This modest, likeable scrapbook from the celebrated tenor Ian Bostridge opens with an acknowledgements section that includes a rollcall of the great-and-good of the high-cultural establishment. It has a rather truckling tone, and this is enhanced in the collection's first item, an Edinburgh festival lecture, "Music & Magic", in which he refers to some "giants" who've preceded him in giving the lecture George Steiner, Alfred Brendel, Pierre Boulez. Their gigantic aura somewhat inhibits the job in hand, a product of Bostridge the academic historian whose study of witchcraft from 1650 to 1750 overlapped with his burgeoning career as a singer.
It is informative and thoughtful, and makes good connections in this arcane and suggestive area, but Bostridge also calls on some over-familiar references and quotations. All in all, "homework well done". The subfusc feel persists for most of the 12 diary extracts that follow reflections on performing, reading, listening. Yet clichés and truisms abound ("function on many levels", "Bach's music represents something very special"). The word "great" is used seven times in just five pages, "occasionally varied by "brilliant", "superb", "legendary", and so on. But the most superlatives are reserved for the book's two final pieces, both devoted to composers whom Bostridge has worked with: Hans Werner Henze, whose setting of WH Auden's "Lay Your Sleeping Head" he describes as "wonderful, sublime", and Thomas Adès, whose opera The Tempest is "mighty music indeed".
The writing comes alive in some 20 book reviews, performer's reflections and sets of programme notes. These passages reveal Bostridge's infectious love for music and appreciative understanding of its workings and values.
Handel benefits from this upturn: Bostridge combines judicious appraisal with generous enthusiasm in discussing his operas. As he does for the stage works of the French baroque works whose apparently stultifying conventions, and the sheer expense of mounting them adequately, ensure they'll always be worthy Causes. Bostridge's advocacy is eloquent and welcome.
Oddly, from such a distinguished exponent, the German Lied doesn't produce such insight. This is not a Cause; the genre's greatness is acknowledged by all its lovers even if the medium remains a secret garden. Here Schubert predominates, and there's one piece on Hugo Wolf. Perhaps these inclusions are an unwitting confirmation of what for me are the writer's limits as a singer he is acutely sensitised to text and character but comparatively pale and wan vocally.
It is Benjamin Britten who looms largest, in Bostridge's programmes, and in the writings he's gathered here. And on the whole Britten brings out the best in both. There is an inevitable, if latent, comparison with Peter Pears, the original of all Britten's operatic leads and most of his song-cycles. Bostridge the singer worthily assumes the mantle, if only in part. For Pears also had a note of steely penetrative power, making possible such unlikely parts as the protagonist of Elgar's Gerontius; he was even conceivable as Wagner's Tristan.
The most living passages in this book are its author's responses to Britten's word-setting, the relationship between his operas and their literary originals, and Bostridge's relationship long after Britten's death with the complex, awkward, vulnerable composer himself, who becomes ever more dislikable with every added memoir or "revelation". There's one reservation; the too-easy use of this music to knock "nasty/difficult/modern" stuff.
Which leads to the book's remarks concerning Stravinsky's alleged coldness. Hotly contested down most of the 20th century since the publication in his autobiography of the view that music is incapable of expressing anything at all, the debate rumbles on into the 21st, and ought to be put out of its misery. Bostridge returns to it in at least four places, most extensively in connection with the composer's snide comments about Britten's War Requiem. It is disconcerting to find so sophisticated and artistically alert a listener retaining such literalism in the teeth of the evidence.
Not that Stravinsky's music is born of his deepest familial/erotic/power-driven fantasies, as with Wagner; or pours out its composer's woes with sobs and throbs like Tchaikovsky; or trumpets to the world his victories and works like Strauss; or like Mahler, equally loud and long, tells every intimate vicissitude of his spiritual and personal affairs. It's in the sense of such impulses growing wearisome, overdone, counterproductive, that the "cool" stance embodied above all by Stravinsky achieves such potency.
And don't be deceived: as much heat can be generated from within the external formalities of a Symphony of Psalms, an Oedipus Rex, a Persephone, as from a War Requiem surely more? (Though I do agree with Bostridge about the chill emanating from The Rake's Progress.)
Robin Holloway's Essays and Diversions is published by Continuum.
