It’s easy to see why “serious” composers are treated like sacred cows. It
goes with the territory — with our studied awe and intimidated respect, with
their lofty accomplishments and complex talents, with their. . .
seriousness. No denying it, that’s how composers are perceived the world
over. But not by me. And not by themselves, I’ll warrant.
Friends, comrades, mentors, conspirators, instigators, infuriators, rascals,
rogues, spellbinders — every one of them, it seems to me, riding in on a
“wink” and a prayer.
And so it comes about that I have just released (for Peter Owen Publishers)
four novel-biographies, in two separate volumes: (1) Beethoven
(Confidential) & Brahms Gets Laid ; (2) Elgar: The Erotic
Variations & Delius: A Moment with Venus .
My coverage of the subjects is provocative, but thoroughly researched, even
so. Sex-mad? Maybe. Obsessed? With music, yes.
How did I get hooked on good music in the first place? That momentous day
dawned at the end of the Second World War, when, 18 years old and newly
invalided out of the Merchant Navy, I was convalescing at home in
Southampton. For six months I’d sat gazing into space. While I’d hug the
armchair, Mum would be sweeping up after Olive, the maid. Hoovering round me
she’d go, not quite drowning out the BBC’s Home Service programme.
That day, out of the Art Deco radio suddenly issued a combination of sounds
unlike any made before or since. It roused me from my death-sentence
lethargy and sent me in search of my Bakelite bicycle pump. Mum and Olive,
astounded by this Lazarus miracle, followed me to the garage. I pumped up
the tyres of my old Hercules bike, pedalled furiously out of the front gate
and was off up the road. They were speechless.
Minutes later I was in the local record shop reading from the back of an
envelope on which I had scribbled the words of the BBC announcer. “Have you
got Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B flat minor?” I asked the salesman,
breathlessly. “Played by Solomon and the Hallé Orchestra?” “Yes, sir,” he
replied. “It’s on four Columbia 12in 78’s at 12/6 each. They come in a
handsome imitation-leatherette album, £2 10s the set.” Shock. All I had was
a ten-shilling note.
I shall never forget Mum’s remonstrance when I asked for a full two-months’
pocket money in advance. “Posh music don’t come cheap, do it, Ken?”
When I finally got to playing that old Tchaikovsky war-horse, I had an answer
for her. “This is sheer heaven. It would be cheap at any price.”
In fact, it started me off on a musical journey, celebrating my favourite
composers in a medium I found easier to command than music. Bartók, Elgar,
Delius, Debussy, Gordon Jacob, Liszt, Prokofiev, Mahler, Tchaikovsky,
Bruckner, Bax, Martinu, Vaughan Williams, Walton . . . the list I conjured
in TV and film biopics and docu-dramas grew. I even thought it was just the
beginning; film and TV decided otherwise.
But the dead composers kept knocking on my door, begging entry. Take Richard
Strauss, family man. His Domestic Symphony sets to music the dramas
of bathing a screaming baby and making love to one’s wife in three
bed-shaking orgasms (count them, if you don’t believe me). And his tribute
to lap-dancing strippers in the Dance of the Seven Veils from Salome
should be heard to be believed. My efforts to widen its audience and
celebrate Strauss in a biopic for the BBC ended in the film being banned and
its reels cast into corporate vaults.
Would this be a good place to mention that I am compelled to investigate the
places where a powerful life force smashes headlong into cultural taboos and
fashions? No? All right, never mind. Read my books under the covers,
flashlight at the ready. But if they’re not just about the sex lives of
these beloved composers, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Those of you familiar with the second half of the age-old “Venus” quote — “.
. . a lifetime with Mercury” — will guess rightly that the old pagan’s
syphilitic sex life plays a prominent part in the Delius book. And for those
not in the know, mercury, until recent times, was the only known treatment
for delaying the blindness, paralysis and painful death that syphilis
represented to an earlier era.
A tragic end, perhaps, but Fred — as he was known to his friends — had one
helluva time on the way. And as for that serenely erotic music, every
chapter in A Moment with Venus is inspired by one of Fred’s
masterpieces. You can follow the titles while spinning CDs if you want a
good wallow. And watch my Song of Summer on DVD afterwards, with Max
Adrian as the definitive Delius.
You may think Elgar a poor book-companion to be sandwiched with Delius in one
volume. Surely, Elgar (“Sir Ted”) is of sterner stuff? Yet the surface
stuffiness hid a romantically anarchic nature: passionate, poetic — the one
revealed in his symphonic self-portrait, Falstaff.
To date I’ve been lucky enough to make two biopics on the great man, both of
which championed his wife as his guiding muse — with only hints as to other
female inspiration. In The Erotic Variations at last I can bring the
results of half a century of sleuthing to the fore.
Did you know, for instance, that Elgar may have had an illegitimate son by
his childhood sweetheart Helen Weaver? That he most likely was the lover of
his daughter’s headmistress, Rosa Burley — his cycling companion for years?
And that arguably his greatest piece of music ( Nimrod ) is dedicated
to a man? Elgar was a man of mystery if ever there was one, in an age when
ambiguity clung to its secrets for dear life.
So, too, was Brahms more than the textbook myth we’ve inherited, of “beer,
beard and belly”. Brahms Gets Laid scotches the popular notion
that his desires could be satisfied with tasteful music-making, thick slices
of Black Forest gateau, pints at the local and woodland walks with mates.
Why, the plucky lad was playing honky-tonk piano in the brothels of Hamburg
by the time he was ten.
He was also one of the most reliable babysitters of all time — as long as the
babies be- longed to the composer Clara Schumann. And when her husband
Robert Schumann was dragged from their home to be locked up in an asylum,
young Joe was given the run of the house, which now included seven kids (two
of them teenage beauties) and his mentor’s sex-starved wife.
Brahms and sex? Surely the cosy old soul was too solemn for the stuff from
which babies are made? Listen to the inner movements of the Third Symphony.
And tell me that a certain section of the Fourth isn’t sex set to music.
Brahms shares this second volume with Beethoven (Confidential ), which
began as a script I co-wrote for Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster (instead
they made The Silence of the Lambs ). The novel is about two private
eyes in search of Ludwig’s secret paramour, the alluring “Immortal Beloved”.
So, hold on to your hat for a “serious” sex romp. And my own nakedly
unabashed love affair with music.
Beethoven Confidential & Brahms Gets Laid and Elgar: The
Erotic Variations & Delius: A Moment with Venus are published by
Peter Owen. Times Books First £11.69 with free delivery (0870 1608080)
