Were I to be marooned on a desert island, and could only take one musical work with me, it would be Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen. (Come to think of it, this could be turned into a pretty successful radio format - I wonder if anyone’s thought of it before?)
There’s a lot in its favour as a long-term accompaniment to albatross fritters wrapped in palm leaves, garnished with sea salt, and drizzled with coconut milkjus.
For a start, The Ring contains some of the most exquisitely beautiful and powerful music ever composed. It is endlessly inventive. It goes on forever, which would be useful, given the circumstances. It conjures up visions of wet, cold pine forests and ash trees and chilly rivers to provide mental shade during the heat of the day – and beautiful sunny intervals and magic fire music to warm you at night.
And, of course, as I’d only have it on record, I wouldn’t have to suffer some modish nincompoop of a director setting it on a council estate or Guantanamo Bay or 1930s Italy.
Okay, being shouted at in German by fat people for hours on end might start to pall after a bit, but any single work - no matter how long and varied - would be bound to get on one’s nerves eventually.
On the other hand, if I was told I could instead take all the works of one particular composer, it would be Vaughan Williams. He blossomed late: his first published work was the folkish song, “Linden Lea”, composed when he was 30, and his first great works, Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and the choralSea Symphony (his first) didn’t appear until 1910, when he was already 37 (Mozart was dead by that age).
After that, though, Vaughan Williams’s output – which spanned an enormous range of musical genres and styles, from hymns and film scores to fully-fledged operas, encompassing everything in between (okay - apart from novelty pop tunes) – was prodigious, and of a consistently high quality. Luckily for his admirers, he worked right up until the end of his long, astonishingly productive life: his 9th Symphony was first performed three months before his death at 85.
The Pastoral Symphony (his third), and the Phantasy Quintet would place one right back in the English countryside in all its sun-drenched loveliness, Sinfonia Antartica, based on his haunting score for the film Scott of the Antarctic would provide a welcome cold wind, while his London Symphony would put one right back in the heart of what, when it was written, was, without doubt, the world’s greatest city by any measure.
Intellectual nourishment would be provided by spiky, complex works such as Job: A Masque for Dancing and the 4th Symphony. Spirituality would be aided byDona Nobis Pacem and the G Minor Mass. The score for the 49th Parallel (the one about Nazis on the run in Canada, where Laurence Olivier produces a French accent that makes Inspector Clouseau sound positively authentic) would provide excitement, and I could bellow along to hymns and folk tunes to celebrate successfully spearing geckos and knocking fat, juicy birds out of the sky with an improvised slingshot.
Of course, there’d always be the Tallis Fantasia and Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus and The Lark Ascending. And I’d get to spend the rest of my life in the company of a near-saint of an English genius, the quality of whose character – so evident in his music – would help prevent me giving in to despair.
However, if I knew I would be eventually rescued – and would therefore be reunited with the music of Vaughan Williams one day – I’d probably plump for Janacek. But I’ll save that eulogy for another day.
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