Andsnes, Astrup and other Norwegians

Had my Arts Desk say on the first of two programmes given by Leif Ove Andsnes (pictured above overlooked by Gainsborough ladies) and two young Norwegian musicians at the Dulwich Picture Gallery; handed over to Gavin Dixon for the second, and he did an excellent job (which means I agree with him). But I couldn't resist going back for the daytime recital, partly because I'd fallen in love with that amazing gallery again and wanted to sit with Soane's provision for natural light from above having its full effect.

On the first evening, I sat myself right alongside Van Dyck's Samson and Delilah, one of my favourite pictures in the gallery along with the three Rembrandts and a Claude.

Tuesday lunchtime was a chance to sit on the other side, so not looking towards the male nudes as in this photo of violinist Guro Kleven Hagen,

but in the opposite direction, with a whole other clutch of pictures around me. Hearing both programmes gave the opportunity to appreciate the perfect symmetries of the programming, made by Andsnes in conjunction with the cultural wing of the Savings Bank Foundation DNB - a very enlightened collaboration responsible for both the majority of the Nikolai Astrup paintings in the current exhibition and the valuable instruments on loan to Hagen and viola player Eiving Holtsmark Ringstad.

The highlight of the second concert, for me, was Ringstad's performance with Andsnes of Sinding's Suite in the Old Style: the first movement a virtual moto perpetuo in which Ringstad dropped no stitch and made musical sense of virtuosity, the second a chance to return to the dark brooding to which the viola is so suited. Diffident in person, Ringstad comes alive as a performer, a good foil to the more reserved musicianship of Hagen. As for Andsnes' inclusion of four of Grieg's many Lyric Pieces, I ordered up the disc of his performances recorded on Grieg's Steinway in the house at Troldhaugen (a pairing of man and piano which, of course, I was uniquely privileged to experience for myself in the realms of Kurtág and Liszt during last summer's trip to Bergen).

Delighted as I was to receive these photos from Dulwich Picture Gallery's press department a week after the event, I felt just a bit miffed that they hadn't taken up my suggestion to photograph the three musicians in the Astrup exhibition's final room of midsummer bonfires. The best I can do is an illicit picture of the crowds in that room - like the Norwegians, I was amazed to see so many of Astrup's flaming canvases gathered together in one space, and there were no postcards of this splendid group.

Many of these pictures I saw for the first time last summer in one of Bergen's superb KODE galleries, in a new wing specially devoted to the master; mostly denuded in the cause of the Dulwich exhibition, the biggest of Astrup's work to be shown anywhere in the world, it currently has a special display devoted to the artist's early works.

What most struck me then and, in much more detail now, was the special quality of Astrup's woodcuts. Like Munch, who bought several of his early works, Astrup proved something of a pioneer here - in fact, more so. He not only painted on his wood blocks, but also on the finished prints. He writes almost self-reproachfully about his 'experimentation', continuing:

I work in my own way, and several of my impressions can appear to be more paintings than woodcuts and this is, of course, really a fault - that is also why I have not considered exhibiting them. Some of them also require a lot of work to print, as I use 5-6 blocks for each impression.

He chose his paper carefully, linking it to his environment - he liked the Kazo of inspirational Japanese example, long-fibred stuff from the paper mulberry tree - and alder was the preferred tree for his blocks, though he also used pear and pinewood.

The Dulwich exhibition gives in some instances four different versions of the same scene, infinitely sensitive to the tones and changing seasons of the small area above Bergen where Astrup worked and lived for most of his life. In a rare move to please a patron fond of the marsh marigolds which feature in some of his most famous images, he reworked Night Ploughing, c.1905

to include the plant in 1927 where the water had been.

An assemblage of no less than four woodcuts of The Moon in May, 1908, which I can only suggest in their entirety from two pages of the excellent catalogue

range from an idyllic scene with two people working in the garden

to what looks like a snowy landscape with a very thick application of paint.

As for the joyous midsummer bonfire images, one famous oil with lovers, dancers and fiddler

exists both as colour woodcut in several versions

and in black-and-white, making the fiddler look like Old Nick - after all, Astrup's pastor father thought these rituals were the work of the devil.

You can see why these images are a source of no small fascination, and I'll certainly return to Dulwich before the exhibition ends on 15 May (if you want to see it after that you'll have to travel to Norway or Germany).

What ought to be more than a footnote but which finds itself squeezed in here by virtue of its link to an unusual concert in a special place has to be the second of the Waterloo Warehouse concerts organised and conducted by the ever-enterprising Jonathan Bloxham (all donations, as before to MOAS, Migrant Offshore Aid Station - and as I promised I gave all savings on Christmas cards and stamps to them as well, though a little miffed not to have had the barest acknowledgment. Anyway the transfer went through). I'm being totally honest when I say that Ben Baker's interpretation of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the orchestra of students and young professionals was the most arresting I've ever heard. Here he is with Jonathan after the performance.

Told an exhausted J he might be able to doze at some point during the Beethoven - I often do, if only mentally - but he had cause to reproach me jovially for never at any point being able to do so. Jonathan paced the central movement just right - more a stately dance than a bland wallow - and Ben, peerless in musicianship and intonation as ever, chose the fiendish cadenzas adapted by Christian Tetzlaff from the version Beethoven made for piano and orchestra, celebrated for having timps to dialogue with the soloist at one point.

The Brahms One which followed was way too big for the modest surroundings, but a flexible and impassioned interpretation with real extra dynamism in the finale, where you noticed all the more how the themes just keep pouring out of Brahms in highest inspiration. This was just as fascinating an approach in its way as Ticciati's with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Jonathan tells me he is up for the post of assistant conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he deserves to get it.

Kremlinology

It's such a jolt to go back to a plain-speaking history of Russia after the selective violence of film and fiction. Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, for all the black-after-white menace of its Part Two, gives you no idea of the amount of blood that flowed, the piles of corpses that accumulated, in the second half of the ever more crazed tsar's rule.* Tolstoy's War and Peace treats the Great Fire of Moscow as a noble patriotic act, but offers no sense of how the fire blazed for ten days and of the carnage it caused (for the same reason, incidentally, I'm not surprised my dad would never speak of his work as a London fireman during the Second World War - we think of the spectacle of the flames, whereas what probably stuck in his mind was charred body after body).

Catherine Merridale's Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History tells the ongoing national tragedy from the perspective of what was for centuries, and is again, the centre of power. In fact its only relatively happy times would have been the brief Russian Enlightenment after things first moved to Petersburg (and a Russian Enlightenment is not the same as a European one). Here's a view from 1800, even more peaceful than Joan Blaue's lovely 'Kremlenagrad' (sic) map of 1648 pictured up top.

This is also a tale of faked legitimacy, the attempt to link the tsars in a line back to the Ryurik dynasty, a mythmaking transparent in Simon Ushakov's rather beautiful The Tree of the State of Muscovy (note the red-walled Kremlin at the bottom) of 1668,

echoed in the desperate ploys of usurpers in all centuries to make their claim to the throne 'right'. Merridale notes how communism tried a different kind of legality, and how Yeltsin attempted to bring back the imperial tone with the reinvention of a red staircase that had actually been destroyed in the time of the tsars.

So many millions of corpses weigh down the reader, and so much destruction of beautiful buildings, even if they were a symbol of oppression (the Orthodox Church before 1917 was, of course, the instrument of the state, as it is again). Gone is the ancient Church of the Saviour in the Forest (pictured below by Fyodor Alekseev c. 1800-10) and so many other ecclesiastical Kremlin buildings.

It's a miracle that the Dormition Cathedral and its neighbours, however much renovated, still stand. The Italian origins of what we see now are vividly brought to life. Merridale's account of Byzantine princess Zoe's journey to Moscow to be wife of Ivan III would be a good basis for a film (how very different to another screenplay I have in mind, of Marie Antoinette and family's flight to Vincennes and their return to Paris in disgrace as described by Stefan Zweig).

Zoe, soon to be Tsarina Sofiya, and her treasure-laden entourage travelled from Rome, where she had been brought up a ward of Pope Paul II, via Siena, Florence, Bologna, Vicenza, Innsbruck and Nuremberg, among other cities, to Lübeck, spent 11 stormy days crossing the Baltic to Tallinn (then Kolyvan) and then two months, mostly through dense forest, via Pskov to Moscow. Three years after their wedding, Ivan invited Aristotele Fioravanti from Bologna to design and execute a new Dormition Cathedral. So what we see as the omphalos of Moscow and all Russia is, like so much else, a foreign import.

In human terms, the splendour quickly faded (in any case Ivan III was not beyond destroying other cities wholesale). The absurd horrors of the smuta or time of troubles make for queasy reading (and helpful clarification for our classes on Musorgsky's Boris Godunov); Pleasure gardens and western fashions come and go in Merridale's picture of the Kremlin in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Then it's back to grimness, cynicism and slaughter for the Lenin and Stalin eras, when the place must have been at its absolutely gloomiest. In the stagnating era of Brezhnev, the Communist Party Hall for thousands was still in full swing, if that's the right word.

And now? Merridale concludes:

At this point in the tale, the idea dawns that it is Russia's people, rather than their leaders, who are blamed for any history of tyranny...On the surface, today's Kremlin is like an essay on that general theme. The message it conveys is hypnotic, a repetition of the obvious and the familiar. As the obedient groups walk round, it takes a well-informed and imaginative visitor to picture the things that have vanished, such as the ghosts of ancient churches, long demolished, the scorch-marks left by heavy guns, or the deep tracks, in now-buried mud, of horse-drawn carts sagging under the heavy rubble from the latest fire. The empty space where the prikazy [chancelleries] used to be, or where once there were warrens for the slaves and palace rats, may yet suggest the shades of long-dead Muscovites, some wielding clubs, some armed with fists, their hearts set on plunder, justice or the obstinate quest for a true tsar. A thoughtful visitor may picture the red flags, the crowds, the icy silence of the Stalin years. But only those who know their history will protest, despite all the romance and gilded domes, that the state whose flag is flying here is yet another new invented thing, the choice of living individuals rather than timeless fate. Its creators are not among the milling crowds, whatever the extent of the Russian people's exasperated collusion at different historical moments. The system is not even the product of some vaguely conceived collective being called the Kremlin. Ultimate responsibility, for better or worse, rests with specific people, and they have real names.

On which note, there's a fascinating speculation in Emmanuel Carrère's dazzling and complex study of the Russian maverick known as Eduard Limonov that Putin is his outwardly unsuccessful subject's double. Carrère chose Limonov because 'his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that's happened since the end of the Second World War.' Putin, too, was 'raised in the cult of the fatherland [motherland?], the Great Patriotic War, of the KGB and the fear it inspires in the wimps of the west'. Yet he became politically skilful and devious, able to lie without blinking, in the way that Limonov never could. Interesting, incidentally, that this Russian edition with a childhood photo which could just as well be of Putin describes the book as a 'novel'. Truth too harsh?

Limonov's life has been one of paradoxes: from the artistic bohemian societies of Kharkov and Moscow to homelessness in New York, a cult literary success due to his many books entirely about himself, joining the Serbian 'liberators' (what on earth would they have made of his having been buggered by black men in American parks had they found out?),  a bizarre flirtation (or more) with the NazBols, the National [Nazi] Bolsheviks whose paradoxical hippiness could only pertain in Russia,

then a brief leaguing with Kasparov as part of a more respectable but equally hopeless opposition.

The only connection between all these seems to have been a desire to be famous and an urge to fight on the losing side. Plus a remarkable loyalty to friends and lovers like his beloved Natasha.

So you can't say there wasn't a certain integrity there. Besides, Carrère is a seriously good, maybe even great, writer to guide us through all the tergiversations and interpose his own personality at times on the precis of Limonov's explicit writings. At the mid point of the book, moving the action to Paris, Carrère gives a slice of his own life, recounting Werner Herzog's crushing dismissal of the book Carrère has written, which he hasn't even read - 'I know it's bullshit' - whereupon a friend says 'That'll teach you to admire fascists'. Carrère, reflecting on the roots of fascism, continues:

I'm not talking about neo-Nazis or the extermination of presumed inferiors, or even about Werner Herzog's frank and robust disdain, but about the way each of us deals with the evident fact that life is unjust and people are unequal: more or less beautiful, more or less talented, more or less prepared for the fight. Nietzsche, Limonov, and this extreme moral stance within us that I'm calling fascist say with one voice: 'That's reality, that's the world as it is.' What else can you say? What stands against this basic fact?

'Nothing,' the fascist will say, 'but the pious lie, leftist otherworldliness, and political correctness, which is more common than clear thinking'.

I'd offer: Christianity. The idea that, in the Kingdom - which is certainly not the hereafter, but the reality of reality - the littlest is the biggest. Or the idea, as formulated in a Buddhist sutra my friend Herve Clerc first told me about, that 'a man who judges himself superior, inferior or even equal to another does not understand reality'....I think that this idea...is the pinnacle of wisdom, and that one life isn't enough to adopt it, digest it, and absorb it, so that it ceases to be an idea and instead conditions at every moment our way of looking and acting. For me, writing this book is a strange way of attempting to do that.

Curiously enlightenment, if not redemption, does come to Limonov, while he achieves a Dostoyeskyan understanding of his fellow men serving a prison sentence for opposition activity. Not only does Carrère opine that, for the first time in his life, Limonov becomes one of those who 'know where they are'; his protagonist also has a time-stopping vision of nirvana which may sound flaky as summarised here, but again Carrère considers it seriously, connecting it speculatively to Limonov's ongoing 'guidance' by a deceased Altai trapper he'd befriended.

So there we have it - not a villain, or a waster, but the portrait of a real man, nastoyashii chelovyek, as Fadayev and Prokofiev put it in the story/opera of a Soviet war hero. And infinitely more complex. As for the ongoing echoes of Stalin-era routines in Putin's Russia, the show trials which courageous individuals like Nadezhda Savchenko have mocked so impressively,  read this powerful article on The Interpreter.

*In a comment below, Laurent drew my attention to an astonishing artistic comment by Gustave Doré. Here it is.

A page of  The Rare and Extraordinary History of Holy Russia with illustrations by the 21-year-old Doré , its caption reads: 'Continuation of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Faced with such crimes, let’s blink our eyes not to see anything more than the broad picture.' Genius, no?

Incandescent Enescu

How I wish I'd devoted more than just two Monday afternoons of the Opera in Depth course this term to George Enescu's Oedipe. I knew the viscous sounds of the three symphonies, and the clearer lines of the neoclassical orchestral suites, but I'd postponed taking down from the shelf where it had sat unwrapped for so long the classic EMI recording with José van Dam, Brigitte Fassbaender, Gabriel Bacquier, Marjana Lipovšek, Barbara Hendricks and Nicolai Gedda with Lawrence Foster conducting the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra. Listening to it along with a handsome vocal score loaned by the Royal Opera turned out to be a revelation, and I don't think there could have been a better sonic guide.

From childhood fascination with a set of 78s featuring the young Menuhin playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and Enescu conducting - let me hasten to add that it was the era of 33rpms, but we had an old wind-up gramophone which I used to spend hours playing with -  I learned that Enescu had been a similar prodigy. But not only that: Cortot (pictured with Enescu above) thought he was a better pianist than most, and he had a phenomenal musical memory. There are plenty of testimonies to prove that he really could go to the piano and play any part of Wagner's Ring without hesitation. In his youth, he was, at least to judge from this remarkable photograph, very beautiful.

Menuhin, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this year, sums it up idiosyncratically in his preface to Noel Malcolm's George Enescu: His Life and Music:

If it is possible for the reader to imagine a man with an encyclopaedic mind which never forgot anything he hear, or read, or saw in the course of his lifetime and could recall instantaneously and play in the most incandescent way any work from Bach, Wagner to Bartók; if the reader could imagine that mind allied to the most generous and selfless of hearts in a human being with a nobility and beauty of build, of presence, romantic in the lineaments of his face, and always propelled by a creative genius whether in speaking, teaching, conducting, playing the violin, the piano, and, very particularly, in composing, the image would still not be complete; a man full of humour (and a most amusing caricaturist) as well as deep philosophy, conversant with the languages and literatures of Europe and England, a man imbued with the highest forms of chivalry and earth-loving patriotism - this would be the teacher I had since I was eleven, continuously for two years, then again for five years and then intermittently over the years that were left to us together. No book can do justice to a man of this breadth and nobility...he remains for me the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician and the most formative influence I have ever experienced.

Just to listen to the classic Menuhin/Enescu/Monteux recording of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins is to share in that hypnotic, or rather mindful, spell. I played the slow movement in class the other week, and I can't speak for the students, but I know I was overcome with that deep-level feeling one gets in the best meditations.

Menuhin said of Enescu's Third Violin Sonata that simply reproducing all the demands in the astonishingly detailed score was hard work enough - not even Mahler or Puccini were more specific. 'Dans le caractère populaire roumain' accounts for the extraordinary writing: this is Enescu's own very haunting distillation of folk fiddling from his native Romania, with its unique fusion of Arabic, Slav and Hungarian music. Delighted to find a version of his own recording with fellow Romanian Dinu Lipatti that also includes the score so you can see exactly what's going on.

Enescu completed the Third Violin Sonata in 1926; work on Oedipe took virtually the whole of the Twenties. There are some connections, not least in the oriental scales of eastern European folk music which surface in some of Oedipe's more lamentatory passages (and there's a lot of lamentation). In Act 2 Oedipe sings a folk-like curse with the same quarter-tones marked into the score that also appear in the sonata. But how to describe the opera as a whole? It's colossally ambitious. Originally Enescu asked from his librettist, the poet and dramatist Edmond Fleg, a text based on Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos and Oedipus at Colonus, but didn't care for the two-part slab that resulted. So that was compressed and two more acts were added, dealing with celebrations of Oedipus's birth and Tiresias's dire prophecy in the first, the slaughter of Laios at the crossroads and the scene with the Sphinx in the second.

At the end of the first class, once I'd played the introduction and opening scene following a cross-section of Enescu's other works, a student said 'it sounds like nothing else' (since then, another has added that she faced the forthcoming Royal Opera production with trepidation, because the score alone on the recording conjures such phantasmagorical images. La Fura dels Baus will surely find strong ones, but they may not be the ones in the mind's eye). I agree - there are fleeting touches of Debussy and Ravel, but altogether it's a more original score than a comparable contemporary opera like Szymanowski's King Roger.

Enescu never overloads or prolongs the climaxes and seems - though it's premature to judge from a recording - to have a perfect sense of pace, especially in the third act which can be directly compared in its subject-matter to Stravinsky's deliberately semi-frozen (but oh so emotional at points) Oedipus Rex. Oedipe's three Act III sweeps of revelation feel totally organic. We've still got the fourth act to look at - cramming it in tomorrow alongside a first look at Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest, moving from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous.

I'd like to draw your attention to the scene with the Sphinx. Sadly this example begins with her first utterance - I'd prefer it to come in with her awakening, the fluttering of giant wings outdoing the hallucinations of Strauss's Herod in Salome - but the music for the scene itself is suitably discombobulating and ends with an upward glissando on the musical saw. The accompanying text is brilliant; provided with a translation alongside here, it shows you what a brilliant twist Enescu and Fleg gave to the myth. The standard mythic question ('what walks...' etc, used in Turnage's jokier Greek) is replaced with one which allows Oedipe to reveal both his heroism and his hubris. And the death of the Sphinx hints that she will have the last laugh.

Finally, let's go back to 1909 and the spark that lit Enescu's fire - his visit to the Comédie-Française to see the great French actor Jean Mounet-Sully (1841-1916) as Sophocles's Oedipus. Enescu declared that when, over a decade later, he tried to give musical voice to the self-blinding, it was Mounet-Sully's terrible cry that he had in mind.

And those eyes - well, you can see how tragedy-mask big they were for expressing the role even better in this everyday photo.

Of course you've got to love Enescu aged 70 for impersonating the performance. I lifted this from Malcolm's book, so I hope that's OK.

I was looking for film of Mounet-Sully - there are a couple of silent extracts, not online - and came across Jean Cocteau reciting his memories of a similar shock to Enescu's on encountering the actor as Oedipus at the Comédie-Française. Cocteau was 12 at the time but recreated the experience towards the end of his life with the utmost vividness. I like the look of the specially-produced little book he made on the subject.

Who would make a great Oedipus today? I haven't seen one (Alan Howard was nowhere near) and the only British actor I can think of with the range is Chiwetel Ejiofor. Certainly bass-baritone Bryn Terfel would be ideal for the opera. Johan Reuter is down to sing the role at Covent Garden - on the evidence of his performance as Nielsen's Saul in Copenhagen last year, he'll certainly be up to the challenge of an operatic role originally written with Chaliapin in mind. That greatest of basses declined since his vocal powers in his mid-60s wouldn't, he felt, have been up to the mark. Anyway, it was a surprise connection to the opera we'd just reluctantly left behind this term, Musorgsky's Boris Godunov. Can't wait for Monday week (14 March), when Richard Jones, Boris director, and Barry, no less, join me at the Frontline Club for what the composer described to me as a 'Twin Peaks' event.

Dust of Empire

Before I moved on to two of his psycho-biographies, reading about Stefan Zweig led me sideways to two short novels set in dusty eastern corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (that's the blessing of Daunt Books which arranges its fiction in sections on countries). I now trust just about anything published by New York Review of Books' Classics series, not least because they're such a pleasure to hold in the hand. Yet the blurb on the back of Dezső Kosztolányi's Skylark as translated from the Hungarian by Richard Aczel led me to expect only the wit, and not the wisdom, of this quietly marvellous tale.

Ma and Pa Vajkay, inhabitants of Sárszeg circa 1900 - which, as Kosztolányi's native Szabadka (Subotica) Péter Esterházy in his stylish introduction describes as  'that (to use his words) poor, grey, boring, dusty, bored, comical, provincial town' - have depended on their unintentionally controlling daughter Skylark for their increasingly limited outlook on life. From the moment they see Skylark off at the town station (Szabadka's depicted up top) on her reluctant summer visit to nearby country relatives, their life begins to change. Small pleasures and misdemeanours are recorded by the author not with scathing irony but with a real sympathy for these townsfolk. I expected something wicked, along the lines of Sologub's The Petty Demon, but the results are quite different.

Perhaps it's all best summed up by the local newspaper editor Miklós Ijas, the nearest thing to an authorial self-portrait (I imagine). In an unusually candid and lofty couple of paragraphs, Kosztolányi captures his own achievement in making the outwardly comical richly human. Ilja is standing in the street outside the Vajkays' humble home:

He stood for some minutes before the gate with all the patience of a lover waiting for the appearance of his beloved. But he was waiting for no-one. He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into his arms, stripping it of flesh and bone, and feeling into its depths as if they were his own. From this, the greatest pain, the greatest happiness is born: the hope that we too will one day be understood, strangers will accept our words, our lives, as if they were their own.

All he had heard about his father had made him receptive to the suffering of others. Until then he had wanted nothing to do with those who lived and moved around him...For yes, at first sight they had seemed worthless, twisted and distorted, their souls curling hideously inwards. They had no tragedy, for how could tragedy begin to grow in such a wasteland? Yet how profound, how human they all were. How much like him. So he did have something in common with them, after all.

That excerpt is untypical of the rest of the book, which is not often given to inner reflection, but paints the souls of the characters in all their contradictory richness all the same. As Esterházy points out of the style, 'Kosztolányi simplified the Hungarian sentence, made it shorter, purer'. Towards the end of his preface Esterhazy decides that the writer is closer to Chekhov than to Musil: 'He shares that same helpless fascination for the banal or trivial, for a drama-of-being which can be unravelled from a remote gesture, a twitch of the mouth, a dismissive wave of the hand, from lamplight and ugliness. A spider's web over a mine.' And he ends: 'Kosztolányi''s prose is quiet and sharp. Today our books are noisier and perhaps more blurred'.

There is little of the 'quiet and sharp' abut Robert Musil's astonishing account of sado-masochism and psychological torment in a military boarding school clearly modelled on the one he was forced to attend in Hranice (now in Moravia; there's another, Bohemian Hranice in the Czech republic; the real-life academy pictured below), The Confusions of Young Master Törless. That the impressions remaining from having read A Man Without Qualities decades ago are blurred is perhaps right - Musil is the stream-of-consciousness writer whose very fascination lies in the way that meaning and definition slips away at every turn. His sentences go on for ever, a bit like Proust's; hard to say whether Christopher Moncrieff has done a good job of the translation.

At first I was impatient, following on from Kosztolányi, to find this all self-indulgent, a bit evasive about its homoerotic element (but then that must have been the case, outwardly, with the kind of schoolboys pictured within). Even when Törless finally decides to speak unambiguously to the masters about the strange events that have gone on, Musil pauses for yet another digression which comes closest to defining his special style, and brings it close to Hofmannsthal's perception of transience:

For thought is a strange phenomenon. Often it is nothing more than an accident that vanishes without a trace, because for thought there is a time to be born and a time to die. We can make an amazing discovery, and yet it slowly withers away in the palm of our hand like a flower. The form remains, but its colour and fragrance have gone. Or, put another way, we might remember it word for word, the logical value of its phrases might remain intact, and yet it drifts by aimlessly on the surface of our being and we don't feel enriched by it. Until the moment - perhaps many years later - when it suddenly reappears, and we realize that in the interim we have been hardly aware of its existence, although logically speaking we knew it all the time.

Yes, there are dead and living thoughts. The thought that moves around on the surface, in the light, and which can be regained by the threads of causality at any time, isn't necessarily the most vivid. A thought we encounter in this way remains as insignificant to us as a random solider in a column of marching troops. A thought that might have passed through our mind a long time ago only really comes alive when something which isn't thought, which isn't logic is added to it, with the result that we feel its truth, independent of any proof, like an anchor that has been dropped into living, bleeding flesh...Only half of any great discovery is made in the light-filled region of the mind, the other is found in the dark soil of our inner depths, and this is above all a state of mind which grows at the farthest extremity of our thoughts like a flower.

Of course it was the age of Freud, though the founding father of psychoanalysis was the first to admit that much of what he had to discuss had already been articulated in masters like Shakespeare, Ibsen and Dostoyevsky. Certainly knowledge of Freud allows Zweig to shed a special, if speculative light on some fascinating historical subjects. I wasn't sure I wanted to read a 500-plus-page biography of Marie Antoinette; nor does Zweig's subtitle, 'the portrait of a mediocre character', exactly encourage it. Actually 'mittleren' really translates 'ordinary', and even that isn't quite right; Zweig's preface in Eden and Cedar Paul's translation qualifies that by explaining that his book will be about an average, unreflective queen forced by tragic destiny to transform:

At the very time when she was stripped of the last insignia of power, she grew aware that in her there had dawned something novel and stupendous, and that but for her sufferings this dawn would never have begun. 'Tribulation first makes one realise what one is'. With mingled pride, agitation and astonishment, she uttered these remarkable words, seized with a foreboding that through suffering her life, otherwise commonplace, would grow significant for posterity. The consciousness of a supreme duty lifted her to a higher level than she had ever known. Just before the mortal, the transient frame perished, the immortal work of art was perfected. Marie Antoinette, the mediocrity, achieved a greatness commensurate with her destiny.

A tragic tale indeed - and it needs no rose-perfumed invention on Zweig's part to show the transformation. Marie Antoinette's deeds and words are sufficient in the final stages of the tragedy. Even as a pleasure-loving queen, thoughtless of the people and heedless of expense, she can be paradoxical in Zweig's eyes: her very refusal of stiff courtly etiquette showed spirit, albeit the determination of the Valley Girl as portrayed by Kirstin Dunst in Sofia Coppola's rather amazing film (though it doesn't go far enough, of course).

Marie Antoinette's essential fidelity to the very foolish and hapless Louis XVI speaks well for her; the true love she felt for the noble Swede Count Fersen was discreet and constant to death, and there's not the slightest hint of dalliances with anyone else. And she always put her son, at least, before herself (first portrait above, one of  Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun's several portraits, this one of Marie Antoinette with her children;  below, the craven David's sketch of the queen on the way to the scaffold).

Yet it's in the final stages that her sense of tragic dignity constantly amazes. Up to that point she's still capable of intrigue, as Zweig's account of the flight to Vincennes and especially the journey back to Paris makes clear (this episode would make a superb film in itself). But the outrage we feel at the whole sickening episode of the Dauphin's 'confession' of incest with his mother - very Turn of the Screw, this, especially in the conflict between the two women who want him to be too good and the revolutionaries who want him to be too bad - makes us all the more impressed by her unshakable dignity in court. I like Zweig's dramatic sense, too, which hides the King's execution from our sight until the last minute, just as it was hidden from his consort. This is a book to be read alongside Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, and it succeeds on the same high level. Mary Queen of Scots next.

Just a quick final note on a masterpiece which has nothing to do with the above, but since we're on the subject of books, I urge you to read it since, being advertised as 'a novel for young adults', it might slip through the net.

Janne Teller's Nothing, translated from the original Danish by Martin Aitken, has been turned into a bold and beautiful opera at Glyndebourne, the latest unforgettable achievement of that company's long-running, award-winning education department. I describe the mythic essence of the subject, both simple and complicated, over on The Arts Desk, and can only reiterate that the book is even stronger and more uncompromising. It's written from the perspective of  a teenager but it's not exclusively for that age group; it should have a powerful and unsettling effect on everyone who reads it.