About happiness

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are among the fundamental rights of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.  They can be read together: a man or a woman has the right to live and to be free to seek out his or her own preferred form of happiness. Here we have to qualify with J.S. Mill “On Liberty” that freedom to pursue happiness is limited by its not causing harm to others.  A pessimist who sees life as a zero sum game might argue that one man’s happiness necessarily entails another man’s unhappiness.  The optimist in me, however, does not see life that way so I believe with the American founding fathers that a harmless pursuit of happiness is possible.

The whole point of having the freedom to pursue one’s own preferred form of happiness is that happiness can take many forms which may suit each individual differently.  What indeed is happiness ?  It is a word used to cover many quite different feelings and states of mind: joy, pleasure, delight, bliss, satisfaction, self-fulfilment, contentment, peace of mind, serenity, wisdom - to name but a few and they are all quite different things.  Generally, being happy is regarded as a positive and desirable state.

“Happiness” then is something of a catch-all word, not unlike “love”.  There are many forms of love: the parents’ love of their child, the child’s love of its parents; the first love of teenagers and the love of a couple married for twenty-five years; love of one’s friends - to name but a few, and they are all quite different things.  Happiness may or may not be possible without love; although also Aragon writes “Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux” (there is no happy love).  Since love implies engaging with someone else, the happiness that comes of love, active and passive, is of a greater human value.  Indeed can a solitary man or woman truly be happy ?

If I were asked: Did you have a happy childhood ?  Is yours a happy marriage ?  Have you had a happy life ?  I would answer: “On the whole, yes.”  That is, all in all, taking the rough with the smooth, weighing everything in the balance, I have more often been happy than unhappy.  Happiness is not, nor could ever be, a permanent state in a normally constituted sentient human being living in this world.  It is a high to which there are always corresponding lows.  Its very elusiveness is indeed why it has to be pursued.

The main problem in the pursuit of happiness is recognizing when we have attained it.  Real happiness is here and now, it is of the present moment.  It is not the nostalgia for a sweetly remembered past which was not actually as we fondly imagine it to have been.  Nor is it the imagined perfection of a desired future which is actually unattainable.  Real happiness is only now and now is as good as it is ever going to get.  It never was better and it never will be better.  Perceived happiness is a clear case of the best being the enemy of the good.  The past and future can get in the way of full awareness of the present and prevent us from recognizing when we are happy.

Perhaps I am suggesting we should revise downwards our expectations of life.  I know I lowered mine a long time ago.  This is not being negative or settling for second best: it is merely embracing reality.  Some things are never going to happen, so get real and enjoy what you have for which you ought really to be very grateful.

In fact there is an awful lot to enjoy in what we have and what we are.  For example, as we recover from illness we are happy to have returned to good health; and yet we ought to be happy to be in good health whenever we are not unwell.  We have become blasé about the sheer miracle of being alive.  

If you can find enjoyment and satisfaction in the basic functions of life, a good meal, a good night’s sleep or in everyday society, a friend’s smile, an unexpected gesture of solidarity, or in nature, the warmth of the sun on your skin on an autumn day, the beauty of a tree, then you are well on your way to being happy.  I’m not suggesting that conversely when you’ve had a bad meal, a bad night’s sleep, somebody’s been rude to you, it’s raining and you’re surrounded by ugliness that you should automatically be unhappy; although I admit myself to soon becoming a grumpy old man in such circumstances.  I’m talking about an ability to recognize what is positive in everyday life which can become a background feeling that makes the difference between being predominantly happy or unhappy.

On a miserable day, however, we are going to have to fall back on some deeper form of happiness to avoid being unnecessarily sad.  Here we are moving away from the more sensual forms of happiness, joy and pleasure to the more rationalized forms of self-fulfilment, satisfaction, peace of mind and such.  It is a question of taking a step back from immediate impressions which may be adverse and unhappy, so as to relativize them by placing them in a broader context.  A lot of this has to do with getting outside of our immediate self and recognizing how we fit into something bigger, society, nature or put less abstractly how we relate to those who are close to us; in short recognizing our worth to others.  This is the motivation identified by Adam Smith in his “Theory of moral sentiments”: we try to behave in a way that will cause others to think well of us.

Perhaps all that I am saying is that we all want to be loved and if we know we are loved then we can be happy.

However, that is not something that is owed to us once we have outlived the child’s entitlement to be loved by its parents.  It is something we are going to have to work for.  A deeper happiness, therefore, entails some effort on our part.

The fleeting happiness of the moment, that of the senses, is a gift if you can recognize it, but you probably cannot hold onto it: Aragon again on man “quand il veut serrer son bonheur, il le broie” (when he wants to hold tight his happiness he crushes it).  The deeper happiness, however, is not given, it has to be pursued and striven for through engagement with others.  As such it is always subject to setbacks: our children fall ill; those dear to us die; our friends betray our trust.  There are real reasons to be unhappy.  Only a fool is happy the whole time.  Yet also it is foolish to be unhappy for trivial reasons.

Happiness remains possible but only here and now.

Happiness is about being here.

About cruising

I have just been on a cruise for the first time in my life.  I had never been on one before because it was not the kind of holiday I had really fancied, being one who generally by instinct flees the herd.  As such I was not keen on the idea of potentially being cooped up with a lot of people I might not want to be with, possibly even on a vessel pitching all over the place in bad weather.

To celebrate his eightieth birthday my father wanted to invite the whole family on a holiday together, initially thinking in terms of renting a villa somewhere.  At which point, my brother Simon who spent twenty years or so working on cruise liners and therefore knows them well and continues to holiday on them, suggested why not try a cruise.  Overcoming initial skepticism, the rest of us declared we were ready to give it a go, so he and his wife, Penny, who also used to work on cruises, were tasked with identifying a good one for our purposes.

The choice was for a twelve night Mediterranean cruise sailing from Barcelona on board the very up-market Celebrity Solstice.

As we were in a group of eight we had ourselves for company without having to worry about the other passengers. The agreement was to have dinner and spend the evening all together,  while being free to engage in different activities in varying sub-groups during the day.  This worked really well.

A modern cruise liner is a huge affair.  Ours was over 300 metres long with fourteen levels.  Basically it’s a very big floating luxury hotel, the size of a colossal apartment block.  On board were 2800 guests and 1200 crew.  And yet the Solstice is so well designed that to my amazement I never had the impression of sharing it with so many other people.  It was relatively easy to find comfortable spaces to ourselves.  So my main initial fear turned out to be unfounded and I could get on with enjoying myself.

Surprisingly also, given its improbably towering square shape that looks top-heavy (but isn’t really as all the heavy stuff is at the bottom), the ship was remarkably stable and you barely felt it moving - though I admit we were blessed with some partciularly calm seas. 

I now see why cruising has become so popular, so successful and such big business.  It offers the guests a secure, safe and clean environment where most creature comforts are readily available.  You unpack your suitcase once in a surprisingly spacious en-suite cabin (so much so it is actually called a “stateroom”), with your own balcony overlooking the sea and yet you are on tour and wake up in a different place each morning, as if by magic, thereby avoiding the hassle of repacking each time.

Most often the ship docks but occasionally it anchors in the bay and you are ferried ashore in tenders, which I actually found quite pleasant even if it means waiting your turn.  When we alighted that way in Villefranche on the Côte d’Azur and Kotor in Montenegro we were immediately in a picturesque small town.  The downside with docking is that the ship is so huge you can end up in a freight port looking at container ships miles from the centre of town, as in Livorno.  A great exception is Naples where you berth right next to downtown.

A lot of passengers opt for organized tours and as we docked in some ports I counted as many as 28 coaches lined up on the quay waiting for them.  However, all that is strictly optional and you’re perfectly free to do your own thing, which Clara and I did each time, knowing the language and indeed town in most ports of call.  The only thing you must remember is to make double sure you don’t miss the boat at the end of your time ashore, as it could prove expensive and difficult to catch up with it at its next stop.  How do they know if everyone’s got on ? The ship has a card and computer based system for counting everybody off and back on, being able to check faces against photos they take of you when you check in at the start of the cruise.

Our itinerary was basically to sail from Barcelona across to Italy then all the way around it to Venice and back to Barcelona, pausing on the Damatian coast on the way up and down the Adriatic.  The first stop was Villefranche near Nice where we spent the day with Italian friends who came to meet us from their house on the coast near Menton so we could go for a walk around Cap Ferrat on what later became a rather wet day.  From Livorno six of us did our own outing to Pisa.  From Civitavecchia we caught the train up to Rome to stroll around, see Umberto and Silvia and catch an unexpected glimpse of the Pope.  From Naples, Simon and Penny and the two of us visited Capri and did a fantastic walk high above the blue sea with views of rocky islets.  Then I showed Clara a bit of the centre of Naples.  

So after four intense days of shore visits I was actually ready for my first day all at sea without having much to do.  Nonetheless I found myself up at dawn watching us sail through the straits of Messina.  Since our party was having dinner early I found I became an early riser and visited the swimming pool at 7 every morning when it was very quiet before breakfast. 

After the day lazing on board it was time for another four days’ intensive tourism.  Kotor is situated at the end of a long fjord in Montenegro, which makes for an impressive sail in and out.  To the amazement of the rest of our group, Clara and I climbed the 250m up to the fortress and back down before visiting the old town.  Then there was an an afternoon and a morning in Venice, which never fails to delight.  Sailing in and out of Venice is quite outrageous as the ship actually transits through the Giudecca canal between San Marco and San Giorgio, the Salute and Redentore.  Standing on level 15 it’s like arriving on a very low flying aircraft, as you’re actually above most buildings.  They say it can’t be doing the foundations of the islands any good. Our last port of call was Dubrovnik, for me one of the prettiest old towns on the Mediterranean.   The final two days cruising back to Barcelona seemed to pass very quickly

Part of the basic cruise formula is that there is a limitless supply of free food on board.  There’s a huge cold and cooked breakfast buffet and a huge cold and cooked lunch buffet.  On the Solstice there is a more formal sit down dinner with a menu and waiters.  In case you’re hungry in between there are snacks, beefburgers, pizza, ice-cream etc available.  The opportunities for over-eating are endless and among the many guests a fair few were seriously overweight, mainly but by no means all of them American.  To make it more difficult to resist temptation, the food was generally very good.  It took a degree of will power not to over indulge myself and I confess to having eaten two main courses one dinner - not actually a good idea as I realized afterwards waddling around the deck on my post-prandial stroll.

If the food was for free, that is included, the drinks certainly were not, with just a beer starting around 5€. Actually it was difficut to tell just how much because being an American run operation the prices on board were in dollars and the billing was American in so far as any price you saw then had tax and gratuities slapped on top of it.  However, since no cash changes hands as it’s all done by on board billing cards,  it’s all fairly painless.  Anyway my father was gnerously picking up the tab.  Basically like any hotel and catering operation it’s on the drinks that they make their money.   Otherwise there was always limitless ice cold water and hot coffee free of charge. 

Feeding 4000 people evry day is no mean feat and requires a lot of organization of which we got a glimpse one day at sea on a guided tour of the galleys.  About half of the crew work in the food and beverage department.

The crew were from sixty different countries, our dinner waiting team was from Peru, Colombia and Hungary.  The captain was Greek. The guests also came from all over the world, plenty of Americans and Canadians, but also Brits, Spanish, French, Latin Americans, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans etc.  (Announcements were in English, Spanish and French.)

Actually the people on the ship were a microcosm of the world: the guests were from the rich countries, the crew from the poor countries.  Most of the crew are paid a pittance, thus they can be so numerous that the ship can provide a top quality service

Cruising has of course been in the headlines this year because of the Costa Concordia wreck.  It all goes to show that no amount of technology can protect you from human error and folly.  Risking over 4000 lives and around $700 million of hardware requires an impressive degree of recklessness. The worst part of the story though was that having holed his ship instead of going down with it the captain was one of the first off and rather farcically was shouted at by the coastguards telling him to be a man and get back on it to do his duty.  It’s a great modern moral tale of human weakness and I’m sure it will be the subject of film and literature.  Of course it’s not really funny as over thirty people died in the ensuing confusion.  That in turn has served to remind people that though a cruise liner looks and feels like a luxury hotel it is actually still a ship at sea and all the usual laws of nature apply.  Guests now pay attention at the muster station drill.

We saw Costa’s latest even bigger ship when in Venice, according to an article we read it is fully booked for its first voyage.  So apparently punters have not been deterred.

In Venice we had our own bit of drama when high gusting winds pushed the ship so hard one of the bollards on the quayside gave way and the ship slipped its moorings.  Fortunately our crew was on the ball and the situation was soon brought under control with the assistance of some tugs and the ship was repositioned.  The captain gave a full explanation afterwards.  I felt I was in safe hands.

As an introduction to cruising, I have probably been spoilt, by the standard of comfort and cuisine, the ingenuity of design, the quality of hospitality and gentility of fellow passengers aboard the Solstice.

So my first experience of cruising, to quote our jovial waiter Felix, is that it is “an excellent choice”.

About twentieth century classical music

I have been reading Alex Ross’ best-selling book about twentieth century classical music “The Rest is Noise”.

Some may think that twentieth century and classical are contradictory terms. What we mean by “classical music” is music that has been written down by a composer in the most minute detail, so generally not improvised, and intended for listening to in the concert hall in respectful silence: serious music as an art form in other words.

(See also About classical music)

I have read the individual chapters of “the Rest is Noise” while listening to the music described in them insofar as I have recordings of the works in my vast CD collection (now nearing 2000). It has been a useful opportunity to rediscover some stuff I’d forgotten I owned, which I acquired many years ago during earlier bouts of exploration of the 20thC repertoire. I actually have quite a large number of CDs of music from the first half of the 20thC. I think a lot of very fine classical music was written during those decades and it doesn’t get performed as much as it ought to.

What I like about Ross’ book is that he has no axe to grind and he is enthusiastic about some of my own favourite composers. He seeks to give an account of all classical music in the 20thC. Inevitably, he admits, he can’t be exhaustive, but he attempts to cover the many often contradictory trends and the more famous composers and their works, putting them in historical context and providing some technical analysis. He wants to stimulate an interest and curiosity. He certainly got me digging out some pieces I hadn’t listened to in a long time.

One reason I started to read the book is that we had recently seen Strauss’ “Salome” at the opera and this is the work Ross takes as the starting point of the “modern” in 1905. Of course this is something of a literary device to start his book with, a big bang of a “succès de scandale”. Strauss’ opera on its opening caused a big stir in the musical world with ts discordant orchestration and its racy subject matter. The plot has Salome failing to seduce John the Baptist then in revenge incestuously inciting Herod to have his head cut off so she can kiss it. For the time the scoring was as outrageous as the story. Of course, Ross once he gets going is quick to point out that the modern had been gradually emerging over the previous decade through the works of composers like Debussy. Strauss himself after a relatively brief experimental period lapsed back into his natural idiom of the lush post-romantic, writing “der Rosenkavalier” which is heavily influenced by the Viennese waltz only two operas later in 1911. The other main character in Ross’ first chapter, Mahler, is also essentially a late romantic rather than a modern. Moderns and late romantics co-existed at the start of the 20thC not unlike how impressionists co-existed with academic painters in late 19thC France.

However such labels, though convenient, are inaccurate. If one thing is true about the 20thC it is that composers are much more individual than in previous centuries in their expression and less tied to convention, notwithstanding their following certain fashions. The greatest follower of different trends was of course Stravinsky, who not unlike another long lived prolific artist of the 20thC, Picasso, went through a whole series of different periods, while retaining his characteristic bold melodic and rhythmic signature. Stravinsky produced a scattered handful of masterpieces beginning with the “Rite of Spring” but also many other works I enjoy less. He was lionized in exile in France and the United States to an extent that made him a household name (as in the one name the man in the street will give you if you ask him “name a 20thC composer”) thereby putting in the shade many other 20thC composers who are equally noteworthy.

Oddly enough living down the street from him in exile in Hollywood was the other composer frequently billed as the grand old man of 20thC classical music, Arnold Schoenberg. In my opinion, Schoenberg has an awful lot to answer for. I like his late romantic “Verklârte Nacht” (Transfirured night) which he wrote in his 20s in 1899 for string sextet and later orchestrated. Then at the start of the 20thC he spent a lot of time writing the rather overblown Wagnerian sprawl of “Gurre-Lieder” a kind of cantata for huge orchestra and voices. That’s one of the few CDs I actually got rid of (I’d bought it 2nd hand from the record library) after listening to it in concert I decided I didn’t really want to hear it ever again. If I thought that was bad, then Schoenberg got worse by becoming “modern”. He rejected the tyranny of writing in a specific key, that is he became atonal. Still later he decided to give each of the twelve notes in the scale a democratically equal chance (dodecaphony, serialism). As you can see his was a purely intellectual approach. He spent a lot of time theorizing and teaching and then put his theories into practice, sometimes rather mechanistically. The result, most of the time is unlistenable, and believe me I have tried to give him a fair hearing. In fact that was his aim, he wanted to prove his intellectual and moral superiority, he was not in the business of trying to please the audience. If by chance he wrote something that went down well with the public, he felt he had somehow got it wrong.

This actually led to a huge schism in 20thC music between those composers writing mainly still tonal music with recognizable tunes seeking to communicate with audiences and the moderns who thought that the former had “sold out” and the only valid form of serious musical expression was to be progressive, to break with all tradition and to make strictly no concessions to the listener. That dichotomy between die-hard high-brow moderns and crowd-pleasing low-brow composers still exists today. I have sat bemused through many a first performance of deadly earnest, rather ugly and totally forgettable music, which I can confidently predict will be consigned to oblivion. There’s an annual festival of this stuff in Brussels called Ars Musica” which I call the “Arse Music” festival as it sounds like so much farting. There are occasional flashes of beauty but largely this music is an assault on your ears and patience. I’m sure nobody genuinely likes it, it just gives you intellectual street cred to claim you do. I’m going to one of the concerts in the series tomorrow, I’ll let you know how I get along.

Still on the subject of modern compositional techniques let me say that I find serialism a strange idea. In its extreme form, writing a line using all twelve notes only once is a much more tightly constrained convention than anything to be found in say 18thC classical music and as such is creatively quite sterile. If you think about it, all the great tunes in Western music are based on a repetition of notes. Take the opening of Beethoven’s 5th symphony: three notes are repeated and then followed by a lower fourth one. Most melodies give you that feeling of completeness and logic you get from passing through the same point again in a slightly different way. So in not repeating notes you run the risk of not writing a tune, only a scramble. Still, occasionally it comes out all right despite itself.

Doggedly modern classical music is the equivalent of abstraction in painting, which I also have little time for. In my humble view, a good painting contains a recognizable image and a good piece of music contains a recognizable tune. (As indeed a good novel contains an interesting story). Scattering notes or scattering blobs of paint apparently randomly, or possibly according to fixed patterns, demonstrates technique but communicates nothing - apart perhaps from a growing feeling of irritation and alienation. It’s all form and no content. “Formalism” by the way was the charge the Soviet establishment unfairly laid against Shostakovich when he became too modern for their taste. Again, music written this way may occasionally come out all right and you can say “that’s an attractive sound or texture” but it doesn’t actually go anywhere.

Some writers of the history of 20thC classical music focus only on the modern, concentrating on Schoenberg and the experimental modernists who followed him, while conveniently ignoring most of the rest, in what they regard as a logical progression. Fortunately “the Rest is noise” is not like that and gives space to everyone. The point is that the 20thC is a rather messy co-existence of different kinds and styles of music, reacting to and against each other, feeding off each other and off many outside influences.

The first half of the 20thC was particularly fertile in this respect and produced many fabulous works. I see the following main strands in what was going on, alongside the modern already discussed. Secondly, there were the late romantics who still went on doing what they had always done, thereby providing seamless continuity with the late 19thC. Most of Elgar and Rachmaninov’s ouput is in the 20thC. Both Mahler and Strauss are largely working in the late romantic idiom of open-ended structures with thick orchestration and long drawn out melodic lines. Thirdly there was the neo-classical reaction to that, returning to shorter classical forms, lighter clearer orchestration and jauntier tunes. Prokofiev’s first symphony is the “classical” example and as an aesthetic neo-classicism informed many lighter pieces by other composers even if they were formally not so tight. Fourthly there was a desire to draw on outside influences, different rhythms and modes found in rediscovered folk music and jazz. This was ethnic input in the broadest sense rather than academic tradition. For the folk we have the Stravinsky of the “Rite of Spring”, Bartok and Janacek, for the jazz Milhaud, Gershwin and Weill as examples.

However, any composer worth his salt dabbied in everything and this is certainly the case with the big three Russians, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, who for me are major figures in the 20thC repertoire. They took what best suited them from all of these strands and used it at any given moment to produce a given effect, indeed on occasion thriving on juxtaposition. It is this cross-fertilization of different styles and influences that makes classical music from the first decades of the 20thC so exciting and ground-breaking while still being accessible and enjoyable; in short, fun.

From the second half of the 20thC fewer works are represented in my CD collection, and are mainly accounted for by Shostakovich and Britten. For me Shostakovich is the greatest 20thC composer given his breadth of range and depth of emotion and thought. He was a musical genius, a superb orchestrator, a turner of a catchy tune and a master of form. He was capable of conveying by turns the horror of the century in which he lived, sardonic humour and heartfelt human suffering. He was a complex character who chose to compromise with the Soviet régime in order to stay alive in his own country and to be able keep on composing for performance. As a composer he found a kindred spirit in Britten whom he met on several occasions in Russia and England thanks to their mutual friend the cellist Rostropovich, for whom they both composed. Britten had an unerring feeling for the dramatic gesture and is strikingly original in his vocal lines, often written with his lifetime partner Peter Pears in mind.

From the last quarter of the 20thC, after the deaths of Shostakovich and Britten, post 1976, there is hardly anything in my collection apart from the odd bit of Pärt, Tavener and late Tippett. I’ve tried sampling various composers active in the period but they don’t really do it for me. On the one hand there seem to be atonal experimentalists who are just not pleasant to listen to and at the other extreme tonal minimalists who keep on repeating lines gradually changing one note at a time in a way that is just boring, unless you happen to be in a drug induced secondary state. There doesn’t really seem to be much in between. Anyway, Ross has given me a few new names which I shall try out.

So which 20thC pieces do I enjoy listening to ?

I shall make two lists. The first is of operas I have enjoyed at the opera house, theatre or cinema (you’ll see why I add that qualification as the blurring of genres is a constant in 20thC classical music).

1900 Puccini Tosca

1902 Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande

1904 Janacek Jenufa

1905 Strauss Salome

1911 Strauss der Rosenkavalier

1926 Berg Wozzeck

1928 Weill die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny opera)

1934 Shostakovich Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

1945 Britten Peter Grimes

1957 Bernstein West Side Story

Tosca is a bit of a cheat as it was first performed at the start of 1900 and therefore written before; however, most of Puccini’s operas were written in the 20thC and Tosca is his best. Strauss is in there twice not because I think he’s the best but because the two works are utterly different representing two distinct trends in 20thC music. The four greatest and most performed 20thC composers of operas remain Puccini, Janacek, Strauss and Britten. (See also About opera)

I make no apologies for West Side Story; the tunes are totally memorable and the orchestration brilliant, quite modern in its dissonance.

The next list is rather of pieces I listen to in my living room and kitchen and have not necessarily ever heard performed live, though I’d like to. This is not intended aa a list of the greatest non-operatic works of the 20thC or of significant historic milestones. It is an honest list of CDs I actually play regularly for pleasure, recordings of music that happens to have been written in the 20thC. You may find you know a lot of these pieces without having necessarily thought of them as 20thC classical music. You will probably also find my taste very conventional. Many of these pieces I have known and loved for decades as many other music-lovers and concert-goers have too. My whole point in writing this is to argue that the best of 20thC classical music is not just for pretentious nerds but is genuinely enjoyable for the cultivated masses.

1901 Rachmaninov Piano concerto 2

1904 Mahler Kindertotenlieder

1908 Debussy Images for orchestra

1908 Ives Unanswered question

1910 Debussy Preludes book 1, for piano

1910 Ravel Pavane (orchestra version)

1912 Prokofiev Piano concerto 1

1913 Stravinsky Rite of Spring

1914 Holst Planets

1915 Sibelius Symphony 5

1916 Debussy Sonata for flute viola and harp

1917 Prokofiev Symphony 1 “Classical”

1919 Elgar Cello concerto

1920 Vaughan Williams The Lark ascending

1920 Milhaud Le Boeuf sur le toit

1924 Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue

1924 Shostakovich Symphony 1

1926 Janacek Sinfonietta

1931 Ravel Piano concerto in G

1933 Shostakovich Piano concerto 1 with trumpet

1934 Prokofiev Lieutenant Kijé suite

1936 Barber Adagio for strings

1936 Bartok Music for strings, percussion + celesta

1936 Orff Carmina Burana

1937 Shostakovich Symphony 5

1938 Stravinsky Concerto “Dumbarton Oaks”

1939 Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez

1940 Prokofiev Piano sonata 6

1943 Britten Serenade for tenor, horn and strings

1944 Copland Appalachian Spring

1944 Prokofiev Symphony 5

1945 Strauss Metamorphosen

1945 Villa Lobos Bachianana brasiliera 5

1946 Stravinsky Concerto for strings (Basel)

1948 Messiaen Turangalila

1948 Shostakovich Violin concerto 1

1948 Strauss Vier letzte Lieder (4 last songs)

1959 Britten Nocturne

1960 Shostakovich String quartet 8

1969 Shostakovich Symphony 14

1977 Pärt Tabula rasa

1987 Tavener Protecting veil

1991 Messiaen Eclairs sur l'au-delà

This week, exceptionally, I have been to the Bozar to listen to two concerts of 20thC classical music.

On Sunday I saw Valery Gergiev and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in a programme of music from 1903 to 1965. First they played Dutilleux: “Métaboles” which I had never heard, I would describe it as a bit like West Side Story without the tunes. Then there was Leonidas Kavakos in Sibelius: Violin concerto, which I don’t know well. The solo playing was fantastic and the piece typical of Sibelius in the way it built up gradually to climaxes. The main attraction for me was Prokofiev: Symphony 5 which I know well. Gergiev is always superb in the Russian repertoire. He brought electrifying clarity to the many-layered finale. The hall was packed and enthusiastic.

Yesterday I saw the famous modern Ensemble Intercontemporain from Paris who were to have been conducted by their founder Pierre Boulez, but George Benjamin came instead. The hall was less than half full and subdued. They played two pieces by composers I’d never even heard of, Donatoni: Tema and Borowski: Second (a brand new work with the composer in attendance), then Boulez: Eclat/Multiples and Schoenberg: Suite. This was me subjecting myself to the modern in a spirit of discovery. True to form the three pieces in the first half were atonal and tuneless, the main interest being unusual combinations of instruments producing curious sounds eg piano, celesta, xylophones, tubular bells, harp, guitar, mandolin, massed violas, assorted brass and woodwind. I found the Boulez more interesting and got into the first part “Eclat” being literally splinters of sound, but the second part “Multiples” went on for too long before stopping abruptly. I read afterwards that it is one of his famous “works in progress” and gets longer as the years go by. Oddly enough after all that the Schoenberg in the second half seemed like light relief. Everything is relative, I suppose. The Suite is for three strings, three clarinets and a piano. Written in 1926 it still has a clear structure, feet-tapping rhythms and recognizable patterns of notes (sort of distorted tunes); it’s strange but enjoyable.

So there you are, I went out with an open mind and open ears to listen to a lot of pieces I didn’t know and found as usual that I get on better with music from the first half of the 20thC, even old Schoenberg !

Listening to twentieth century classical music doesn’t have to be about making an effort though, there are plenty of pieces, especially from its first fifty years, which are for everyone simply to enjoy.

About the Hospice du Grand Saint Bernard

I have just spent three nights at the Hospice du Grand Saint Bernard. St Bernard started providing refuge to travellers there in 1050, so in a sense it is the oldest mountain hut in the Alps, yet it is quite unlike the mountain huts described in my last post.

The Hospice is built on the Great St Bernard Pass at 2469m and at that altitude is snowbound from September to June. The pass links the Val d’Aosta in Italy to the Valais or Rhône Valley in Switzerland. It therefore lay on the most direct route from Rome to London. The Romans built a road over it and some of the columns marking the miles still survive, notably at Bourg St Pierre, the last settlement before ascending the pass on the Swiss side, some 24 Roman miles out from Martigny which was an important Roman town in the Rhône valley. One can only wonder whether the climate was more clement in those days making it possible and worth their while to build the road instead of going a much longer way round. The pass was dedicated to Jupiter or Jove and as such before being renamed after St Bernard was called the Montjoux pass in French. Many ancient ex-votos addressed in Latin to Jupiter for protection have been found along it.

The pass has always been dangerous, particularly avalanche-prone in certain key passages and subject to fog at the top on up to 200 days a year. Also in the Middle Ages it was a favourite haunt of brigands ready to rob and kill travellers. Apart from being a significant trade (and smuggling) route it was the route for pilgrims travelling from England to Rome, the Via Francigena. It was a long hard slog. From Bourg St Pierre it is 800m up and back down and 24 km in distance to the first settlement in Italy, Bourg St Rhémy. Travellers and pilgrims who were mainly on foot could also die of exhaustion and exposure.

Bernard de Menthon was born into a noble family by lake Annecy in Savoie but chose to enter the church and became the archdeacon at Aosta. He realized something had to be done to protect the travellers and so organized the building of the Hospice, that is a place providing hospitality, refuge, half way along the route, right at the top of the pass where the weather was worst and people were most tired. He also saw to the elimination of the brigands. In the iconography he is shown, for example in paintings in the large church attached to the Hospice, with one foot on a defeated prostrate monstrous man with horns whom he has set in chains.

The Hospice continued to be enlarged and consolidated over the centuries becoming a large and actually quite forbidding looking set of four storey high blocks built of extremely thick walls and set on either side of the road with a covered bridge connecting them.

As late as the 1930s there were still as many as 25 “”chanoines” or canons in permanent residence. They are not actually monks as they do not live in recluse but in permanent contact with the outside world. Anybody turning up would be given a free meal and a bed for the night. If word came in that some were in distress on the way up, collapsed, lost in the fog, hit by avalanche, they would go out in all weathers, assisted from the 18thC by the famous St Bernard dogs to look for them and fetch them in, whoever they were, no questions asked in a gesture of purest Christianity.

Basically it was the church engaged in a huge act of charity demonstrating faith through good works. And it still is.

In 1968 the Swiss and Italians completed a 6km tunnel down at 1900m right under the pass and Hospice. If you wanted to get from one side to the other during the nine month winter, there was strictly no need any more to brave the pass.

And yet the Hospice lives on. Those who go there now during the months when the road is closed to traffic go there not out of necessity but of desire to be in the high mountains to seek out nature and themselves in a special place. So too it was in my case.

Together with seven other French ski-tourers and a guide we stepped out of our minibus at the car park next to the tunnel entrance which marks the end of the road as far as the Hospice is concerned. From here on no motorized transport is allowed and you have to proceed on foot, that is using touring skis or snow shoes.

By the way the Hospice lays in all its winter supplies before the road closes in September and takes only one helicopter drop in March before the road reopens in June. They have to manage resourecs carefully and get visitors to take away their own rubbish. Miraculously, for a place at this altitude, they have a spring not far away which delivers a constant supply of delicious fresh water.

To begin with the ascent is leisurely following the summer road as far as a small stone shelter reached after several km. The way then follows the side of the torrent more steeply up the encouragingly named “Combe des Morts” (something like “Dead Man’s Gulch”) where over the centuries many have died victims to avalanche. Fortunately this section is marked by posts, for we soon found ourselves in the thickest of fogs with visibility down to less than 10m at one point. Thus we didn’t see the Hospice till we were right up against its walls. It had taken us two and a half hours to get there.

Once having stowed our skis and boots in the cellar we went back upstairs and along a vaulted corridor with stone flagged floor to the communal room still known as “le Poêle” (“the Stove”) as in former times it was the only heated room in the Hospice. Here we were greeted by one of the chanoines wearing a short white smock made of light fleece over a pair of jeans and with a simple wooden cross hanging from his neck. He offered us a most welcome bowl of hot tea and asked us how our ascent had gone and told us one or two things useful to first time visitors. Our dormitory was comfortable and a short walk from some hot showers and indoor loo: as mountain huts go, this was pretty luxurious.

After a good if not gastronomic dinner the chanoine informed us of some evening activities, there would be a slide-show about the Hospice and the museum would be open. They are proud of their almost thousand years of history and want visitors to learn about it.

We visited the museum where one of the star exhibits is Barry, a now stuffed St Bernard dog who in the 19thC saved 42 lives. The famous dogs can no longer be seen at the Hospice during winter, they are looked after by the Barry Foundation in Martigny. Since nowadays visitors deliberately ski up to the Hospice they tend to be eqipped with avalanche victim detection devices. These are known as ARVA in France, DVA in Switzerland and earlier as BarryVox which was the name given to the first model developed by the Swiss Army in the 50’s. If the chanoines have to go out looking for avalanche victims these days they use the modern electronic device. Nonetheless a French guide in residence is currently training a Collie to be a rescue dog.

The next day we were blessed with a clear blue sky day and climbed up and skied back down Mont Fauchon (2912m) in Italy.

Afterwards at 5.30 we attended afternoon mass, or eucharisty, celebrated not in the beautifully and elaborately decorated church but below it in the bare though heated crypt. This daily service is at the heart of life in the Hospice. The three resident chanoines and deaconess are joined also by visiting deacons and priests in the officiating and other lay visitors are invited to do the readings and provide musical accompaniment to the songs. The resulting shared event is informal while respecting the structure of mass. On the first afternoon I found the sermon beautifully preached by the Prior, José, and quite thought provoking.

Thus a group of people had withdrawn from the hurly burly of the modern world to make the effort of walking up to an isolated place of a timeless human dimension, close to the beauty and overwhelming force of Nature, to reflect together on the nature of human relationships, love and charity.

The example of the chanoines still honouring a century-old tradition of providing hospitality to those passing their way, whatever their background and belief, is inspiring, it is Christianity at its best.

About mountain huts

Last summer I stayed in four different mountain huts in three countries, which gave me an opportunity to start writing the chapter on huts promised some time ago in the post About mountains. I never quite finished it, but have been spurred on to do so now by having just stayed in the Hospice du Grand Saint Bernard about which I shall write soon in my next post.

The word “hut” comes from the German speaking Alpine countries where these buildings are called a “Hütte” but they are usually much bigger and more robust than the English “hut” would suggest. In the Romance language countries they are called a refuge (“refuge”, “rifugio”) which I think is a more elegant expression conveying their purpose of providing the mountaineer with a safe haven in a storm and let’s face it the mountains can quickly become a very hostile environment so somewhere warm, dry and cozy where you can shelter and spend the night is a great boon, even essential.

Kugy, the great Austro-Hungarian discoverer of the Julian Alps wrote that you only really get to know a mountain when you have slept on it. He generally used to bivouac himself as he was exploring at a time when huts had not yet been built where he went, but his phrase still holds good for the less intrepid like me who prefer to sleep indoors at altitude, if only because it means carrying a hell of a lot less stuff with you up the hill (sleeping bag, mat, possibly tent, food, cooker etc).

You can still appreciate the silence and isolation before turning in and wake up to find yourself in an amazingly unspoilt location.

Mountain huts as we know them started appearing in the late 19th and early 20th C when gentleman and lady climbers first hit on the notion that Alpine walking and climbing were a fine way of enjoying nature, a thought which had never really occured before to the god-fearing locals who saw the mountains instead as a potentially rather dangerous place which one had to put up with when looking after grazing sheep and cows or out hunting chamois and the like.

The main purpose of staying in an Alpine hut is to enable you to make an early start already at altitude on a route which may be very long to complete or is likely to become dangerous later in the day because of deteriorating snow and ice conditions as things warm up or because of the risk of an afternoon storm. However, linking together several different huts can become a pleasant itinerary in itself, obviating the need to make a long descent back into the valley once having painstakingly gained altitude.

Alex, my long-standing mountaineering companion and myself find ourselves subtly moving with age from the first into the second category of hut visitors.

This July we hauled ourselves up to the Oberaletschhütte at 2640m, perched above the glacier of the same name. The approach used to be over the glacier itself but as it has receeded leaving a dirty mess of rocks and rushing torrents among the occasional snow and ice, a new path was constructed a few years ago clinging to the moutainside above it and rejoicing in the name of Panoramaweg. It was indeed a spectacular walk but with our heavy bags we were well and truly knackered by the time we got to the hut and we were also too late to bag one of the more comfortable lower bunks.

Before dinner we took the time to gather information on possible routes for the next day with the hut keeper and a group of young English climbers. The routes looked and sounded iffier than we had expected. The glacier itself did not offer an immediate enticing stroll over snow but a slow progress over stones and boulders littering it for several kilometres. Even to get down onto it we would have to descend a cliff using a long metal ladder. The alternative was an unmarked scramble up a ridge with a long scree downhill back to the hut path, always assuming you found the right way down.

That evening the hut had organized a folk music evening featuring four accordeonists and a double bassist, whose instrument had been helicoptered in. Music, merriment, dancing and later yodelling proceeded into the small hours of the morning, accompanied by plenty of beer and impenetrable Swiss German dialect.

When we surfaced, bleary-eyed the next morning we looked at each other and had to admit we had slept badly, felt dictinctly unfit and didn’t fancy our chances on either itinerary A or B. So we decided to go back down the same way to a rather attractive looking small hotel we has passed on the way up, from where we could do an easy summit, the Sparhorn, the next day. And off we tottered at a leisurely pace admiring the view over the glacier and later across to the distant Matterhorn.

In so doing we had made the hut itself our final destination and it had indeed been fun to spend the night up there with the local entertainment. We resolved that our next outing would seek to do no more than to walk lightweight up to a hut and return to the valley by a different route.

Thus in September we had a weekend away to visit the Cabane de Valsorey, this time a hut in French speaking Switzerland. You can use this hut to climb the Grand Combin, but on a wet weekend late in the season nobody there was going to go any further the next day. The Cabane stands in a fairly desolate location at 3037m overlooking the Valsorey glacier. That represents quite a long walk up from Bourg St Pierre at 1640m where we left the car. We made it in good time just before it started to rain and after eating our picnic we retired for an almighty siesta in the single large dormitory above the main room and kitchen downstairs. Valsorey is quite small and is run by two women. There were nine of us staying that night, all the others were Swiss, though one young couple had decided they wanted to live somewhere exotic... Burnley, Lancashire.

As the rain beat down outside it was good to be warm and dry indoors, reading what books we could find or looking out of the window at the changing view as the clouds crept down and then lifted again.

The next day we were all walking the same route at our different paces, it was another newly constructed panoramic path, though views were limited because of the cloud cover. We kept seeing the younger group we had chatted to the previous evening as we overtook each other pausing in different places. Huts are a great place to establish mountaineering cameraderie.

The best hut I stayed in last summer was in the Carnic Alps in Friuli, Italy. Clara and I returned from the pleasant cool of Edinburgh to the unspeakable sweltering muggy August heat of Monfalcone which plunged me into a vile mood. That evening I had an altercation with a cantankerous old woman who complained I was standing in her way on the cycle track part of the pavement: I told her to go and die. Clara found this a bit strong and told me I had better take myself off to the cool of the mountains to calm down.

So the next morning I was on the 7 am bus bound for Tolmezzo and beyond.

My objective was to climb the highest peak in the Carnic Alps, Coglians 2788 m. The bus would only get me to 800m leaving a rather long walk in to the starting hut Marinelli at 2120m. It turned out to be totally off the beaten track, as most hikers come up by shorter routes. I met only two people on that long way up. Mid-week the place was fairly quiet, there were only fifteen of us staying over. Once arrived and having dumped my rucksack in my rather comfortable room I sat outside on the terrace with an Apfelschorle and asked to borrow the guitar for a strum. I fell into conversation with Ugo, a now retired local pastry cook and former mountain rescue man who was a regular visitor to the hut and had known its present warden Caterina since she was a little girl, daughter of the previous warden. He was a guitarist himself and also very interested in English literature. I got him to point out all the peaks we could see in the vast panorama from the terrace.

At dinner I was at Ugo’s table with a talkative Roman whose family was originally from Friuli and his much younger girlfriend who he wanted to show the region to. The food was excellent, pasta of course to start with and then salsiccia, polenta and wild mushrooms all with copious regional red wine, followed by Apfelstrudel (you can work up quite an appetite doing a 1300m ascent). At another table was a group of local men in their sixties maybe even seventies, talking Friulano, which qualifies as a language as it is just one dialect too far away to still be recognizable as Italian. In fact the evning became something of a crash course in Friulano because some jokes Ugo had told us in Italian he later retold in Friulano to the old guys.

After the food they got going in a capella Friulano folk songs. It was quite wonderful. I contributed to the musical evening by doing a few standards on the guitar and continued with the staff who now appeared after the washing up was over and a round of liqueur was offered on the house. Finally we went outside to look at the stars and after a while Caterina asked me to play something. “Caruso” seemed appropriate (as I write this I note that Dalla sadly passed away last week).

The next morning I said a fond goodbye and set off up Coglians. It turned out to be quite a slog as parts were very steep and sometimes over quite loose ground. At the top I met the party of six old Friulani who had got there before me.

I came back down to stay on the Austrian side at the Wolayerseehütte. It was a pleasant enough hut but the experience was quite different. This one lies on a popular route walked by German speakers on the other side of the border. They purposefully walk from one hut to the next moving Eastwards along the chain. So it was very full and businesslike, none of the small local and family atmosphere of Marinelli and the feeling that local regulars had come up simply becuse it was a great place to spend an evening. The food inevitably was nowhere near as good as in Italy.

The next day I walked a section of the Carnic high route westwards having left the crowd at the hut gathering to move on east. I met no one for three hours. It’s quite easy to find that real mountain solitude if you don’t follow the herd.

I guess that over the years I must have stayed in about fifty different Alpine huts in France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. The variety is immense. The French, at least those of the Club Alpin Français seem to go in for the “harder than thou approach”: the experience is not genuine if you’re not roughing it. The worst one I’ve stayed in is the Refuge des Ecrins at 3175m: a bare main room, uncomfortable dormitories, bad food on plastic plates and an abominable outdoor squat toilet where your doings drop straight off a cliff. At the same altitude in the Südtirol you can stay in the Becherhaus 3195m with a wood panelled and nicely decorated cozy Stube rather like in some moutain farmer’s home, eat good food, and sleep in nice little bedrooms for four. Staying in a hut doesn’t have to be an unpleasant experience. In fact at the Becher there was a group of jolly young locals who had come up all the way just for a good walk and the laugh of having an evening and night up there in a group of friends.

There is something quite magical about a mountain hut that gets it right and offers you a comfortable homely experience of a small group of people who have all made a big effort to be in a special place where they are safely protected from the harsh night outside.

About landscape painting

Recently I went to see the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy, “A bigger picture”. Hockney, now in his seventies, remains active and prolific. Most of the work has been created in the last ten years and a lot of it was done specifically with the show in mind, especially for the large walls available to him. All the paintings on show are landscapes, revealing Hockney as a proud defender of a great English painterly tradition going back to the likes of Constable, Turner and Cotman. Most of these landscapes are of Yorkshire and as such deeply resonant to me as a fellow Yorkshireman. Hockney makes a strong case for figurative painting as a pleasure to the eye. Pretentious intellectual snobs may dismiss it as neither difficult nor challenging but they forget that art is intended not only to provoke but also to produce beauty.

The paintings are a celebration of nature in its wonderful ordinariness close to home. This is art that makes us look again at our surroundings and enjoy them more. It is also the art of a real skilled craftsman (Hockney cheekily remarked that he had personally made all the works on show, unlike he implied some of his contemporaries). Hockney is a fine draughtsman with a delight in colour. He has created some huge works (several metres across) made up of many canvases which fit together in a grid producing an effect that is quite physical, you feel yourself entering into the painted woodland.

Hockney has also worked hard at catching the changing seasons, doing the same landscape in spring, summer, autumn and winter (we are reminded of the series of paintings by Monet, eg of haystacks). He wants to show us the paradoxical permanence of ever changing nature in its repeated cycles. It is as if in old age after decades of having painted a great variety of subjects, nature is now what matters most to him and he has been fired with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to get all of this down while he still has the time. Because of this the paintings have a communicative spontaneity. Some may find the show repetitive, but I found the cumulative result makes landscape painting something far from static.

Some of my favourite painters were specialists in landscapes, I think in particular of Cézanne, Monet and Van Gogh (there’s a few references to Van Gogh in the show, eg hayfields and swirling blossoms).

To begin with, in the history of Western art, landscape was only valued as a backdrop to the human interest, the madonna and child or whatever the subject was. In one of my favourite Brueghels, “Hunters in the snow”, the landscape is magnificent, it structures the painting and is an important part of it, but ultimately it is only there to provide a framework for the human activity. It is also in fact totally imaginary, being a composite of familiar Flemish villages and Alpine vistas remembered from the road to Italy.

I suppose some of the first landscapes for landscapes’ sake were done by such 17thC Dutch painters as Van Ruisdael. These are flat landscapes with great lowering brooding skies and the odd windmill or belfry. In fact it was at this period that the Dutch word “landschap” was imported into the English language to describe this kind of painting. In a way these landscapes which are based on local reality are an extension of Dutch Golden Age genre paintings, that is scenes from everyday life, such as people in taverns, church interiors, servants pouring milk. Unlike their Italian counterparts painting biblical and mythological scenes on commission for the church and nobility, the Dutch painters were seeking to sell pleasing scenes to merchants who could relate to the subject matter.

A further boost to landscape painting came in the early 19thC with the Romantic movement’s admiration of nature. This is when the dramatic natural scene really takes off in such works as Caspar David Friedrich’s strangely remote and intimidating mountains. This is also the period of Constable and Turner. Slightly later, in France, Corot and the Barbizon painters start taking their easels outside to paint countryside scenes not far from Paris and this feeds directly into the ever popular work of Monet, Sisley, Pissaro and the like. Landscape for a time becomes the dominant genre in the 19thC. Then Cézanne starts to analyse the geometric structure of the view and Van Gogh to simplify the lines and colours stamping his own personality on it. From there it is a short step to Kirchner’s bold expressionist Alpine landscapes, but the interest of artists is already attracted to other more urban subjects and is beginning to veer off into abstraction. So it is quite refreshing after so many decades of neglect to see artists like Hockney return to landscape painting.

The bulk of my own paintings over the years have been landscapes. For the artist a landscape is a convenient subject, it’s there for free and it keeps still. it doesn’t move about as much as a person. As a painter you just have to choose your viewpoint, set up and get on with it. It isn’t of course quite that simple, as outdoors the light keeps on changing with the rise and fall of the sun and the passing of clouds. It tends to change much faster than you can get it down. One technique to deal with this challenge is seen in Greenaway’s film “The Draughtsman’s Contract”, where the artist is commissioned in the late 17thC by a nobleman to do a series of views of his country estate. He works on each picture in stages during a given time slot. I have often myself done a sketch on day one and then coloured it on successive days at the same time of day. That of course depends on the weather not having changed.

What I describe here holds for working in the field only from observation. You can of course make a few preliminary sketches and then go away and work from memory back in the studio. Before the impressionists and the outdoors movement, that was actually the usual technique, not least given the size of canvas worked on and the taste for fairly precise brushstrokes requiring time for the paint to dry before continuing. Hockney has used both techniques, working outdoors from observation and in the studio from memory, and you can compare the results in the show.

I myself prefer to paint from observation. For a start it’s a great excuse for sitting still outdoors and since I’m painting on a small scale with watercolours there’s no imperative reason to be indoors to do it, unless it’s really cold and I’m looking out of the window. Actually it’s the process of making the picture which I find as rewarding as the take home souvenir. It’s being forced to really observe and allow myself to become impregnated with the scene. During the drawing It’s about making countless decisions of my own on how to convert three dimensions into two instead of merely copying the flattening of the camera lens. During the colouring it’s about how I attempt to convey the impression of colour I perceive. Even from one position we see from a variety of viewpoints as we move our eyes and change our focal distance. We subjectively highlight certain shapes and patches of colour which become for us focal points even if in terms of overall surface area they are insignificant. How often have you taken a photograph and been disappointed with it because it is not what you thought you saw ?

When they are successful I find my landscapes closer to how I remember a place than a photograph, in the sense that they convey a certain feeling as much as what is inevitably an imprecise graphic record.

Here are six of my landscapes.

Cévennes, France

Julian Alps, Italy

Hermanus, South Africa

Elba, Italy

Hvar, Croatia

Dolomites, Italy

About my reading in 2011

About my reading in 2011

Looking at the list of books I read In 2011, I seem to have increased the share of non-fiction, though not greatly compared to 2010.

My big achievement in this area was to read Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” which I had failed to finish on a previous attempt. The trick is not to get stuck on the pseudo mathematics “let x be..” and the intimidating looking formulae. You just skip over them because he nearly always immediately goes over the same argument again in less abstract and plainer English. He is very convincing and it’s hard to diagree with him, so you end up really wishing his policies were being acted on more right now. The great thing about Keynes is that he sees money not as an end in itself but as a means to satisying needs. For him the real purpose of economic policy should be to provide employment and this is too important a task merely to be left to the markets and speculators, for they fail at it. There is a clear rôle for the state. In our twenty-first century, post-cold-war world of roaring unfettered capitalism, that is of course an unwelcome message to big finance. But Keynes’ time will come again, the economies of the developed world are in free-fall, and his policies are what we need in order to return to a fairer world of shared prosperity. Not that Keynes was a socialist by any means, but he grasped why certain economic behaviour is actually counter-productive, even if that may seem counter-intuitive.

An easier but very enlightening read on contemporary economics is Lanchester’s “Whoops” a great explanation of how we got where we are in the current crisis; but offering no quick-fix solution, although he clearly points in the direction of my own preferred option: nationalize the banks, because they have failed us, lost the plot and are starving the real economy of its lifeblood.

In the popular science department, I read Deutscher’s “Through the language glass” a potentially intriguing book for a linguist on the subject of how the language we speak may influence the way we think. In the end he spends most of his time on just two examples: the well known fact that words for colours are not an exact match between languages; and the fascinating case of some remote tribal languages that base directional information not on the changing egocentric view of the speaker (eg left, right) but on a fixed geographical framework (eg north, south).

I was going to read all of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” but somehow ran out of steam half-way through volume 2 around about Justinian. Volume 1 is a cracking good read though.

I read a couple more books by De Botton “Status Anxiety” and “Architecture of Happiness” but I’m starting to find him a little inconsequential; although he writes elegantly and makes some good points, he can give you the feeling of lacking an overall compelling argument which leads you to a conclusion.

Weightier indeed was J.S. Mill“On Liberty” and “On Utilitarianism”, two basic texts of political philosophy.

My Hellenist friend Umberto gave me a good essay by Grosdent “La Grèce existe-t-elle?”, which is amusingly written in the style of a Platonic dialogue. The subject turns out to be quite topical with the ongoing crisis (Greek word of course) in Greece. Grosdent takes to task the Western idealizing vision of an Ancient Greece that probably never was but which causes disappointment when confronted with the Modern Greece. He argues that the modern is indeed a descendant of the ancient, it’s just that we were a bit naive about the ancient.

Rousseau’s “Confessions” I guess I should still include under non-fiction, though they have clear literary pretensions. They are in fact two books. The first is quite disarmingly frank and a fascinating read. In the second book his confessions start to get more paranoid and self-justificatory. However, while on the subject of himself as a young man he has no particular axe to grind and this is a refreshingly sincere warts-and-all autobiography. I certainly frequently thought “what a prat”, but this perhaps is the point as he challenges us into questioning some of our own unreflecting behaviour, certainly when young and more spontaneous. Clearly the biggest problem with Rousseau is that he gave away his own children for adoption and then proceeded to pontificate in vast tomes on education. What a prat! I’m sorry but there’s no way around that one.

I also read “Le contrat social” which like many French monuments is not all it’s cracked up to be. This short text is a bit overly descriptive of existing systems and skimpy on ground-breaking political thought; it is rather lightweight compared to Hobbes and Mill. The French intellectual establishment is good at self-publicity, whereas the English, in so far as it exists, tends to forget its own heroes.

I also re-read some of Pascal’s “Pensées”, actually as it’s name suggests a collection of often brilliant insights though never mustered into a coherent whole.

I turn now to fiction. Last year I got seriously into audio-books for very long car journeys, so one or two of these titles were actually listened to rather than read, but I think we can still count that in this survey.

I re-read Dostoievski’s “Crime and Punishent”. I still think a great book, but it doesn’t get any less strange and let’s be frank, Raskolnikov must be pretty unhinged to kill just out of curiosity.

New to me on the classics front was Defoe’s “Moll Flanders”, a ripping yarn whose resourecful heroine endears herself to the reader notwithstanding her breaking of several moral codes.

Stendhal’s “Chartreuse de Parme” is another epic adventure story, this one also offering a study of ambition and of the Italian psyche.

Another French classic was Balzac’s “Lys dans la vallée” which is worth persevering with through all the descriptive passages for its rather unexpected outcome which puts the rest into a different perspective.

The author I read most of last year and who was new to me was Emile Zola. I listened to the early murder story “Thérèse Raquin” and read six of the series of twenty novels about related characters from the same large family, the Rougon-Maquart, living in France in the mid 19thC, so almost contemporary with him. Zola wanted a real setting for his stories or “natural” as he called it, but to our modern minds it is more often what we would call urban and industrial. He researched each novel carefully and includes fascinating descriptions of how things work rather than the rather boring superficial descriptions of how things look typical of Balzac. In fact the setting takes on a life of its own and plays a leading rôle as one of the characters, an infernal machine often consuming and destroying the working man. Thus Germinal is about coal-mining and an ill-fated strike, la Bête humaine about the railways and living with a murder on your conscience, l’Assomoir about working class alcoholism, l’Oeuvre unsuccessful artists contemporary with the impressionists, Nana about the theatre and high-class prostitution, and l’Argent about the stock exchange and speculation. These seem surprisingly modern subjects for novels over a century old. In terms of plot, I find Zola refreshing, instead of yet another love story, improbable action packed adventure or whodunnit, the interest relates to the outcome of a more down to earth drama. Zola’s characters are frequently weak and driven by money and/or lust. His dialogues are convincingly real. I like him, so I may yet read the other fourteen.

After all last year I read my 17th and 18th Graham Geene the early “England made me” set mainly in Stockholm and the late “The Human Factor”, a realistic cold-war counter-espionage story. Perhaps, with their eye for sordid local detail and what really motivates people, Greene and Zola have a lot in common.

And so, finally, to recent fiction.

On a Jonathan Coe recommendation I bought the acclaimed Japanese novelist’s Murakami’s “Wind-up bird chronicle”, which like many books I buy would probably have adorned my shelf unread for a long time had it not been for a theatrical adaptation of it I was going to see at the Edinburgh Festival. Anything Japanese brings with it a certain sense of other-worldliness, something for which I think the expression “cultural difference” is too polite to render the utterly different take on life. Coe said he admired Murakami’s writing for the way in which everyday life serves in it as a trigger for profound insights into the human experience, which is in his way what Coe does in his writing. Only Coe is Western and Murakami is Japanese. So Wind-up bird turns out to be startlingly original, certainly for a Western reader, and often quite odd, even unsatisfying, but definitely not boring and sometimes actually quite poetic in its imagery in a way that stays with you afterwards.

The American Jonathan Frantzen has a huge reputation, and I loved “The Corrections” written in 2001. He is not very prolific and his next novel “Freedom” only appeared in 2010. I think it is good but not as good as “the Corrections”. I also had troubles with it stylistically and I suspect that his choice of a simple English close to the colloquial American vernacular will make it age quickly. Still it is very much a novel for today about what is wrong with America today.

Mathhew Kneale’s “English Passengers”, which won the Whitbread prize for a first novel 10 years ago, is a styslistic tour de force being written in as many different styles as its various narrators. It’s a great many-layered story, both funny and moving, initially about how a Manx smugglers’ ship gets chartered for a crackpot vicar’s quest to find the Garden of Eden, but ultimately about 19thC British colonial racist treatment of Tasmanian aborigines. The ending is brilliant.

Finally let me talk about Joe Powell’s “Breaking of eggs”. The title comes from Stalin’s famous quote comparing making a revolution to making an omelette, “it can’t be done without...” The hero is a Polish born communist sympathizer living in Paris who used to make his living writing tourist guides about Eastern Europe. The fall of the Berlin wall and state socialism changes all of that and he embarks on a journey of political and self-discovery, realizing he has been living in a world of self-delusion and that many lives including his own were broken by the old system. It is a fascinating story written in a thoughtful, sensitive, uderstated way that evokes a huge chunk of post-war history we have been hastily brushing under the carpet or summarizing in convenient slogans.

So that’s what I have been reading over the last year. I hope you may be stimulated to try some of these titles for yourself.