"Berlin is well worth a visit" was a slogan of the West German Tourist Board in the years when West Berlin was isolated from the rest of the Federal Republic. It's a line that's even more true today. Though many Irish people may look to Paris or Rome as their primary tourist goal, they would do well to try Berlin, writes Tony Williams.
As I discovered during a month's holiday this summer, the city has much to offer visitors from these shores, from its integrated public transport system - cheap weekly or monthly tickets allow you to make as many journeys as you want by tram, bus, underground and suburban railways - to the five symphony orchestras and three opera houses, a happy legacy of the divided city. Berlin has many culinary delights, and one of these was breakfast at the Yorckschlößchen - as recommended, according to the menu card, by no less a person than Kevin Myers.
It was the musical riches of the city I especially wanted to explore. There were wonderful performances by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the German Opera Berlin, and other ensembles of works by Bruckner, Wagner, Brahms and other Austrian and German composers. Yet the musical highlight of the trip was something entirely different and unexpected: a piano recital by the German pianist Michael Endres which included the First Piano Sonata (1910) of Arnold Bax, an English composer with strong Irish links, who died in Cork on October 3rd, 1953, 49 years ago this week.
Voyage of discovery
Endres's full engagement in a voyage of discovery was unmistakable, from the turbulent opening to the exultant pealing of bells at the work's conclusion. And the warm and sustained applause indicated that the Berlin audience had responded to Bax's music.
After the concert I ventured backstage and discovered Michael Endres to be a total enthusiast about Bax's music. In his delight at meeting someone who shared his passion, he showed me the music and, skipping animatedly backwards and forwards through the pages, he pointed out details which, in my snail-like approach to scores, I had great difficulty in following.
He said he would be performing all Bax's piano sonatas throughout Germany in the coming year, before recording them on CD. He is also organising a memorial broadcast concert in 2003 devoted entirely to chamber works by the composer.
Arnold Bax was born of wealthy parents in London in 1883, and he wrote his best music - tone poems, concertos, seven symphonies, instrumental and chamber music, songs and choral works - roughly between 1910 and 1939. As a composer he described himself as a "brazen Romantic", and his complex, melodically fertile music is by turns surging and calm, grim and tender, doom-laden and joyful.
Full of contrasts
The many passages of stormy music are in part impressions of nature, but they may also reflect Bax's response to tragic events of the times, or his tempestuous romantic involvements. Like the music, the personality and life of the man himself were full of contrasts: he was a shy, retiring man given to strong emotions and impulsive actions, a cricket-loving Englishman, Master of the King's Musick, and an Irish nationalist.
It was the inspiration of Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin which first brought this "tireless hunter of dreams" to Ireland in 1902 on the first of many visits, though he was resident here only between 1911 and 1913. His favourite haunts were in the west, with its legends and wild, lonely beauty. He spent long periods in the Donegal Gaeltacht area of Glencolumcille. Bax learned to speak and write Irish, and published poetry and prose on Irish subjects under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne.
In the years before the first World War Bax became a close friend of the poet and painter George Russell (AE) and other writers. He also became acquainted with Pádraig Pearse and other leading figures of the Easter Rising, with which he sympathised and whose outcome devastated him.
Bax dedicated one of his most moving orchestral works to Pearse following his execution on May 3rd, 1916. This is In Memoriam,with its memorable elegiac melody, a work which, astonishingly, received its first performance just four years ago. In the same year, he expressed his response to the Rising in poems. It was one of his proudest moments when Yeats told him he considered A Dublin Ballad 1916 to be "a masterpiece".
Bax felt that Ireland had a positive influence on his developing musical style, helping him to break free, "in part at least", from the "sway of Wagner and Strauss". He began to write "Irishly, using figures and melodies of a definitely Celtic curve". This can be heard most obviously in In the Faery Hills (1909), but also in another orchestral tone poem relating to Irish legend, and one of his finest works, The Garden of Fand ( 1913), with its evocation of the Atlantic, initially glinting and undulating gently, ultimately wild with tumultuous waves, and its glorious tune capturing Fand's immortal love.
Bryden Thomson
In recent decades Bax has not been well served in his adopted country. I can recall performances of only a couple of symphonies by the NSO under Bryden Thomson in the 1980s. Thomson gave an apt description of the process of coming to understand and love Bax's music: "Bax is rather like Guinness - it's an acquired taste, but once you've acquired it. . ."
A revival of interest in Bax's music is long overdue. Perhaps it will be sparked off by Michael Endres's endeavours. How well one of his marvellous chamber works, for various combinations of instruments involving three to nine players, would sound in Bantry House at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, in the county of his final resting place.