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.

About... About being here !5)

Dear reader,

Welcome to season 5 of about being here.

Last year’s posts sort of tailed off as I became more interested in drawing and painting than writing.

Or maybe it’s just that blogging is far more of a long rainy winter’s evening type activity which in the spring and summer is overtaken by more active and less reflective pursuits.

Be that as it may I did actually reach last year’s objective of ten posts, so I’ll stick with that for this year.

Enjoy.

ABH

About the euro and speculators

One of the reasons behind the creation of the euro was that member states were fed up of their currencies coming under constant speculative attack, the ultimate aim of which was to destroy the ERM (European exchange rate mechanism). It seemed safer to band together in a single currency so as to be stronger together and thereby avoid the weakest in the pack being picked off by predators.

Twenty or so years later it is now the euro countries’ sovereign debt that finds itself under speculative attack from the obscure and modern vindictive gods who are collectively known as “the markets”, probably with the ulterior motive of destroying the euro itself. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Maybe the answer is in turn to band together in a single debt to avoid the weakest being picked off, that is to issue euro-bonds.

At present, however, this is a non-starter as the self-styled virtuous northerners are not ready to subsidize their perceived profligate southern partners. If views on this are to change it would require a degree of “economic governance” or enforced fiscal integration and discipline that is incompatible with current forms of democratic control.

I have recently been reading Keynes’ “General theory” (1936) of which many passages still seem highly relevant. A few quotes will illustrate: “A conventional valuation which is established as the outcome of the psychology of a large number of ignorant individuals is liable to change violently as the result of a sudden fluctuation of opinion due to factors which do not really make much difference to the prospective yield.” It is on these fluctuations that the speculator makes his profit. He is concerned “not with making superior long-term forecasts of the probable yield of an investment over its whole life, but with foreseeing changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the general public.” Keynes concludes that “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

Speculators then play a game of making short term gains on fluctuations in price that feed on often irrational expectations. They are in no way interested in making a long term investment that gives them a slow return as an income, merely in making a quick profit on the difference between buying and selling prices. They are not interested in the good of the economy and how that benefits you and me. They do not care for economic fundamentals, they are only interested in guessing in which direction the herd will next stampede before it does. Mass movement is indeed now reinforced by such things as computer programmes that automatically sell securities when they fall below a certain price. Then there are rules on the kinds of assets which banks have to hold as capital which oblige them to off-load bonds when their rating falls below a certain level.

Speculators thrive on uncertainty. It is in their interest to spread rumours and provoke wild swings as it’s on the difference between the ups and the downs on which they make their money, not from any reasoned long-term investment in what is economically sound. Speculators are like fraudsters who take out an insurance policy on a house and then burn it down to make a claim. Only the house they are setting fire to is the one in which you and I live. We need to lock them up so we can live in peace and security.

Keynes argues that speculation is the disadvantage of having a system geared towards liquidity; that is the ability to sell anything at short notice to turn it into cash. He jokingly argues that to deter speculation, purchases of securities should be made more like marriage, difficult to render asunder. The much debated idea of a financial transaction tax in part seeks to slow down the mad spiral of speculative transactions and would be a step in the right direction if it could be made to work. Only without all countries on board it would merely displace financial business from one continent to another. The financial transaction tax also has the attraction of taking money back off these wretched people for the benefit of the state which previously bailed them out. The financial sector of course who would have to pay the tax argues strongly against it. Instead of listening to the arguments of the “too big to fail” brigade we should consider what is best for the real economy. The truth is that the vast bulk, about 90%, of financial transactions in markets today are purely speculative.

Keynes was of course talking mainly about speculators’ behaviour on the stock market; the dilemma now is that this same behaviour is being applied to government borrowing, which intrinsically is a totally different form of financial activity and investment. Let me explain why.

Ever since ancient times states have tended to find the need to spend more money than they could levy through taxes and have therefore had to borrow. Initially this was often in order to fight wars. As notions of what the state was about evolved in the last century the purpose of borrowing became more to fund the providing of stimulus to the economy and a social safety net. Latterly however, it has also been to bail out the financial sector itself. Over the last three years because of this the average rate of OECD country endebtedness has risen from 78% to 92% of GDP. In the same way as in the past if the state didn’t borrow enough, it could lose the war, at present starved of cash it will probably likewise fail in these three modern aims. So basically by refusing to lend to sovereigns at a normal rate of interest the financial sector is shooting itself in the foot, by slowing down the economy and depriving itself of its life-belt.

Normally for a bank, the difference between lending to a sovereign and to a private company is what follows and this basic premise needs to be recalled during the current hysteria. Businesses can go bust so you may lose the money you lent them. Countries, however, do not usually go bankrupt: governments can make their citizens and businesses pay more taxes; or, quite simply, they can print more money (though that would have the effect of depreciating the monetary value of the loan in real terms, so creditors might not find it a good idea to lend to countries who tend to do this). Therefore, usually, lending money to a sovereign state is risk-free and should command a low rate of interest, whereas lending it to a private company is iffy and should command a high rate. So far so good, and for decades this was the basis for a cozy relationship between states and the financial sector that lent to them, which even includes the man in the street making a modest investment for a rainy day. Buying sovereign bonds as long as they give you a return higher than the rate of inflation represents a safe place to park savings and is an essential part of your portfolio: not sexy but reliable. This basic relationship grounded on confidence has now been shattered by the behaviour of speculators who have scared markets into losing that confidence.

Having lost interest in poorly performing shares speculators have turned their attention to bonds. The trouble is they treat bonds like shares, not for keeps and a slow return, but for buying and selling for a quick profit. They have introduced into the bond market an instability that just wasn’t there before, creating huge problems for states and the real economy. The old assumption that the sovereign will always pay has been undermined by hysterical talk that he might not repay your loan. It’s a bit as if suddenly, for no real reason other than a malicious rumour, Joe Bloggs’ bank suddenly becomes convinced he is not able to keep up his mortgage payments and so decides to double his rate of interest overnight because in their eyes he has become risky. As long as Joe Bloggs quitely was paying 3% he was perfectly solvent and could go on paying forever, now he has to pay 6% very soon he will be reposessed. The “markets” by demanding usury type rates of interest of perfectly viable states will inevitably force them into default. This bad-mouthing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are playing a very dangerous game and they need to be stopped for our general good.

How did we get here?

Firstly, as mentioned already, following the finacial crisis and subsequent recession shares seemed to be going all one way and were less of interest to speculators so they turned their attention to bonds.

To cause a stir and create uncertainty (as is their modus operandi), they started to put it about that ratios of public debt to GDP that had been high and a fact of life for decades were all of a sudden unsustainable, when in fact for some time now states and in particular euro area countries bound by the Stability and Growth Pact have been patiently working on bringing the public debt gradually down. Only unfortunately it had recently shifted back up because of the need to bail out a previously irresponsible financial sector which had got itself into a long-term mess by making too many bad loans for a short-term profit. It seems a bit rich that the very people who the generous taxpayers helped out should now roundly turn on states for their burgeoning debt which has been caused only by rescuing them in the first place. In fact it beggars belief, but this is the obscene truth.

First and foremost in rocking the boat are of course the ratings agencies. These same people, Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and co. are those who recommended investors to acquire sub-prime mortgage backed assets as triple A. Not only did they fail to see the financial crisis of 2008 coming they actually caused it. Quite why any creedence should be paid to these people is beyond me. And yet what they say moves markets. Even worse respecting their ratings is actually part of our banking capital adequacy rules. That needs to be changed immediately. We need a properly independent public body to recommend which sovereign bonds are investment grade, not some outfits owned in turn by the New York based financial sector.

Have you ever also stopped to wonder why it is that it is euro area sovereign debt which is under attack and not US debt, when in absolute terms US debt is bigger and in relative terms just as high ? It is true the Americans can print as many dollars as they like and so will always be laughing all the way to the bank, but as I said earlier a depreciating currency in itself is not a particularly good recommendation to invest in that country. No, actually apart from a slight downgrade by Moody’s last August when Congress came perilously close to not adopting the package that at the eleventh hour prevented a US default, a downgrade which was not actually commensurate with the risk, these American ratings agencies are staunchly patriotic.

It’s always the European countries they are gunning for. To put it simply, some Americans (and many British too) do not like the success of the euro in becoming the world’s sceond currency and challenging the dollar’s hegemony. If they could sink the euro that would suit them. More immediately though, by attacking the euro area, they divert attention from the parlous state of the US public finances and economy.

Let me hasten to add that oficially the American administration, rather than the private sector, is deeply worried about the euro as they realize a disaster in Europe would be bad news for the US economy.

Since I’ve shared one conspiracy theory with you, try also this one for size, think it over.

Following the end of the cold war and the crowing victory of capitalism over socialism, following the disappearance of an alternative widespread narrative to keep capitalism in check, the real big vested capitalist interests in the financial sector are greedy for more and more and more money and power. Let’s be frank this is where the real global power lies, many multinationals have a turnover bigger than the GDP of a medium-sized state. In fact big business and the financial sector would like to see the disappearance of the state altogether as it gets in the way of their freedom to do business, what with the state’s annoying tendency to tax them and curb their activities with rules and regulations. They conveniently forget that it has been the state that has boosted the economy for their benefit when the market has failed and that it is the state which has saved them from going under during the financial crisis.

No, they want to reduce the state. They lecture us that it is unsustainable, living beyond its means, profligate, irresponsible, that it cannot afford things which it actually already could when in was much poorer immediately after the war (education, health care, social benefits etc). What they are in fact against is redistribution away from their rich selves towards the poorer. It is not for the rich few, led by the speculators, to decide what public policy is, it is for democratically elected governments. We should not let ourselves be dictated to by them.

In fact their policies are wrong and self-defeating. In Keynesian terms what we need right now is not austerity and spending cuts but government stimulated consumption to boost employment if we are to avoid a serious recession. In the country where I live, Belgium there has been no government with powers to take new initiatives for over a year, so there have not been the same cuts as in other euro countries, and guess what, Belgium has the highest growth rate in the euro area.

So what of Greece ?

It’s true that Greece only entered the euro on the basis of falsified accounts which didn’t show the real position of its public finances and it should therefore never have joined. However, decision-makers at the time were happy to turn a blind eye (as indeed they had already done towards Italy’s and Belgium’s debt): it was politically expedient to let Greece in just in time for the launch of the notes and coinsin 2002, that way of the 15 EU member states at the time all 12 who wanted to be in (i.e. except United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden) could be.

The Germans later insisted on the Stability and Growth Pact to enforce fiscal discipline on euro members but that in turn soon lost all credibility when among the first not to meet it were Germany and France themselves who were let off its strictures.

I personally don’t think all of this matters much in the sense that the euro is a political project as much as an economic one and its creation was a supreme act of political faith and commitment to European integration, as much as a bold economic experiment. The numbers to a certain extent were window dressing based on theory rather than practice. Romano Prodi, the President of the Commission, once famously described the pact as “stupid” for not permitting expansionary economic policy to be pursued by governments when needed. He then had to come and eat humble pie before the finance ministers (I was there) but he wasn’t wrong.

The fact of the matter is as a currency the euro has retained its value well against the dollar for over a decade and has become the world’s second currency. A currency that is the accepted means of payment among 327 million people because of its sheer mass is not about to disappear overnight. Although sound public finance is one of the euro’s entry criteria, that doesn’t mean it’s about to implode because several of its members according to its own criteria do not have sound public finances. It may well depreciate even if it hasn’t done so much yet, but it’s not going to suddenly disappear just because it hasn’t been around for that long. There is this totally unrealistic hype that if a member defaults that’s the end of the euro. In the United States a number of states in the federation, including California, have technically been in default but that has not changed much about the dollar.

The notion that Greece might leave the euro is also absurd. There is no treaty provision for exit, the process of joining is described as “irrevocable”. There is no drachma to go back to. Even if there were, Greece would be far worse off having to pay back its debts in a currency (euro) inevitably appreciating against its own (new drachma). Just imagine anyway the glee of the markets if they managed to force Greece out. Having tasted blood the next day they would be baying for Portugal, then the day after that Ireland, then Spain, then Italy. There would be no end and the euro would certainly unravel. Greece’s exit is the last thing the euro needs.

In the meantime Greece may well default. So what. The euro will fall in value against the dollar and even Chinese renimbe (but not against the Swiss franc as last month they pegged themselves to us, so the euro can’t be all that bad, after all the Swiss aren’t stupid financially) but that would be great news for our exports and jobs.

Some banks may go under and maybe it’s about time we let some go instead of this “too big to fail” nonsense.

I remember as a sixth-former being told by Sir Keith Joseph (a Tory grandee at the time) the great capitalist myth that the entrepreneur is a noble being who takes a risk and may be successful or may equally lose his shirt. It seems today that there is a general reluctance on the part of the financial sector to lose any clothing at all. Moral hazard rules.

Yes and our pension funds will all take a hit, that’s yours and mine. The finacial sector’s problems will feed again into the real economy dragging us all down. Maybe then we will have learned our lesson and should just go ahead and nationalize them all, because let’s face it their job is too important to the economy to be left in the hands of a few self-interested gamblers. Then we could oblige them to lend to governments at a reasonable rate of interest in return for services rendered. Yes, the probably forthcoming Greek default poses some interesting scenarios.

Yet in all of this the euro itself will not go away and those who would have you believe that are just milking your anxiety so they can speculate on it.