★★★★★
Johnson’s book is a deeply personal and human meditation on music and mental health, and the redemptive power of love
“…As I got out of the taxi Kate fixed me with a look of intense, focussed concern and walked straight up to me: What’s happened?”
This moment from Stephen Johnson’s new book, MUSIC LESSONS: Seven Composers and What They Taught Me, is unexpected in a book about classical music. It could have come from a novel, or perhaps, in this case, an autobiography. I will return to this moment later, but first, it’s worth considering what kind of book this is (and isn’t).
Johnson is a writer, broadcaster and composer who presented BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music for 14 years and is a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine. His 2018 book How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (Notting Hill Editions) won the Rubery Book Award for Non Fiction in 2021. That book begins with one of the most profound and moving pieces of writing about music I have ever read.
It’s 2006, and Johnson is in a ‘tiny apartment’ in St Petersburg to interview the clarinettist Viktor Kozlov, one of the few survivors from the first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (the ‘Leningrad’) in 1942, when the city was surrounded by the German army.We are there with Johnson as he feels ‘a sudden heart-stopping clasp’ on his arm. He’s just asked Kozlov how the symphony makes him feel today. Kozlov and his wife start ‘sobbing convulsively’; Kozlov just about manages to get the words out: ‘It’s not possible to say. It’s not possible to say.’
Kozlov’s gesture, his tears and his stuttering speech say more about the power of music than any musicology ever could. Johnson recounts the story again in his new book, and it’s worth repeating.
In his introduction, Johnson informs us that it’s very difficult to be objective when writing about music, which is ‘such an elusive subject.’ It’s fascinating to compare two experiences he describes of listening to music in the concert hall. In the first, he’s sitting in Gloucester Cathedral with his wife Kate, listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion so that he can write a review. I’m right there with him; not long ago, I was in the Royal Festival Hall in London with my wife, to review the same piece. He points out that if he were just a ‘regular audience member’ (like our respective wives), he wouldn’t need to bother himself with musical technicalities, or with any ‘feeble pretence of objectivity.’ Ultimately, he surrenders to the music… but he still had to go home and write his review!
The second experience occurs a quarter of a century later, in St Etheldreda’s Church, Hatfield. It’s Johnson’s birthday, and the cellist Guy Johnston is playing John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil. He’s happier than he’s ever been. He’s been able to sustain a ‘deeply rewarding career’ in music for the last 40 years. Surrounded by friends and with Kate sitting next to him, he feels, in Dante’s words, ‘the love that moves the sun and other stars.’ The psychological wound in him, which looked as if it would never heal – like Amfortas’ wound in Wagner’s Parsifal – is ‘beginning to close up.’ He feels like one of the most privileged people in the world.
This book, in seven essays on individual pieces or parts of them by the composers Bruckner, Rachmaninoff, Bach, Lili Boulanger, Wagner, Sibelius, and Beethoven, tells the story of Johnson’s redemption through music and love. He makes no apology for the amount of personal detail he reveals. In fact, this is the point of the book and what gives it its extraordinary power. His mission is to show ‘how powerful and benevolent a force music has been in my life.’ Describing the book as a series of essays doesn’t really do it justice, making it sound like a dry work of musicology. It’s not. Occasionally, Johnson uses a technical term to describe a musical effect, and he charmingly apologises for doing so. But he still has an eloquent turn of phrase when he describes, for instance, the musical effect of the ending of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8,
‘Trumpets and horns pierce through the orchestra’s terror-stricken harmonies to just the rhythm of the first theme – its skeleton, you might well say – on a single, baleful repeated note. Then all is hushed… the music’s very heartbeat ebbs away to nothing. It’s one of the grimmest endings in symphonic music’
I would happily read a book full of such musical insights, but Johnson is aiming at something much deeper than that, and he achieves it subtly, by gradually creating a narrative across the seven chapters. He quotes the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard’s wise saying, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ The same is true of this book; it’s only at the end that it gives up its secrets, that Johnson’s subtle narrative becomes clear, linking all seven pieces, not in their musical style but in the effect that they have had on him. This is a human journey, not a musical one.
In the opening chapter, on Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8, Johnson immediately lays his diagnostic cards on the table: he has ‘Bipolar Disorder, Type Two, with Autistic Traits.’ He also describes his struggle to come to terms with the effect of being brought up (if that’s the right phrase) by a seriously mentally ill mother, ‘sometimes affectionate… but more often withering or weirdly distant.’ He describes Bruckner’s struggles with mental health, including an obsession with counting; he tried to count the number of leaves on a tree and the sequins on his sister’s dress. As Shakespeare’s Lear says, ‘that way madness lies.’ At first, I thought that Johnson was going to compare his own disorders with those of famous composers, and to see how they were healed or treated. What Johnson does instead is much more interesting; he describes the effect that the music has on him, and how it has helped change his life; the ‘lessons’ of the title.
At the end of the book, looking back on what he has written, Johnson is surprised to discover how much religion there is in it. To be clear, he doesn’t preach, and he explicitly distances himself from the American Evangelical pastors who preach about ‘God and Guns’ and the ‘Prosperity Gospel.’ He says he could believe in the God who can expose himself, in King Lear’s words, ‘to feel what wretches feel’, even to the point of despair. This is God manifest in the figure of Jesus in the St Matthew Passion, who cries out in agony, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, the Jesus who has become at this moment, ‘just a man.’
This version of Jesus shows compassion in the sense of suffering with, which Johnson describes as both a Buddhist and a Christian notion. He writes movingly about Kundry’s kiss in Wagner’s Parsifal, which awakens the title character to feel compassion for the first time. This, in turn, helps Johnson feel compassion for his mother, which is remarkable, given his relationship with her.
But there’s another woman in Johnson’s life who has had a much more positive effect on Johnson’s mental health, helping him realise that not all women are as abusive as his mother. Amusingly, he bonded with Kate over their shared love for Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, the subject of one of the book’s chapters. But to return to the scene I mentioned at the start of this review, when Kate sensed that something was terribly wrong, it was Kate who saved Johnson from suicide. Johnson describes the way Leonore’s love for Florestan breaches the prison walls in Beethoven’s Fidelio. In a beautiful analogy, Johnson describes Kate’s ‘fierce, yet tenderly searching love that had somehow managed to penetrate the walls of my prison’: the moment of redemption.
MUSIC LESSONS Seven Composers and What They Taught Me is published by Notting Hill Editions
Now read on…
The St Matthew Passion
Personal writing about music