With the death of the composer Alexander Goehr at the age of ninety-two, a chapter has ended in postwar music. This is not so much because he was a member of the so-called New Music Manchester Group, which included both Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, or because he was one of the last composers alive to have studied with Olivier Messiaen. It’s that Goehr’s lineage reached back, through his father, to the leader of the second Viennese school, Arnold Schoenberg. This was something he wrestled with all his life.
Walter Goehr, a conductor and composer, was born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1903 and became a student of Schoenberg’s in 1921. At a party thrown by Billy Wilder in 1930, he met the pianist and photographer Laelia Rivlin, whose family had fled the antisemitism of her native Ukraine following the Russian Revolution. Walter and Laelia were married the same year, and Alexander was born in 1932. A few months later, when the Nazis came to power, the family moved to London.
Walter quickly established himself there, particularly as a conductor. He worked in films, supervising the scores of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going and A Matter of Life and Death and composing the music for David Lean’s Great Expectations. In the concert hall, he conducted the first performances of Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time and Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, and the British premieres of Mahler’s sixth symphony (as late as 1950) and Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie in 1954.
The twenty-two-year-old Alexander went to Paris the following year to study with Messiaen. It is hard to hear Messiaen’s influence in his music, but in Paris he met former Messiaen student Pierre Boulez, just seven years his senior, and for a time Boulez’s influence was strong. The trouble was that Alexander was never comfortable being a radical in the Boulez mould. The avant-garde attracted him, but he was held in the grip of tradition, and as much as anything by his father’s influence.
Walter’s teacher, Schoenberg, it must be remembered, was the most traditional of modernists. He considered atonality a matter of evolution, not revolution, and the twelve-tone system that provided its means of organisation, a discovery more than an invention. In his teaching, Schoenberg drew his examples from Bach, Mozart and Brahms. Walter felt his son lacked the fibre to be a real composer and didn’t hold back from saying so; he also believed (and was surely correct about this) that writing avant-garde music was no way to make a living.
“It became impossible,” Alexander Goehr once told me in an interview, “to do what others of my generation did — to break out into totally new things. I seemed always to be travelling the opposite way, because the sneering faces of those Schoenbergians and my father [were] not entirely constructive… The one thing I really cared about was to prove to this now long-dead individual that, in the sense that Brahms was a composer, I could be one too. To this day I can allow myself no special privileges: I can’t say, ‘I’m a modern composer, and you don’t understand my work’; I regard it as a personal defeat if people can’t follow my pieces — which is generally the case, obviously.”
On his return to England from Paris, Goehr composed The Deluge to a text by the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein based on writings of Leonardo da Vinci, and in 1959 his father conducted its first performance in London’s Wigmore Hall. It was a major critical success and Walter was asked to repeat it in other countries, but he refused. From this distance, it is hard not to see an element of jealousy in his attitude. In order to support his family, he had virtually abandoned composing, which he considered the only real musical activity.
When Walter suddenly died the following year, Goehr composed a piece in his memory, borrowing the title Little Symphony from another of Schoenberg’s pupils, Hanns Eisler. But Goehr’s symphony wasn’t “little” at all except in its scoring for chamber orchestra; it was nearly half an hour long and it was full of the sorts of musical devices that might have pleased his father — an extended set of variations for the second movement; an authentic scherzo for the third. It also made reference to two of his father’s musical enthusiasms, Schoenberg’s first chamber symphony in the finale and, in a brief, rapt prelude, the “Catacombs” movement from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. This was a piece to which his father had devoted a detailed analysis, and in fact it is this analysis on which Goehr’s music is based; we never hear a note of the Mussorgsky original.
In their different ways, The Deluge and the Little Symphony made Goehr’s name, and while he now lost the support of Boulez, who found the Little Symphony too conventional, he was increasingly composing for Britain’s musical establishment. There was a violin concerto for Manoug Parikian and the London Symphony Orchestra, a piano trio commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin for the Bath Festival, a Konzerstuck for piano and orchestra for Daniel Barenboim (a full-blown piano concerto for Barenboim would follow) and a cello concerto, Romanza, for Jacqueline du Pré, which she premiered with her husband Barenboim conducting.
More symphonies followed too, though they never proclaimed themselves as numbered entities — as with the Little Symphony, their titles were always slightly self-effacing: Sinfonia, Symphony in One Movement, Symphony with Chaconne. There were also operas and music-theatre pieces, though dramatic music never seemed Goehr’s true metier.
Related to this, perhaps, you could argue that Goehr’s work lacked the personality so evident in the music of his contemporaries, Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle. In the 1960s and 70s some of Maxwell Davies’s pieces had more personality than music; while Birtwistle — the hedgehog to Maxwell Davies’s fox — slowly forged a visceral style that was always instantly recognisable. Goehr knew he was neither sort of composer; that his was a music of ideas.
“I don’t think my imagination is aural,” he told me, “I think it’s intellectual. Regrettably — but, you know, that’s all I can do.”
Our conversation took place in 1992 at Goehr’s home in Cambridge, where he was professor of music from 1976 to 1999, having ascended to this lofty post without a single academic qualification of his own. It hardly mattered; his intellect had long since turned him into the éminence grise of British music and the names of students who went to Cambridge to study with him make impressive reading, including the likes of George Benjamin and Thomas Adès. Schoenberg would have approved; maybe even Walter.
Goehr’s name will live on through his students’ work, but his own music, even if it always came with a bit of special pleading, is well worth your time. I find myself returning, in particular, to the Little Symphony, the orchestral piece Pastorals, and the song-sequence Sing, Ariel, to words selected by his friend Frank Kermode from half a millennium of English poetry. The composer might have believed his music to be “all I can do,” but it was still quite a lot. •
