Luise Adolpha Le Beau (1850-1927): 2-6/12/24

[oddoneout]

Thank you, french frank. The trouble is, that Composer of the Week only differs from those other horrors, these days, in its addition of - sometimes lazily inaccurate, or skewed - life stories. I dimly recall a time where more complete works, and fewer single movements or extracts, was the norm. We live in a different world, and the programme's time has, I think, passed.

I can't help wondering if criticism of and dissatisfaction with COTW these days is in part a result of the lack of the kind of more meaty treatment that used to be available on R3. If the more technical considerations of a composer's output are addressed in a dedicated programme, then the more superficial approach of COTW isn't such an issue as there are alternatives. I appreciate the opportunity COTW allows me to be introduced to composers I would never otherwise encounter, and also to look at aspects of well known composers in a way I find easy to understand.That I realise is anathema to the serious music-lovers , but so be it. As a teenager and young adult in orchestras and singing groups outside school I became used to the dismissive and superior attitudes from those who were better informed and more talented than I. Didn't like it, but the desire to continue with the music making was more important than the effect on my self-confidence and feeling of inferiority.

[Master Jacques]

I can't help wondering if criticism of and dissatisfaction with COTW these days is in part a result of the lack of the kind of more meaty treatment that used to be available on R3. If the more technical considerations of a composer's output are addressed in a dedicated programme, then the more superficial approach of COTW isn't such an issue as there are alternatives. I appreciate the opportunity COTW allows me to be introduced to composers I would never otherwise encounter, and also to look at aspects of well known composers in a way I find easy to understand.That I realise is anathema to the serious music-lovers , but so be it. As a teenager and young adult in orchestras and singing groups outside school I became used to the dismissive and superior attitudes from those who were better informed and more talented than I. Didn't like it, but the desire to continue with the music making was more important than the effect on my self-confidence and feeling of inferiority.

There's a great deal in what you say. Composer of the Week had precisely this strong and useful educational function, in a period where it was actually at the 'popular' end of Radio 3's output. It was a sort of midday equivalent to David Munrow's superlative teatime programme Pied Piper, nominally aimed at teenagers, but actually enchanting everyone who heard it. Now that Composer of the Week has to take on the burden of being at the "thinking person's" end of the spectrum, it has lost its very reason for existing.

Who was it who said, that 'if you feel you're the stupidest person in the room, then you're in the right room'? Don't dismissive and superior attitudes harden us to prove such people wrong?

[french frank]

There's a great deal in what you say. Composer of the Week had precisely this strong and useful educational function, in a period where it was actually at the 'popular' end of Radio 3's output.

I've just located R3's commissioning brief for Essential Classics, year 2017-2018, including:

"Presentation should be light, brief and engaging - informative, but inclusive. Detailed musicological and biographical detail should be kept to a minimum. This is more suited to Composer of the Week which follows at 12.00."

[kernelbogey]

I am sure you'd agree, that 'unconscious [fill in the blank-ism]' is notoriously the last bastion for those whose campaigning positions fail to stand up to fact, and who resort to amateur psychology instead. The slur relies on theories of the 'unconscious' which are to say the least, open to argument, and can come over as an easy put-down.

MJ, you're of course entitled to your opinion on all of the above. 'Amateur psychology' has of course become quite widespread - and, I'd say, on the whole to the good of society/familes/relationships. But, like amateur anything, open to questionable usage. I no longer user the term 'unconscious' as a noun, but only as an adjective or adverb; we could equally say 'out of awareness'.

I would recommend next time you are 'cut up' by another driver, checking out with yourself what you say to yourself about the driver - gender, race etc. A useful exercise.

But I'll say no more here on that topic.

[Master Jacques]

I would recommend next time you are 'cut up' by another driver, checking out with yourself what you say to yourself about the driver - gender, race etc. A useful exercise..

As I don't drive, and never could, the only people who 'cut me up' are cyclists driving on the pavement. They get my standard response 'you are breaking the law', irrespective of age, sex, gender, sexuality, race or creed. Living as I do in South East London, most of the divides between these things are in any case long since blurred, thank goodness.

(And I am inured to prejudice, conscious or unconscious, against my musical tastes!)

[Master Jacques]

I've just located R3's commissioning brief for Essential Classics, year 2017-2018, including:

"Presentation should be light, brief and engaging - informative, but inclusive. Detailed musicological and biographical detail should be kept to a minimum. This is more suited to Composer of the Week which follows at 12.00."

Ha, I love it! Thank you for this official confirmation of Composer of the Week's recent "intellectual" elevation, french frank.

[oddoneout]

Ha, I love it! Thank you for this official confirmation of Composer of the Week's recent "intellectual" elevation, french frank.

That's not COTW's fault though is it - it's because of what has been stripped away from around it.

[Sir Velo]

As I don't drive, and never could, the only people who 'cut me up' are cyclists driving on the pavement. They get my standard response 'you are breaking the law', irrespective of age, sex, gender, sexuality, race or creed.

Who are only there in the first place due to the totally inadequate provision for those who prefer active travel as a means of transportation (compare Paris; Amsterdam, Copenhagen etc), by which they keep themselves fit, thereby reducing the burden on the NHS (ie the taxpayer or you and me if you prefer!) but don't get me started!

[Nick Armstrong]

"I agree with Nick."

You can’t go wrong!

[Master Jacques]

That's not COTW's fault though is it - it's because of what has been stripped away from around it.

It wasn't the fault of the horse-drawn stagecoach that it was stripped of its functions by the nasty, smelly new railways. But it died all the same. And so should Composer of the Week, reduced from a programme giving listeners a great eagle-eyed view of Beethoven which was otherwise unavailable, to footling about, bigging-up the brave-and-frustrated-biopic of this or that insipidly minor 19th-century French salon composer.

[Master Jacques]

Who are only there in the first place due to the totally inadequate provision for those who prefer active travel as a means of transportation (compare Paris; Amsterdam, Copenhagen etc), by which they keep themselves fit, thereby reducing the burden on the NHS (ie the taxpayer or you and me if you prefer!) but don't get me started!

In my neck of the woods, the cyclists get onto the pavements because the curbs have been levelled to facilitate wheelchair users, ignoring some perfectly good cycle lanes to take shortcuts. A classic example of a great initiative producing unintended consequences!

[Ein Heldenleben]

Yes indeed, F. R. Leavis still reigns!

One particularly interesting exercise, for me, is to try and move away from Leavis, by examining cases where the biography is inextricably linked with the art, as its subject. This is not true of many composers, as it needs a facility in the written word which only Berlioz (among household names) possessed. I often wonder what his music would amount to without its biographical component in the listener's mind. My answer - like that of his own French classicist contemporaries - is, not a hill of beans.

It's rather the same case with Mahler, who has reached his current sainted status for biographical as much as musical reasons.

Funnily enough a lot of literary theory also shuns the biographical approach . “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” et tout ça.
Thing is Leavis produced some very good criticism on Yeats without mentioning the Easter arising or Maud Gonne once.
To your earlier point on the sometimes irrelevancy of biography I must have read 8 to 10 lives of Mozart including classics like Robbins Landon’s which just cover one year. But do I really “know “ Mozart? I know a lot of facts but

These great geniuses are essentially unknowable . The sad facts of his last months just aren’t reflected in the triumph of his music, It’s all been sentimentalised, You ending up “knowing “ more about Mozart from Act 2 of Nozze or stumbling through a sonata than listening to a hundred COTW’s.

[Master Jacques]

The sad facts of his last months just aren’t reflected in the triumph of his music, It’s all been sentimentalised, You ending up “knowing “ more about Mozart from Act 2 of Nozze or stumbling through a sonata than listening to a hundred COTW’s.

Bravo! I've never read a biography of Mozart, but feel he's an intimate friend.

[french frank]

That's not COTW's fault though is it - it's because of what has been stripped away from around it.

Everyone else took a step backwards. But the lesson of popularism is that lowest common denominator drags everything down to its own level. And, as everything sinks, a lower lowest common denominator is established.

[Ein Heldenleben]

"I agree with Nick."

The rise of feminism in my lifetime - well, in the second half of my lifetime - is a beacon of hope for humanity in my view. I imagine that would be true for many if not all who post here. The struggles of women like Le Beau - in the 1850s! - are also a beacon of hope.

In my view, and in my experience, it is easy to get caught in unconscious misogyny, and we must guard against it.

Feminism in the sense of being prepared to starve to death for your beliefs over the rights of women surely predates our lifetimes by at least a century? More if we take Wollstonecraft’s Vindication as the starting point in the UK..