OF ALL the creative mind-sets, that of the composer is, perhaps, the most difficult to present in dramatic form. A painter splits up with his girlfriend, and so he flings a pot of paint at a canvas. A poet gets drunk, and unlocks a dark subconscious. A composer, I suppose, can thrash around on the piano. But — unless he has one of those new-fangled MIDI keyboards — he still has to get out his sketchbook and focus his passions into dots and lines. There is a long journey from psyche to sonata.
This is presumably why there have been so few satisfactory biopics and drama-documentaries about composers. Music is the most abstract of art-forms, and the technical and emotional processes that lead a composer from one note to the next are far less apparent to the rest of us.
The latest in a series of tributes to Vaughan Williams — Late Love, Late Life (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week) — dealt with his love affair with the much younger Ursula, whom he eventually married after the death of his first wife, Adeline. While featuring some distinguished figures such as Oliver Neighbour, Michael Kennedy, and David Willcocks, the programme notably failed to present any plausible insights into the relationship between Vaughan Williams’s personal life and his public music.
The presenter, Julian Lloyd Webber, had to rely on the kind of clichés that might one day contribute to a musical version of 1066 and All That: “Once again, war and its aftermath clouded his horizons,” as a fitfully discordant section of the Fourth Symphony plays in the background. The gentle sensuality of Serenade to Music, by contrast, was related to the supposition that Vaughan Williams was getting from Ursula lots of what he rarely, if ever, got from Adeline.
Only near the end was the truth of the matter admitted: when composing, Ralph Vaughan Williams was consumed by the process. Nobody, not even Ursula, entered into that world; and it remains, as it must remain, secret.
As mysterious — if not quite as hallowed — is the world of Oxbridge High Table. High Table, Lower Orders (Radio 4, Fridays) is a new comedy by Mark Tavener, which attempts a Trollopian take on college intrigue, but which manages to create an environment that is far less humorous than the real thing.
The weekday-morning comedy slot on Radio 4 is intended to be gentle, but this script produces about as many laughs as a report by the maintenance committee on the state of the flowerbeds in the Fellows’ garden. Even the likes of Geoffrey Palmer and Samuel West cannot save it from the kind of torpor that afflicts elderly members of the SCR after a second helping of steamed pudding.
This is quite the opposite of the effect created by the Five Live commentary team at this year’s Open Golf, who are capable of entertaining the listener through the dreariest episodes of this mammoth event.
What is most impressive is the sense of the physical that they are able to give to a game that we can only imagine. In a similar way, when a favourite book is adapted for film, the visual image when one switches to television coverage is almost a disappointment.
|
back to Media
previous story
|
next story 
back to top
%231%23.gif "Wordl Vision Sponsor a child Nov to Dec campaign © site")
