions of Englishness.

Cultural historian Richard King is the author of the critically-acclaimed author of How Soon Is Now? and his new book is a history of the British countryside told through the relationship between music and landscape and a lyrical exploration of how Britain’s identity was shaped throughout the Twentieth Century by the urge to reimagine the country’s wild places. From the psychologically altered English landscape Vaughan Williams and his generation encountered as they returned after the armistice, to the agrarian revivalists and of the 1930s; from the ‘Back to the Land’ movement of the 1960s to the changing landscape of the 1980s, which witnessed the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common and New Age Travellers congregating every year at Stonehenge, rural Britain was a source of great social energy and a place of dramatic change.

Music was an inspiration and complement to these new interpretations of a British pastoral tradition, from the song written to commemorate the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932, to the moment, sixty years later, when the sound systems at the country’s largest ever illegal rave, held at Castlemorton Common, finally ran out of charge.

Through a series of ‘headphone walks’ and reflective interviews with musicians, filmmakers, ruralists and witnesses Richard King listens closely to Britain’s rural landscapes and the compositions inspired by their beauty and drama. His journey takes him from the west coast of Wales to the Lothian Hills, from the Thames Estuary to the Suffolk shoreline – and from Vaughan Williams to Brian Eno, from Penguin Cafe Orchestra to the Raincoats, from Kate Bush to Boards of Canada, ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’ to Greenham Common …

His unique and intimate history of a nation celebrates the British countryside as a living, working, and occasionally rancorous environment – rather than an unaffected idyll – that forged a nation’s musical personality and provided a space in which life could be experienced on its own terms and its fullest, under open skies, far away from the gaze of authority.

The Lark Ascending by Richard King is published by Faber