The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [44]
Nick sat at the table, quick-witted after a mug of coffee, and ready to say all kinds of things. Today especially he was maddened by Strauss's bumptious self-confidence, which took no account of his own frustrations, the two tense weeks in which the dream of Leo as a possible future had faded on the air. But he contented himself with making a ghastly face. In their ongoing Strauss feud he was always cheerfully combative and found himself leaping to more and more dizzy positions—after which he had to take a few moments to reason his way to them over solid ground. Simply having opposition brought latent feelings to the surface and polarized views he might otherwise hardly have bothered to formulate. It became urgent for him to revile Richard Strauss, and he did it happily but a little hysterically, as if far more than questions of taste were involved. He could measure the strange zeal of the process by the degree to which he found himself denying his own ingenuous pleasure in some of Strauss's material and the magical things he did with it—this massive tune now, for instance, which would be running through his mind for days to come. He watched Gerald revelling and swelling too, and a vague embarrassment at the sight made it easier for him to say, "No . . . no. . . it just won't do," as the music was quickly faded out.
"Herbert von Karajan there, with the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic in superlative form."
"Exactly, that's the one we've got, isn't it?" Gerald said. "The Karajan, Nick?"—since it was Nick, over the summer months, who had been through the record cupboard and put all the discs in alphabetical order.
"Um—I think so . . ."
"But it's possible, isn't it," the clever young man went on, "to wonder if the sheer opulence of the sound and those very broad tempi don't push this reading over the edge, losing that essential drop of self-irony without which the piece can all too easily become an orgy of vulgarity. Let's hear Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw in the same passage."
Gerald had the stern, pinched look of someone wounded in debate and measuring his response with awkward dignity. The orchestra rampaged all over again. "I don't think I care for this one quite so much," he said. And then a little later, "I don't see what's vulgar about being glorious."
Nick said, "Oh, if you were worried about vulgarity then you'd never listen to Strauss at all."
"Ooh . . . !" protested Gerald, suddenly cheerful again.
"Perhaps the early Symphony in F," Nick said. "But even that . . ."
"I'm going over to Russell's," said Catherine, walking through the room with a hat on and her fingers in her ears—whether to block out the Hero's Deeds or her father's objections wasn't clear. In fact Gerald said, "OK, Puss," and stamped his foot exultantly at a blasting entry for the horns. It was a clear case of God-dammery, her word for all heavily scored Romantic music. She went out into the hall and they heard the slam of the front door.
What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, the sense that the moral nerves had been cut, leaving the great bloated body to a life of valueless excess. And then there was the sheer bad taste of applying the high metaphysical language of Wagner to the banalities of bourgeois life, an absurdity Strauss seemed only intermittently aware of! But he couldn't say that, he would sound priggish, he would seem to care too much. Gerald would say it was only music. Nick tried to read the paper for a couple of minutes, but was oddly too excited to concentrate.
"And then the cor anglais, changed at last from whining adversary to pastoral pipe, introduces the poignant melody which announces the Hero's impending departure from the world. For how not to do it, let's go back to that mid-price disc from the Caracas Radio Orchestra, whose soloist seems not to have been told of this important transformation in character . . ."
"Gerald, did you manage to get hold of Norman?" Rachel asked, with an insistent tone, as if herself not quite sure of getting