A year from home

After the Love Letters concert on Tuesday night of works and letters written by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn I thought again about how the culture we live in determines the development and expression of our talents and skills.

Fanny Mendelssohn lived and worked in her younger brother’s shadow. Fanny was as talented and well-trained musically as Felix but as soon as she married she was expected to give up her music and composing. Her father wrote to Fanny when she was fifteen years old “perhaps for him (Felix) music will become a profession, while for you it will always be an ornament and can and should never become the ground bass of your being and doing.”

Fanny’s husband and brother privately supported her and Felix often asked her advice and seems to have published some of her music under his name. However echoing their father Felix refused to help her publish in her own name. He wrote that publishing her music “would only disturb her in” her “primary duties” of managing her home.

With her artist husband’s full support she established a musical salon in her family home and she composed most of her music for these weekly performances. However, her home duties, organising the salon and opposition to publishing by her brother gradually sapped her enthusiasm and strength for composing. It is only away from home on a trip through Italy with her husband and son that she is able to gather inspiration and energy write a longer work.

Away from the strictures of Berlin society she interacted with composers, musicians and other artists in Rome who appreciated her as a pianist and composer and examined her talent and self from the outside. She comments in her diary “that it is so difficult to lift oneself up from one’s time, one’s family, one’s own self” but nourished by the new milieu writes a sustained work, Das Jahr, a kind of musical diary of her year away, and sketch many other works.

Home again, and with her husband’s support, Fanny decides to publish and only after writes to Felix:

"I'm beginning to publish...and if I've done it of my own free will and cannot blame anyone in my family if aggravation results from it...then I can console myself with the knowledge that in no way did I seek or induce the kind of musical reputation that might have brought me such offers. I hope I shall not disgrace you all, for I am no femme libre...If it [my publication] succeeds, that is, if people like the pieces and I receive further offers, I know it will be a great stimulus to me, which I have always needed in order to create. If not, I shall be at the same point where I have always been."

I can only imagine the strength of will Fanny summoned to publish and afterward write to her brother. All her upbringing had engrained a sense of restraint and feminine submission to father and brother into her. The temporary standing outside of societal and familial strictures and expectations allowed her to see them as constructed for a certain time and place and to gain the courage to flout them to her own ends.

After her death Felix composed a tormented string quartet, reproaching himself musically for not supporting publication of her work. Tuesday evening finished with an arrangement of this Quartet no. 6 in F minor arranged for a string orchestra. He clearly came to believe that life is too short to waste talent such as hers – his anger with himself and regret for his censoring of her musicality were clearly apparent in the work.

Making the Stars

The fifteenth Canberra International Music Festival is in full swing. The first concert in the National Portrait Gallery foyer was a tribute to Peter Sculthorpe on his 80th birthday. His How the Stars were Made opened the programme. William Barton’s didjeridu was the base for an evocation in percussion of the Aboriginal story about the creation of the heavens. For the space of the piece we were out in the desert watching the stars spearing into the sky. Bells, cymbals, drums, half-formed melodies, sticks, triangles and gongs cascaded over each other, then the didjeridu remained, a haunting ongoing reminder of the past in the present.
I sat with William Barton’s mother, Delmae, before the concert. She told me that she had recently sung a song of lament and hope for reconciliation at St Mary’s church in Brisbane as the congregation left the church for a new home at a Trades Hall. The community appears to be one of inclusiveness, welcoming people from all walks of life without judgement. Pity the Roman Catholic Church, who proclaim themselves to be the living body of the man who came to earth to reconcile all with God, can’t at least tolerate and at most enfold them all in its bosom. (Perhaps the lack of bosom in the hierarchy is the problem?)
The concert continued with the Tinalley Quartet. With their hands and bows they infused the music with their own vitality and passion. At their own concert last night we swooned to their Schubert Quartettsatz and Ravel quartet.
I was pleasantly surprised by the accessibility of Sculthorpe’s songs. Mina Kanaridis’ pure, strong but not resonant soprano, certainly enhanced my appreciation of them.
Sculthorpe, who sat immediately in front of me during the concert, says that after his first music lesson at age 7 or so, he rushed straight home and started writing music. His teacher scolded him for misinterpreting the reason for piano lessons and he composed by torchlight under the blankets for a year or so afterward. I thought this a charming story until I remembered that the reason I nagged my mother for piano lessons was that I wanted to learn how to make music in the fullest sense. I spent many hours as a child experimenting with sound on the old honky tonk piano stored on the back verandah. The only composition I remember was a cascade of notes I called The Bells. When did the dream of creation degenerate into the dirge of scales and fingerings?