A great Irish essayist

Not Swift, or probably any of the other names that spring readily to mind. I confess I hadn't heard of Hubert Butler until J came back from an evening devoted to him with a documentary I have yet to see at its core, clutching two of those beautifully produced books of essays which Notting Hill Editions do so well (I first read Thomas Bernhard in that format).

As a well-travelled multilinguist and a voice of Europe's terrible 20th century upheavals - he was born in 1900 and died in 1991 - Butler had a special angle to what he wrote. Hannah Arendt famously called it 'the banality of evil', and Butler - who sums up the essence of Eichmann in an essay if you don't think you can face Arendt's stupendous Eichmann in Jerusalem - puts it differently, time and again. 'It is the correlation of respectability and crime that nowadays has to be carefully investigated,' he writes in cool understatement.

The figure and the constellations around him who seem to sum it up most closely for Butler are Ante Pavelitch (we now write 'Pavelić'; pictured above), 'probably the vilest of all war criminals', the Croatian fascist dictator and leader of the terrible Ustaše movement, his Minister of the Interior Andrija Artukovitch (Artuković) and the Catholic clergy, most closely a Franciscan order, complicit and active in their crimes.

I don't think I knew of the enormity of all this - Pavelić features as a cool monster in a work of genius faction with odd ties to Butler, Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt - but Butler states it coolly: in 1941 the Croatian government, dedicated to the extermination not only of the Jews but also of fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox, 'introduced laws which expelled them from Zagreb, confiscated their property and imposed the death penalty on those who sheltered them. Some 20 concentration camps were established in which they were exterminated'. The figures are of 30,000 Jews and 750,000 Orthodox massacred, some 240,000 Orthodox forcibly converted to Catholicism. Even if these figures are exaggerated, it was the most bloodthirsty religio-racial crusade in history, far surpassing anything achieved by Cromwell and the Spanish Inquisition' (below, Pavelitch and Archbishop Stepinac, Butler's paradigm of 'an ambitious, rather conventionally minded Croatian' capable of plentiful 'twists and turns...to keep pace with history').

Butler's special line of inquiry - and he was ostracised by the Irish establishment for establishing the truth - was to find out how and why Artukovich spent a year being sheltered in Ireland. The Franciscans provide the connection, though those to whom he spoke seemed ignorant of Artukovitch's status as a refugee war criminal and had, along with most clerics in Rome, 'been highly confused by what was happening in Croatia' (but this is an ironic swipe, because he goes on to point out that only one man in pursuit of the truth, Cardinal Tisserant, 'had a clear idea').

The gist is that 'if Artukovitch had to be carried half way round the earth on the wings of Christian charity, simply because he favoured the Church, then Christianity is dying. And if now, for ecumenical or other reasons, we are supposed to ask no questions about him, then it is already dead'. Butler enlarges on this in an early 'Report on Yugoslavia'. Deploring the 'hysterical adulation...poured forth by almost all the leading clergy upon Pavelitch', he adds:

As I believe that the Christian idiom is still the best in which peace and goodwill can be preached, I found this profoundly disturbing. I doubt now [1947] whether it is even wise for us to use the language of Christianity to the Yugoslav till all the vile things which were said and done in the name of Christ have been acknowledged and atoned for. I think the bitter hatred which is felt for the Churches in Yugoslavia is inflamed by all the lies and dissimulation about these things, by the refusal to admit that the Christian Church during the war connived at unspeakable crimes and departed very far from the language of Christ.

And in the central essay which gives Notting Hill Books' volume its title, 'The Invader Wore Slippers', he returns to the issue:

I felt that it was not the human disaster but the damage done to honoured words and thoughts that was most irreparable. The letter and the spirit had been wrested violently apart and a whole vocabulary of Christian goodness had been blown inside out like an umbrella in a thunderstorm.

The wider point being made in 'The Invader Wore Slippers' is how 'the moral problems of an occupation' turn out to be 'small and squalid'. Ordinary people are expecting jackboots; 'the respectable Xs, the patriotic Ys and the pious Zs' are unprepared for 'carpet slippers or patent leather pumps'. The Guernsey occupation is elegantly left to speak for itself - 'events for an October day in the first year of occupation [in the Guernsey Evening Post]: "Dog biscuits made locally. Table-tennis League of Six Teams formed. German orders relating to measures against Jews published. Silver Wedding anniversary of Mr and Mrs W J Bird."...Lubricated by familiar trivialities, the mind glided over what was barbarous and terrible.'

Not that the occupiers aren't skilful at winning complicity by double games. At one point Hitler is quoted on how to use the Church as his propagandists: 'Why should we quarrel? They will swallow anything provided they can keep their material advantages'.

Depressing instances abound. But Butler sees hope in the behaviours of small nations in which 'the Wicked Man is not yet woven so scientifically into the fabric of society', citing the ways Denmark and Bulgaria found to evade giving up their Jews in the Second World War. He praises the local community spirit, and in a long, brilliant interlude, 'Peter's Window' writes of his time living with a Leningrad family in 1931. Normality is celebrated, but its obverse is warningly inserted:

These are the things we talked about in Leningrad in 1931: spoons, buttons, macaroni, galoshes, macaroni again. I don't believe I ever heard anyone mention Magnitogorsk [pictured below: Komsomol meeting there the same year] or the liquidation of the Kulaks or any of the remote and monstrous contemporary happenings to which by a complicated chain of causes our lifestyle and our macaroni were linked.

At the end of that decade Butler was in Vienna working frantically with those admirable people the Quakers - he was not one himself - to find as many Jewish citizens as possible places abroad. He writes that, strangely, he was happy because all his faculties were engaged, and 'most people tied to a single job or profession die without exercising more than a tenth of their capacities'? The essay, after giving a devastating portrait of an Austrian Butler brought to Ireland, wheels round again to questions of the Catholic Church's role in World War 2.

So, an admirable man who acted in the maelstrom. But we wouldn't read him if his style wasn't so pure and, in its elegance, so capable of the sudden devastating sideswipe. His writing is the polar opposite of Patrick Leigh Fermor's flowery prose, and though I find the precision hard to emulate as an incorrigible sub-Jamesian, I salute it. Now to the volume of Ireland-based essays, The Eggman and the Fairies.

Dyre desire of Light

Heading his manuscript copy of The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar quotes John Florio’s translation of Virgil via Montaigne:  ‘Whence so dyre desire of Light on wretches grow?’ One of James MacMillan’s themes in his lecture for the Royal Philharmonic Society yesterday was how we wretches today, whether religious in the narrow sense of the word or the wider, still desire the light that music’s most transcendent passages can offer us. Actually, that sounds impossibly pompous, as JMacM’s soft-spoken, reasonable speech, eschewing all mention of himself in that visionary tradition, did not. I couldn’t quite work out the connection between his opening thoughts on Blake as an example of a broader visionary vein in English art and his central assertion of the importance of Roman Catholicism in Elgar’s life and work, but it was all food for thought. Bust of Beethoven in my shot below there to mark the RPS's 200th anniversary.

It’s true, we do tend to shunt Elgar’s Catholicism rather to one side, even in discussing the composer’s most overt assertion of his faith in Gerontius (though what more do you want than the Jesuits’ ‘A.M.D.G’ - ‘Ad majorem Dei Gloria’, ‘To the greater glory of God’ - at the top of the above page?). But perhaps it’s also true – a point not addressed yesterday – that the Catholic fervour which came from Elgar’s mother, and certainly not from his staunchly Anglican father, dwindled in later years. I can’t find the quotations I want, but I still have the hunch that the 'single short remark' Elgar made to Ernest Newman on his deathbed so ‘terrible’ that the younger man never repeated them to anyone might have been ‘I lost my faith in God’ (more frivolously, on hearsay, I’d wish it to be ‘I always preferred young men’, but no more of that).

No matter; the speech threw up plenty of points for discussion and, as Jude Kelly in fine presenting fettle said, we could have sat and talked for another hour. Nice to chat briefly to The Man afterwards, and I’m hugely looking forward not only to hearing his Oboe Concerto again in Glasgow on Friday – he will be elsewhere – but also his new Viola Concerto, due to be premiered by Lawrence Power as part of The Rest is Noise festival. I think I’m right in saying, at least from checking the index, that Alex Ross in his book of that name doesn’t give a single mention to MacMillan, one of the major voices in music today – and one of my two favourites (Adams being the other, of course).

Two hours later, I was in the chair alongside venerable composer Anthony Payne, whom of course we have to thank among other things for that rather miraculous realization of Elgar’s Third Symphony, and Heather Wiebe, Virginia academic newly arrived at King’s College London. Our moderator was Tom Hutchinson of the RPS, and the theme, supposedly, was 'The Edwardian Empire: Society and Culture', obviously with special reference to the performance of Gerontius due to follow in the Royal Festival Hall.

I was wrong in thinking that Heather was there as the cultural historian; she, too, is a musicologist, this time specializing in Britten. So we all had to readapt as we launched our little presentations by way of a start. Frankly, I think the esteemed AP should have gone before me, for clearly I’d stolen some of his thunder with the line about Elgar the European; but I also managed to contrast that with the perceived notion of the court composer to Edward VII. And in any case, Anthony was so genial, wise and good at batting the ball back and forth that it all became a delightful discussion in praise of our composer’s terrific originality. Maybe an antagonist could have stirred it all up more productively, but we had fun – even if I seem to have blanked out chapter and verse in all the after-euphoria (hoping there’s a recording. 15/7 Just discovered there is, here on soundcloud, thanks to The Rest is Noise festival's impressive soundarchiving. James's talk is there too).

We were all of us, JMacM included, seated in what’s supposed to be the royal box for Elder’s performance in the evening. I can’t say it moved me much. This conductor works so hard on revelatory textures, gleaming in the hands of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and is a superb chorus master, there with every word for the LPO Chorus and the Clare College Cambridge singers who served as the semichoir. But he doesn’t strike me as having the natural tempo rubato which late romantic music like this requires. Everything seems dotted and crossed with excessive precision; you can see the wheels at work. And sometimes he’s just too slow, in the tradition of his beloved Goodall, which sank the Angel’s Farewell for me, resplendently as the ever-dependable Sarah Connollly delivered it.

I did love Paul Groves’s hard work on extracting every inch of meaning from Cardinal Newman’s text, though, and in pushing his far-from-Helden voice to the right limits of agony and exultation when needed. The clarity of this truly world-class score came across beautifully. But for me, the desired light never quite shone. Have gone over to Sakari Oramo’s Birmingham recording at home to find out what was missing, and there is all the magic in all the right places.

So, from ‘A.M.D.G’ to Bach’s ‘S.D.G.’ (‘Soli Deo gloria’, ‘Glory to God alone’). Much less heavy weather results from this week’s Sunday cantata (someone told me Radio 3 is following the same calendar as I am; I had no idea). ‘Alles nur nach Gottes Willen’, BWV 72, is one of the short cantatas for the third Sunday after Epiphany* - short, it's argued, because the choir would have got very cold at this time of year; they were allowed to slope off before the hour-long sermon. Lucky them; in my treble days we had to sit and read Commando comics under the desks.

God’s will as exemplified, perhaps, in the day’s reading from Matthew 8 about Christ's healing of a leper (mosaic above from Monreale), is all there is to it. So it makes for a rather complacent sequence, shorn of questioning or suffering The striking minor-key launch of darting, rather agitated strings slightly undercuts the chorus’s sentiments (‘All only according to God’s will’); the music was re-used, not so interestingly in my opinion, at the start of the Gloria in Bach’s G minor Mass, BWV 235.

The alto reaches to the still-lively heart of the cantata. His/her recitative turns to arioso in the nine lines beginning ‘Lord, if thou wilt’ and moves almost seamlessly into the aria with the addition of two solo violins to the cello and continuo line, fugueing in one of the ritornellos. There’s a simple, dancing soprano number and a chorale based on a text by Albert, Duke of Prussia and an old French theme used in a cantata of the previous year, 1725. There – I’ve got off lightly this week**, but I’m looking forward to being tested rather more by JSB in weeks to come. Here's another from Suzuki's Bach series, Robin Blaze replacing Sara Mingardo whom I heard on another instalment of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage 2000.

*As 'Uncle Toby' points out below, I've got my church calendar in a muddle. This year we miss out on the third and fourth Sundays after Epiphany. This is Septuagesima, so I'll have to add another cantata. But that gives me the excuse of two more (fourth Sunday and Sexagesima) next week.

**Clearly not. The Septuagesima candidate I have to hand is 'Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn', on an altogether grander scale. Shall do my duty willingly some time this week