The trouble with Harry

Peter Heyworth of The Observer would have been Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s ideal interviewer, because he understood what the music was about and cared deeply about what it said.  But he died before he could be persuaded to write a book  about Birtwistle comparable with his great two-volume study of the conductor Otto Klemperer and the Birtwistle book based on a penetrating series of interviews has been written by Heyworth’s successor as Observer music critic, Fiona Maddocks.

Though not perhaps quite as enthralling as Heyworth’s might have been, it is well written, if somewhat straggling in presentation and a bit prone to employ old-fashioned touches of interview technique, such as the tendency to round off quotations with the addition in brackets of such words as “laughs” or, irritatingly and more frequently,  “chuckles” whenever Birtwistle says something amusing which she thinks deserves to be amplified. Court reporters once did this  when a judge made some witty comment, but it seems out of place in a book about a modern composer whose music is as serious as Birtwistle’s, and it soon becomes distracting.

Perhaps Birtwistle’s laughs and chuckles were themselves distracting enough to merit mention but the writer should have found a different way of saying so. 

Never having met him I cannot supply a personal observation but at least  the text of the book is interesting enough to survive this minor blight. 

Birtwistle’s thoughts on his music are invariably worth reading, and it is good that Maddocks generally lets him speak out, even if she permits herself a fair amount of deocoration. Happily she incorporates comments on him by his three  gifted sons  from his three gifted sons (though none of them is specially musical) in constructing her portrait of this peripatetic genius who has lived in Lancashire, Scotland, France, America, and, at theage of eighty,   Wiltshire, often moving house on the spur of the moment to new surroundings (on one occasion one of his sons treks home from London  to visit him in the Hebrides only to find that he has suddenly moved to a bleak part of southern France). But somewhere in the book an even better book seems forever to be lurking, and does not quite get out.

There is sometimes something slightly schoolmarmy about Maddocks’s questions which gets in the way of the natural flow of their conversation but Birtwistle - known to friends as Harry - is probably not the easiest of people to interview (he refuses, for example, to discuss his schooldays, although, apart from one beating, which is not  dwelt upon, nothing very significant appears to have happened to him). 

That he is a great composer, however,  is never in question and much of the book is enjoyably enlightening, not least when he talks about his trees and gardens and the construction of dry-stone walls, which he treats as meticulously as his music.

30 October 2014