Canadian painter of icebergs

‘My paintings are always disasters while I am doing them. It isn’t until I see them later, and someone else likes them, that I can see their virtues.’ This is from the early teen diary of Doris Mccarthy, a Canadian artist who died a decade ago today (aged 100!). She spent her life teaching, and it was only in retirement that she began to exhibit more commercially, often of paintings inspired by travels in Canada and to the Arctic. She also wrote several autobiographical works in which she occasionally referenced her own diaries.

McCarthy was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1910. She attended the Ontario College of Art from 1926 to 1930, where she was awarded various scholarships and prizes. She became a teacher at Central Technical School in downtown Toronto where she worked for much of her life. She travelled abroad extensively and painted the landscapes of various countries. Following her retirement in 1972, she began exhibiting commercially on a more regular basis, not just in Toronto but across the country. That year, she also made the first of a number of trips to the Arctic. Indeed, she was probably best known for her Canadian landscapes and her scenes of Arctic icebergs. In 1999, she was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario. She was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and was a recipient of the Order of Canada among other honours. She died on 25 November 2010. A little further information is available at Wikipedia, the Wynick/Tuck Gallery, and Mountain Galleries.

McCarthy seems to have been a diarist. Among the many items in her archive, the University of Toronto lists ‘over five decades of correspondence between McCarthy and her best friend, Marjorie Beer (née Wood); diaries written by McCarthy between the ages of 12 and 90; personal artifacts and keepsakes; photographs of her family, life and travels dating back to the late 19th Century; and draft manuscripts of McCarthy's autobiographical publications’. Images from two of her diaries - the first from January 1922 to October 1924 and the second from 1930-1931 - are available to view at the university’s collections website, although there is no text transcription.

The university provides a brief description of the first of these two diaries. ‘Doris McCarthy’s personal journal from ages twelve to fourteen. Doris McCarthy started writing with Marjorie for the school newspaper. Both of them developed an interest in authorship and decided they would ask for diaries on Christmas 1921. Doris started her first journal, this one, on New Year's day, 1922. Because Doris’ journal was blank, she could write whenever and however much she wanted to on the pages. Doris also developed the habit of drawing/sketching at the same time as her interest in writing. Although there are some sketches in the journals, she primarily used other exercise books for drawing.’

Although McCarthy’s diaries have never been published (as far as I know), she did, later in life, write several autobiographical works - A Fool in Paradise, The Good Wine, and Ninety Years Wise - which can be digitally borrowed (briefly) at Internet Archive. These include occasional references to, and quotes from, her diaries.

In 2006, Second Story Press published Doris McCarthy: My Life. The publisher states: ‘This memoir marries the best of McCarthy’s previous writings with exciting new material and traces a compelling woman’s life from energetic early girlhood to reflective old age.’ Some pages of this can be previewed at Googlebooks. And, like the earlier books, she makes infrequent references to her diaries. Here are several of those references (in no particular order).  

‘My diary is full of complaints about the bad sketches I was making, but it later reports a quite successful exhibition of them and the canvases based on them. My paintings are always disasters while I am doing them. It isn’t until I see them later, and someone else likes them, that I can see their virtues.’

***

‘Living in my own little flat had given me back the freedom of my diary, and I wrote out the emotions of those first tormented up-and-down months. I fought against falling into such a profitless love, struggling to be content with companionship, lying awake nights in anger and despair, weeping on Marjorie’s shoulder. By early November we had agreed to stop seeing each other.

“November 6: I’m glad it’s done, and I’m more terrified of going on than of stopping; but I still feel the way I did the week war was declared - as if my world had suddenly fallen apart, and I’m sick with loneliness and fear of my own weakness.” ’

***

‘My diary for the spring of 1974 is full of details about sales of paintings, fresh delight in the garden, and the newfound pleasures of retirement.’

***

‘It was wonderful that two children who were so different could grow to be so close. Marjorie was almost delicate; Doris was stocky and strong, with her mother’s emotional energy, and the confidence to take the lead in physical skills. Doris was a good student, intellectual, with high marks in everything. Marjorie was top student in the humanities but had no head for mathematics; her genius was with people. She met everyone with a warmth and interest that took her right through their reserve and into their hearts. Marjorie was a poet with a magical imagination and a delicious sense of fun. We both intended to become great authors, and each of us had in the works several short stories and at least one full-length novel. In discussing our literary ambitions, we agreed, probably on her suggestion, to ask to be given diaries for Christmas, in order to practice Improving Our Style. On New Year’s Day 1922, each of us began a journal.

A few weeks later we wrote a verse play together, a one-act drama about a fairy kingdom suffering under persecution by mischievous elves. I suspect that its plot owed much to Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. It contained some slight variety of character, a modicum of conflict, and a happy ending. Our elders were impressed and, thanks no doubt to Mother’s influence, it was produced as part of a concert to raise money for the building of the St. Aidan’s church Memorial Hall. As the curtain closed, the rector, Dr. Cotton, called us up to the stage to be presented with flowers. My diary’s detailed description of the event concludes with the declaration, “This day is an epoch in my life.” ’

Copland watches Shostie

‘I watched Shostie while Lukas and Kabalevsky played a Haydn Symphony 4 hands. He loves music with a kind of innocent joy I have rarely seen in a famous composer. Music must have been a great solace to him in the tough days.’ This is the famous American composer Aaron Copland, born 120 years ago today, writing in a diary he kept while visiting the Soviet Union. Although there are ‘diaries’ mentioned in the inventory of Copland’s archive at the Library of Congress, it is only this diary that has ever been published.

Copland was born on 14 November 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five children in a Jewish family with a Lithuanian background. His father owned and ran a department store on Washington Avenue, with all the family working for it when they could. Copland attended attended Boys High School in Brooklyn, and developed an early interest in piano, being guided by an older sister. Throughout his teens he took piano lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn, deciding at the age of 15 to become a composer. He regularly attended music performances, and undertook formal lessons in various aspects of music, not least with Rubin Goldmark. His graduation piece was a three-movement piano sonata in a Romantic style. His interest in European music led him to study at Fontainebleau, where the French had set up a music school for Americans. There he came under the influence of the, by then, famous Nadia Boulanger.

After having studyied a variety of European composers while abroad, Copland made his way back to the US in the mid-1920s. He debuted Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in early 1925 with the New York Symphony Society under Walter Damrosch. Many works followed which would bring Copland national and international fame. He focused on music that could be identified as “American” in its scope, incorporating a range of styles, including jazz, folk and Latin American. Piano Variations (1930), The Dance Symphony (1930), El Salon Mexico (1935), A Lincoln Portrait (1942) and Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) are among his most well known compositions. He never married; biographers suggest he was gay and had love affairs with several men including Victor Kraft, artist Alvin Ross, pianist Paul Moor, and dancer Erik Johns.

In 1944, Copland composed the music for Martha Graham’s 1944 dance Appalachian Spring. The following year it won him the Pulitzer Prize. In 1949, he returned to Europe, where he met the new wave of avant-garde composers, like Pierre Boulez and Arnold Schoenberg. Adopting Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition, he wrote Old American Songs, a first set of which which was premiered by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten. In 1950, Copland received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome. During the 1951-1952 academic year, he gave a series of lectures at Harvard University, which he published soon after as Music and Imagination. During the first half of the 1950s, Copland was investigated by the FBI, and interviewed by Joseph McCarthy. However, the musical community promoted the patriotism of Copland’s music, and the investigations ceased in 1955.

Notable among Copland’s later works are the Piano Fantasy (1957), Connotations (1962), commissioned for the opening of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and Inscape (1967). But, in general, his more avant-garde works were less well received, and after the 1970s he stopped composing, though he continued to lecture and to conduct through to the mid-1980s. Encyclopaedia Britannica has this assessment: ‘For the better part of four decades, as composer (of operas, ballets, orchestral music, band music, chamber music, choral music, and film scores), teacher, writer of books and articles on music, organizer of musical events, and a much sought after conductor, Copland expressed “the deepest reactions of the American consciousness to the American scene.” ’. He received more than 30 honorary degrees and many other awards. He died in 1990. Further information can also be found online at the official Aaron Copland website, Wikipedia, Biography.com, and Library of Congress.

The Copland archive, at the Library of Congress, contains approximately 400,000 items, dating from 1910 to 1990. It includes his ‘music manuscripts, printed music, personal and business correspondence, diaries and writings, photographic materials, awards, honorary degrees, programmes, and other biographical materials’. Unfortunately, no further detail on the diaries is given (how many there are, from what periods of his life etc.). And though biographies of Copland mention his diaries very occasionally, it is only the brief day-to-day diary he kept during a four-week journey to the Soviet Union in early 1960 that has been published: in the Music Library Association’s journal, Notes  (vol. 70, no. 4, 2014) described and annotated by Kevin Bartig (available online at JSTOR).

According to Bartig, Copland was accompanied by Lucas Foss and visited the Soviet Union as a representative of the US State Department. He conducted and performed his own music, met with fellow composers and students, and distributed material on American music. The diary he kept is a considered by Bartig to be a rare day-to-day account of Cold War diplomatic work, and reveals how Cold War geopolitics mediated Copland’s musical evaluations.

Bartig, in his introduction, provides details of the trip and the diary: ‘In his initial entries, Copland, unlike most first-time visitors to the Soviet Union, barely mentions housing, transportation, or food. Although never loquacious as a diarist, he declared that “it would be easy to make hasty judgements” concerning Soviet life, presumably a reason to limit himself to musical observations. Copland summarized his experiences at the end of each day, usually relying on notes scribbled on scraps of paper during meetings and listening sessions. (Wherever possible, material from these notes has been included both in brief, explanatory passages between entries, and in the notes.)

The itinerary and concert programs were sketched out only after arrival, on the first full day of the tour. Both were subject to last-minute changes. For example, an article in the Moscow newspaper Izvestiia reported that Moscow audiences would hear Copland’s Third Symphony and suites from Appalachian Spring and The Tender Land, but only the symphony eventually appeared on a program. Likewise, Copland and Foss were to visit Kiev, but Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, was substituted at the last moment for unclear reasons. Copland and Foss likely spent their first days at the imposing Leningrad Hotel, where the 1958 delegation had lodged, eventually moving to the more centrally located Métropole Hotel. Throughout the tour, a translator accompanied the Americans; Foss dubbed her their “spy secretary,” a rather accurate description of such functionaries, who were to document their guests’ movements and reactions.’

Here are several excerpts.

24 March 1960
‘I have a cold. Damn! Lunch given for us at the Embassy by the Counsellor Minister, Mr. Freers. Present Khrenikoff, Kabalevsky, Shostie (with 2 wives). It transpired that Leeds [Music Corp.) pays publication rights for Soviet music and them nothing (so reports Khrennikov). They looked hopeless at the prospect of paying American publishers’ fees for performance. This spoils my idea of a depot for Amer[ican] music in Moscow, tho’ they claim the Union will collect a library of foreign music on their own. I stayed home in the evening and nursed my cold.’

25 March 1960
‘Dress rehearsal in the morning. Concert at night. Felt strange conducting the Soviet anthem and Star Spangled Banner side by side, TV camera glaring at me. Third Symphony went pretty well, with a fair reception. L.F. big hit as pianist. Shostie’s Ninth completed the program. At the end I presented him with honorary membership in the Nat[ional] Inst[itute] of Arts and Letters. Post-concert party at the Tuchs - no Russians accepted invitations, so we were consoled with foreign press people and Amb[assador] and Mrs. Lewellyn Thompson.’

26 March 1960
‘Visits from Soviet literature paper, Gregory Schneerson, and Mr. Leonidoff of N.Y.C. ballet. Lunch at the residence of the Indian Ambassador Mr. [K.P.S.] Menon. Visit to the Conservatory. Instead of students we were met by a group of professors, including Shaporin. We heard a talented oratorio by a young man called Albert [sic] Schnittke entitled Nagasaki. This allowed him a few grave dissonances (like the Hollywood writers might allow themselves with similar material). Also heard part of a ballet The Hunchback by S[h]chedrin and a Sinfoniett by Karamanov, neither of which were in any way interesting. A short discussion followed in which I suggested that Russian composers knew too well what style to work in. Disturbed reaction on the part of our listeners. I told them that listening to typical Russian music exclusively it would be hard for me to imagine all the other existing styles of contemporary music. In the evening a service intim[é] chez Shostakovitch. His wife and son Maxime, Kabalevsky and Khrennikov and their wives were there. (When I told Mrs. Khren[nikov] that she looked Scotch she replied: oh no, I’m Jewish.) Purely social evening - few toasts and Shostie in a relaxed and charming mood. Big and generous spread of food (all familiar items at our hotel) with shouts of Maxime (who looks at 20 like a young French intellectual) down the length of the table. I watched Shostie while Lukas and Kabalevsky played a Haydn Symphony 4 hands. He loves music with a kind of innocent joy I have rarely seen in a famous composer. Music must have been a great solace to him in the tough days. Much excitement about a chess tournament whose results were announced over the air. I was persuaded to play my Piano Sonata. At the end they all 3 said “Spasibo” (“thank you”) with no comment of any kind.’

30 March 1960
‘Rehearsal in the morning. Presented discs to the radio station, scores to a choral conductor, clar[inet] concerto to a clarinetist, etc. ’Tis thus we propagandize. Meeting at 5 with Composers’ Union of Latvia. Very well organized presentation of their music on tape with short fragments of works by younger men, Edmund Goldstein (1927) and [Romuald Grinblat] (1930) and older men Jacov Medina (18[90]) and Adolf [Skulte] (1909) teacher of most of the young composers. Top man seems to be Janis Ivanovs, composer of many works, including 9 symphonies. Saw little merit in his stuff, myself. They seemed genuinely interested in hearing some of our stuff. I gave them a taste of App[alachian] Spring and Lukas his Symphony of Chorales (2 mvts.) and Song of Songs (someone mentioned Hindemith, and unearthed his [Lukas’s] Berlin birth, with the usual innuendoes). Dashed off to hear two acts of Prokofieff’s The Duenna at the Riga Opera. One of his least inspired pieces in a creditable production.’

Lunch at Algonquin

Carl Van Vechten, the American writer and photographer, was born 140 years ago today. He is well remembered for his photographs of artists and celebrities, but also for being an enthusiastic patron of the so-called Harlem Renaissance. For nearly a decade he kept a daily record of his social (and often drunken) activities. After having been sealed by Van Vechten himself until 1980, this diary record was finally published in the early 2000s. It’s a good read only if you want to know who he was lunching with at the Algonquin or drunkenly stumbling with ‘from one cocktail party to another on an almost daily and nightly basis’!

Van Vechten was born on 17 June 1880 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His father was a banker, and his mother was a musician and arts benefactor. He was educated locally, and then, in 1899, decided to study various art and music topics at the University of Chicago, where he also contributed to the college newspaper. After graduating, he went to work as a columnist for the Chicago American, developing a gossipy semi-autobiographical style, and occasionally including photographs he’d taken. Eventually, he was fired for, what some described as, ‘lowering the tone of the Hearst papers’. In 1906, he moved to New York City, where he was appointed assistant music critic at The New York Times. The following year, he was granted leave to travel in Europe to research his interest in opera, and while in England married Anna Snyder from Cedar Rapids.

On his return to The New York Times in 1909 he became the first American critic of modern dance - at a time when Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were on stage - while at the same time developing an interest in avant garde art. Around 1913, he became friends with the American author Gertrude Stein, championing her work, and maintaining a lifelong correspondence with her. Indeed, she appointed Van Vechten her literary executor, and, after her death, he brought her unpublished works into print. 

Having divorced Snyder, Van Vechten married the actress Fania Marinoff in 1914 - the marriage lasted 50 years even though he took many male lovers. The couple were known for socialising with black friends and groups; Van Vechten was a pioneering advocate of African-American artists, and became very involved with what is known as the Harlem Renaissance. He gave up his newspaper job in order to write full time, soon publishing several collections of essays relating to music, ballet, and cats. His first novel - Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works - was published in 1922. The Tattooed Countess (1924) and Nigger Heaven (1926) also proved popular.

In the early 1930s, Van Vechten gave up writing, choosing to become a photographer instead, taking portraits of many of his friends and acquaintances. Among his subjects were fledgling artists and established cultural figures of the time such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, Bessie Smith, and Stein. During World War Two, he volunteered at the Stage Door Canteen (an entertainment venue on Broadway for servicemen). Saul Mauriber, one of the restaurant staff there, became his photographic assistant (eventually acting as photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate). Van Vechten’s photographs were widely exhibited and frequently used as illustrations in books and magazines. During his lifetime, he presented various parts of his collection to several university libraries; and, after he died, Mauriber arranged with The Library of Congress for it to acquire some 1,400 photographs. Van Vechten died in 1964. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Daily Beast and The New Yorker.

Between 1922 and 1930, Van Vechten kept a daily diary of his activities. An edited version, heavily annotated by Bruce Kellner, was published in 2003 as The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-30 (University of Illinois Press). Some pages of this can be previewed at Googlebooks. According to Kellner, Van Vechten left no explanation as to why he started or stopped keeping the diary, but he sealed it until the 100th anniversary of his birth - i.e. 17 June 1980. Kellner further says: ‘During the subsequent twenty-odd years, the small daybooks have proven of inestimable value to a number of writers on various subjects, although the entries are almost entirely free of literary or social observation and commentary. Instead, they record the daily comings and goings - as well as the drinking habits, feuds, and love affairs - of a wide number of significant figures of the period. Taken as a collective accretion over their nine years, they make clear that the twenties passed - for many people, including Van Vechten himself - in an alcoholic haze, cheerfully at first and then desperately, as the decade’s denizens stumbled from one cocktail party to another on an almost daily and nightly basis, until the long bender wound down to the sobering silence that gradually followed the stock market crash in October 1929. At the end of 1930, when Van Vechten stopped keeping his daybooks, the party was over.’

All of Van Vechten’s entries are very brief, matter of fact - usually containing lists of names of people he’s met during the day. More often than not he could be found meeting them at Algonquin, the famous Midtown Manhattan hotel that had opened in 1902. Kellner’s annotations are considerably more substantial than the entries themselves.

Here are several extracts (without the footnoted annotations) from The Splendid Drunken Twenties.

10 September 1922
‘Meade Minnegrode came in afternoon to see my Melvilles for his bibliography. Tom Beer came with him. Joe Hergesheimer turns up & has dinner with me at Leone’s (raided 2 nights ago, but we still have cocktails). Afterwards he came down to the house. Fania, who has been at lack [Marinoff]’s in the country all day, returns & Tom Beer and Ernest Boyd come in. They stay till one o’clock. I work all day on 4th chapter.’

22 October 1922
‘Lunch at Algonquin solo. Afternoon at Mrs. Atherton’s. She tells me that she visited Philadelphia at time of Walt Whitman’s funeral, “Everybody was drunk but Agnes Repplier.” Fania goes to Leo Lane’s for dinner & I dine at Avery [Hopwood]’s. John Floyd there. We visit The lungle, 11 Cornelia Street in the [Greenwich] Village, a tough gangster resort. Avery loses his overcoat. On way to police station to report loss we run into a murder.’

6 November 1922
‘Tea at 5 at Waldorf with Hugh Walpole [English writer] (No tea. We sit in his room and talk.) I give a lunch at the Russian Inn for Boyd & Ettie Stettheimer. Andrew Dasburg & Antonio de Sanchez join us. I give The Blind Bow-Boy to Alfred [Knopf]. Tom Beer at the Yale Club at 7, gives me a bottle of absinthe. Cocktail with Joe Hergesheimer at Algonquin. Dinner at Algonquin with Fania. . .’

27 November 1922
‘Still have bad cold. Sent “On Visiting Fashionable Places Out of Season” to Emily Clark for The Reviewer. Lunch at Algonquin with Marinoff & Claire Schermerhorn. Rita Romilly & Helen Westley came in after lunch. Dinner with Marinoff at Ceylonese Restaurant. We went to the premiere of Gertrude Saunders in Liza at 63 St. Theatre, a negro review. Wonderful!’ 

24 January 1923
‘Lunched at Algonquin with Ralph Van Vechten & Charles Brackett . . . Dinner at 7 with Gertrude Atherton at Madison Square Hotel. She told me the marvelous history of her father & mother, & of her husband George Atherton, who died on a man-o-war &, as a guest, was not buried at sea but was brought home in a keg of rum.’

Tchaikovsky’s poison

‘It is said that to abuse oneself with alcoholic drink is harmful. I readily agree with that. But nevertheless, I, a sick person, full of neuroses, absolutely cannot do without the poison . . .’ So confided the great Russian composer, Tchaikovsky, born 180 years ago today, to his diary. Although the diaries are full of references to his drinking, they reveal nothing about his inclination towards homosexuality; they do, though, provide lots of comment on other musicians and on writers: he was a great fan of Tolstoy, and admired the composers Beethoven and Mozart, but considered Brahms a ‘scoundrel’.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 in the Ural Mountains near the metal works where his father worked. He started piano lessons at five, and, while at the School of Jurisprudence, between 1850 and 1859, he helped in a choir. Although he began his career at the Ministry of Justice, he did not stay long there, preferring to enter the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he worked under Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Zaremba. Later, he taught at the new Moscow Conservatory. Although his First Symphony was given a good reception in 1868, a year later his first opera, The Voyevoda, flopped. Subsequent works were largely successful.

In the mid-1870s, he found a patron in Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow, and this allowed him to give up teaching. Though they never met, the two corresponded for over 13 years. In an attempt to deal with growing concerns about his sexuality, Tchaikovsky married an admirer in 1877. But the marriage failed almost immediately, and he plunged into an emotional crisis and an attempted suicide. His brother, also a homosexual, took him back to St Petersburg. Thereafter, as he travelled widely across Europe, and, once, to the US, his fame as a conductor and composer grew. Although it was said he died of cholera, some researchers suggest he may have committed suicide out of fear that his affair with a Russian nobleman would be exposed. More biographical information is available online at the Tchaikovsky Research website, Wikipedia, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Tchaikovsky kept a diary during the latter years of his life, and this was first translated (by Wladimir Lakond) and published (by W. W. Norton, New York) in 1945. However, nearly half a century earlier, G. Richards in London published Tchaikovsky - His life and works, with extracts from his writings, and the diary of his tour abroad in 1888. This latter book is freely available online at Internet Archive, but the 1888 ‘diary’ reads as though it were written as a memoir not a diary. See The Diary Junction for some links to online extracts of Tchaikovsky’s diary.

Academics have, naturally, examined the diaries very closely, not least in search of some clues concerning the composer’s sexuality. In his book Musical Musings Petr Beckmann has a chapter on How Homosexual Was Tchaikovsky?, and this is available online at Fort Freedom. Beckmann notes, first of all, that the musicologist E. Yoffe believes there is nothing in Tchaikovsky’s ‘voluminous correspondence (5,000 letters) or in his eleven diaries (1873, 1884, 1886-1891) that refers directly to his alleged homosexuality’.

Beckmann explains that Tchaikovsky’s diaries often contain brief, even one-word entries (‘A walk. Newspapers. Whist. Supper at home.’) and very frequently contain statements about his inclination to drink: ‘I drank a good deal’; ‘Drunkenness’; ‘Felt bad from drunkenness’; ‘Drunkenness at the [railroad] station’; ‘Drunkenness during intermission [at the opera]’. However, Beckmann then goes on to discuss some ambiguous entries in the diaries where Tchaikovsky writes of unspecified ‘inclinations’.

Beckmann concludes as follows: ‘I know only of two places in Tchaikovsky’s diaries and correspondence where he expresses disgust at himself for some behavior or habit whose nature he does not indicate. Homosexuality is a distinct possibility, though I have given reasons why that appears unlikely, or at least no more likely than his (documented) addiction to alcohol or an (entirely speculative) addiction to drugs. Should homosexuality prove nevertheless correct, it would be but an additional symptom in a high-strung over-sensitive man who was emotionally severely maladjusted, or even disturbed.’

As for the diaries themselves, the excellent Tchaikovsky Research website provides comprehensive information on all the surviving manuscripts and fragments. It also has available many extracts, newly translated into English. The main diary index provides a portal to view extracts from April-June 1884 and February-April 1886, but other extracts in English can be found when viewing the results of searches on individual topics, such as other composers.

20 February 1886
‘Bright, frosty, but spring is near, - the snow was melting in the sunshine, and during the day it was just as warm in the gallery as in the room. After tea I went to the school, but a mass was in progress (somebody’s funeral service) and there were no lessons. I wrote with success. After dinner I walked to the river via Praslovo (but skirting it to avoid the urchins). During tea I read Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”. I like it very much, and yet I’m not a Shakespearist. I worked splendidly in the evening. After supper I fussed over my choice of Mozart for the suite, playing them through until 11.30. Aleksey sorted out all my letters today. Photographs.’

13 July 1886
‘When I made the acquaintance of L N Tolstoi I was overcome by fear and a sense of awkwardness in front of him. It seemed to me that this supreme student of human nature would, with one glance, be able to penetrate into all the recesses of my soul. In his presence, so I thought, there was no longer any way of successfully concealing all the rubbish which I have at the bottom of my soul and just showing myself from the bright side. If he is kind (and that he must be, of course), I said to myself, then he will tactfully and gently, like a doctor investigating a wound who knows all the places that hurt, avoid touching and irritating these, but in this way he will also make me feel that nothing is hidden from him; if, on the other hand, he is not particularly compassionate, he will stick his finger straight into the sorest spot. I was terribly afraid of either of these situations. However, neither the one nor the other actually occurred. In his writings the most profound student of human nature, he turned out to be a simple, sound, and sincere person in his treatment of other people, and he revealed very little of that all-knowingness which I had been afraid of. He did not avoid touching [these sore spots], but neither did he seek to cause deliberate pain. It was clear that he by no means saw in me an object for his investigations; rather, he simply wanted to chat with me about music - something that he was interested in at the time. Amongst other things, he liked to reject Beethoven and openly expressed doubts as to his genius. Now that is a trait which is not at all characteristic of a great man, since bringing down to the level of one's ignorance a genius who has been recognized as such by all, is typical of narrow-minded people.

Perhaps never in my life has my composer’s pride been so flattered and moved as when L N Tolstoi, sitting beside me and listening to the Andante from my First Quartet, burst into tears.’

11 July 1886
‘It is said that to abuse oneself with alcoholic drink is harmful. I readily agree with that. But nevertheless, I, a sick person, full of neuroses, absolutely cannot do without the poison against which Mr Miklukho-Maklai [a Russian anthropologist] protests. A person with such a strange name is extremely happy that he does not know the delights of vodka and other alcoholic drinks. But how unjust it is to judge others by yourself and to prohibit to others that which you yourself do nor like. Now I, for example. am drunk every night, and cannot do without it. What should I do then . . .’ (This extract can be found on the Fort Freedom website.)

2 October 1886
‘Probably after my death people will be interested to know what my musical passions and prejudices were, especially since I rarely expressed these in conversation.

I shall make a small start now and eventually, when I get to those composers who lived at the same time as me, I will also discuss their personalities.

I’ll start with Beethoven, whom it is customary to praise unconditionally - indeed, one is supposed to cringe before him as before God. And so, what does Beethoven mean to me?

I bow before the greatness of some of his works, but I do not love Beethoven. My attitude towards him reminds me of how I felt as a child with regard to God, Lord of Sabaoth. I felt (and even now my feelings have not changed) a sense of amazement before Him, but at the same time also fear. He created heaven and earth, just as He created me, but still, even though I cringe before Him, there is no love. Christ, on the contrary, awakens precisely and exclusively feelings of love. Yes, He was God, but at the same time a man. He suffered like us. We are sorry for Him, we love in Him His ideal human side. And if Beethoven occupies in my heart a place analogous to God, Lord of Sabaoth, then Mozart I love as a musical Christ. Besides, he lived almost like Christ did. I think there is nothing sacrilegious in such a comparison. Mozart was a being so angelical and child-like in his purity, his music is so full of unattainably divine beauty, that if there is someone whom one can mention with the same breath as Christ, then it is he.

Speaking about Beethoven, I have stumbled across Mozart. It is my profound conviction that Mozart is the highest, the culminating point which beauty has reached in the sphere of music. Nobody has made me cry and thrill with joy, sensing my proximity to something that we call the ideal, in the way that he has.

Beethoven also caused me to shudder. But it was rather out of something akin to fear and painful anguish.’

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 7 May 2020.

Kollwitz’s weavers

‘Went to the theater with Karl; saw The Weavers [. . .] I was overcome by something of the same feeling I had when I saw The Weavers for the first few times. Of the feeling that animates the weavers, the desire for eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the feeling I had when I did the weavers. My weavers. In the meantime I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist.’ This is from the diaries of Käthe Kollwitz, a famous German artist and sculptress who died 75 years ago today. She is largely remembered for her depictions of the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class.

Kollwitz was born in 1867 in Königsberg, Prussia, the fifth child of a housebuilder and his religious wife. From the age of 12, she was instructed in drawing and copying plaster casts; and by 16, much influenced by her grandfather’s socialist politics, she was drawing working people, the ones she saw coming to her father’s office. With no colleges open to her nearby, she studied in Berlin and Munich art schools for women. Initially trained as a painter, she was influenced by the work and writings of fellow artist Max Klinger and began to focus on the graphic arts. After 1890, she was mostly etching and working with sculpture (later also turning to lithography and woodcuts). She became engaged to Karl Kollwitz, a medical student, while in Munich, and by 1891 they had married, and were living in a large apartment in Berlin, and he was practising as a qualified doctor. They had two sons, Hans and Peter.

Kollwitz’s series of etchings The Weavers (1898) - inspired by seeing a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers, which dramatized the oppression of the Silesian weavers in Langenbielau and their failed revolt in 1844 - first brought her critical attention. She joined the Berlin Secession artistic movement from 1901, and in the years through to 1908 - during which she made several trips to Paris - she produced her second major cycle of works - Peasant War. She was awarded the Villa Romana prize for the etching Outbreak, and the prize allowed her to study in Florence during 1907. On returning to Germany, biographers says, she became inspired by the Expressionists and Bauhaus artists to simplify her modes of expression. Her son, Peter, died in combat in 1914, leading her into a deep depression. She worked for years on a monument to him, destroying one and not completing a second until 1932.

In 1922–23, Kollwitz produced the cycle War in woodcut form. Much of her art in this period was taking pro-war propaganda and turning it round to create anti-war works, critical of the growing nationalism she was witnessing. In 1924, she finished her three most famous posters: Germany’s Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War. By the mid-1930s, she had completed her last major cycle of lithographs, Death, and was facing persecution by the Nazi regime. She died on 22 April 1945. Four museums - in Berlin, Cologne and Moritzburg, and the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Koekelare - are dedicated solely to her work. The Käthe Kollwitz Prize, established in 1960, is named for her. Further information can be found online at Wikipedia, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, The Art Story or Spartacus

Kollwitz kept a diary intermittently throughout the latter part of her life, from 1909. Extracts from these diaries were first edited by her son, Hans Kollwitz, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, and published in 1955 as Diaries and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz by Henery Regnery Company. It was subsequently reissued by Northwestern University Press in 1988 as The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz - a digital copy of this can be borrowed freely from Internet Archive (with log-in). Hans Kollwitz says in his introduction: ‘The diaries give us a valuable insight into Mother’s methods of work and her tempo. She constantly swung between long periods of depression and inability to work and the much shorter periods when she felt that she was making progress in her work and mastering her task. She suffered terribly during these spells of emptiness.’

Here are several extracts from the diaries, including one in which Kollwitz reflects on her past entries, observing that she wrote mostly about obstacles and trouble and seldom about being happy.

1 December 1914
‘Conceived the plan for a memorial for Peter tonight, but abandoned it again because it seemed to me impossible of execution. In the morning I suddenly thought of having Reike ask the city to give me a place for the memorial. There would have to be a collection taken for it. It must stand on the heights of Schildhorn, looking out over the Havel. To be finished and dedicated on a glorious summer day. Schoolchildren of the community singing, “On the way to pray.” The monument would have Peter’s form, lying stretched out, the father at the head, the mother at the feet. It would be to commemorate the sacrifice of all the young volunteers.

It is a wonderful goal, and no one has more right than I to make this memorial.’

22 August 1916
‘Stagnation in my work.

When I feel so parched, I almost long for the sorrow again. And then when it comes back I feel it stripping me physically of all the strength I need for work.

Made a drawing: the mother letting her dead son slide into her arms. I might make a hundred such drawings and yet I do not get any closer to him. I am seeking him. As if I had to find him in the work. And yet everything I can do is so childishly feeble and inadequate. I feel obscurely that I could throw off this inadequacy, that Peter is somewhere in the work and I might find him. And at the same time I have the feeling that I can no longer do it. I am too shattered, weakened, drained by tears. I am like the writer in Thomas Mann: he can only write, but he has not sufficient strength to live what is written. It is the other way round with me. I no longer have the strength to form what has been lived. A genius and a Mann could do it. I probably cannot.

For work, one must be hard and thrust outside oneself what one has lived through. As soon as I begin to do that, I again feel myself a mother who will not give up her sorrow. Sometimes it all becomes so terribly difficult.

Hoyer has answered my letter. His reply is very kind. He too calls me Mother. But that doesn’t bother me. Now all three of them call me that, Hans Koch, Noll and Hoyer. At first I felt alarm, then happiness, and now diffidence -wondering what I can give them. I can really be a mother only to my own.

I suppose it is conceivable to broaden out so that one can feel great love for other children than one’s own, but again it is the same as in my work: I feel that I cannot. I am not broad enough for that. My strength is insufficient.’

28 June 1921
‘Went to the theater with Karl; saw The Weavers at the Grosse Schauspielhaus. The inflammatory effect of the mass scenes. “Let Jaeger come out, let Jaeger come out! Let Hoelz come out!”

I was overcome by something of the same feeling I had when I saw The Weavers for the first few times. Of the feeling that animates the weavers, the desire for eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the feeling I had when I did the weavers. My weavers.

In the meantime I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist. My childhood dream of dying on the barricades will hardly be fulfilled, because I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they are like in reality. And so I know now what an illusion I lived in for so many years. I thought I was a revolutionary - and was only an evolutionary. Yes, sometimes I do not know whether I am a socialist at all, whether I am not rather a democrat instead. How good it is when reality tests you to the guts and pins you relentlessly to the very position you always thought, so long as you clung to your illusion, was unspeakably wrong. I think something of the sort has happened to Konrad. Yes, he - and I too - would probably have been capable of acting in a revolutionary manner if the real revolution had had the aspect we expected. But since its reality was highly un-ideal and full of earthly dross - as probably every revolution must be - we have had enough of it. But when an artist like Hauptmann comes along and shows us revolution transfigured by art, we again feel ourselves revolutionaries, again fall for the old deception.’
 
31 December 1925
‘Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even. So there were at most brief notes when things went well with Hans, but long pages when he lost his balance. And I wrote nothing when Karl and I felt that we belonged intimately to one another and made each other happy; but long pages when we did not harmonize. As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents. Certainly there was truth behind what I wrote; but I set down only one side of life, its hitches and harassments. I put the diaries away with a feeling of relief that I am safely out of those times. Yet they were times which I always think of as the best in my life, the decade from my mid-thirties to my mid-forties. A great many things were very confused in those days. Then came the war and turned everything topsy-turvy. Knocked one down flat on the ground. Half alive and half dead, one crawled in silence, living a humble life drenched with suffering. One rose to one’s feet very slowly indeed. New happiness came with Hans, Ottilie, the babies. Karl was always at my side. And that is a happiness that I have fully realized only in these last years - that he and I are together. Now we are wonderfully fond of one another. He is no longer the same man he once was, as I am no longer the same woman. He has left many things behind him, has grown out of and above them. What has remained is his “innocence,” as Sophie Wolff calls it. He has a really innocent heart, and from that comes his wonderful inward joyousness.’

May 1943 [The last diary entry.]
‘Hans has reached the age of 51. Air-raid alarm the night of May 14. It was the loveliest of May nights. Hans and Ottilie did not go to sleep until very late. They sat in the garden and listened to a nightingale.

After work Hans came, then Ottilie and finally Lise. The four of us sat together. On his birthday table, below the grave relief, I had placed the lithograph Death Calls, the print of which I worked over. Then there was a drawing I had made of Karl one time when he was reading aloud to me. We were sitting around the living room table at the time. This drawing is a favorite of Hans’. And there was also the small etching. Greeting, which is closely connected with his birthday.

We lit Josef Faasen’s large candle.

Early next morning, Hans came again and brought a great bouquet of lilies from the garden. What happiness it is for me that I still have my boy whom I love so deeply and who is so fond of me.

Goethe to Lavater, 1779: “But let us stop worrying our particular religions like a dog its bone. I have gone beyond purely sensual truth.” ’

Nijinsky going mad

One of the most famous dancers that ever lived, Vaslav Nijinsky, died 70 years ago today, three weeks after his 60th birthday. But the dance in him had died 30 years before that, leaving him to spend half his lifetime in and out of mental institutions. Astonishingly, at the very point in his life that he was going mad, when, in fact, the dance was leaving him, he started to write a diary, and kept on writing for six weeks. A sanitised version was first published between the wars, but the full and unbowdlerised text only emerged in the 1990s.

Wacław Niżyński, or Vaslav Nijinsky, was born in 1890 to Polish parents, both dancers, in Kiev, Ukraine. Aged nine, he was entered into the Imperial Ballet School, and by 1907 began to star as a soloist at the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1908, he embarked on a relationship with Sergei Diaghilev - although sexual at first, it was their partnership in dance that would lead them both to fame. In 1909, Diaghilev took a company of Russian opera and ballet stars - including Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova - to Paris for a highly successful season; and thereafter he formed Les Ballets Russes which would become an artistic and social sensation, setting trends in art, dance, music and fashion for the next decade.

Within a couple of years, Nijinsky himself was choreographing the troupe’s ballets, notably those based on Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. The Diaghilev-Nijinsky relationship took a turn for the worse in 1912, when Les Ballets Russes toured South America without Diaghilev. Romola Pulszky, a Hungarian countess who had been pursuing Nijinsky, finally won him over onboard the ship to South America and they were married in Buenos Aires. But on returning to Europe, Diaghilev - angered by the turn of events - dismissed Nijinsky, who then tried, unsuccessfully, to set up his own company.

During the First World War, Nijinsky was interned in Hungary but Diaghilev succeeded in getting him released for a North American tour in 1916. Thereafter, though, the dancer succumbed increasingly to mental illness, and was taken by Romola for treatment to Switzerland. There he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919, and spent the rest of his life in and out of psychiatric institutions. He died on 8 April 1950. For further biographical information see Wikipedia or the American Ballet Theatre website.

In 1919, in Switzerland and on the edge of his breakdown, Nijinsky began writing a diary and he continued to do so for six weeks, filling four notebooks (although one is just letters). A version of this diary was first edited by Romola and published in English in 1936. In 1953, Editions Gallimard came out with another heavily edited version, this time in French. Even after Romola died in 1978, her daughters, Kyra and Tamara, refused to release the full text, and it was not until 1995 that a full unexpurgated text was first published in France (by Editions Actes Sud).

In a review of the French edition, The New York Times said: ‘Much of the text reads like a stream of consciousness dominated by a series of fixations, including Nijinsky’s identification with God and Jesus Christ, his love of humanity, his concern for feelings, his distaste for eating meat, his disdain for money, his wife’s curiosity about his writing and his need to confess his sexual habits.’

Four years on, in 1999, an English version translated by Kyril Fitzlyon and edited by the American dance critic, Joan Acocella, was published in New York (by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) and London (by Allen Lane).  The publishers say The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky is ‘the only sustained, on-the-spot written account we have by a major artist of the experience of entering psychosis’. The full text can be borrowed online freely from Internet Archive (though log-in is required).

In Acocella’s introduction, she explains with precision how extensively Romola bowdlerised her husband’s diary for the 1936 edition. But Acocella also acknowledges that ‘a large part’ of Nijinsky’s reputation actually rests on the diary as it was first published - an edition which is still in print today (as part of the Penguin Modern Classics collection).

Various reviews of the unexpurgated diary can be found on the internet. Peter Kurth at Salon is not very impressed: ‘Unfortunately, the diary provides no special insight into the qualities that made Nijinsky one of the greatest dancers of all time. Dance is impossible to recapture on paper. And Nijinsky’s case is doubly problematic, since his total output was small, and only one of the dances that he choreographed for himself, L’Apres-midi d’un faune, still survives in performance. Acocella thinks it entirely possible that in writing the diary Nijinsky hoped to create a work of literature, but she offers it, wisely, for what it is: a footnote to genius, the last, sad record of a legend.’

The New York Times (again, this time about the English edition) concludes with this thought: ‘The diary’s final lines are not, as the old edition had it, ‘God seeks me and therefore we will find each other,’ but a mundane thought that never gets finished. How ironic that in erasing the real ugliness of his insanity, the old version silenced not only Nijinsky’s true voice but the magnificently gifted body from which it came. And how fortunate we are to have them both restored.’ A few pages of the book and other reviews can be read at Amazon.

It is worth noting that although this text of Nijinsky’s is referred to by everyone as a ‘diary’, it does not look like a diary, for there are no dates at all, and nor, with some exceptions such as when he writes about his meals, does it read much like a diary. Also worth noting is the fact that the Australia-based film director Paul Cox made a film, released in 2001, called The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky - see IMDB.

Finally, here are some extracts from The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky - unexpurgated edition: 1) the first in the book; 2) one about Diaghilev; 3) and the diary’s very last entry.

1)
‘I have had a good lunch, for I ate two soft-boiled eggs and fried potatoes and beans. I like beans, only they are dry. I do not like dry beans, because there is no life in them. Switzerland is sick because it is full of mountains. In Switzerland people are dry because there is no life in them. I have a dry maid because she does not feel. She thinks a lot because she has been dried out in another job that she had for a long time. I do not like Zurich, because it is a dry town. It has a lot of factories and many business people. I do not like dry people, and therefore I do not like business people.

The maid was serving lunch to my wife, to my first cousin (this, if I am not mistaken, is how someone related to me by being my wife’s sister is called), and to Kyra, together with the Red Cross nurse. She wears crosses, but she does not realize their significance. A cross is something that Christ bore. Christ bore a large cross, but the nurse wears a small cross on a little ribbon that is attached to her headdress, and the headdress has been moved back so as to show the hair. Red Cross nurses think that it is prettier this way and have therefore abandoned the practice that doctors wanted to in-still in them. The nurses do not obey doctors, because they do not understand the instructions they have to carry out. The nurse does not understand the purpose she is here for, because when the little one was eating, she wanted to tear her away from her food, thinking that the little one wanted dessert. I told her that “she would get dessert when she had eaten what was on the plate.” The little one was not offended, because she knew I loved her, but the nurse felt otherwise. She thought that I was correcting her. She is not getting any better, because she likes eating meat. I have said many times that it is bad to eat meat. They don’t understand me. They think that meat is an essential thing. They want a lot of meat. After eating lunch they laugh. I am heavy and stale after eating, because I feel my stomach. They do not feel their stomachs, but feel blood playing up. They get excited after eating. Children also get excited. They are put to bed because people think they are weak creatures. Children are strong and do not need help. I cannot write, my wife disturbs me. She is always thinking about the things I have to do. I am not bothering about them. She is afraid I will not be ready. I am ready, only my digestion is still working. I do not want to dance on a full stomach and therefore will not go and dance while my stomach is full. I will dance when it all calms down and when everything has dropped out of my bowels. I am not afraid of ridicule, and therefore I write frankly. I want to dance because I feel and not because people are waiting for me. I do not like people waiting for me and will therefore go and get dressed. I will put on a city suit because the audience will be composed of city folk. I do not want to quarrel and will therefore do whatever I am ordered to do. I will now go upstairs to my dressing room, for I have many suits and expensive underwear. I will go and dress in expensive clothes so that everyone will think I am rich. I will not let people wait for me and will therefore go upstairs now.’

2)
‘I know the tricks of impresarios. Diaghilev is also an impresario, because he has a troupe. Diaghilev has learned to cheat from other impresarios. He does not like being told that he is an impresario. He understands what being an impresario means. All impresarios are considered thieves. Diaghilev does not want to be a thief and therefore does not want to be called an impresario. Diaghilev wants to be called a Maecenas. Diaghilev wants to become part of history. Diaghilev cheats people, thinking that no one knows what he is aiming at. Diaghilev dyes his hair so as not to be old. Diaghilev’s hair is gray. Diaghilev buys black hair creams and rubs them in. I noticed this cream on Diaghilev’s pillows, which have black pillowcases. I do not like dirty pillowcases and therefore felt disgusted when I saw them. Diaghilev has two false front teeth. I noticed this because when he is nervous he touches them with his tongue. They move, and I can see them. Diaghilev reminds me of a wicked old woman when he moves his two front teeth. Diaghilev has a lock of hair dyed white at the front of his head. Diaghilev wants to be noticed. His lock of hair has become yellow because he bought a bad white dye. In Russia his lock was better, because I never noticed it. I noticed it much later, for I did not like paying attention to people’s hairstyles. My own hairstyle bothered me. I constantly changed it. People said to me, “What are you doing with your hair? You always change your hairstyle,” and then I said that I liked changing my hairstyle because I did not want to be always the same. Diaghilev liked to be talked about and therefore wore a monocle in one eye. I asked him why he wore a monocle, for I noticed that he saw well without a monocle. Then Diaghilev told me that one of his eyes saw badly. I realized then that Diaghilev had told me a lie. I felt deeply hurt. I realized that Diaghilev was deceiving me. I trusted him in nothing and began to develop by myself, pretending that I was his pupil. Diaghilev felt my pretense and did not like me, but he knew that he too was pretending, and therefore he left me alone. I began to hate him quite openly, and once I pushed him on a street in Paris. I pushed him because I wanted to show him that I was not afraid of him. Diaghilev hit me with his cane because I wanted to leave him. He felt that I wanted to go away, and therefore he ran after me. I half ran, half walked. I was afraid of being noticed. I noticed that people were looking. I felt a pain in my leg and pushed Diaghilev. I pushed him only slightly because I felt not anger against Diaghilev but tears. I wept. Diaghilev scolded me. Diaghilev was gnashing his teeth, and I felt sad and dejected. I could no longer control myself and began to walk slowly. Diaghilev too began to walk slowly. We both walked slowly. I do not remember where we were going. I was walking. He was walking. We went, and we arrived. We lived together for a long time. I had a dull life. I grieved alone. I wept alone. I loved my mother and wrote letters to her every day. I wept in those letters. I spoke of my future life. I did not know what to do. I cannot remember what I wrote, but I have a feeling that I wept bitterly. My mother felt this because she wrote me letters in reply. She could not reply to me about my aspirations, because they were my aspirations. She was waiting for my intentions. I was afraid of life because I was very young. I have been married for over five years. I lived with Diaghilev also for five years. I cannot count. I am now twenty-nine years old. I know that I was nineteen when I met Diaghilev. I loved him sincerely, and when he used to tell me that love for women was a terrible thing, I believed him. If I had not believed him, I would not have been able to do what I did. Massine does not know life, because his parents were rich. They lacked for nothing. We did not have bread. My mother did not know what to give us to live on. My mother joined the Ciniselli Circus in order to earn a little money. My mother was ashamed of such work because she was a well-known artiste in Russia. I understood it all, even though I was a child. I wept in my heart. My mother also wept. One day I could bear it no longer and ran to Bourman, a friend of mine, he was called Anatole. He is now married to Klementovich.’

3) ‘I had a good dinner, but I felt that I should not eat soup. It was canned soup . . . I wanted to run and get some money, for I thought it was necessary, but God proved to me that I should not. I took a checkbook. I want to take a checkbook and not money, because I want to show on the Stock Exchange that I have credit. The stockbrokers will believe me and will lend me money. I will win without money. I know that everyone will be frightened, and therefore I will go to the Stock Exchange by myself. I will put on a bad suit because I want to see the whole life on the Stock Exchange. I will deceive the stockbrokers. I will take my good suit and pretend to be a rich foreigner, and I will visit the Stock Exchange. I am afraid of the Stock Exchange because I do not know it. I went there once with Diaghilev, who knew a man who was a stockbroker. Diaghilev gambled for low stakes and therefore won. I will gamble for low stakes because I too want to win. I know that little people lose because they get very nervous and do silly things. I will observe everyone with complete detachment, and I will understand everything. I do not like knowing everything in advance, but God wants to show me the way people live and therefore is warning me. I will go to the railway station on foot and not in a cab. If everyone is going in a cab, I will too. God wants to show people that I am the same kind of person as they are ...................
I will go now..............
I am waiting..............
I do not want.............
I will go to my wife’s mother and talk to her because I do not want her to think that I like Oscar more than her. I am checking her feelings. She is not dead yet, because she is envious.................’

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 8 April 2010.

Dedekam, songwriter and diarist

Sophie Dedekam, considered one of the most significant Norwegian women composers of the 19th century, was born 200 years ago. Hardly known outside of Scandinavia, she is principally remembered for a hymn that is included in the current Church of Norway Hymn Book, and for a diary she kept while visiting France for several months in 1845. The diary was first published some 35 years after her death, but was recently re-published.

Dedekam was born on 1 April 1820 in the Norwegian coastal town of Arendal. Her father was a merchant and local politician, becoming the town’s first mayor. He also helped found and run a local museum, and was active in the theatre. As a child, Sophie was given music lessons by her mother - an accomplished pianist.  Aged 25, she travelled to France, where she gave a number of concerts in Paris and elsewhere. 

Back in Arendal, Dedekam continued with her domestic, social and musical life, as a singer and collaborative pianist. From an early age, she also composed songs. In 1854, her mother died, and thereafter she became more spiritual, embracing Pietism (a branch of Lutheranism). When her father died in 1861, she was unmarried, which left here dependent on friend and relations. Her main home was with her sister Cathrine and her husband, though she stayed with her life-long friend, the folklorist, bishop and poet Jørgen Moe and his wife, as well as with other relatives in Christiania (now Oslo). She died in 1894. Wikipedia seems to be the only online source of biographical information in English (and, oddly, Wikipedia’s bio in English is far more detailed than the Norwegian-language version).

Although Dedekam rarely received recognition for her songs, nor did she seek any, forty of her musical pieces were eventually published by Wilhelm Hansen Music Publishers (known today as Edition Wilhelm Hansen) in Copenhagen. A number of her songs, in fact, became quite well known. Two of her songs were also published by Theodora Cormontan, the first woman professional music publisher in Norway. According to Wikipedia, her most enduring set of songs is 6 Sange: udsatte for to syngestemmer og pianoforte (6 Songs for two voices and piano), originally published by Wilhelm Hansen and reissued by Recital Publications in 2009. The melody for which she is best remembered is associated with an evening prayer song that appears in the current Church of Norway Hymn Book (as well as in the current Swedish equivalent).

Dedekam is also listed (by Wikipedia) as a diarist - though I can only trace one diary that she kept and which was published. This dates from her sojourn in France in 1845. Her grandnephew Henrik Harboe edited the diary (and her letters from the same period) and published them in 1929 under the title Dagbok og brev fra en reise til Paris i 1845. The work was republished by Solum Forlag in 2000. Here are three extracts, scanned from the original Norwegian, and (very crudely) translated via GoogleTranslate.

9 April 1945
‘Today we have a fresh gale, after having the headwind yesterday and so it will be so some days we are in France. Here are many ships around us, several steamers have passed, and yesterday a vessel sailed so close to us that we could talk to the people. It was a Swede who came from Antwerp and was to speak Gothenborg. We envied him the good wind, today he can envy us. Thus things are going up and down in this world!

Now we have nothing more than a coarse loaf, so we must take our refuge to the ship’s bread. We still have some butter left, but surely we got the last jar; what is on board is almost inedible. We still have fresh meat for a roast and some fish cakes, so our stock is over. We have cooked delicious bird soup, fresh meat soup, juice soup, roast, today we had porridge and stew. The milk is long ago over, we use wine and water. We are glad to have some more time. Last Sunday we had Eggedram. We also made chocolate. The Captain is fishing for fresh fish, cod.

Here is very good, but there is also much that you have to turn on board. I have often thought of you, dear Cath. How it should have gone here with your chicken main. We lie so low and we can’t get any higher, as the ship often pours in one side, not to mention all the dunk we get when we were going out and into the bunk. We smoke here so that we are almost mad; then the door must open, . . . but we are very well, are not cold. Last night I was troubled by a visit, which I have the dreadful idea was a bed bug, but I have yet to know, Guess it was a flea, though it is far nobler animals, of which I speak a lot, but here must unfortunately be found by the former.

It blows hard, rains and is thick. We’ve only been on the deck for a little while, I dread the night if this is to increase. The Captain has dreamed of his Wife. God help us!’

27 July 1845
‘Here is a good Veir, and it is sad that we cannot use the last day we are probably in France. Thiis and Tellefsen have been here in Visit and invited us to tomorrow evening. Volkmar has eaten here. We did a little tour of la Jeée, but were chased in by the rain.’

28 July 1845
‘It is a precarious world in which we live; one has only the present moment that one can reasonably possess. Today, Aalholm has received a letter from Andersen in Fecamp, which will be completed on Thursday. Tomorrow we travel to Havre, and from there to Fecamp and from there to Norway. So it's the last day we're in Honfleur. We've been to Visit at Thiis, Mad. Pottier, St. Martin, Satis and Huberts. Last time we were at the Côte de Grace, which showed its beauty. There is no other place on earth that has made the impression on me, I sat long at the foot of the image of Christ and, with my inner heart, once again decided in this life to see the view from there. Tonight it is raining. We have been walking the streets of Honfleur for the last time, but I do not want to think about the sadness of “for the last time.” I have been given a very beautiful gold ring of food. Ullern. One thing makes me almost happy to be traveling, since Tellefsen has asked me to sing at his concert this Thursday, and I couldn’t say no, although it has cost me tears. One time to trade off could go ahead, but 2 times was multiplied. It is shown that he is a rare talent. He played for us a bit at Thiis and it was astonishing.’

In a hammock with Brahms

‘I bought a strong hammock yesterday, and Brahms and I went into the lovely beech-wood and hung it up between two trees, on a spot from which through the foliage we could see the sea far below us. We both managed to climb into it simultaneously, an amusing, though by no means easy task to accomplish.’ This is from the diary of George Henschel, a naturalised British musician born 170 years ago today. Accomplished and famous during his lifetime, he is probably remembered mostly for his lifetime friendship with Johannes Brahms, and for the diary entries about him.

Henschel was born on 18 February 1850 in Breslau, Prussia (now part of Poland) and educated as a pianist, making his first public appearance in Berlin aged but 12. He subsequently took up singing, developing a fine baritone voice. In 1868, he sang the part of Hans Sachs in a concert performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Munich. And in 1874, while taking part in the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Cologne, he met and became friends with the composer Brahms. Starting in 1877, he began a successful singing career in England. In 1881, he married the American soprano, Lilian Bailey; and the same year he became the first conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. While in Boston, the couple had a daughter, Helen, who would later become an accomplished recitalist and pianist, and who would also write a biography of her father.

In 1886, Henschel launched the London Symphony Concerts. In 1890, he took on British citizenship, and in 1893 he was the founder of the Scottish Orchestra (now the Royal Scottish National Orchestra). Henschel’s compositions are listed as including instrumental works, a fine Stabat Mater (Birmingham Festival, 1894), an opera, Nubia (Dresden, 1899), and Requiem (Boston, 1903). Lillian died in 1901, and in 1907 Henschel, married Amy Louis, one of his students at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School) in New York. They too had one daughter, born in 1910. Henschel was knighted in 1914. He died at Aviemore, Scotland, in 1934, and is buried in the local churchyard. Further information is available online at Wikipedia, Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

During his lifetime, Henschel published two autobiographical works (both freely available online at Internet Archive): Personal Recollections of Johannes Brahms: some of his letters to, and pages from a journal kept by George Henschel (Richard G. Badger, 1907); Musings and Memories of a Musician (Macmillan, 1918). The following are extracts from Henschel’s diaries taken from the former.

3 February 1876, Münster, Westphalia
‘Brahms arrived yesterday. I am glad my hoarseness is gradually disappearing, for the thought of singing, at the concert day after tomorrow, those high notes in his “Triumphal Hymn” for Double Chorus and Baritone Solo, rather troubled me. I asked him if eventually he would object to my altering some of the highest notes into more convenient ones on account of my cold, and he said: “Not in the least. As far as I am concerned, a thinking, sensible singer may, without hesitation, change a note which for some reason or other is for the time being out of his compass, into one which he can reach with comfort, provided always the declamation remains correct and the accentuation does not suffer.’
 
6 February 1876
‘Yesterday was the concert. Brahms played his Pianoforte Concerto in D Minor superbly. I especially noted his emphasizing each of those tremendous shakes in the first movement by placing a short rest between the last note of one and the first small note before the next. During those short stops he would lift his hands up high and let them come down on the keys with a force like that of a lion’s paw. It was grand.

Dear old Isegrim conducted and fairly chuckled with joy at every beautiful phrase. The glorious but horribly difficult “Triumphal Hymn” conducted by Brahms, went splendidly. It was a veritable triumph for the composer. The joy and gratification expressed in Brahms’ face at the end, when acknowledging the enthusiastic acclamations of audience, chorus, and orchestra, was evidently caused as much by the consciousness of having written a truly great work, as by its reception and appreciation; a most welcome change from the affected excess of modesty often exhibited on concert platforms.

My throat not being quite well yet, I changed, with Brahms’ approval, the dreaded phrase [line of music ] and sang it like this [line of music] by which Brahms’ intention of emphasizing the word “heavens” was still carried out, the note “c” remaining the highest of the phrase.’

8 July 1876, Sassnitz on Rügen island
‘Arrived here last night. The diligence was delayed by one of the heaviest thunderstorms I can remember, and I did not pull up at the little hostelry, which also contains the post office, until half-past eleven; but in spite of the inclemency of the weather and the late hour, Brahms was there to welcome me and we had an hour’s chat in the little coffee-room. Then he returned to his lodgings down in the village, whilst I came up here to the hotel on the Fahrnberg, where, however, to my great delight, Brahms is going to have his mid-day and evening meals regularly.’

10 July 1876
‘Yesterday afternoon I spent nearly three hours in Brahms’ rooms. He showed me new songs of his, asking me if I could suggest a short way of indicating that a certain phrase in one of them was not his own.

“I have,” he said, “taken a charming motive of Scarlatti’s [line of music] as the theme of a song I composed to one of Goethe’s poems, and should like to acknowledge my indebtedness.” I proposed, as the best and simplest way, that he should merely place Scarlatti’s name at the end of the phrase in question.

He also showed me the manuscript of an unpublished song and the first movement of a Requiem Mass, both by Schubert, enthusiastically commenting on their beauty. The first two issues of the Bach Society’s publication of cantatas were lying on his table, and he pointed out to me how badly the accompaniments were often arranged for the piano; how, in fact, the endeavor to bring out as nearly as possible every individual part of the orchestra had rendered the arrangement well nigh unplayable for any but a virtuoso.

“The chief aim,” he said, “of a pianoforte arrangement of orchestral accompaniments must always be to be easily playable. Whether the different parts move correctly, i. e., in strict accordance with the rules of counterpoint, does not matter in the least.”

Then we went together through the full score of Mozart’s “Requiem,” which he had undertaken to prepare for a new edition of that master’s works. I admired the great trouble he had taken in the revision of the score. Every note of Süssmayer’s was most carefully distinguished from Mozart’s own.

It was a wonderful experience to have this man’s company quite to myself for so long a time. During all these days Brahms has never spoken of anything which does not really interest him, never said anything superfluous or commonplace, except at the table d’hote, where he purposely talks of hackneyed things, such as the weather, food, the temperature of the water, excursions, etc., etc.’

11 July 1876
I bought a strong hammock yesterday, and Brahms and I went into the lovely beech-wood and hung it up between two trees, on a spot from which through the foliage we could see the sea far below us. We both managed to climb into it simultaneously, an amusing, though by no means easy task to accomplish. After having comfortably established ourselves in it, we enjoyed a very cozy, agreeable hour or two of dolce far niente. Brahms was in an angelic mood, and went from one charming, interesting story to another, in which the gentler sex played a not unimportant part.

In the afternoon we resolved to go on an expedition to find his bullfrog pond, of which he had spoken to me for some days. His sense of locality not being very great, we walked on and on across long stretches of waste moorland. Often we heard the weird call of bullfrogs in the distance, but he would say: “No, that’s not my pond yet,” and on we walked. At last we found it, a tiny little pool in the midst of a wide plain grown with heather. We had not met a human being the whole way, and this solitary spot seemed out of the world altogether.’

Nerves before a sitting

It’s 40 years to the day since Cecil Beaton died. A famous photographer and costume designer, he was also a significant diarist. His self-edited diaries were first published in six volumes while he was still alive but, since his death, various ‘unexpurgated’ collections have also appeared. Whether heading to the BBC for an interview as a young man, or in his 60s preparing to photograph Picasso or the Queen, both of whom he knew from previous sittings, Beaton uses his diary - among other things - to confess nerves and insecurities.

Beaton was born in 1904, in Hampstead, London, the eldest son of a successful timber merchant. He was given a camera when still young, and used it to take photographs of his sisters. He was educated first at Heath Mount (where he was famously bullied by Evelyn Waugh), then at Harrow and St. John’s College, Cambridge. Even before finishing his studies, he had set up his own photography studio.

He soon developed a reputation as a fashion photographer, working for magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue. He also photographed celebrities, and members of the Royal Family for official publications. During the Second World War he worked for the British Ministry of Information as a documentary photographer. On one assignment he was sent East to photograph the Empire and its allies at war. After the war, Beaton designed sets, costumes, and lighting for the Broadway stage, and for Hollywood films. He was knighted in 1972. Two years later he suffered a stroke that left him partly paralysed. He died on 18 January 1980. See Wikipedia, Huxley-Parlour, or the V&A for more biographical information.

Beaton began keeping a diary while still a boy and kept the habit for most of his life, though he didn’t start publishing his diaries until the early 1960s. He carried on until the early 1970s, creating a set of six, each one with a similar sub-title, as follows: The Wandering Years (1922-1939); The Years Between (1939-1944); The Happy Years (1944-1948); The Strenuous Years (1948-1955); The Restless Years (1955-1963); The Parting Years (1963-1974). In London, they were published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, and in New York by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

A decade after his death, in 1991, Oxford University Press brought out two books based on Beaton’s work for the Ministry of Information during the war: Chinese Diary and Album and Indian Diary and Album. And, more recently, there have also been two books promising Beaton’s unexpurgated diaries: The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries As He Wrote Them, 1970-1980 (preview some pages at Amazon), and Beaton in the Sixties: The Cecil Beaton Diaries As He Wrote Them, 1965-1969.

Hugo Vickers, who provides an introduction to both the ‘unexpurgated’ volumes of diaries and who is one of Beaton’s biographers, gave a brief summary of Beaton the diarist (in a more general article) to The Guardian: ‘As a diarist, he tried to preserve the passing moment in aspic, but there was more to it than that. Aware that he had rare access to the people he photographed, he trained himself to make pen portraits of these figures, who were closely observed and their foibles uncomfortably recorded. He was never without a marbled book with blank pages in which to scribble at free moments. His memory was good and his pen sharp. Some of his images are very funny, some unkind, but he is never dull. And nor does he spare himself in these pages. Another diarist, James Lees-Milne, thought of Beaton’s diary as a particularly spiky spike on which to be hoisted to posterity, while John Richardson thought he had ‘a homosexual’s flair for seizing on the zeitgeist’.’

See The Diary Junction for links to a few diary extracts. Here, though, is the young Beaton (taken from The Wandering Years).

June 1926
‘I’d been wondering lately if I couldn’t get a job talking on the radio. I wrote to the BBC offering my services, and received a summons to be tried. In fear and trembling, all bunged up with a bad cold, I found my way to the broadcasting place. This really was an adventure! I hadn’t told anyone except N and B. I was interviewed by a tall, rough man named Sieveking. He said, ‘Read!’ Suffering from acute embarrassment, I started to drawl a bit of a short story I’d written. But I had hardly got going before he shouted, ‘Stop!’ I couldn’t think what disaster had occurred. ‘No, I’m afraid it’s no use. Your voice just isn’t any good!’

‘Couldn’t you hear me?’ Yes, Sieveking said he could hear me very well, but mine was a voice that didn’t ‘take’. I asked, ‘Does a cold make any difference?’

‘It would.’

‘Well, I have a bad cold.’

At last Sieveking confessed, ‘It’s no good pretending. With most people I beat around the bush and make false excuses. But if you won’t be grossly insulted, I’ll tell you just what’s wrong.’

‘Yes, I’d be interested.’

‘Well, when you’re broadcasting you’re talking to the masses. These people don’t like being talked down to or patronised.’ What he was trying to say was that I had an over-cultured up-stage sort of voice! This was a bitter shock for me. I’d always thought I spoke in a less affected way than my friends. No, Sieveking stood firm. I didn’t speak English as it should be spoken. I talked with an Oxford accent.

‘Surely not! I went to Cambridge.’

Sieveking then gave me an imitation of my voice. It sounded so exaggeratedly high-class as to make me almost sick! Why, I talked just like the silly ass in musical comedy - the nut with spats, large buttonhole and eyeglass! I felt annoyed, but flattered that the man had told me the truth. I said I could easily get rid of my faults if I practised, and would come again when my cold was better. I’d better try to talk to the masses in a straightforward way.

I came home and ate worms. Hell and damn!’

24 August 1936
‘It was on one of these mornings that the breakfast tray brought with it a fatal telegram: ‘Daddy gravely ill. Come.’ In a flash, everything changed. My mood, my life, the colour of the room, the significance of everything altered.

Since I was very small, I had always wondered what would happen if one of my parents died. The mere contemplation of such an event brought tears to my eyes. Now it had materialised in absentia, and it hurt sufficiently for me to cry. In a few minutes I got through to London on the telephone. My mother was suffering greatly, and wailed hysterically for me to come. My father had died of a heart attack at dawn. . .’

And here is Beaton in his sixties (taken from Beaton in the Sixties).

28 April 1965
‘It is strange that at an age of over 60, I should be able to work myself into such a nervous condition at the idea of photographing Picasso. I was certainly extremely on edge. I remember when I first photographed him in the early thirties, at that time I could speak very little French. . .’

18 September 1968
‘. . . I felt I must try to get a new picture of the Queen . . . Martin Charteris rang from Balmoral to say the Queen was not averse to my taking some new pictures of her. Later the phrase changed to ‘would be pleased’ and it was added that I should take some pictures specially for new stamps to be issued in the Channel Islands.

I suppose I’ve forgotten that in earlier days I would get ‘nerves’ before an important sitting, but certainly this time I felt quite anxious. The difficulties are great. Our points of view, our tastes are so different. The result is a compromise between two people and the fates play a large part. One does not know if things will conspire against me, or if the sun should shine.

There have been so many pictures of the queen in tiara, orders and crinoline that I felt I must try something different. I asked Martin if a deerstalker cloak would be suitable. No, he didn’t think so, but what about an admiral’s cloak? Nave-blue serge. That sounded great and when I saw the cape in his office, felt this would be an enormous asset. . . Martin telephoned to say the Queen had agreed to wear the cloak, was rather giggly about the whole thing, and said it didn’t matter what she wore underneath it as it wouldn’t show if she had nothing on. ‘Oh, the saucy thing!’ Eileen said when I relayed this piece of information to her. . .’

‘[Later in the same (long) entry about the photos:] . . . Maybe I was tired, but no question of masterpiece. How could the camera be so cruel? There was no imperfection it glossed over! I was appalled, really dunched. Blau [head of Camera Press which distributed Beaton’s photographs] comforted me, said he thought it a remarkable collection, the Queen shown in honesty as she is today, a woman of 42, no longer a child, not a film star, not made up for photographs, not particularly interested in her appearance. This was an interesting set.

The following day I was fresher. The rapturous cries of others helped me. The slight retouching helped too . . . Martin seemed enthusiastic, liked the cloak, and I left for America (I write on the plane against time)) without knowing if the cape will be approved or not. In fact, it is still in the hands of fate what results will come out of this latest milestone in my career. Or is it a nail in the coffin?’

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 18 January 2010.