Music for a cause…or dark purposes

Islamabad diary
I’ll never have a convertible, the one’s which are classy being beyond my means, but I often daydream that if I had one, preferably an open Merc, and if there was a classy lady – well, any lady – sitting beside me what music would I put on, to soften the mood and, not to put too fine a point on it, lower the forward defences.
Here is something for toreadors of the road to consider: if the object of your marked attention be not totally without an ear for music, there is nothing as a gambit to beat the Prelude to Wagner’s great opera, Lohengrin.
When the violins go up and the music rises and the orchestra breaks all barriers of sound, it has to be a dumb mule, and not worth your attention, who is not moved by something created out of the moon and the stars.
Forget the plot, the German libretto, and forget what the opera is about. Lend your ears only to the music – I was about to say divine but that would have been too much of a cliché. If the lady be anything approximating to what nowadays we understand by that all-purpose term ‘cool’ she will ask what all the whacking noise was about. And if to your explanation she says it’s cool then you know immediately that you have struck gold and are headed in the right direction. But if she purse up her nose and ask if you have something different, Rihanna or Beyonce for instance, the sensible thing to do is to politely chuck her out at the next halt and say what a wonderful time you had.
In our time we took to cigarette smoking as a mark of having come of age. Sporting a Ronson lighter with your cigarette pack was also considered hip, our sense of style a bit dated and influenced too much by Hollywood. There was no Wagner, no Beethoven – you had not the means unless you travelled abroad and brought back gramophone records to play on your Grundig record player on four legs which not everyone had. How many records could anyone bring? It was only when I got to Moscow on a diplomatic posting that on a visit to Frankfurt I bought a set of Beethoven’s symphonies and brought them with me as if carrying the spoils of war.
Compare that poverty with the wealth, the unfathomable treasure, decked up, row upon row, in length immeasurable, up there in the skies nowadays. All you have to do is to pull it down from the heavens (I wish we could do without the word download) and if you have the proper speakers then you are like Prospero (The Tempest), summoning spirits from the air to do thy bidding.
Then not only is the Prelude at your command but the whole of Wagner. There is a 1942 recording of the Meistersingers (Overture), Furtwangler, no master greater than him, conducting and Goebbels, just imagine, sitting in the front row. This was the year of Stalingrad, the war starting to go badly for Germany, but here is the German Philharmonic in full swing, with the Swastika displayed on the walls. Forest Murmurs from Siegfried, Toscanini conducting. I had my son, Shehryar, watch it and he was moved. I checked to see whether he was pretending, but he was not. And the Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla, again Furtwangler conducting – brings on the goose pimples.
Opera, if a beginner and novice like me can at all speak of it, is an affair of the heart. You don’t have to go to music school to understand it. You may know not a word of Italian but if there be something in your soul, some spark of poetry and romance, there is no getting away from its magic spell. As Julia Roberts, playing the role of a hooker in Pretty Woman, is moved when she goes to an opera performance for the first time. Her escort, Richard Gere, from the corner of his eye watches to see if she is of the right stuff…and the happy look on his face when he notices that she is so taken with the singing that her eyes are wet.
Shamefacedly I have to confess that my knowledge of music is very limited and it is only when plucking things from the air that I discover new things, of whose existence I was previously unaware. Only this year I happened to come across the greatest Wagner soprano of all time, the Norwegian Kirsten Flagstad (everyone agrees to this). She is beyond anything you may have heard. The Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, Flagstad in full cry…ignore the meaning, just go for the music. There is nothing cooler than this.
Until recently I was totally unaware of Richard Strauss’s Last Four Songs. He insisted that Flagstad should sing them. She did but if memory serves he had passed away by then. With Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting, was it possible to beat such a combination? The last of the four songs, Im Abendrot, by Flagstad is about death and the closing of the seasons. All great music is moving; it wouldn’t be music if it were not. But each time I listen to this I am left speechless.
As I write I am listening to Entrance of the Gods and as the music soars I wish Wagner was better known in this country. Why doesn’t DJ Butt vary his fare and inject some of this sonorous stuff into his repertoire? The climax of the Lohengrin Prelude, for instance, I am ready to lay a bet on this, is powerful enough to move any crowd. You don’t have to announce the music. You just have to play it and that would be enough.
Why doesn’t My Lord the Chief Justice take notice of the senseless ban enacted here on the treasures of outer space? If this be not a matter of public importance, fully attracting the operation of that much misused article of the constitution, 184(3), then there’s something fundamentally wrong with our reading of the constitution. Milord should have something from Wagner played right in the courtroom – say the Prelude when the violins are at their shimmering loudest – and he should ask the attorney general by what measure of higher wisdom has this ban been deemed appropriate?
To stand in the front ranks of nations some requirements have to be fulfilled. The first is literacy, universal literacy; the second is cleaning up our landscape by eliminating that scourge of mankind which is the plastic shopper; the third is Wagner. How can any nation claim any kind of status for itself if the strains of Wagner and Strauss be alien to it, names which I use at random as metaphors for culture and art? These things must come first, tanks and missiles only later.
For a nation to walk erect, for the tyranny of closed minds to give way to something more open, for a people to be able to think and talk without the fear preying on their minds that some religious law is violated or a neighbourhood cleric is shocked, it must open the closed shutters of its mind to the best that there is of human knowledge and achievement. Geography has not isolated us so much as the insularity of our minds. Shouldn’t Milord take notice of this? To echo Dickens’ immortal words, why must the law become “a ass, a idiot”?
When Hitler’s armies laid siege to Leningrad there was widespread starvation, conditions so awful that the dead were left lying in the streets. In the dead of the Russian winter there was no heating. People ate their pets; they ate whatever they could lay their hands on. The question arose as to what should be done with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra. Amidst all that misery it was decided that (1) school examinations would not be postponed and (2) the Orchestra would keep on giving public performances. Try beating that for cool.
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