Janet Baker - In Her Own Words

Occasionally you watch something on television that you know will stay with you for a long time to come. Maybe even for a lifetime. That's a big claim to make for a broadcast. But a recent BBC Four documentary for me falls into that extremely rare category of "outstanding". It's
Janet Baker - In Her Own Words.

She had, as everyone knows, one of the greatest mezzo-soprano voices of the twentieth century. I say "had" because, to the consternation of her audiences (though for the best of reasons that she explains in the programme), she decided to retire from professional performance thirty years ago when she was just 56. She had already retired from the operatic stage a few years earlier. I won't rehearse her life story. Her autobiography Full Circle, an appearance on Desert Island Discs and above all this TV documentary tell it all - or at least, the bits she is willing to share in public for she is, as she herself acknowledges, a very private person.

We all have our favourite Baker recordings. Among mine are her Mahler songs, her Wagner Wesendonck Lieder and her Brahms Alto Rhapsody which we had played at my beloved grandmother's funeral and which had us all in tears. Two discs stand out above all, for me. The first is her radiant performance of Bach's solo cantata 82 Ich Habe Genug, recorded in 1966 with Yehudi Menuhin and the Bath Festival Orchestra. Although it originated as a bass cantata, I can only ever hear it in my mind as Janet Baker sings it, with an insight, a sensitivity and what I can only call a degree of personal commitment that are second to none.

My other favourite from a vast discography is her legendary recording of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius made with Sir John Barbirolli in 1964 (on my disc, linked with her equally legendary performance of the Sea Pictures). For many of us, that version of Gerontius will always be the definitive one. I learned to love Elgar's masterpiece through this recording which we bought when my wife was singing it (in the alto chorus line!). We had not long been married. Janet Baker was the soloist in that concert at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford - 1975, I think. I'd never heard the work before, and it came as a revelation that was life-changing for a quondam evangelical confronted with the catholic spirituality of John Henry Newman and Edward Elgar. There's so much deep magic in Barbirolli's classic recording, and not a little of it is due to Janet Baker's rapturous performance as the angel, especially in those marvellous closing pages of the oratorio. Who wouldn't willingly be lowered into the cleansing waters of purgatory if we were sung to like that?

But you don't need to know any of this to enjoy, and be inspired by, this substantial TV documentary. It's beautifully made. Janet Baker is 85 now, but she comes across as a woman of extraordinary dignity and nobility of character. During much of the conversation, the focus is on her face as she sits in an upright chair squarely facing the camera. She makes a lovely portrait, a bit like a late painting of Rembrandt. To me her features, animated, strong but tender, disclose a personality that is finely wrought over a long lifetime, radiating a deep wisdom that comes from living the reflected life. She has a wonderful way with words, by which I mean not simply her fluency, her charm, her gentle irony and her self-deprecation, but the insights with which even the most straightforward of her observations and reminiscences seem to be charged.

You feel that she conceals as much as she reveals, and you honour that. This is a respectful documentary. But she tells us more about herself in this programme than we have heard before. Not so much the facts about her career as the meaning they have carried for her. Early on, she speaks candidly about her childhood memory of the death of her much-loved elder brother from a heart condition. One morning she was told that he would die that day. She was sent down the road to play with her friends. Coming home in the early evening, her parents and she went upstairs and stood round his bedside until the end came. Her mother turned to her and said: "You're all I've got now". Baker goes back to this memory more than once in the broadcast: not surprisingly, it proved a defining moment in her life. She says that she carried the burden of being there to look after her mother from that moment onwards, how it made her into someone who was fundamentally serious about life as she put it. The programme shows her singing the Farewell from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Glyndebourne Festival in the 1960s. It is achingly beautiful. You wonder how it could be done with such intensity not only of musicianship but of human feeling. When we know about the loss she had to bear in childhood, we understand where it comes from. "She could not sing something that was not deeply understood by her" says one of her colleagues.

There is so much that is deeply moving in this programme: in the quotations from Janet Baker's sublime musical performances, in the tributes of her colleagues and friends, and most of all, the awareness and humanity with which she speaks about herself and her life. Towards the end she muses about growing old, suffering, mortality and death. She speaks about how old age is a kind of withdrawal, a turning away from hectic involvement in the world, how important self-acceptance, truth-telling and solitude have become. You glimpse something of her vulnerability. She is realistic about approaching the end, about the necessity of dying. You don't see her as she speaks. Instead, you are treated to a beautiful sequence of images of the sea, the waves lapping the shore as if to say: dying is, or ought to be, a homecoming, a safe landing after the hazards and ordeals of travelling the ocean of human existence.

And all the while, we hear her sing the last of the five Rückert-Lieder by Gustav Mahler, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.

I have died to the world's turmoil,
And now I rest in a silent realm!
I live alone in my own heaven.
In my love, and in my song!

I can't tell you how poignant it is, perhaps especially when you are conscious yourself of growing old. When the song has ended, we see her turning tenderly to her husband next to her, whose carer she has been since his stroke, touching his hand, as if to say, yes, Mahler speaks the truth, doesn't he? And then her own tears come, and the camera does not flinch from them, because somehow they gather up the meaning of this extraordinary, and beautiful, human life.

"It is a difficult thing to be a singer" she says. "But it's a far more difficult thing to be a human being." The spirituality, if you like, that runs through this broadcast is something very special indeed. It's worth the licence fee by itself. It won't be on the iPlayer for ever. Watch it while you can. Have tissues to hand.

Up in the Attic

I've been in London this week going through my late mother's things. Readers of this blog will know that she died in July at the great age of nearly 94. 

 

You might think it was dispiriting to spend several days in your parents' house where only their memories are left behind, especially when it's the home you were brought up in. Not at all dispiriting, though it was thought-provoking. My sister lives not far away and we had many hours together sorting their stuff out, going through a vast number of books, unearthing unsuspected papers in the attic and reminiscing about our childhood in North London in the 1950s and 60s.

 

The trapdoor to the attic was hardly ever opened. So I had never clambered inside it before this week (unless the memory has been wiped). How strange, this late in life, to find an undiscovered country in your own childhood home! Once, when my father was busy up there archiving his papers (or something), I dared to climb a few rungs of the ladder he had positioned against the skirting board. It was queasy perching there as the ladder flexed and swayed above the stairs that descended into the abyss below my feet. I did not want to go any further. I could not go any further. (Later in life I replayed that experience when I followed a false trail high up on the Langdale Pikes. The friend I had got separated from said he spent an uncomfortable hour rehearsing the speech he would need to make to my wife when he came back from that Lake District expedition alone.)

 

We found a lot of papers that my father had obsessively kept: decades of bank statements and cheque-book stubs, invoices, receipts, business letters and utility bills. But this was not all there was. We came across a large musty bag containing my grandmother's personal archive. (This was my mother's Jewish mother, "Omummy" who with my grandfather whom I never knew was hidden underground in occupied Holland following the German invasion.) Letters from her children, her parents and her friends were carefully bundled together - by year I think. There was correspondence from the German front during the Great War with postage stamps bearing the Kaiser's image. 

Most poignantly, and chillingly, I unearthed my grandmother's Verzeichnis über das Vermögen von Juden, the Third Reich's valuation of my grandmother's assets as a Jew, signed on 29 June 1938. She had pathetically little to declare: by then, not long before Kristallnacht, regular income for Jews who had been in business had dried up. It was a case of Things My Mother Never Told Me to quote the title of Blake Morrison's memoir. I was both moved and excited by this find that I hadn't expected. It will take time to assess how important it may be in contributing to our knowledge of family life during the Great War, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era.

 

Taking breaks in the fresher air downstairs, I was happily poring over my parents' immense collection of books. I remember from childhood how some of the titles stood out on the choked bookcases: Bannister Fletcher's History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, G.M. Trevelyan's four volume English Social History, Plato's Republic (Benjamin Jowett's version, the famous nineteenth century Master of what would be my Oxford college, Balliol), Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million, Spinoza's Ethics, the Knox translation of the New Testament that a Catholic boyfriend of my mother had given her during the war in a vain attempt to convert her to Christianity.

 

But most of all I relished what was on the top-shelf. These books, far above my head, were strictly not for children to take down and look at. I know what you're thinking. But you're wrong. These were the leather-bound volumes of German poets: Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Rellstab, Hölderlin, Rilke and others. They were beautiful books, a joy to look at especially when the sun was setting in summer and lit up the fine bindings in a golden light. They had belonged to my grandmother (or her parents) and been passed on to my mother. They were never opened, and a day came when my parents decided that they should go into stack to make room for newer books that needed accommodation. So they were banished to the attic in a big mouldy suitcase where they remained for years until I rescued them from their long dusty exile and brought them back downstairs this week. 

 

Heinrich Heine was one of the greatest European Romantic poets. He was from Düsseldorf where my mother was born and grew up until 1937 when as a teenager she was sent to England. While browsing through her bedside books, I'd come across a paperback anthology of German poetry. On the flyleaf was written in my grandmother's careful script: "for Michael" - so it should have come to me when she died in 1987. She had also referenced her favourite poem. It is by Heine, so in my imagination it belongs to that nineteenth century leather-bound set on the top shelf. Here is a translation by Sibylle Luise Binder of that poem, Wo?

Where will the tired wanderer last resting place be?

Under palms in the South? Under lime trees by the Rhine?

Will I be hastily buried by strangers’ hands in a desert?

Or will I rest in the sand on a sea’s strand?

At least, here like there I’ll be surrounded by God’s heaven. 

And at night as lamps of death the stars will hover over me.

 

I didn't know the poem before this week, but I think it will come to symbolise these winter days spent in my parents' home. It's typical of the Romantics' love-affair with death, and with the metaphor of life as the journey of an exhausted wanderer yearning for home. (To get the idea, listen to that seasonal song cycle Winterreise by Schubert, a profound setting of poems by another Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller in which a rejected lover finds his whole life under review as he makes his winter's journey away from all that is familiar and homely. Or look at the pictures of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.)

 

As I thought about the Heine poem, and the death of my parents and grandparents, I recalled that it was Advent. It's the season when we reflect on the Last Things: death, judgment, hell and heaven in the light of Christian faith. In later life our thoughts inevitably turn towards mortality: the loss of those we have known and loved, the prospect of our own death, "one whole day nearer now" as Philip Larkin put it (on whom see my last blog). Heine's poem is about death as a homecoming. I found it comforting to read in this house of truth where death could not be evaded, this place that was once home and that is so full of childhood memories. And in this Advent time, it was good to be reminded that we live by the promise of the One who is to come, that in our Father's house are many mansions.