Brisbane Gothic stalls once more
The unwelcome news that yet another performance of the Gothic may have been relegated to the back-burner comes at the critical time when United Music Publishing have exhausted their stock of the full score. I imagine it would be a relatively expensive exercise to tool up for a tiny printing run of a work amounting to over 250 pages per score (the previous run of only 100 copies having taken three decades to walk out the door), so for the time being I would guess UMP will not do this. Thus the full score may be considered “out of print” for the foreseeable future.
The score of course bears as much relationship to a musical performance as an architect’s blueprint does to a building—architects and composers, unlike most other artists, provide only a starting point, and are subsequently reliant on the labour and artistry of many others to build up a representative edifice in sound, stone, or steel. Buildings may stand for many centuries, but only since the invention of the gramophone could a musical performance persist beyond the gathering together of the musicians that rendered it. Brian’s orchestral music being particularly costly works to mount, perhaps performances of them will become so rare that they will only be known to listeners poring through the back catalogues of Marco Polo and Naxos discs.
However the link with architecture runs deeper, as we know from Paul Rapoport and Malcolm Macdonald in particular how profound an inspiration the Gothic cathedrals were for Havergal Brian: in Opus est Professor Rapoport likens the Gothic to the blueprint for a massive cathedral with cruciform floorplan. The enormity of Brian’s “transepts and crossing”—in the blueprint, the shorter axis of the cathedral, or in the score, the three orchestral movements comprising Part One—are an imposing monument in themselves, and as we know Brian himself suggested it could be performed as such: yet the work has only been given once in this form.
Alongside my previous letter on the topic, David Jenkins observed in NL 172 that there is no way really to separate the two parts of the work: he likens the final stages of the Vivace to a “rite of passage”, virtually demanding an enlargement of scale for a full-blown choral finale to ensue. The new structure Brian conceived imposed a three-fold division on the latin text Te Deum matching the layout of sanctuary, choir, and nave in the plan for the cathedral’s long axis.
Choral symphonies beginning with Beethoven’s 9th, and continuing through Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Mahler’s second, all milestones on the way to the Gothic, have necessarily invoked the voice as a means of overcoming the “finale problem” for this perilous genre—the difficulty in finding an appropriately fitting climax to the expanded time and resources employed by an out-sized symphonic work. However the freely developing multiplicity of styles generated by Brian’s choral finale “solution” took over control, overwhelming his efforts to keep the setting of the Te Deum on track (each successive movement also enlarged the orchestration). To use a cliché, Brian had created a monster.
A few years ago I visited Siena Cathedral, and climbed the massive piers of what was to have been the façade of the new cathedral, which give excellent views of the city. After a century of construction, by the 1330s the Sienese had a fairly respectable cathedral underway, when they envisaged enlarging it out of all known proportion by making a new nave, larger and taller than any yet built, at right angles to the current floorplan, and to which the existing building would have formed the transepts. Sound familiar, anyone?
What happened next should provide a cautionary tale: firstly, the Black Death raged across Europe, and it is thought that half to two-thirds of Siena’s population perished between May and September 1348; the city’s economy was ruined for decades to follow, thus shelving such a gigantic building project. Secondly, the columns supporting the new bays of the nave had been built too narrow and tall for the materials to support their own weight, leading to the prospect of a partial collapse (as parts of Beauvais had done). The far wall, isolated to the side of the current building, was the only major part of the construction not to be pulled down, literally a massive Gothic folly.
So if there is anything to be learnt from these architectural and economic lessons, it is that construction projects occur in economic cycles, and musical projects of the size envisaged by Havergal Brian are affected by similar cycles: with typical bad luck, the composition of the big four symphonies—contemporaneous with the massive skyscrapers being built in Manhattan—had come too late for the previous cycle of musical giganticism, which had had its peak before the War, only to be severely curtailed in the 1920s. By the time economics could afford Brian’s big works again, he had fallen into partial obscurity, often thought to be a relic of an older generation.
Although the main cause driving up the costs of producing orchestral music is the numbers of performers, it is only one aspect of the problem: complex music demands more intensive rehearsal, and then for several of the symphonies, certainly the big four and possibly also Symphony 7, the duration of the work itself demands more time—David Brown’s story, in Newsletter 71, of Sir Charles Mackerras fitting the seventh along with symphony 31 and The tinker’s wedding into a very tight recording schedule is worth reading in this context.
So, while it is not surprising that effectively there have been no public performances of the Gothic in a quarter of a century, what is a surprise is that no performance of the “Demi-Gothic”, or just the orchestral movements alone, have eventuated in the same time. On the grounds that the full work is twice as long and requires nearly twice the number of orchestral personnel, Part One alone ought to be about a quarter as expensive to put on. However, the unusual instrumentation affects both parts of the symphony, thus mitigating such attempts at cost containment: supernumerary players often have to be paid at higher rates than the core players on contract; increasing the numbers of professional musicians does not increase costs at a linear rate; rehearsal venues need to be larger; publicity budgets need to be expanded; and so on.
The Gothic (and Das Siegeslied) then involve the extra costs and organisational effort associated with managing adult choirs; that’s before you also pay for four expensive professional singers for the solos. Oh, and there’s a children’s choir also? Given that it’s a rare sight these days to see more than 150 players engaged for a Berlioz Requiem or a Mahler 8, then the Society should naturally expect a comparatively more difficult and obscure work for a minimum of 160 professionals and 40 extra instrumentalists to be performed, well, hardly ever. Indeed, in these “economically rational” times, it is hard to imagine any orchestral manager in his or her right mind giving even the slightest consideration to it.
Can the Gothic be made any easier to perform? Arguably yes; however over the years several different viewpoints have been articulated in the letters page, which might be summed up:
0. Stop hitting your head against the wall: don’t perform the symphonies at all. Concentrate on publishing and promoting the smaller works.
1. Arguably the purist view, that Brian wrote the piece the way he did for a reason, and intrinsically the number of performers he envisaged and the number of notes they must play or sing is part and parcel of the whole work; any hedging at finding all of the obscure instruments or extra musicians is to be regretted.
2. The alternate side of the purist view, given that it also meets with Brian’s authorial fiat: forget about Part Two of the work and concentrate on promoting Part One as a balanced, three-movement orchestral symphony.
3. The pragmatic view: stage the whole work, but cut corners here and there in order to avoid the proposal stalling on logistical grounds. I would place myself in this camp, but being something of a textual purist I would be concerned that any changes treat the musical values of the work as paramount. If the work needs to be scaled back, at least do so with some musicological grounds: employ an architect rather than swinging the wrecking ball.
4. Finally, there appears to be occasional expressions of what might be called a radical pragmatic view: rather than just attempt to scale back the Gothic, why not be bold and actually rewrite it into a practical performing edition, in addition to rescoring it for smaller forces?
I will be happy to hear from enraged correspondents if I have left out any other camps pitched on the Society’s Gothic battleground. Notably, there seem to have been no suggestions on how the final option might be achieved, so I propose to canvas what a “performing edition” might look like in a future Newsletter, along with an explanation of the methods by which I suggest a putative performance of the entire Gothic might use an orchestra with as few as 156 players—no wrecking ball required!
Philip Matthew Legge
NL186 © 2006 Philip Legge