Books Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music Hear Me Out – All my Music Armando Iannucci
revived his creativity, but Tennant doesn’t really assess her influence on his actual music; few of his settings of her verses are especially significant. Nevertheless this remains an extensive, frank but urbanely unsensational account of a vivid character, much more than a pendant to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s own biographies. Michael Scott Rohan ★★★★
Little Brown ISBN 978-1-4087-0988-7 278pp £14.99
‘Classical music is there for us all, inviting us to reach out and touch it.’ So saying, Armando Iannucci lays out his musical stall with a series of personal reflections on a wide range of topics, composers and pieces, deftly articulating what makes them so special (or not). Without recourse to technical jargon or analytical discourse, he zones in on music’s nexus points, celebrating some of the finest music ever composed and those special moments that can induce a state of nirvana in a matter of seconds. Iannucci’s bright and breezy style makes this a book one can happily dip into or read straight through at a single sitting. Along the way you’ll encounter entertaining nuggets about (among other things) modernism, the scherzo, arrangements, completism, repetition and mobile phones. He summarises his fascination with Mahler’s music as being more about the questions it raises than any answers it may attempt to provide, and touching on Mozart’s tantalising fusion of innocence and experience, reflects that ‘it’s going to take a lifetime to work out what I make of him.’ Julian Haylock ★★★★
Opera: Passion, Power and Politics Ed. Kate Bailey
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V&A Pub., ISBN 978-1-8517-7928-4 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-8517-7946-8 (paperback) 153pp hb £35; pb £25
This is a handsome, beautifully illustrated tome produced to document and support the upcoming V&A and Royal Opera House (ROH) exhibition of the same name (V&A: 30 September – 25 February). Edited by curator Kate Bailey, the book includes insights from a variety of opera stalwarts, such as Plácido Domingo and Danielle de Niese. Like its museum
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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Bartolomeo Cristofori and the Invention of the Piano Stewart Pollens Cambridge University Press ISBN 978-1107-09657-8 384pp £74
Vivid characters: Ursula and Ralph Vaughan Williams
counterpart, Opera: Passion, Power and Politics comprises seven sections that each focus on a single city and opera – ‘the soundtrack to the history of Europe’ writes outgoing ROH director Kasper Holten – and considers the social fabric into which the music was woven. While it’s regrettable that this highprofile project neglects to include a contemporary opera, the chosen works are not intended to be a prescriptive ‘Top Seven’. There’s enough here to pique the interest of the general reader, although the primary audience will surely be attendees of the exhibition in search of further reading – and a charming coffee-table souvenir. Claire Jackson ★★★★
Mistress and Muse: Ursula – the Second Mrs Vaughan Williams Janet Tennant Albion Music ISBN 978-0-9956284-0-3 394pp £30
It’s remarkable how many male composers leave much younger widows to bear the torch – sometimes, like Cosima Wagner, with pernicious effect. Ursula Vaughan Williams, as this welcome new biography emphasises, wisely decided the torch ‘can look after itself’ and spent her remaining five decades at the heart of British music and arts, maintaining her own individuality as a minor poet and novelist. She met Ralph, already 64, in 1938, his wife Adeline long crippled by arthritis. Their immediate attraction launched not just an affair, but a civilised ménage à trois, with Adeline’s evident approval; another, with a mutual friend, apparently followed. Tennant’s assertion that Ursula was Ralph’s first affair is unlikely; a charmer with a roguish delight in silk-stockinged legs, his many ‘flirtations’ included pianist and serial amorist Harriet Cohen. The happiness Ursula brought
Stewart Pollens fell in love with the sound of a Bartolomeo Cristofori piano when, as an apprentice harpsichord maker, he chanced to overhear it being played; this book is his encyclopaedic tribute. Almost nothing is known of Cristofori’s early years in Padua, but Pollens gives us the full works on his career at the Medici court in Florence, Italy, where in 1688 he was hired to tune harpsichords, and where he began to make his own keyboard instruments, including harpsichords, clavichords, and spinets (one of which reportedly had gold strings). Pollens quibbles about Cristofori being the original ‘inventor’ of the piano, then concedes that his pivoted-hammer plus escapement mechanism, and his capitalising on the potential of increased string tension, have earned him that title. Readers should be warned that half of this expensive book is devoted to minutely detailed descriptions of the innards of specific instruments, including such arcana as tables of string-lengths and strikingpoints measured in millimetres. Cristofori’s posthumous influence – indirectly on JS Bach, and even on the revolutionary Sébastien Erard a century later – makes a fascinating thread, but you have to dig for it in this mountain of erudition. Michael Church ★★★