Our critics cast their eyes over the latest selection of books on all things music
The Life and Music of Elizabeth Maconchy
Erica Siegel
Boydell 352pp (hb) £75 The core of ‘true music’, the Irish-English composer Elizabeth Maconchy said in 1940, was ‘impassioned argument’, something certainly true of her magnificent cycle of 13 string quartets and sundry other works beside. Maybe it’s partly the urgency and grit of her music that make this first full-length study of her life and output both valuable and frustrating.
Erica Siegel, an American music historian, couldn’t have been more assiduous in her collection of available data (we’re almost drowned in information about Maconchy’s mixed relationship with the BBC) or her analyses of key works, each taking up to eight pages with bountiful musical examples.
Yet for all the juggling necessary to sustain the roles of 20th-century modernist composer, mother and earner of money, this was a life low in drama, and Siegel’s scrupulously scholarly account, rich in footnotes, cannot muster any narrative drive. The reader pounces all the more gratefully on the small details that flesh out her character (she had two cats named after Karl Marx and Holst), or the exhaustive index’s crisp summary of Maconchy’s wartime activities: ‘first aid, gardening, hen-keeping, jam-making’. Geoff Brown ★★★
Mozart in Italy – Coming of Age in the Land of Opera
Jane Glover
Picador 288pp (hb) £25 Jane Glover has previously written fresh and popular treatments of Mozart’s Women and Handel in London, but her earliest book was a scholarly survey of Cavalli. Now she combines research with travelogue in a compelling account of the years that Mozart spent learning his operatic craft in Italy. She brings vividly to life the pressures on the young composer, from commissioning and rehearsals to the demands of patrons and singers, and not least the expectations of his father Leopold.
Where Glover excels is in narrative: we are taken into the swirl of the Venetian carnival, the stuffy academic aura of Bologna, the lofty church music of Rome and introduced to some of Mozart’s earliest operas – some of which like Lucio Silla still await fine stagings here. We surely need a little more caution in taking everything Mozart writes in his exuberant letters too literally, and it’s an open question as to how far Wolfgang was ‘destabilised’ by his domineering father
