William Taylor of Norwich - 'Kräftig, aber klappernd'.

Born in Norwich, William Taylor (7 November 1765 - 5 March 1836) was an essayist, scholar and translator of German Romantic literature. Along with Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey he was also a leading mediator in Anglo-German literary relations. Indeed, it was because of Taylor's early advocacy of German literature that the influential Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (Universal Literary Newspaper) could declare in 1796 -

'Incidentally, German literature has the greatest number of followers in Norwich, for understandable commercial reasons.' [1] 

In his lifetime Taylor was widely read. Importantly,  his translations of German poetry  bridged German Romanticism to English Romanticism. Taylor's translations influenced the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth to produce Lyrical Ballads (1798), a vanguard  literary work of Romanticism which, with its inclusion of Coleridge's long poem The rime of  the Ancient Mariner, changed the course of English poetry. 

More recently, Taylor's name and contribution to English appreciation of German literature is featured in Peter Watson's tour-de-force survey of German science and culture, The German Genius (2010) [2]

William Taylor's diverse  interests included - philology, etymology, chronology, topography, history sacred and profane, ancient and modern, political economy,  statistics, international law, municipal law, Talmudic legend, Muslim ethics, Biblical texts, churches and sects, parliamentary reform, slave trade and almost every category of modern European literature.  Among the thousands of reviews and essays which he wrote are those with titles such as, 'The Jews in England', 'Songs of the Negroes of Madagascar', 'Historic doubts concerning Joan of Arc', 'On the Sublime and Beautiful', an 'Ode in Praise of Tea' and, 'Of the Use of Ice as a Luxury'.

As the only child of a wealthy merchant who traded and exported Norwich goods to continental Europe, Taylor was fortunate in his education. He was taught by the English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743 - 1825) at her Palgrave Academy in Suffolk. 

Barbauld informed her former pupil of her reading aloud a poem translated by him at an Edinburgh literary soiree and of the reception it received -  

'Are you aware that you made Walter Scott a poet ? So he told me the other day I had the gratification of meeting him. It was, he says, your ballad of Leonora, and particularly the lines-

'Tramp, tramp across the land they speed: Splash, splash, across the sea'. [3]

Later, Taylor lauded Barbauld as, 'the mother of his mind'. Barbauld's own career as a poet ended abruptly in 1812, with the publication of her Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, in which she severely criticized Britain's participation in the Napoleonic Wars. Shocked by the vicious reviews it received, she published nothing more. 

 

Anna Barbauld can been in a group of three Muses, standing beside an easel with arm raised, in Richard Samuels' painting Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1779). 

Devoted to his mother, Taylor never married, but did have a friendship unto the death, begun during  his schooldays when  meeting the serious-minded theologian and antiquarian Frank Sayers (1763-1817) at Barbauld's Palgrave Academy. A portrait of Sayers painted by John Opie dated 1800, hung for many years in William Taylor's library, and in all probability both men were homosexual. [2] 

For many years Taylor's daily routine consisted of rising early and studying until noon, swimming in the River Wensum from a bath house upstream from the city, followed by a long walk in the afternoon. In the evening he liked to drink (heavily) and discuss linguistics, literature and philosophy in society. 

In May 1790 Taylor visited France; arriving at Paris he declared himself to have ‘kissed the earth on the land of liberty.’ He spent nine days at the National Assembly, listening to its speakers debate upon the governance of the new, revolutionary France. The fever of the times are characteristically described by him thus-

'I am at length in that point of space where the mighty sea of truth is in constant agitation and every billow dashes into fragments some deep-rooted rock of prejudice or buries in a viewless gulph some institution of gothic barbarism and superstition. I am at length in the neighbourhood of the National Assembly, that well-head of philosophical legislation whose pure streams are now overflowing the fairest country on earth, and will soon be sluiced off into the other realms of Europe, fertilising all with the living energy of its waters.' [4]

Upon his return to Norwich Taylor translated some of the decrees of the National Assembly and read them at a meeting of the Revolutionary Society (which was named after the 1688 British revolution, not the recent French revolution). 

In 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, Taylor embarked on another tour of Europe, visiting France, Italy and Germany, partly on business for his father. In Paris he met the Norfolk-born political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary, Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man (1791) 

In 1792, while visiting the Norfolk market-town of Alysham, the English satirical novelist and playwright Frances Burney, (1752-1840) noted of Norwich's political life -

'I am truly amazed to find this country filled with little revolution societies which transmit their notions to the larger committee at Norwich which communicates the whole to the reformists in London. I am told there is scarce a village in Norfolk free from these meetings'. [5] 

It was the British Prime Minister Pitt the Younger who called Norwich the Jacobin city after the clandestine French political movement which agitated for improved worker's rights and conditions. The historian E.P. Thompson in his groundbreaking work The Making of the English Working Classes sets the scene for the radical politics of late 18th century Norwich.  

Norwich, an ancient stronghold of Dissent, with an abundance of small masters and artisans with strong traditions of independence, many have even surpassed Sheffield as the leading provincial centre of Jacobinism......... In August 1792, when the Norwich Revolution Society sponsored a cheap edition of Rights Of Man, it claimed to have forty-eight associated clubs. By October it claimed that the 'associated brethren' were not fewer than 2,000.

But Norwich, was, in other respects, by far the most impressive provincial city. Nineteen divisions of the Patriotic Society were active in September, and, in addition to the weavers, cordswainers, artisans, and shopkeepers who made up the society, it still carried the cautious support of the patrician merchant families, the Gurneys and the Taylors. Moreover, Norwich owned a gifted group of professional people, who published throughout 1795 a periodical - The Cabinet - which was perhaps the most impressive of the quasi-Jacobin intellectual publications of the period. Its articles ranged from close analysis of European affairs and the conduct of the a war, through poetic effusions, to disquisitions upon Machiavelli, Rousseau, the Rights of Women and Godwinian Socialism. Despite the many different degrees of emphasis, Norwich displayed a most remarkable consensus of anti-Ministerial feeling, from the Baptist chapels to the aspiring philosophes of The Cabinet from the 'Weavers Arms' (the headquarters of the patriotic Society) to the House of Gurney, from the Foxite Coke of Holkham to the labourers in the villages near the city. The organisation extended from Norwich to Yarmouth, Lynn, Wisbech and Lowestoft. [6]

Throughout his life William Taylor was a Unitarian, attending the newly-built Octagon chapel which was completed in 1756 in the Neo-Palladian style by architect Thomas Ivory (above). Classified  as  'liberal'  in the family of churches, Unitarians place emphasis on reason when interpreting scripture. Freedom of conscience and the pulpit are core values of its tradition. Unitarianism is also known for rejecting several orthodox Christian doctrines, including original sin, predestination, and the infallibility of the Bible. The Unitarian's tolerant creed catered well for the liberal beliefs of several leading Norwich citizens including William Taylor from the year of the Octagon Chapel's completion in 1756 to the present day. [7]

In Taylor's day, the late 18th and early 19th century, the Octagon congregation included most of Norwich's principal Whig families - the William Taylors and John Taylors (unrelated one to the other, the Marsh family (the carriers), several leading medical families, the Aldersons, Dalrymples and Martineaus, beside Alderman Elias Norgate, the Alderman John Green Basely, the Bolingbrokes, some of the Barnards and J.E. Smith the botanist.  [8]

Taylor's great literary protégé without doubt was George Borrow (1803-1881) who lived at Willow Lane while attending Norwich Grammar School during his teenage years. In many ways Norwich's connection to the Romantic movement is embodied in  George Borrow who was of a dashing, Byronic-like appearance, of athletic build, over 6 feet tall with a shock of white, not blonde, hair.  A pugilist with a fiery temper, holding strong opinions including being a fervent anti-Papist, he was  keen to study the culture and language of the Romany people who he first encountered on Mousehold Heath. As a young man Borrow roamed the length and breadth of Britain as a tinker, while also studying the Romany language and its culture. 

Its in Borrow's Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851) a literary work which hovers somewhere between the genres of memoir and novel, and which has long been considered a classic of 19th-century English literature, that a conversation between an old man and a young man is recollected. Taylor speaks first,- 

‘Suicide is not a national habit in Germany as it is in England.’

‘But that poor creature, Werther, who committed suicide, was a German.’

'Werther is a fictitious character, and by no means a felicitous one; I am no admirer either of Werther or his author.  But I should say that, if there ever was a Werther in Germany, he did not smoke.  Werther, as you very justly observe, was a poor creature. He is a fool who breaks his heart on any account; but it is good to be a German, the Germans are the most philosophic people in the world, and the greatest smokers: now I trace their philosophy to their smoking......[9] 

In the sequel to Lavengro, the equally unclassifiable The Romany Rye, (1857) Borrow refers to his mentor as -  

'a real character, the founder of the Anglo-German school in England, and the cleverest Englishman who ever talked or wrote encomiastic nonsense about Germany and the Germans'. [10] 

With Taylor's encouragement, George Borrow embarked on his first translation, Klinger's version of the Faust legend, entitled Faustus, his Life, Death and Descent into Hell which was first published in St Petersburg in 1791. Borrow, in his translation however, changed the name of one city, making one passage read:

'They found the people of the place modeled after so unsightly a pattern, with such ugly figures and flat features that the devil owned he had never seen them equaled, except by the inhabitants of an English town, called Norwich, when dressed in their Sunday's best'.

For his ridiculing of Norwich society, the Norwich public subscription library burned Borrow's first publication. The ultimate harsh review.

 

Above - The artist Alfred Munnings' depiction of George Borrow with his gypsy companion Jasper Petulengro  at the summit of St. James Hill with its panoramic view of Norwich. Petulengro says - 'There's a wind on the heath brother, who would wish to die?'

Taylor made his name translating Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise, the themes and subject-matter of Lessing's drama greatly appealing to his radical and progressive convictions.

Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Lessing (1729-81) is set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade. It describes how the wise Jewish merchant Nathan, the enlightened sultan Saladin, and a Templar knight resolve the misunderstandings between Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Its major themes are friendship, tolerance, relativism of God, a rejection of miracles and a need for communication. Primarily an appeal for religious tolerance, its performance was banned by the church, and was not performed until 1783, after Lessing's death. 

Far more problematic is the relationship between the German giant of literature,  Johann Goethe (1749-1832) to Taylor. Henry Crabb Robinson, who was a classmate of Taylor's at Barbauld's Academy, informed Goethe in 1829, 'Taylor’s Iphigenia in Tauris, as it was the first, so it remains the best, version of any of your larger poems'. 

Taylor sent his translation to Goethe in Weimar; but he never heard whether the poet received it, and for this perceived snub he became hostile in his judgement of Goethe in his last years. A statement in Goethe's Tages und Jahreshefte suggests the fault and negligence lay with Goethe himself, for he stated-  'A translation of the Iphigenia appeared in England; Unger reprinted it, but I retained neither the original nor the copy'.

 

But in fact, not only is the original edition and Unger’s reprint recorded as once in Goethe's library, but also Taylor’s Historic Survey of German Poetry, which includes the complete Iphigenia in its third volume. 

Goethe also wrote about Taylor erroneously, and of his monumental work he rather dismissively stated, on 20 August 1831 to Carl Friedrich Zelter -

“I received 'A Survey of German Poetry’ from England, written by W. Taylor, who studied 40 years ago in Göttingen, and who lets loose the teachings, opinions, and phrases that already vexed me 60 years ago.”

But in fact Taylor never studied at Gottingen.  Worse harsh criticism was to come for Taylor in 1831 when Thomas Carlyle published a review of hisHistoric Survey of German Literature. Carlyle's scathing review  seriously damaged Taylor’s literary reputation to the present-day and his hostility and intolerance towards Taylor is also evident in Sartor Resartus (1836) with its pun-like Latin title of 'The tailor retailored'. There may even be intentional word-play upon the proper name of Taylor and the lowly occupation of tailor in its title. Carlyle's novel also includes sharp and critical remarks upon Taylor's creed, that of Utilitarianism, as well as repeated mocking of the excesses of German philosophy and idealism. 

During Norwich's 'Golden Age' in literary and artistic life (circa 1760-1832), William Taylor became acquainted with several of the Norwich School Painters and gave lectures to the Norwich Philosophical Society on art. In a lecture of 1814 he advocated architecture and Urban settings to be higher artistic subjects than those of rural life. His comment may well have been directed towards leading artist of the Norwich movement, John Crome (1768-1821) who produced a number of urban Norwich riverscapes, some of which are set almost on his doorstep, including  Back of New Mills (below) dated circa 1814 -17. 

There's the distinct possibility that Taylor's  influence upon the aesthetics of theNorwich School of Painters may be far greater than hitherto  has been acknowledged. 

One genre of literature which Taylor shared an interest with Anna Barbauld and the poet Southey, was children's literature, in particular, the fairy-tale. Southey is credited as being the author of the original version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in 1837, a year after Taylor's death, while Taylor himself wrote a version of Bluebeard and Cinderella.

  

William Taylor's friendship with Robert Southey (above, circa 1795) began in 1798 when Southey visited Norwich as Taylor's guest; the poet revisited him at Norwich in February 1802. In correspondence to Taylor, Southey asks him-

'Can you not visit Creswick next summer ? Coleridge will talk German with you; he is desirous of knowing you; and he is a sufficient wonder of nature to repay the journey'.  [11]

'I wish you could mountaineer it with us for a few weeks, and I would press the point if Coleridge also were here: but even without him we could make your time pass pleasantly; and here is Wordsworth to be seen, one of the wildest of all wild beasts, who is very desirous of seeing you'. [12]

Its testimony to their long friendship that the poet Southey (1774 -1843) who was Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death thirty years later, (Walter Scott having declined the post) could criticize Taylor's literary style yet their friendship remain intact, after writing to him, firstly-

' you too often (like your admirable old townsman Sir Thomas Browne) go to your Greek and Latin for words when plain English might serve as well'.

Perhaps influenced by his German reading, Taylor was fond of introducing newly coined words, most of which were as incomprehensible to the average reader as his ideas. The editors of the periodicals to which he contributed objected about his neologisms, his friends pleaded with him to abandon the habit. Sir James Mackintosh however, remarked of Taylor's idiosyncratic style, 'He does not speak any language but the Taylorian; but I am so fond of his vigour and originality that... I have studied and learned his language'. [13] 

Southey persisted in his pleas-

'How are plain Norfolk farmers - and such will read the Iris - to understand words which they never heard before, and which are so foreign as not to be even in Johnson's farrago of a dictionary ? I have read Cowper's Odyssey and to cure my poetry of its wheyishness; let me prescribe the Vulgar Errors of Sir Thomas Browne to you for a likely remedy.'  [14] 

Ignoring Southey's advice, the poet now severely admonished the Norwich scholar-  

'Now I will say what for a long while what I have thought. That you have ruined your style by Germanisms, Latinisms and Greekisms, that you are sick of a surfeit of knowledge, that your learning breaks out like scabs and blotches upon a beautiful face.......Wordsworth, who admires and reverences the intellectual power and the knowledge which you everywhere and always display, and who wishes to see you here [in the Lake District] as much as I do, frets over your barbarisms of language, which I labour to excuse, because there is no cure for them.' [15]

Taylor defended his literary style thus-

'Were I reviewing my own reviewals, I should say, This man's style has an ambitious singularity which like chewing ginseng, which displeases at first and attaches at last'.

'And yet my theory of good writing is, to condense everything into a nutshell: I grow and clip with rival rage, and produce a sort of yew-hedge, tangled with luxuriance and sheared with spruceness. The desire of being neat precludes ease, of being strong precludes grace, of being armed at points than being impervious at any'. [16]

Southey repeatedly invited Taylor to stay with him, along with Coleridge and Wordsworth at the Lake district, but Taylor repeatedly declined.  It may in fact have been far livelier at the Creswick cottage in the Lake District than Taylor could imagine. Government spies were sent to watch the comings and goings of the poet's residence, for Wordsworth and Coleridge were both known to the authorities for their radical political views, while in 1799 Coleridge and Southey were involved with early experiments with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) supervised by the scientist Humphrey Davy.  

Taylor's aesthetic preference of the urban over the rural is trenchantly expressed in correspondence with Southey thus - 

'How can you delight in mountain scenery ? The eye walks on broken flints; not a hill tolerant of the plough, not a stream that will float a canoe; in the roads every ascent is the toil of Sisyphus, every descent the punishment of Vulcan: barrenness with her lichens cowers on the mountain-top, yawning among mists that irrigate in vain; the cottage of a man, like the aerie of an eagle, is the home of a savage subsisting by rapacity in stink and intemperance: the village is but a coalition of pig-sties; where there might be pasture, glares a lake; the very cataract falls in vain,- there are not customers enough for a water-mill. Give me the spot where victories have been won over the inutilities of nature by the effort of human art, - where mind has moved the massy, everlasting rock, and arrayed into convenient dwellings and stately palaces, into theatres and cathedrals, and quays and docks and warehouses, wherein the primeval troglodyte has learned to convoke the productions of the antipodes'. [17]

To which the poet Robert Southey parried -

'You undervalue lakes and mountains; they make me happier and wiser and better, and enable me to think and feel with a quicker and healthier intellect. Cities are as poisonous to genius and virtue in their best sense, as to the flower of the valley or the oak of the forest. Men of talent may and will be gregarious, men of genius will not; handicraft-men work together, but discoveries must be the work of individuals. Neither are men to be studied in cities, except indeed, as students walk into hospitals, you go to see all the modifications of the disease'. [18]

In his lifetime William Taylor (above) attracted considerable hostility for his radical religious and political views.  Nicknamed  'godless Billy' by fellow Octagon Chapel member, Harriet Martineau (1802-76) who petulantly reminisced of him:

'his habits of intemperance kept him out of the sight of ladies, and he got round him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they could set the whole world right by their destructive propensities'.  [19]

Taylor was not without a stochastic ability either. As early as 1804 he made the suggestion that ships could be powered with steam before the world’s first commercial steamboat, the North River Steamboat, began operating out of New York in 1807. In 1824 he introduced the idea of cutting through the isthmus of Panama when the first attempt to construct a canal through what was then a  province of Colombia at Panama, did not begin until 1881. [20] 

Both Taylor's life and writings offer a few cautionary lessons to writers, especially those not living at the hub and centre of either conventional society or London, the literary capital of England. Just as Taylor's contemporaries, the various painters associated with the 'Norwich School' discovered, Norwich, with its rural hinterland  of Norfolk and its North Sea coast-line was inspirational for creating art, but its patronage was thin. Art sales and advancement were facilitated far easier in London than Norwich. Likewise, the damage inflicted from a single malignant review can unjustly ruin a writer's reputation, sometimes long after their death.  One possible reason for unjust and critical hostility against Taylor would be prejudice against his sexual orientation.  At one time Taylor considered a vacancy at the British Museum, but it was taken before he applied. One suspects that he loved the familiar charms of Norwich far too much to ever leave the 'Do different' City.  There's more than a hint of humorous self deprecation in his stating- 

'Contented mediocrity is always the ultimate destiny of us provincials'.

But, as his words quoted here hopefully demonstrate, William Taylor was a highly expressive writer, a Vulcan-like wordsmith who wrote thousands of literary reviews and articles on an extraordinary range of topics in his lifetime.

In the late nineteenth century the German literary critic George Herzfelde considered Taylor's translation of Iphigenie auf Tauris to be 'Kräftig, aber klappernd' ('Powerful but Clattering') [21]. Herzfelde's pithy observation seems apt of much of Taylor's idiosyncratic writings and translations.

A single sentence suffices to highlight Taylor's Classical learning, aesthetic sensibility and subtle wit -

'Those who can die of a rose in aromatic pain have not grief in reserve for Medea's last embrace of her children'.

Books

* William Taylor of Norwich: A Study of the Influence of Modern German Literature in England (1897) by Georg Herzfeld 

* C.B. Jewson -The Jacobin City 1975 Highly Recommended

* The Making of the English Working Class - E.P. Thompson 1963 reprinted in 1980 Pelican

*John Warden Robberds A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich (1843).

  

*Review from The Quarterly (1843-44).

Notes

[1] In the original - Uebrigens hat die deutsche Literatur aus sehr begreiflichen mercantilischen Gründen die zahlreichsten Anhänger in Norwich'.  

[2] Peter Watson -  The German Genius (2010) pub.Simon and Shuster page 314

[3] Chandler, David "Taylor, William" in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) speculates upon Taylor's sexuality. 

[4] John Warden Robberds - A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich (1843).

[5] The Making of the English Working Class - E.P. Thompson 1963 reprinted in 1980 Pelican

[6] C.B. Jewson -The Jacobin City 1975

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Appendix III Romany Rye

[11] Robberds

[12] - [18] Ibid.

[19] The Life of George Borrow by Herbert Jenkins

[20] Perhaps from his reading Sir Thomas Browne's speculation that - 'some Isthmus have been eat through by the Sea, and others cut by the spade: And if policy would permit, that of Panama in America were most worthy the attempt: it being but few miles over, and would open a shorter cut unto the East Indies and China'.

[21] William Taylor of Norwich: A Study of the Influence of Modern German Literature in England by Georg Herzfeld (1897)

Shostakovich's String Quartets

The intimacy and privacy of the String quartet became a favoured medium for the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75). His cycle of fifteen String Quartets  may be considered equal in profundity, wit and technical brilliance to Beethoven's String 

Several of Shostakovich's quartets evoke a Kafkaesque atmosphere of anxiety, dread and fear induced by life in the Totalitarian era of Stalin. On a number of occasions he was under extreme pressure to conform to Communist Party aesthetics. nevertheless  he managed to preserve the highest degree of artistic integrity in his String Quartets in which the 'Other Shostakovich', someone quite separate from the 'Official' State War hero and composer of the patriotic  Leningrad' Symphony  is featured.

As Alex Ross notes-

'The 'other Shostakovich' was a gnomic, cryptic, secretly impassioned figure who spoke through chamber music (twelve string quartets from 1948 on) .... The string quartet became his favourite medium: it gave him the freedom to write labyrinthine narratives full of blankly winding fugues, near-motionless funeral marches, wry displays of foolish jollity, off-kilter genre exercise, and stretches of deliberate blandness. One of the composer's favourite modes might be called "dance on the gallows" - a galumphing, almost polka-like number that suggests a solitary figure facing death with inexplicable glee'.[1]

'Like the Second and Third Quartets, the Fifth begins with a sonata form movement with exposition repeat. In its virile Beethovian energy, this magnificent movement resembles the first movement of the Second Quartet, with a sense of militant resistance, which had not appeared in Shostakovich's music since that work eight years earlier, though the second subject is a graceful waltz. Segueing to its central slow movement, the quartet retreats into an icy muted B minor. ....this threnody for crushed aspirations and deformed lives also recalls the 'ghost music' of the Third Quartet'.




In contrast to Beethoven's expanding the canvas for a String Quartet, Shostakovich in his 7th String quartet (1960) telescopes the format, returning to the length of an early Haydn String Quartet.  Lasting little more than 12 minutes, the length of many single movements of a Beethoven Late quartet. It includes acerbic wit and fiercely contrasting dynamics, along with an enigmatic opening phrase.




Known in the USSR as the 'Dresden' quartet, the Eighth Quartet was composed in three days during the composer's visit to the ruined city of Dresden in July 1960...Shostakovich had supposedly been so shocked by the devastation he saw that poured out his feelings in music, inscribing the work 'In memory of the victims of fascism and war'. .....the composer told friends that, far from concerning the dead of Dresden - victims not of fascism but of Western democracy working to Soviet military request - the quartet was actually a musical autobiography. 'Everything in the quartet ais as clear as a primer. I quote Lady Macbeth the First and Fifth Symphonies. What does fascism have to do with these ? The Eight is an autobiographical  quartet, it quotes a song known to all Russians: "Exhausted by the hardships of prison".

Alex Ross notes -  'The personal motto D S C H, which sounded so pseudo-triumphantly in the finale of the Tenth Symphony, is woven into almost every page of the Eight Quartet. It appears alongside quotations, from previous Shostakovich works, including the Tenth Symphony, Lady Macbeth, and the First Symphony, not to mention Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, Siegfried's Funeral Music from Gotterdammerung, and the revolutionary song "Tormented by Grievous Bondage". .....The final pages of the score trail resemble in a curious way, the mad scene in Peter Grimes , in which the fisherman is reduced to singing his own name : "Grimes! Grimes ! Grimes!". It is the ultimate moment of self-alienation' [3]




Shostakovich and Britten

During the 1960's Shostakovich became a friend of  the composer Benjamin Britten (b. Lowestoft 1913-76). Both composers shared a liking for the music of Gustav Mahler,  both worked within the framework of Western tonality and respected each other's work sufficiently to quote each other in their respective compositions. The theme of the Outsider in society is prominent in both men's music, not least in Shostakovich's later string quartets. Both composers also died tragically prematurely. 

In his highly recommended book on 20th century music and its relationship to politics, 'The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century', the musicologist Alex Ross provides the historical details on the two composers friendship thus-

'In September 1960, when Dmitri Shostakovich came to London to hear his Cello Concerto played by Mstislav Rostropovich, he was introduced to Benjamin Britten. In the following years Britten and Pears made several visits to Russia and the friendship between the two composers blossomed when Britten and Pears traveled to A Soviet composer's colony in Armenia, where Rostropovich and Shostakovich were staying.

Ross notes -'Despite obvious differences in temperament- Britten was warm and affectionate with those whom he trusted, Shostakovich nervous to the end - the two quickly found sympathy with each other, and their connection may have gone as deep as any relationship in either man.

Britten had long admired Shostakovich's music, as the Lady Macbeth-like Passacaglia in Peter Grimes shows. Shostakovich, for his part, knew little of Britten's music before the summer of 1963, when he was sent the recording and score of the War Requiem. He promptly announced that he had encountered one of the "great works of the human spirit". In person he once said to Britten, "You great composer; I little composer". Britten's psychological landscape, with its undulating contours of fear and guilt, its fault lines and crevasses, its wan redeeming light, made Shostakovich feel at home.

Both men seem almost to have been born with a feeling of being cornered. Even in works of their teenage years, they appear to be experiencing spasms of existential dread. They were grown men with the souls of gifted, frightened children. They were like the soldiers in Wilfred Owens poem, meeting at the end of a profound, dull tunnel.

In 1969 Shostakovich capped the friendship by placing Britten's name on the title page of his Fourteenth Symphony.

Dmitri Shostakovich with Benjamin Britten

Alex Ross summarises Shostakovich's String quartets thus -

'The creations of Shostakovich's sixties, a time of increasingly deteriorating health, form a group of their own,....Here, turning away from confrontation with the State and dogged by the possibility of sudden death following his first heart attack in 1966, he focused with growing austerity on eternal and universal subjects: time, love, betrayal, truth, morality and mortality. Withdrawn and cryptic, these compositions are often compared with Beethoven's own late period. ......It  is as if  the composer has seen too much evil, suffered too much duplicity. His withdrawal from the world in his late works seems at least partly to have been founded on a growing mistrust of humanity per se. From those who knew him it seems that Shostakovich's philosophy, at its simplest, was to value the individual and fear the crowd, the heartless collective. Like Britten, he ponders in old age a kind of Noh theatre of moral parable, chiseling away the superfluous to expose the essential human beneath, bereft of its camouflage of vanity and pretence.....The desolate psychological terrain of Shostakovich's late-period music overlaps everywhere with that of Britten's. [5]

Another reviewer of Shostakovich's String Quartets states- 'The quartets are neither minor in their scope or ambition. They all have something to say about the nature of human existence and folly, collectively or as individuals. There are brief moments, more perhaps towards the later quartets, where bitterness and dark intimations of mortality give way to a peaceful acceptance.  There are no happy endings, only surrender to the inevitable, alone in the knowledge of the truth of what we are and what we have been'. [6]

 It's been suggested  that Shostakovich, faced with close scrutiny from Officials, adopted the role of the yurodivy or holy fool in his relations with the government; this persona features in his String Quartets. Austere, increasingly terse and morose, they also bear witness to the intense emotional strain the composer endured throughout his life in compliance with the Soviet authorities. Far from being exclusively expressions of the Russian Soul, they're recognisable as giving voice to the loss of Faith, alienation and existential angst suffered by many in the West in the twentieth century.

Notes

[1] The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century  Alex Ross 2007 Farrar Straus and Giroux
[2]The New Shostakovich Ian MacDonald Pimlico 2006
[3] The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century  Alex Ross 2007 Farrar Straus and Giroux
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Anonymous Amazon reviewer.

The most detailed and scholarly online writings, far surpassing my effort, on each and every one of Shostakovich's Fifteen String Quartets can be found here. 

Beethoven's String Quartets

The String Quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) are ranked amongst the greatest of the genre. Frequently technically innovative in structure, experimental in harmony with poignant  melodies and sharp wit, Beethoven's late quartets in particular express not only world-weariness and resignation but also serenity and transcendence. As such they are considered to be amongst the most enigmatic and mysterious of all music within the Western classical tradition.

Its worthwhile reminding ourselves of basics. A string quartet is a musical ensemble  consisting of four string players – two violin players, a viola player and a cellist. A prominent combination in chamber ensembles in classical music, most major composers from the mid 18th century onwards, wrote string quartets. The String Quartet was developed into its current form by the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn (1737-1809) whose quartets in the 1750s established the genre.

Ever since Haydn's day the string quartet has been considered a prestigious form which challenges the composer's art. With four parts to play with, a composer has enough lines to fashion a full argument, but none to spare for padding. The closely related characters of the four instruments combined cover a wide compass of pitch. The writer of string quartets must concentrate on the bare bones of musical logic. Thus, in many ways the string quartet is pre-eminently the dialectical form of instrumental music, and the one best suited to the activity of logical disputation and philosophical enquiry. [1]

The literary figure, polymath and contemporary of Beethoven, Wolfgang von  Goethe (1749-1832) explains the appeal of the string quartet thus-

"If I were in Berlin, I should rarely miss the Moser Quartet performances. Of all types of instrumental music, I have always been able to follow these best. You listen to four sensible persons conversing, you profit from their discourse, and you get to know the individual character of the instruments" [2]

Beethoven's early string quartets were composed between the summer or autumn of 1798 and the summer of 1800. They are clearly born of the tradition of his great predecessors, yet they already strain towards new directions. Succinct themes capable of extensive development; endlessly imaginative melodic manipulation; startling dynamic contrasts; complete, sometimes radical, formal mastery are all evident in Beethoven's first set of six quartets, Op. 18. [3]

The opening movement of the C minor quartet no. 4 of the set of  opus 18  displays much of the tension and angst of a minor key Mozart quartet, along with an indebtedness to Haydn's development of the quartet, as well as some distinctly Beethovian dramatic moments.





Of Beethoven's Middle quartets, the most important are the three so-called Razumovsky Quartets opus 59. (7, 8 and 9) named after the Russian prince who commissioned them. Dating from 1806 a contemporary music journal described the Razumovsky quartets as-

" long and difficult...profound and excellently wrought but not easily intelligible - except perhaps for the third, whose originality, melody and harmonic power will surely win over every educated music lover" [4]

In the Razumovsky quartets, along with his 3rd symphony, the Eroica Symphony in E flat major ,opus 55 (first performed April 1805) Beethoven breaks free from Classical form and convention towards Romanticism with the accent on feeling, self-expression and extended form. Its of these three quartets that Beethoven allegedly replied to an uncomprehending violinist, "Not for you, but for a later age".

The second movement of the E major String Quartet (no. 3 of opus 59) is often likened to music of hymnic transcendence. Beethoven's pupil, Carl Czerny relates it was conceived whilst the composer gazed at the night sky in contemplation of  'the music of the spheres'.




The New Grove Beethoven informs us that-

After completing the Ninth Symphony in early 1824 Beethoven spent the two and a half years that remained to him writing with increasing ease and exclusively in the medium of the string quartet. The five late string quartets contain Beethoven's greatest music, or so at least many listeners in the 20th century have come to feel. The first of the five, op. 127 in E flat of 1823-24, shows all the important characteristics of this unique body of music. It opens with another lyrical sonata form containing themes in two different tempos; the Maestoso theme melts into a faster one, wonderfully tender and intimate. [5]

The composition of  the A minor quartet op. 132 was interrupted by a serious illness in April 1825. An extraordinary 'Hymn of thanksgiving in the Lydian mode' forms its central movement in which the composer gives Thanks for the restoration of his health.



In the Quartet in B flat op. 130, the confrontation of themes in different tempos gives the opening movement an elusive, even whimsical feeling. A deliberate dissociation is intensified by the succession of five more movements, often in remote keys, with something of the effect of 'character pieces' in a Baroque suite. The feverish little Presto is followed by movements labelled by Beethoven Poco scherzando, Alla danza tedesca and Cavatina......[6]

The movement entitled Cavatina sees Beethoven at his most expressive with a heartfelt Welt abschied (Farewell to the World).




No discussion of Beethoven's Late String quartets can be complete without acknowledgement of the observations of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69). Although the eminent philosopher and musicologist  himself found it impossible to complete a book upon Beethoven's String Quartets, nevertheless  he perceptively articulates defining qualities of Beethoven's late string quartets in the scattered fragments of his writings,thus -

There is in them something like a paring away of the sensuous, a spiritualization, as if the whole world of sensuous appearance were reduced in advance to the appearance of something spiritual.... It can be said that in the latest Beethoven the fabric, the interweaving of voices to form something harmonically rounded, is deliberately cut back. In Beethoven's late style there is altogether something like a tendency towards dissociation, decay, dissolution, but not in the sense of a process of composition which no longer holds things together: the disassociation and disintegration themselves become artist means, and works which have brought to a rounded conclusion take on through these means, despite their roundness, something spiritually fragmentary.  Thus, in the works which are typical of the true late style of Beethoven, the closed acoustic surface which is otherwise so characteristic of the sound of the string quartet with its perfect balance, disintegrates. [7]

Beethoven's String Quartet cycle may be considered unparalleled in scope, inventiveness and emotional depth until the String Quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75). The Soviet-era composer's String Quartets match Beethoven's in technical brilliance and profundity  in many ways and therefore invite comparison; however, Beethoven's String Quartets stand independently in their own right, as monuments to the revolutionary genius of the Romantic composer.

Notes

[1] Wikipedia
[2] Goethe 1829 Correspondence
[3] Beethoven String Quartets  Vol.1  Basil Lam BBC Music Guides 1975
[4] Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 
[5] The New Grove Beethoven  ed. Joseph Kerman and Alan Tyson pub. W W Norton & Co 1983
[6] Beethoven String Quartets Vol. 2. Basil Lam BBC Music Guides 1975
[7] Theodor W. Adorno Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts pub. Polity Press. 1998 New Ed 2002

Kazuo lshiguro

A Happy Birthday to Kazuo Ishiguro (b. Nov. 8th 1954, Nagasaki) recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I'm not particularly well-qualified to share any observations upon Ishiguro’s novels, having only read his An Artist of the floating world (1986) some thirty years ago, and once again recently, his Never Let me Go a couple of years ago and The Remains of the day more recently.

Ishiguro completed his MA in Creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 1980, my Alma Mater, and I remember meeting the co-founders of UEA's prestigious creative writing course, the novelists Angus Wilson (1913-1991) and Malcolm Bradbury ( 1932 - 2000) way back in the 1970's. 

The jacket-notes for what is Ishiguro's only Japan-centred novel An artist of the floating world  describes the novel thus-

1948: Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his two grown daughters and his grandson, and his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories return to the past - to a life and a career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism - a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity. 

But of greater interest to myself is the postscript dated January 2016  to mark the occasion of his novel's 30th anniversary, in which Ishiguro states-

‘An Artist’ was written between 1981 and 1985, years of crucial, often fractious and bitter transition in Britain. The governments of Margaret Thatcher had brought an end to the post-war political consensus about the welfare state and the desirability of a ‘mixed’ economy (in which key assets and industries are owned publically as well as privately). there was an overt and strident programme to transform the country from one based on manufacturing and heavy industries, with large organised workforces, into a predominantly service-based economy with a fragmented, flexible, non-unionised labour pool. It was the era of the miners’ strike, the Wapping dispute, CND marches, the Falklands War, IRA terrorism, an economic theory - ‘monetarism’ - that characterised deep cuts to public services as the necessary medicine to heal a sick economy. .... This novel.....was shaped by the Britain in which I was then living: the pressures on people in every walk of life to take political sides; the rigid certainties, shading into self-righteousness and sinister aggression, of ardent, often youthful factions; the agonising about the ‘role of the artist’ in a time of political change. And for me personally: the nagging sense of how difficult it is to see clearly above the dogmatic fervours of one’s day; and the fear that time and history would show that for all one’s good intentions, one had backed a wrong, shameful, even evil cause, and wasted one’s best years and talents to it.  - London, January 2016

And in fact its often been commented upon that Britain and Japan share a number of cultural and socio-economic characteristics; both are heavily industrialised island nations which once pursued Imperial ambitions, both once possessed a formidable and large naval force, both are also nations which to the present-day have rigidly defined social hierarchies.

In his dystopian science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go (2005) the English county of Norfolk, where Ishiguro 'discovered' his vocation as a novelist, is described as a place where everything which is lost ends up -

“You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'

"Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was where all the lost property found in the country ended up".

"Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that, 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk." - Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

In what is perhaps Ishiguro's most well-known novel, The Remains of the Day (1989)  which has been described as P.G.Wodehouse meets Kafka, Ishiguro explores psychological characteristics often associated with the English nation, the famous 'stiff upper lip' of emotional repression and inarticulateness; of individuals who are unable to express themselves adequately, a particularly English tragedy, often enhanced and facilitated through an inflexible and detrimental to equality, hierarchical class-system which refuses to die an honorable death. 

Written in a  fluid, intimate and masterful prose style, distinctive characteristics of Ishiguro's prose, The Remains of the Day depicts England in the 1930's in which the class system dominates people's lives. It also describes how through political naivete the British upper-class were blind to the dangers of fascism spreading throughout mainland Europe, a political awareness which remains unlearnt in sectors of British society to the present-day, as Ishiguro himself states in an article on the result of the ill-conceived British referendum on membership to the European Union [1] as well as in interview on BBC television.

In the excellent Merchant-Ivory film adaption of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1993) the magical chemistry between the actors Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson makes no small contribution in  portraying the fatal psychological inadequacy of the English, an inability of emotional expressiveness, aided and abetted by their obsession with status and social class. These factors blight what ought to have been a healthy love affair between the two central characters of Ishiguro's brilliant novel.  

Mark Burrell's 'The Trump Show: Let's Make America Great Again'.

In the British artist Mark Burrell’s painting Lets Make America Great Again (2017) the negative emotional and psychological traits of America’s controversial President, Donald Trump are satirized.

Realized in the medium of alkyd resins, Burrell's artistic imagination is clearly alive and well, enhanced as ever through skillful draughtsmanship and a meticulous attention to detail. These talents, in conjunction with the artist’s sensibility, insight and occasional dark humour contribute to create a provocative art-work.  Donald Trump is portrayed as an overgrown baby in the care of a hooded baby-sitting member of the KKK who is pushing a pram on the edge of a cliff. Meanwhile, the American flag is in flames as Trump in his pram stuffed full of dollars and lit by coloured bulbs, sounds off his horn, only to emit bubbles in vain.

With its extensive landscape, rock formation and setting sun background Let's Make America Great Again  alludes to the Romantic 'Wild West' landscapes of the American painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), in particular the sweeping landscape of his Emigrants Crossing the Plain (also known as On The Oregon Trail). By utilizing Bierstadt's famous painting as a template for his own art-work, Burrell effectively contrasts and parodies America of the 19th century, a nation built by aspirational, freedom-loving emigrants, to an America of the 21st century and a President who advocates the construction of walls to prevent emigrants entering America.

Albert Bierstadt  Emigrants Crossing the Plain 1869

Finer details of Burrell's Let's Make America Great Again include - the hammer and sickle in the American flag, a letter saying Trump loves Putin, and a meteorite heading towards the White House. Its background features two contrasting scenes, to the right, a Hieronymus Bosch-like scene of hell in which a factory belches thick pollutant smoke, to the left, a heavenly woodland scene in which a copse of trees bathe in the golden light of a setting sun.

The allusions are stark and disturbing. The fate of a nation seems balanced between a heavenly and hellish future in the hands of a man-child. By placing Trump in a pram there's more than a hint of the recently-elected American President's well-documented record of  immaturity and childish temper tantrums.

Like many similar-minded artists, Burrell has exercised his artistic talents to speak out on the behalf of a mostly silent and unrepresented majority of sane-thinking people. In his own words -

'I felt compelled to paint a picture of my concerns of which I think millions of others in the world are also fearful'.

In Let’s Make America Great Again (65 x 75 cm.) Burrell is following in the footsteps of a long established tradition of British art, that of political commentary through satire. Its a tradition which historically spans from the cartoons of James Gillray (1756-1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) to the Victorian humour of the magazine Punch to the latex puppetry of Peter Fluck and Roger Law in the British TV show Spitting Image (1984-96).

One weapon of the artist and cartoonist alike is that of satire, defined as the mocking of characteristics and personality traits, often of politicians and those in power in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intention of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or even society itself into improvement. Satire's greater purpose is constructive social criticism, it uses wit to draw attention to issues affecting the world and society today. [1]

Trump’s fatal combination of psychological traits, perceived by many to be those of arrogance and ignorance, are rich pickings  for comedians, artists and satirists alike. They are also psychological traits which are often attributed to Americans in general, either through prejudice or misunderstanding of cultural norms, but also occasionally correct in assumption, hence the view of the stereotypical American throughout the world. Arrogance and ignorance may be considered charming and excusable attributes in a child or baby perhaps, but hardly ever acceptable in a septuagenarian leader of a world superpower.

The very real anxiety for millions of sane-thinking people today, politics apart is simply, how could someone with a well-documented unstable personality have become elected as the leader of one of the world’s most powerful nations ? Burrell along with millions of others' concerns are very real, especially when the danger of a thermonuclear war is threatened through the fatal combination of one individual with immense power being psychologically unstable. Never before as much as now has the world urged America to ensure there is a rational mind fully in control of its nuclear arsenal.

Burrell’s artistic desire to to portray ‘the raw emotions behind the mask’ in which an insane-looking Trump appears little more than a monster blighting a beautiful country, succeeds on several levels; Let’s Make America Great Again is simultaneously a satirical portrait and indictment of Donald Trump’s psychological and emotional stability, a near hallucinatory and apocalyptic-impending landscape allusive to the world's future as one of heaven or hell, and not least, a worthy addition to a life-time portfolio of art conjured with steadfast industriousness in tandem with free-ranging imagination.

The title of Mark Burrell's painting (detail, above) originates from a frequently repeated statement made by Donald Trump throughout his election campaign - 'Let's make America great again'. The statement can only be rhetorical. How can America be 'made great again' when it already is ?

Perhaps President Trump means make America great again as one of world's nations with the greatest inequalities of wealth distribution ? America's already great at that. Perhaps he means 'Make America Great Again' in terms of military expenditure ? America is also great at that. Its expenditure in military hardware and defence outstrips the rest of the entire world combined, and at the present time of writing President Trump has  completing a series of arms deals with Saudi Arabia totaling more than $300 bn. Perhaps President Trump means make America great as a world distributor of pornography ? It already is. Perhaps he means make America great again in the number of people incarcerated in prison ? America's already one of the greatest at that too. Perhaps he means 'Make America Great Again' in terms of America being a world leader in consuming the world's resources ? Again, its already great at that. One strongly suspects Trump's election slogan appeals most to those with a weak identity and suffering from insecurity in the face of a rapidly-changing world.

The indisputable facts remain - the American population which represents only 5% of the world's total population consumes an astounding 26% of the world's energy. America also consumes a staggering 30% of the world's resources and is the world's largest single emitter of carbon dioxide, 'Greenhouse gas' emissions which cause climate change and global warming. Phenomena which are scientifically proven but which worryingly, for all those who care about the world’s future, the current President denies. At the present time of writing Trump has withdrawn from the crucial Paris climate agreement talks, as if one nation could isolate itself from environmental concerns which affect the world.

Accordingly to Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, the authors of Why do people Hate America, it was the acclaimed British dramatist, screenwriter  and Nobel prize winner, Harold Pinter (1930-2008) who stated in 2002 -

The US has ‘exercised sustained, systematic, remorseless and quite clinical manipulation of power world-wide, while masquerading as a power for good’. It is ‘arrogant, indifferent, contemptuous of International Law, both dismissive and manipulative of the United Nations: this is now the most dangerous power the world has ever known - the authentic “rogue state”, but a “rogue state” of colossal military and economic might’.   [ 2]

Along with the commonly-held perception of many Americans appearing as arrogant and ignorant, the briefest of inventories of commonly-held grievances against America and its people includes - resentment at thinking themselves the centre of universe, an unhealthy diet and epidemic obesity, a gargantuan consumption of the world's resources, the export of trash cultures, an obsession with war, diplomatic meddling in other nation's affairs and acting unilaterally on the world-stage of politics. [3]

The tragedy of today is that much of the world has long looked up to and respected America as the upholder of humanitarian and democratic values, only to be bitterly disappointed by American protectionism, unilateralism and rabid nationalism in the policies of its latest President, Donald Trump. 

Mark Burrell’s The Boy who was Happy to be Himself (2017) is a witty response to America's export of 'Trash culture', in particular Hollywood and its machismo superheroes. Quintessentially gothic in its evocation of a mysterious atmosphere, its an artwork which is humorous but with a serious message as well. 

Set at night in a urban street in moonlight with a broad wash of midnight blue, the centre-stage of The Boy who was Happy to be Himself  depicts a floodlit bill-board with three life-sized superheroes. The slogan Coming to you Soon is inscribed above them. With his back against these figures, and seemingly oblivious to them all, a boy is seen engrossed, reading a book. Beside the boy there's a book-stand with the words ‘The Magic of Books’ inscribed upon it. Meanwhile, life goes on in an intimate street setting - a bonfire is attended and chimneys smoke, someone taking an evening walk carries an umbrella which mysteriously provides light. A masked schoolboy standing beside the billboard gazes towards the viewer. A tower-block of flats can also be seen, allusive to a landmark visible from Burrell's studio in his home-town of Lowestoft.

A  hallmark of Burrell’s art is its unique colour tonality, an instance of which occurs in the reflected colours of the paving-stones in the foreground of The Boy who was Happy to be Himself, effectively making the ordinariness of paving-stones appear magical, a superb example of magical realism, no less. Another attribute of Burrell's art is its skillful draughtsmanship, the viewer's eye perusing the scene in this case is tugged between a calm street background and intriguing foreground imagery.

Burrell's art encourages the viewer to look and look again, and in doing so discover new layers of allusion, meaning and detail. A closer inspection of its superheroes reveals Batman to be obese and thus barely capable of acrobatically swooping across the night-sky while Superman's youthful vigour has long past, his receding hairline suggestive of an ageing Dad-with-Slippers adventurousness, while the Norse god Thor has a glazed and manic expression, suggestive of a Viking berserker barely capable of intrepid North Sea navigation. Uninterested and unimpressed by any of these three superheroes, a  boy with his back turned against them reads a book. The contrast between the ability to think for oneself and not allow the Hollywood film industry to shape one's view of the world, is stark.

Burrell’s humourous painting is not without a serious message. Hollywood’s film industry with its pervasive influence upon the human imagination cannot be over-estimated. There are few in the world today whose imagination has not been manipulated by its relentless agenda of advertising American values. Hollywood's influence  is often far greater than consciously realised, contributing towards what may quite rightly be termed as none other than American cultural imperialism. Hollywood's domestic market consumption in turn may well contribute towards an acclimatising and hardening of American youth towards war, conflict and economic competition against the world at large, rather than relate and understand cultures and people beyond the American border.

The superheroes Batman and Superman originated from 1930's America, an era of economic depression and rampant crime, and as such are the product of American wish-fulfillment to eradicate social problems without any realistic understanding of the dominant cause of most social problems then as now, namely, grossly unfair wealth distribution. Hollywood itself is a multi-billion dollar industry which is little sympathetic to  its impact upon the environment or its consumption of the world’s quite finite resources.  Its hard to comprehend the facts. Warner Bros. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) has a supposed $410 million price tag. Superman Returns (2006) cost $246 million to make, Man of Steel (2013) cost $228 million and grossed $668 million worldwide, The amazing Spider-Man (2012) cost over $238 million, grossing $752 million, Superman Returns (2006)  cost $246.4 million and returned $391 million for its financial investors, Spider-Man 2 (2004) cost $250 million and made $783.8 million.

But are any of these badly misinterpreted Nietzschean Ubermensch worthwhile emulating in any way ? The predictable and formulaic plots of many Hollywood films are inevitably the product of scripts written with investors in mind and who simply want a large financial return on their investment without any concern of artistic integrity. One questions with Burrell, whether Hollywood's consumption of the world’s quite finite resources, purely for entertainment purposes, often of quite a childish nature, can ever be truly justified.

Recent  political propaganda which satirizes the British Prime Minister Theresa May and her election slogan (Strong and Stable). 

The inclusion of the Norse god Thor in The Boy who was Happy to be Himself produces a startling cognitive dissonance when juxtaposed to all-American superheroes. Burrell's Thor has a manic look about him, reminiscent of the stentorian British actor Brian Blessed (b. 1936) or wild-man  Oliver Reed (1938-1999). Its a look suggestive of one whose brain may be burnt-out from drinking vast quantities of mead or from ingesting too many fly agaric mushrooms as the Viking Berserkers were inclined to do.

Thor's joining the ranks of American superheroes is a good example of cultural appropriation. The Norse god was a sacred figure who existed thousands of years before Hollywood, yet has been used by American filmmakers as an example of a super-hero and as such is an example of what is termed as 'cultural appropriation'. Examples of cultural appropriation, that is, the 'borrowing’ of symbols associated with a specific cultures include amongst numerous examples, Mohawk hair-styles, Tartan kilts and Rastafari dreadlocks, all of which are worn by those not part of the culture from which they originated, but appropriated as badges of identity. Cultural appropriation and its widespread abuse by Western culture is discussed in depth in the Palestinian historian Edward Said in his ground-breaking work Orientalism (1978).

Incidentally, understanding of the Viking era was considerably enhanced when in 1938 at Woodbridge in Suffolk, just 40 miles south of Burrell's home-town of Lowestoft, the site of two 6th and early 7th-century cemeteries was discovered by archaeologists. One cemetery contained an undisturbed ship burial, including a wealth of Anglo-Saxon artefacts of outstanding art-historical and archaeological significance. The Sutton Hoo Viking burial site remains one of the most important of all archaeological discoveries of  the Viking era (500-1100 CE).

With self-deprecating humour Burrell confesses to 'getting tired of American propaganda', such as produced by Hollywood, whilst admitting to indulging in a little propaganda of his own. He also suggests it may be the Buddhist-orientated spiritual self-help guide, the international best-seller The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle which is being read by the young lad in his painting.

Holding no illusions about the reception of his new painting, Burrell states -

'Some will pick up subliminally my message, others will think it just another funny pic'.

Burrell also reflects on how certain motifs in his paintings featuring candles, tea cups, fun-fairs and flags and which are often set during evening or night, have altered little over the past 40 years.

The 'message' of The Boy who was Happy to be Himself seems to be - the easiest way to emancipate one's mind is simply to read, preferably in printed book form (still arguably the most efficient way to absorb information) to find out for oneself in order to think for oneself, independent from influences such as the near world-wide dominance of American culture.

Mark Burrell's The Watchers (36" x 30") is a sharp indictment of the City bankers, debt-collectors, government bully-boys and jobsworths in general in Britain today who are busy devastating the lives of the disabled, vulnerable and unemployed without a thought or care of the damage they cause, whilst 'only doing their job'.

Painted in 2009, the year in which the harsh realities of the world Recession began to be assimilated by millions of people with a noticeable decline in living standards, Burrell's The Watchers features a combination of two of the artist's strongest attributes, namely, skillful portraiture and a social conscience. Not unlike the German artists George Grosz (1893-1959) or Otto Dix (1891-1969), both of whom documented the social injustices and inequalities of Germany's Weimar Republic (1919-33), Burrell  is also well-capable of utilizing his artistic talents in order to produce hard-hitting social commentary. In the artist's own words -

'People are being constantly abused by the state and the unemployed are being used as scapegoats. People need to look a bit harder. Its a heavy unfair system full of legal forms of corruption'.

Much of the Western world's current economic and social woes can be traced back to the era of Thatcher and Reagan and their adoption of the economic model advocated by the so-called Chicago school of economics as represented by Milton Friedman and the Austro-British economist Friedrich Hayek. Basically, Neo-liberalism (which is neither new or liberal) is an ideological knee-jerk reaction against socialism which rejects the responsibilities of the Nation-State towards its citizens. Indeed, when the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925 - 2013) first came to power she allegedly slapped a copy of Hayek's book, 'New Economics' onto a table, saying, 'this is what we believe in'.

Since the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008 resulting in a debt being passed onto the rest of the world and paid for by those who were not responsible for the banking failure, the economic policies of Neoliberalism have been found wanting, in particular in a fair distribution of wealth, resulting in a certain amount of on-going brutalization in sectors of Western society, as depicted in Burrell's The Watchers. One certainly wouldn't want to bump into any of these characters down a deserted street !

Through their familiarity in exploring the little understood world of the imagination, the British artists Mark Burrell (b. 1957) and Peter Rodulfo (b. 1958) the co-founders of the North Sea Magical Realism art-movement are equally adept at adjusting the focus of their artistic imagination. Its thus relatively easy for them to venture into new territory such as the arena of political commentary.

The artist Peter Rodulfo has also been known to make a satirical statement in his art concerning politics in England today. In his A Barrel of Laughs painted in 2013, some 4 years before the British Referendum upon continuing membership to the European Union, Rodulfo astutely identifies the prime culprit who instigated the fiasco and farce which continues to embroil British politics. Surrounded by pigs, suggestive of the phrases 'Pig-headed' and 'Pig-ignorant' the Far-right politician Nigel Farage (b. 1964) is seen in a barrel, perhaps an allusion to his tub-thumping, jingoistic and rabble-rousing tendencies, certainly not because he is in any way whatsoever A Barrel of Laughs, as the colloquial British phrase puts it.

Of particular note is the great care taken in A Barrel of Laughs in its draughtsmanship and depth of perspective, resulting in an extensive landscape with a finely wrought cloudscape.

Humour and playfulness in general are frequently encountered in much of Rodulfo's art. Although satire is most often associated with literary forms, it also occurs in the visual arts. Because satire often combines both anger and humor, as well as the fact that it draws attention to controversial topics, it can be profoundly disturbing, not unlike the thinly-veiled racism of the central character featured in Rodulfo's A Barrel of Laughs.

Nigel Farage’s hobbies includes predictable pre-occupations of the Far-Right, an unhealthy obsession with World War II in which, contrary to his rhetoric, he took no part whatsoever, the historical event occurring long before he was born. He also likes to tour battlefields in preparation for a history book  which he plans to write for schoolchildren.

Underlying much of Farage's and fellow Brexiteer's ideology is the delusional belief that English exceptionalism can take on and beat all Europe. In essence, the founding myth of the Britain which exists in Farage and his followers minds is simply a way of justifying their xenophobia. For Farage and his followers, the Second World War was not about fighting against the Nazis, but purely and simply about fighting against foreigners. They may say "Nazis" but in reality they simply mean "Germans". The supreme irony being which is lost on Farage and  followers of the Far-right who incessantly harp on about a war in which they did not participate as they were not even alive, is that the second world War War had as its imperative the objective of the elimination and defeat of the Far-Right in power in Europe at the time.

     

Unlike Nigel Farage, Peter Rodulfo is well-read enough to be described as erudite. Indeed, in 2016 Rodulfo proposed the seventeenth century literary figure Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) to be an ancestral member of the North Sea Magical Realism art-movement. Browne's elective affinity to the art-movement is founded upon several factors. Firstly, geographically, as Browne is recorded as botanizing upon Great Yarmouth's sand-dunes and throughout Norfolk's extensive coastline. Secondly, as an artist possessing unique imaginative gifts in concept, imagery and symbolism, and finally and not least, as one whose contribution to the visual arts is far greater than is commonly known. For example, one of several techniques employed by political cartoonists includes that of caricature, a word which derives from the Italian of caricare—to charge or load, thus caricature essentially means a "loaded portrait". According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word 'Caricature' was introduced into the English language by Sir Thomas Browne. Its one of hundreds of words which the seventeenth century polymath and literary artist is credited as the first to employ. Browne's definition of caricature being, 'When Men's faces are drawn with resemblance to some other Animals, the Italians call it, to be drawn in Caricatura', while also advising his eldest son Edward Browne - 'Expose not thy self by four-footed manners unto monstrous draughts, and Caricatura representations'. [4] 

However, in Rodulfo's painting it is as much the word-play of the plural of pigs, the word 'swine,' which means 'a contemptible or unpleasant person' in the English language which may be applicable to Farage than the specific art of caricature itself.

Rodulfo's satirical painting A Barrel of Laughs voices the concern of all sane and politically literate people in England today, namely, how far previously unacceptably right-wing views have permeated into British politics. Indeed there remains little for Nigel Farage's single - cause political party UKIP to campaign for, now that their goal has theoretically been achieved, namely the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Project.

The British philosopher A.C.Grayling speaks on behalf of many, including doubtlessly Rodulfo, when stating of Nigel Farage -

"I think he’s a bounder. He’s a cad. He’s an embarrassment. I cringe at the thought of how he behaved like a football hooligan and a lager lout in the European Parliament. What an advertisement for the best of the English character. I have no time for him at all. I think he is an embarrassment and a waste of space".

When distinguished academics such as A.C. Grayling raise the concern that Brexit is beginning to look like a right-wing coup its surely time to heed the early warning signs of a nation sleep-walking into fascism, chanting in their sleep, 'It couldn't happen here'. It could, and is happening.

The North Sea Magical Realism artists Mark Burrell and Peter Rodulfo are united in their concern over recent political elections in the USA and GB. Their art goes some way towards highlighting and combating the exploitation of the politically illiterate, indoctrinated through a right-wing media and those whose misanthropic politics of greed and hatred are alarmingly vociferous in America and Great Britain today.

Recommended Reading

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle pub. Yellow Kite 2001
Meaning in the Visual Arts by Erwin Panofsky pub. University of Chicago 1955
Why do people hate America ? Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies pub. Icon Books 2002
Orientalism - Edward Said 1978

*High quality prints of Mark Burrell's 'Let's Make America Great Again' are available from the artist.

Contact  Mark Burrell Art   to purchase.

*All three paintings discussed here are exhibited at Burrell's Open Studio's week-ends  
June 10th / 11th, 17th / 18th and 24th / 25th.

Notes

[1] Wikipedia
[2]  Granta Spring 2002
[3] 'Why do people hate America ?' by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies pub. Icon Books 2002.
[4] Christian Morals pub. post. 1716
[5]http://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/interview/a-c-grayling-brexit-is-starting-to-look-a-lot-like-a-coup/