Into Italy

               Lawrence and Frieda in the 1920s

You can do worse, it has been suggested, than read the works of DH Lawrence - though FR Leavis, Cambridge’s abrasive Lawrentian sage, would have put it more affirmatively than that. Could you, he might have asked, ever do better?

On trips to Italy, where for a time Lawrence travelled restlessly, I feel I have been reading him for most of my life, not least during the twenty years I was lucky enough to own a tiny property in the mountains above Lake Como, where my Lawrence fixation was linked with another one involving  Alessandro Manzoni, whose passion for the Italian north inspired his substantial historical novel The Betrothed. It is a book, I was to discover, as enthralling as Lawrence’s famous reflections on the trek he made just over a century ago with Frieda, his future wife, from southern Germany across the temperamental Alps to the sunny security of Lake Garda at the age of 27, examining wildflowers and eventually munching figs as he progressed. 

Manzoni, dedicatee of Verdi’s Requiem, placed his indelible stamp on Italian literature with the  adventures of Renzo and Lucia, the young lovers around whom he assembled The Betrothed, and I have delved into this panorama of old Italian life again and again on trips when a music critic should do more with himself than devour the works of Donizetti.

My targeted village was no international tourist spot - it was a workplace, not only for me but for the cheesemakers, creators of the Taleggio now sold by Sainsbury, who were among its other  inhabitants. The  place  never quite became my home, which indisputably  remained  Edinburgh, especially when people, spotting me in the Queen’s Hall, approached me with a jovial shout of                                       “Back from Tuscany.” 

I  was conscious that, with its fireflies on warm nights, its platefuls of polenta, its attractive self-containment, home was what in fact my abode in Lombardy could easily have become, if I had allowed it to. I paid Italian tax, had a local  bank account, and was registered as a resident.  Though friends and relations frequently came calling I never stooped commercially to sub-letting it.  But if I had truly lived there, I would no longer have been able to go there. I would be there already. I wanted to retain the joy of being a visitor. 

My village’s name was Introbio and  I prized it because it was so simply itself.   I knew from reading Manzoni that an attack on its ancient fortified tower, during a period of north Italian strife, had prompted  him to launch a chapter of The Betrothed with the  words “Introbio has fallen.”  But each summer when I was there, villagers from far and wide - from neighbouring Primaluna and Pasturo  or from Barzio and Ballabio along the valley - commemorated its historical rescue from adversity by ascending  mile after mile to a triple  conical peak, the Pizzo  di Tre Signori, highest in the area called the Valsassina, for a  sprawling outdoor service of thanksgiving. 

    With Sue in quest of Lawrence

This ceremony took place in what, for me, was invariably blistering sunshine, and was presided over by three priests flown up from Introbio by helicopter. The pilgrimage each year started soon after dawn and lasted all day.  At the top of the climb, people congregated on the slopes voicing old Italian mountain songs reminiscent of Verdi’s nostalgic Ai Nostri Monti from near the end of Il Trovatore.  The atmosphere, with the assistance of a cheerful mountain inn at the scene of the service, was celebratory.  

Twilight in Italy, the first of DH Lawrence’s collections of Italian travel essays, would spring to mind, even though it was about a different, though not  dissimilar, Alpine pass, further to the east.  While Sue, whom I was soon to marry, posed with me on one occasion for a snapshot as if we were Lawrence and Frieda tramping the the Pfitserjoch in less settled weather, observing  “the crucifix in the mountains,” as Lawrence called it at the start of his book, and dallying at rustic refuges in prediction of episodes from Women in Love, his greatest novel, the circumstances of their renowned walk came invariably into focus.

Even a minor accident, when I slipped and fell while being followed down a narrow track by a random cow with a Mahlerian bell  clanging on its neck and was nearly flattened beneath its feet, was all part of the picture.

Previously, on our first overland traversal of the Alps, Sue had driven me south from Alsace with a small cargo of furniture in alarming snow and fog  over the top of the St Gotthard Pass before spending a night in a fire-lit chalet run by the Nestle chocolate family as a guest house.  There, with a small group of Americans, we had eaten thick veal chops and fresh rosti potatoes  for our supper on the heights above the flashy ski resort of St Moritz before descending next day to the  small Italian town of Chiavenna, where one of our village friends used to go to have his hair cut, and  from there to Lake Como. 

But it is the Lawrence route which has now become glamorous showbiz, his long mountain hike evoked on film by Catherine Brown, a British authority commissioned a year or two ago by the BBC Culture Show to follow the track, in company with a fellow Lawrentian, the lanky Geoff Dyer, author in 1997 of Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence, an oblique but hilarious study of the man.  At one point while writing his book Dyer had resolved, he said, not to write it,  but he did so all the same, choosing its title from Lawrence’s Collected Letters where, “out of sheer rage, ”  Lawrence had been contemplating the idea of a short biography of Thomas Hardy.   

As Lawrence, reputedly a man of infinite anger, had asserted, he had no real wish to write about Hardy.   Dyer took this as his cue and, scribbling with manic virtuosity, had progressed with his own book.

In Catherine Brown’s filmed re-enactment of Lawrence’s Italian journey, there were unexpected problems to contend with.  She had never made a film before and, with a cameraman lugging his big movie camera up the track like a cross-bearer, found it all much harder than expected.  The weather was erratic.  Her climbing boots leaked.  She had a hangover induced by an Alpine liqueur and was feeling dehydrated.   But in Lawrentian  terms the adventure represented Eternity with a capital  “E.”  The film, ripened by references to his vivid vocabulary, would endure until the world ended.

She and Dyer were expected to converse on foot about Lawrence’s vexed sense of humour, which she believed in and said definitely existed.  She quoted examples but the BBC’s film director was not amused.    After several takes, clearer evidence was demanded.

As a side issue there was the knowledge that, en route, Lawrence and Frieda had encountered two young male friends, with one of whom Lawrence went botanising while, in a mountain shed, Frieda had a secret fling with the other.  Now this was something with dramatic, possibly even humorous, potential.  But when, to Lawrence’s discomfort, she divulged the truth to him a day or two later, they had reached the perilous top of the pass in darkness five miles higher and things were not looking good for Frieda’s safety. 

Lawrence’s book and its incidents are now gorgeously evocative and visual, still savoured and avidly pored over, the whole experience re-enacted in the film and on a travel page of the Financial Times featuring Brown and Dyer in transit, accessible on the internet. 

The original  walk was a far cry from Lawrence’s native mining community of Eastwood near Nottingham, which he wanted to destroy brick by brick, and in two subsequent collections of essays - Sea and Sardinia, with its emotive opening words, “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move,”  and  in its successor Etruscan Places - move  was what he undoubtedly  did, while asking people continually where he should move to.

But before then, from high in the Alps, his descent to Lake Garda with Frieda  went without mishap.  They rented a house set back from the lake. They ate figs. Later they  would continue south to Tuscany and ultimately to the coastal resort of Taormina in Sicily, with its views of smoking Mount Etna. There, for three years, they rented another house, the Villa Fontana Vecchia, on the edge of what is now the via David Herbert Lawrence, where the premises with their identifying plaque would later be occupied by a local Sicilian and his nonagenarian mother who, as a girl, had once delivered Lawrence’s letters. 

What remains of his furniture - a sofa and the desk at which he furiously wrote and did translations -- is reportedly still there.

Sue and I honeymooned in Taormina in 1995.  Following the Lawrence trail has become high-edge travel, an ongoing, unending  reality for all who do it, and, with Sue,  I remain exultant to have done a few small  bits of it.  

30 September 2016

Watch this space...

Conrad has been writing a long blog on a topic close to his heart ... which will be appearing very soon.

Travels with a Steinway

Sviatoslav Richter, for me, formed the starting point.  Bruno Monsaingeon’s substantial documentary film of the great Russian pianist, a biographical memoir long available on DVD, remains a haunting masterpiece of musical observation and perception that led to others of its kind, not least the more recent two-hour DVD (Amazon £15.53) of the winter journey by train across Eastern Europe with the gifted  young Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski in company with a shiny Steinway grand.

Playing on a train is not an engagement in the art of the tranquil, as I discovered when I journeyed on the revamped Orient Express with another music critic, the avuncular John Amis of the BBC, from Verona to London, enticed by free tickets, sleeping berths and meals with the chance - at least for me - to write a commemorative article in the Herald newspaper.

There was also an entertainment factor in the form of a Beethoven recital on a grand piano in the cocktail bar by the modish pianist (already heard during John Drummond’s day at the Edinburgh Festival) Jan Latham Koenig, who was working his passage across Europe for a fee, it was said, no more than the price of a ticket. In other words, like me, he probably had a freebie.

It was not, however, the noise of the train which got in the way, even though Koenig seemed impervious to it.  It was the frequent plunging into tunnels, which coincided with that portion of the journey through the Alps.  Drink, at Orient Express prices, was no sedative, and when Koenig, looking stunned that there were critics on board, joined us for dinner he said we should not treat it too seriously. It was all just a piece of fun.

I cannot say I laughed, except at his embarrassment.  But Anderszewski’s impeccable film is another matter entirely. The rightful winner of major awards, it is made for smiles not  laughs. It has a scrupulously devised screenplay and is a nostalgic journey, entitled Unquiet Traveller, around his Polish past, with stops for concerts and rehearsals in Warsaw and elsewhere, including some delicate moments of Brahms with Gustavo Dudamel and the Philharmonia Orchestra, slotted into  Monsangeon’s probing scenario. The result is musical portraiture of the most entrancing sort.

Seated alone  at the keyboard while snowy vistas sweep past the windows, Andreszewski dips into favourite pieces, talking quietly as he plays. If the green train stops at a station - he finds all stations thought-provoking - he steps outside, then climbs back on board, maintaining the continuity of his private dialogue and the sounds he draws from the keys. It is all utterly personal and holds you in its grasp.

I have treasured this disc  for a while and, because Andreszewski, an articulate Bachian among other things, has become a familiar figure in Scotland,  it is something easy to                       take pleasure in.

No mere travelogue or conventional interview, it delves into an inspired pianist’s persona, watches what he does, listens to what he says as he sits there unfurls some Schumann and switches straight from the depths of Szymanowski to Mozart, softly singing fragments from The Magic Flute, which obsess him as the snow scene gleams outside.

Snow: ah yes, snow certainly comes into it as the train trundles along then pauses to let him disembark for a visit to a vegetable market with his granny in Budapest. Later, back on board, friends and colleagues materialise for an illuminated supper with frozen schnapps while the end of The Magic Flute rings out in the background.

No it is not the Orient Express and all the better for not being.
21 September 2016

The unforgotten

Half a century ago, on 17 September 1966, the unforgettable Fritz Wunderlich, Germany’s most vocally perfect young Mozart tenor, died after reputedly falling down a staircase in his home. It was a demise which, in its different way, reminded people of President Kennedy’s fate three years earlier  They said they would always remember what they were doing at the precise moment it happened.

I certainly could. I was standing in Stockholm railway station, phoning home on a nordic night after a performance at the Swedish festival, when the news was broadcast.  I shall not forget it.

In fact Wunderlich’s final appearance had been a fortnight earlier at the Edinburgh Festival, where with his customary sweetness he had sung at the Usher Hall. As festival programme editor at the time, I had been urgently phoned on the day of the recital to see if I had a copy of the Schubert songs that were to launch the programme.   His pianist, Hubert Giesen, had evidently left his own copy of the music at home and, on an Edinburgh Sunday in those days no music shops would be open.

I had the right songs and there was no problem. An hour or so later, from my seat in the hall, I could see Fiesen sitting at the keyboard, my copy of the music in front of him, methodically tearing out the relevant pages in readiness while Wunderlich stood waiting.  Happily they were returned to me later, so I was able to piece them together again.

Wunderlich, of course, sang exquisitely, without a hint of tension.  He had appeared as Ferrando in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte with the Bavarian Opera at the King’s Theatre the previous year, and was already adored here.

I never thought that, at the age of 36, his life was almost over. Years later a German radio station rang me to interview me about the Schubert incident. I had not forgotten.
19 September 2016

Views from the stalls

I have been re-reading, with even deeper admiration, Sir Peter Hall’s diaries about the founding of the National Theatre in the 1970s. I have been told, more than once, that I should not have enjoyed them - that Hall was a vain villain, that he was totally self-centred, evasive, and that he got things wrong.

Yet I cannot see it that way. He remains a man who, perhaps knew too much, whose abilities were too wide, and who paid more attention to directing plays than being an administrator. His enemies, Michael Blakemore and Jonathan Miller among them, have made that perfectly plain.

Yet in their kindle edition the diaries are riveting, wonderfully written, illuminating and also greatly touching - the story of a fascinating, complex man of the theatre, obsessive and, on his own admission, paranoid, in the throes of dealing with rivals, writers, actors, backstage wranglers, aggressive unions.

Sometimes, his hopes and desires bit the dust.  Was he over-ambitious? It often looked like it. But not only was he a voracious reader and stage director, he made films (the inspired                Akenfield about his native Suffolk more than a century ago), acted in them, ran a high profile television programme (Aquarius, featuring lengthy, absorbing interviews with Dame Janet Baker and others), spent whole nights devouring play-scripts, was constantly tempted into opera production, where he was much at home - including his original, unmutilated Cosi fan tutte for Glyndebourne, perfectly observed and enacted until an assistant got his hands on it and spoiled it when it went on tour.  

His knowledge of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinter profoundly pervade the diaries, along with delectable walk-on appearances by Ralph Richardson and John
Gielgud. The book, though very long, remains unputdownable.

His Suffolk boyhood - he was the son of a kindly station master - provides the backcloth. But in the end the bomb dropped.    Entering his eighties, and long retired from the National Theatre, he suddenly disappeared from public view.  He had gone out one evening to see a Chekhov play and started shouting insults at the star actress from his seat in the audience - an unforgettable scene of embarrassment for those who witnessed it.

After what can only be called a full life, including four marriages, dementia had attacked him.  He promptly offered himself to Charterhouse, a one-time monastery, now a sort of monastic care home in London where he could live in privacy. He is now in his mid eighties.

Seize your chance and, whatever you thought of his diaries the first time you read them, read them again.
13 September 2016