Irish composer John Kinsella has had a lifelong fascination with symphonies. Just turned 80, he discusses the process in preparing his eleventh, and which symphonies he thinks are the greatest
WHAT MARKS John Kinsella out from the crowd is the fact that he’s an Irish composer obsessed with symphonies. It’s not that there haven’t been other Irish composers who’ve written symphonies. But nobody else has done so with the tenacity that Kinsella has shown. He didn’t complete the work he numbered Symphony No 1 until 1984, the year he turned 52. His 10th was premiered earlier this year by the Irish Chamber Orchestra under Gábor Takács-Nagy, and given rousing receptions in Limerick and Dublin. And Kinsella, who turned 80 yesterday, is raring to get going on No 11.
He’ll have to wait a while, though. His most recent project was a work for solo double bass. “Which is very current, because it’s to do with the Titanic. The double-bass player David Daly, who plays in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, his uncle was Eugene Daly, who was on the Titanic. He was a piper. He boarded at Queenstown with his wife and sister, and is reported to have played a tune called Erin’s Lament as he went on board.
“David has found this tune by referring to the current Athlone Pipe Band. They dug it out for him, what they thought was the actual tune. I’ve written a sort of graphic thing about the whole Titanic experience, weaving this into it. I even heard reference to Eugene Daly on Newstalk last night. There’s a new book out about the Titanic and it gave much more detail about his experiences, where he saw passengers being held in steerage, and a lot of them drowned as a result of that, and some of them were even shot by the crew.
“I’ve just finished that piece, and he’s going to do it this year. And I’ve just started on a string quartet now, for the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry 2013. I’m very much at the beginning stages there, so it’s kind of fraught. Slow progress, digging. That’ll keep me going for about six months. Then I’d love to do a No 11.”
Kinsella picked up the symphony bug as a youngster, when his father encouraged him and his older brother (the poet Thomas Kinsella), and he soaked up all the music he could through radio and live concerts.
Symphonies were always a big excitement. “The idea of these big structures, and the sense of adventure at the beginning of the work as to where you were going to go on this long journey and what you were going to hear and imagine. And then the culmination, perhaps, or the sorrow at the end. It just tapped into my nerve ends, the idea of a large piece of orchestral music like that. I simply couldn’t get enough of classical music. But the symphony, being what it is, was the core of this experience. Going on from there, I always had the urge to write music, although I really knew nothing about it at all.”
What makes a symphony a symphony for Kinsella is “the feeling that something important is to be said, rather than something entertaining, in the very best sense of the word”. He muses over issues of providing contrast, balancing everything into a satisfying whole, getting the pacing right, finding novel formal solutions in a way that makes clear that the fascination is unending. When he talks about the great figures in the history of the symphony he often talks in terms of heaven and special degrees of love.
Haydn he cherishes for, “Optimism, endless energy, and an imagination that, within the terms he was dealing with, knew no bounds. A tremendous sense of fun, and one can pick that up from his string quartets as well, which parallel the symphonies.” Mozart is “a voice from heaven. I can never understand Mozart. As time goes on he’s just more and more of a mystery to me. He’s the exact opposite to Beethoven, a man who dug his way through everything and echoes the human condition very clearly. Mozart seemed to rise above all that. I know he worked very hard, he revised a lot. But the spontaneity of the whole thing is incredible. And if you take his last three symphonies, that’s still a pinnacle that people coming after him are very aware of and which in certain senses has never been equalled.
“Beethoven is the one I understand most. I’ve been reading a book recently by Barry Cooper on his compositional methods. It’s an examination of the notebooks, divining from them how he went about the work of composition, including methods that I’d worked out myself – fairly mundane things, I’m not talking about anything on Beethoven’s level, but working methods, I see that they’re kind of paralleled in his way of trying to put things together. The slogging at ideas, the shaping and re-shaping.
“But there’s a mystery in Beethoven to me. You get the sketchbooks and you have all these pregnant phrases which are ready to go. There’s nothing about the actual work itself. There’s nothing left behind about the intermediate stages of composition through a certain work. But he’s still the one to aspire to, he really is. If I was made pick my hero, he’s obviously the one. It’s everlasting music. And he’s totally indestructible, in the sense that if you hear amateur performers doing Beethoven, there’s always an awful lot left at the end of it.” And Beethoven gets Kinsella’s vote for greatest symphony ever written. He sees Beethoven’s Seventh as being “of a Grecian perfection”.
Also on the shortlist would be Schubert’s Ninth: “The freshness of melody, the rhythms, and then in the Ninth Symphony the overwhelming power of the whole thing still has the power to leave me completely flat.” Schumann is “a special love”, cherished for his melodic invention and his individual approach to form, and he has a grá, too, for Mendelssohn. “The Fourth Symphony, the Italian, is something I’d love to be able to write, I really would. I envy the man his skill. It’s such an amazing work.
“In my early 20s, I couldn’t get enough Brahms. That wore off. And I’m now re-entering a stage where again I can’t get enough of him. His four symphonies are huge areas of discovery and enlightenment, and individuality of technique.”
Tchaikovsky is a master envied for “his sense of orchestration and harmony, and the cleanliness of his sound”. He sees Tchaikovsky, even in depressive mood, as healthy. Mahler, on the other hand, is not, and his music is “a problem, for me. There’s no doubt he’s a composer of the first rank. But his message to me is too depressive. I can’t live with his music. I can admire it, and appreciate it. But I don’t listen to Mahler by choice.” He struggled with Bruckner, too: “I can stand back from a Bruckner symphony now, and appreciate it in the whole, and know what he’s doing. The effect can be totally overwhelming. I think Bruckner symphonies are, if you like, the ideal symphony, because they do say something very important and very profound, and even manage to get very trite ideas in, but they’re in the right place, in the right mixture.”
He praises Nielsen for his “tremendous, gritty music”, and admires Shostakovich as “a great man who’s held the flag for the symphony right through the 20th century.
But the key 20th-century figure for him is Sibelius. “A complete love. He’s somebody I associate with very closely. I feel there’s some Nordic blood in my veins somewhere. Everything he says seems like something I want to say myself, that I can totally appreciate, and I find very strong resonances in his sounds. Sibelius I put up there with Beethoven.”
His favourite among his own symphonies is the Third. “I think the proportions are just about right, although I’ve met people who argue very strongly otherwise. But I’m happy enough with that. I was happy with the way the 10th Symphony went recently. The audience reaction took me completely unawares. They stood and clapped. I was completely unnerved by that. I wasn’t expecting it at all. It was helped by a tremendous, vigorous performance in each case.
“From a formal point of view, the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies I’m very happy with. The Eighth has a problem. It’s only had one performance. It was an experiment with form, which I may have pushed the boundaries too far on for the content. On the other hand, I’d reserve judgment on that until the work could be given enough rehearsal time to realise it. It’s a work that I put so much effort and energy into that I was in reasonably bad health for a while after it. So there must be something in it somewhere.”
And the 10th, written for chamber orchestra rather than symphony orchestra, seems to have marked a turning point. It wasn’t commissioned, and there was no performance in prospect when he composed it. “I deliberately wrote in a vacuum. I deliberately took my time over it. The Arts Council gave me a small grant, I was able to buy a lot of scores and recordings of other music that I took time out to listen to. I just made my own space. It had nothing to do with deadlines or anybody.
“I’d like to do the next one in the same way. I’m very much a fan of the smaller orchestra now. I think the smaller orchestra can in its own way almost say more. You’re forced to say something, rather than just cover up with a trombone blast. Coming back to my greatest symphony ever written, Beethoven’s Seventh, he only had two horns. And he made a big enough noise with that. I’m a very big fan of that. It may be something to do with the austerity of today. Lean and fit.”
Key Kinsella recordings
- Symphonies 3 4. RTÉ NSO/Proinnsías Ó Duinn (Marco Polo)
- Prelude and Toccata, Symphonies 6 6, and other works. National Chamber Choir, RTÉ NSO/Proinnsías Ó Duinn, Gavin Maloney (RTÉ lyric fm)
- String Quartet No 2. RTÉ String Quartet (New Irish Recording Company, LP only, long deleted)
