I’m listening at 1 am on Saturday morning to Brigitte Fassbaender‘s remarkable recording of the song cycle by Schubert called Winterreise (“Winter Journey”). This is extremely depressing music. The last song, for example, is called ‘The Hurdy-Gurdy Man’.
Barefoot on the ice he totters to and fro, and his little plate has no reward to show. No one wants to listen, no one looks at him and the dogs all growl around the old man. And he lets it happen, as it always will, …
Not surprisingly, for many decades these songs were among Schubert’s least performed. But now they are among his most performed songs. Why? I have a theory to offer.
People get used to what happens to them. When what happens changes, they find themselves dragged, as the Californian psycho-babblers say, out of their comfort zone. It is even a comfort zone if it’s misery and they get dragged away from misery into happiness. Misery is comfort because they have got used to it and know how to handle it. Happiness is discomfort because they don’t know how to deal with it.
Life in the West has been a lot better during the last half century than it was in the half century before that. All those creature comforts, package holidays, children all flourishing, television, hi-fi, and in general a standard of living for almost everyone that was beyond all earlier popular imaginings. But people weren’t prepared for all this happiness, all this pleasure, all this contentment. They didn’t know know to handle it, how to live with it. What was to be done with all that stoical acceptance of adversity that had been so painfully learned?
Art stepped in. Art now keeps the unprecedentedly affluent and happy West in a comfort zone of imagined misery, just as in the first half of the twentieth century art kept the West in a remembered and adapted-to comfort zone of late nineteenth century happiness, while all around them life was becoming the very definition of hell on earth. The people of the West hummed Viennese operetta and Broadway show tunes while the armies marched and the gas chambers immolated. Now, when the sun shines, the children are fed and the worst that happens is the occasional transport disaster or homicide or sporting accident, drab young men who never smile drone tuneless dirges on Top of the Pops, and our most admired stage directors alter King Lear, just as they did a hundred years earlier, but this time cutting out the nice bits.
Something else people got used to in the first half of the twentieth century was being deafened by repetitious machinery. So, just when the machines were finally being silenced and replaced by other machines that only hum quietly, what do the sons and grandsons of the toiling factory masses turn around and invent? Deafening and rhythmically repetitious, industrial strength rock and roll.
It is commonly said that art prophecies. But art also remembers and celebrates and immortalises and universalises the lost past, however terrible it may have been at the time. The horrors of the early twentieth century were certainly horrible, but at least they meant something. In those days people knew what they were fighting for. The din of the machines was nigh unbearable, but at least there was some energy flying around and banging away and serious minerals being manhandled, by real men. Art remembers these things, and, comfortingly, keeps them going for a few more decades.
Well, it makes a change from just talking about ID cards.
