The World Around Britten

Extract

In my experience, anniversary articles about living composers, read a few decades after the event, seem terribly stale and drab—the righter, the staler. The reason is clear. Articles which time proves wrong have, at least, a period flavour: how delightful to see how ‘great’ Spohr or Spontini used to be. (There are also those, of course, which time proves wrongly wrong, at any rate for a time: the period flavour of Mendelssohn's greatness is gradually evaporating, his timeless greatness re-emerging). But to see how right Rochlitz was about Beethoven, or how right—about 40 years too late—I was about Schoenberg, is shatteringly tedious: we don't dive into the past in order to watch how, sweat dripping from its self–righteous forehead, it laboriously discovers the obvious. The prophet's tragedy is that by the time he's right he's out of date with the noise he makes. There will never be any professional prophets, as opposed to those enthusiastic amateurs, good luck to them. It is an unrewarding occupation, a pastime in the most profoundly literal sense of the word.