Last Things

VW’s last five symphonies, more than half his symphonic output, were written after the age of sixty-five. Listening to the 7th and 8th I think you might assume they were the work of quite a young man, especially the latter. But there’s something about the final symphony, to which I bent my ears and something like full attention this morning – despite being interrupted by a call from an air-con servicing company during the third movement - that sounds like the work of someone reaching the end of something. Of course, I could be projecting what I know about the work onto it, and there are stretches of music which sound youthful enough – in fact, the scherzo has the energy of the satanic passages in Job – but so much of this sounds like music dealing with inevitable conclusions: elegiac, sombre yet sober, in its examination of how things fade. This is particularly the case with the opening bars and the ending – both have a monolithic, static quality, framing whatever development takes place within a vision of something already accomplished. Struggle within acceptance. The shimmering gauze of sound (those gorgeous strings!) that characterised the earlier symphonies has been torn away and we view the thing itself.

Well, that’s all more than a bit over-the-top, but it does try to point to some of the qualities I find in this piece. On a more mundane level, the writing for saxophones is quite extraordinary – VW gets a mournful lubricity out them that no orchestra or jazz band I know has ever aspired to, except maybe in some of Duke Ellington’s more quirky, tone-poem type of stuff (but in VW there’s nothing approaching swing.) There’s a lovely fluid flugelhorn in there as well, but none of the exotic percussion that is so striking in the previous two symphonies. In that sense this one feels more restrained somehow.

The elegiac mood created by the music has filtered itself not so mysteriously into what will be our last full day in Maison KL for quite some time, but it’s difficult to be overly melancholy when you’ve got a house to clean and a succession of items therein to get fixed. So far we’ve dealt with a broken window, a broken tap, servicing the air-conditioning and a toilet with a slow flush: the joys of home ownership!