The Laughter of Her Heart

I liked being with Father in the paddocks. He was a good farmer. He did everything in a direct, simple, strongly committed way. He looked after his horses, and his machinery. When he sowed wheat I liked looking down to see the seeds falling into the furrows. This meant standing next to Father on the combine, as it was called because it put a mixture of grain and superphosphate into the soil. He started at the outside of the paddock, near the fence, and went round and round until he reached the middle. I knew Father was happy when he sang:

The last time I saw Paris

Her heart was young and gay;

I heard the laughter of her heart

In every street café.

Sometimes he sang another song:

‘Twas on the isle of Capri that I met her …

He’d never been to Paris, or to Capri. Who had? Very few people that I knew, because, after years of depression, there was a war on, and even the wealthier members of society, and there were few of them in our district, had to content themselves with staying at home. It was soldiers, sailors and airmen who moved about, not families. I had to wait thirty-seven years between hearing Father singing his songs and my first visit to Paris. My wife and I and our two children took a couple of rooms in a small hotel on the corner of the famous Boulevardes Saint-Michel and Saint Germain. It was freezing cold so the hotel turned the heating up to the point where the rooms were too hot. Somewhere in the middle of the night I got out of bed to open the window a fraction, and as I stood there surrounded by a mixture of hot and cold air, I heard voices in the street below, singing. Young people were going home after a night out. I forget what they were singing but not the effect. They sang well and they reminded me of a magical moment in the Romeo & Juliet symphony of Hector Berlioz, where soldiers are singing as they go home after the Capulets’ ball: it’s been a night to remember, and it’s almost day. My recording of this music is conducted by Pierre Monteux, a small rotund Frenchman with a large moustache, whose fortune or misfortune it was to have been conducting on the night of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, when the audience refused to accept what Stravinsky was offering. They hissed, booed, walked out …

Music mattered to cultivated Europeans, and after listening to the young people singing beneath our window, I crawled back into bed amazed by the dimension that a Parisian night had offered me. Music could transport you because it had a direct path, a connecting lead to the imagination. Berlioz’s young soldiers have had a wonderful evening, and are conscious of it; some of the night’s awareness is theirs also, but they don’t hear what Berlioz, at his most inspired, can make us hear: the whispering, murmuring, magical theme which will carry us through the love scene he’s about to give us.

Charles Gounod, a lesser composer, once said, I pity Berlioz and I envy him. Pity? Berlioz was frequently at cross purposes with his times, and could rarely be bothered pleasing those with influence, or money to spare. He was a severe music critic and said what he thought of the music around him. Envy? There was no one to match the originality of his genius. Faust tumbling to his damnation, The Childhood of Christ, fairy music, distant thunder in the Fantastic Symphony’s pastorale, the duet of Dido and Aeneas … He gives us worlds we wouldn’t otherwise have known about, but he’s not alone in that. Music can take us anywhere in the mental world of mankind, but I didn’t realise that when I was a little boy standing next to Father as he planted our wheat, horses pulling us round and round the paddock where it would grow, to be harvested later by another machine pulled by the same horses straining under the summer sun. That was the world where I grew up; please enter with me now some other worlds that I discovered in the years that lay in front of me.

We begin with Mahler. I’d come back to Melbourne after three months of military training at Puckapunyal, an army camp north of Melbourne. A young teacher I’d met up there had invited me to listen to music at a house in East Melbourne which, I discovered, was quite unlike anything I’d known before in my life on the farm or student life at boarding school and residential college. It was the home of Vans Ovenden, and his brother John lived next door. Their father, George, was an optometrist in the city, his rooms looking down on the Town Hall. George saw his son when he bothered to get up, stroll into the city, buy an afternoon paper and read it in the workshop of his father’s business. When George and brother John left work, Vans left too, taking his paper with him, to see what his girlfriend Helen might be cooking for dinner. He loved steak, slightly rare, and was likely to eat it in the front room, where his huge but home made musical apparatus gave music night and day, though mostly when 21 Grey Street East Melbourne came to life. It was the only house where the outside light was still on in the middle of the morning. Melbourne didn’t have a lot of night life in that period, so those who wanted company or alcohol ended up at Vans’, rapping on the front door, curious to see who was inside. Vans was welcoming. I was amazed. People didn’t live like this!

But they did. Cars came and went. Taxis dropped people and drove away. If you wanted to drink, you had to bring grog. Melbourne was a prudent, prurient city, with the word wowser flung around by those who hated it that way. They gathered, these night-spirits, in Vans’ front room. They talked, how they talked. Some of them listened. If Vans wanted to hear a new recording someone had brought, he waited until the house had a quiet moment, and then he put it on. Everything about 21 Grey Street was new to me and I thought it was wonderful. Vans knew how respectable I was, and felt a little flattered, I suspect, at my interest … no, devotion. He gave me a key and told me I could come whenever I liked. Sometimes he drove me home to my college and what rides they were, with his ancient Fiat missing telephone poles and parked cars by miraculous late swerves initiated by a drunken Vans who would eventually go to bed at sunrise, to get himself alive again, later in the day, with a couple of ferocious coffees before he wandered in to the family business, where he read The Herald over another coffee, looking down, as I said before, on Melbourne’s solidly respectable Town Hall.

Then came a night when everything was different. News reached Grey Street that a certain young man had killed himself. I had never met this person, but I listened, and, putting together the bits and pieces that I heard, it seemed that he had lived at number 21 with Vans’ former wife, who had not moved out when she and Vans had, first, moved to separate beds and then taken on new lovers. Vans was now with Helen, while his wife had been with the young man whose death was what everyone was talking about. They talked for hours, but eventually most of them went home. It was then that Don Adams, the young teacher who’d introduced me to Grey Street and its owner – for Vans, courtesy of George, was the owner – pulled out a recording which was to become very famous, but which I had never heard.

It was Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth), conducted by Bruno Walter, and sung by Julius Patzak and Kathleen Ferrier.

Two things struck me straight away. This was not the orchestra as imagined by Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, this was an enormous and hugely varied chamber ensemble capable of producing any sound at any time, yet surprising you by its consistency: there was a central idea. Don knew the music, and he sat, abstracted by it, listening; I knew he was applying it to the young man who’d killed himself while I, not knowing any German, could only listen, feeling whatever the music made me feel. Everything centred on the singer, the famous – though I didn’t know that – Kathleen Ferrier, who’d made the recording after her first cancer treatment, had died the following year, and was already a legend of the musical world. Her voice was rich. It floated, it had power, it shaped the drawn-out, curving phrases of Mahler’s song. What was he singing about? What was she singing about? Years later, I bought a book containing the words of the Chinese poems Mahler had set after the death of his four year old daughter:

The world is falling asleep.

A cool wind blows in the shadow of my spruce.

I stand here waiting for my friend;

I wait to bid him a last farewell.

The poet, the composer, the singer – Kathleen’s voice speaking for all of them – consider the world which the three of them are leaving:

O beauty! O world intoxicated with eternal love and life!

In German it goes:

O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens- Lebens-trunkene Welt!

I don’t understand this. I’m at a prior stage, absorbing, one after the other, as singer and orchestra give them to the world, the sounds which are stirring my feelings and my thoughts. The young man is dead. I have never met him and I never will. Don remembers him, and is grieving for him. In the song, the friend arrives, and there are some last words between them. The string basses rumble like tumbrils’ wheels, taking us all, everyone, away.

He said, and his voice trembled: O my friend

In this world fortune did not smile on me.

Where am I going? I go into the mountains.

I seek peace for my lonely heart.

Kathleen Ferrier sings this with an inner acceptance that is almost unbearable, yet redeemed by the beauty of that voice the gods gave her:

I am making for home, for my resting place.

I will never roam into strange lands.

My heart is still and bides its time.

Poet, composer and voice are quiet now, soft, and contemplating, praising, yet preparing to leave, for that last look is the most complete and moving of all, just as it is the final acceptance, after which moment there can be no other. Kathleen gathers herself: 

Die liebe Erde allüberall

Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt

Auf’s neu! Allüberall und ewig

Blauen licht die Fernen!

Everywhere the dear earth

Blossoms in spring and grows

Green again. Everywhere, forever,

The distant horizons shine blue and bright.

It’s a vision to live for but Mahler’s daughter was dead, he himself had only a handful of years left, Kathleen is dead though her voice lives on, and Don and I are thinking of another young man who had been part of the life – the turbulence! – of Grey Street but is no more … while the great singer murmurs the final word a few last times: ‘Ewig.’ Forever. 

This music changes me. I am never to be quite the same young man again. I have a long way to travel before I reach the end of my road, but I now know that there is an end, and it’s there for every one of us.

My university years come to an end. I have a teaching appointment and I move to Bairnsdale. I get a room at Riverview Guest House, not knowing – not yet – that it has once been a private hospital. I meet the local librarian, a writer whose reputation is beginning to rise because he, Hal Porter, is being taken up by people in The Bulletin circle, most especially Kenneth Slessor, one of Australia’s leading poets. Years later I become aware, through reading Hal’s The Watcher on the Cast-iron Balcony, that his mother has died in a front room familiar to me at Riverview. I haven’t been in this room but I know the person whose room it is. This is close enough for me!

I teach. My first year is awful, but I improve. I search far and wide for things that will interest my students. They are country boys and I’m one myself, though my education has shaped me differently. The little town I grew up near has a lending library, mostly westerns, mysteries and romances, and it costs sixpence to borrow a book. Father reads a lot and it doesn’t bother him that he’s reading much the same books over and over. I’m scornful. I’ve been to university, my world has become wider than our farming community admits, and Bairnsdale, where I’m teaching now, is narrow too, in my estimation. How can they live in such a constricted little world? I go to Melbourne as often as I can, and return with books and gramophone records so I won’t feel cut off. I listen to Don Giovanni, and read about it because I want to know how it was written and what it’s saying in this tradition that comes from somewhere far away. I listen to the music of Carl Nielsen which I have discovered at my university college. I play his fourth (The Inextinguishable) symphony more than anything else, then I move onto his fifth. It seems to me that his music is unlike much other European music because it pits against each other not good and evil but positive and negative. That is the battle in the fourth symphony and it’s revisited in the first movement of the fifth. In the movement that follows he sets out to direct the post-victory world but things get out of hand. He offers a fugue, but it speeds up and it’s clear that the composer is lost. What does he do? He stops, and starts again, rather more slowly; he builds his stream of sound more carefully and it reaches full imaginative power with, it always seems to me, a wise head at the wheel. I want more of this. He’s written other symphonies that I don’t know, and endless songs, none of which I’ve heard. I want to hear this music. People hear it in Denmark, why not where I live, in the heavily forested east of Victoria?

I write to the Danish Embassy in Canberra. They write back, suggesting music stores in Copenhagen. I write to one of these shops, they post me a list of recordings and prices. I go to the Bank of New South Wales and organise a cheque made out in Danish money. I send it away, and I wait.

I’m young and impatient. Time drags. For what seems weeks at a time I forget all about Carl and what his music’s going to do for me. Then I remember. Why are they taking so long? Eventually I get a card in my letter box. There is a parcel to be collected. By now I’ve moved from Riverview to the western end of town, and, it being school holiday time, I’m having my car repaired: some welding’s to be done on the front suspension. I could ask one of the young plumbers who board where I do to drive me to the Post Office but it’s a lovely morning so I decide to walk. I take a bag to carry my parcel when I’ve got it, and I set out. The western end of town is only thinly settled, and between the houses there are broad paddocks of grass, green for much of the year but dangerously dry in the fire season. It’s springtime and the grass isn’t yet highly flammable but it’s drying out and with the sun pouring down, it’s full of light. It’s a couple of miles from one end of town to the other and I enjoy my walk. I sign for my parcel at the post office and the man at the counter is curious to know what I’ve got from Denmark. He’s the father of one of my students so I tell him about ordering Nielsen’s music. Then I set off once again for the western end of town. About three quarters of the way I’m back in dry grass country, the sun is shining and I’m feeling exultant. I can’t wait to get home so I sit down in the long grass by the side of the road and open my parcel. There they are, the discs I’ve ordered and on top of them, the one I most want to hear, is a ten inch LP (if you remember such things) of Carl Nielsen’s songs sung by the Danish tenor Aksel Schiotz. If you care to read another one of my mini-mags – So Bitter Was My Heart (2008) – you will find how Aksel Schiotz and the song of that name took a room full of people, not least myself, by surprise one evening when it floated up from the room below where a friend of mine had put it on my gramophone. You can read that for yourself when you have time (see trojanpress.com.au under OUR BOOKS) but for the moment I ask you to join me in the grass by the side of the road, still some way to go before we can hear the songs, but vindicated at last by the arrival of something I know will confirm the love I have for my land. Nielsen loved his native Denmark as I love Australia; in his third symphony, second movement, he asks two singers, a man and a woman, to join the orchestra in ecstatic phrases that float on the wind: it is thrilling to bring him to my land and hear what he has to say!

I left Gippsland eventually and returned to Melbourne. Vans had remarried and moved to a suburb further out than mine. I saw him occasionally, still loved him dearly, but we’d both moved on. He was slightly more respectable – though only slightly – than in the old days, and I was a family man, busy with my work and my writing, not to mention my children. Balancing all the demands and duties of my life was far from easy, but I wrote and had accepted a book about Gippsland: my first. Heinemann Publishers gave me a cheque for $300 and in the joy of this acceptance I went off and bought six wine glasses – I have them still – and a recording of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. I played this a couple of times but couldn’t find a way into it, and put it aside. Some other time!

I got a Commonwealth Literary Grant and wrote another book. I got a second grant and wrote a third. I felt I was doing well, and planned my next, much larger book, a novel with many characters. I would move the reader’s attention from one to another, and back again, causing the reader, I hoped, to hold all these people in their minds at once. It dawned on me that to do this I would need a very different style of writing. But how to find it? Such things couldn’t be bought off the hook like shirts or sports coats!

Debussy’s opera came back to my mind. I began to see why it was written in a style that was endlessly evocative, suggestive, but unfixed, indefinite. It alluded to things without making unequivocal statements. Ideas came and went without any tonal affirmation. Would it be possible to write prose in this way? If so, how? I kept playing the opera, over and over. For two years I put no other discs on my gramophone. Eventually I absorbed Debussy’s style into my thinking about writing. I wrote The Garden Gate. I finished it a changed man. I also knew that by nature I was more Mozartian than Debussyan, so I had to suppose that I would change my writing style again, from one musical approach to another, and slowly this happened, but for all my rediscovery of an Austrian enlightenment aesthetic, my curiosity about the methods and purposes of French music-making persisted. I had studied French at school and university but had never really developed a French way of looking at the world. This began to change. High society in France had soirées where there was music and poetry as well as talk, and numerous composers had written music more intimate than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. I began to listen to the songs and chamber music of Gabriel Fauré, and was enchanted. His respectful setting of words and their rhythms was exemplary. In particular, I found myself playing over and over – something I was used to by now! – his song En Prière:

Si la voix d’un enfant peut monter jusqu-à vous

O mon Père

Ecoutez de Jesus, devant vous aux genoux

La prière!

The child Jesus is on his knees before his almighty father, and our awareness of this situation is increased by the rhyming scheme of these long lines ended, or capped by a word or words of three syllables sustaining a second rhyme:

Si Vous m’avez choisi pour enseigner Vos lois

Sur la terre

Je saurais Vous servir, auguste roi des rois

O lumière

As the song continues – it’s ten lines long – the son’s willingness to carry out the father’s wishes increases, until in the last two lines we hear these words, concluding in a way quite shocking to the non-believer I was by then:

Révèlez-Vous à moi, Seigneur en qui je crois

Et j’espère

Pour Vous je veux souffrir et mourir sur le croix

Au Calvaire!

God’s son, understanding his father’s plan, asks to die on the cross. I am at first appalled by human willingness to accept such a command, then admiring of a composer committed to giving his poet’s thought so convincing an embodiment. Fauré’s setting is simplicity itself. We overhear God the son addressing God the father. I am alternately angry, and amazed, that the composer can do it. The poem grips us with its double scheme of rhyming: couplets at the end of the long lines, one continuing rhyme in the alternating short lines. The rippling piano follows the rhythms and the rhymes, and the voice obeys: this method springs naturally to Gabriel Fauré’s mind.

When we come to Henri Duparc, another great song writer, there is a puzzle. How did he reach mastery so quickly at the beginning, and what caused him to stop composing (he wrote nothing after he turned thirty-seven)? Why the silence that lasted almost fifty years? Thinking about this mysterious absence makes me realise how listening over the years to the works – lots of works – by famous composers makes us familiar with their musical voices. Mozart, for example, is more than the composer of this piano concerto and that opera. As we get to know the body of his work we become familiar with his ways of doing things and we build a concept of his style, his musical voice, which we can recognise even in work we haven’t heard before. We can watch and plot the development of composers as they produce a series of sonatas, songs, symphonies or whatever it may be. We can sense the variety of works we don’t yet know. Not with Henri Duparc. He left us a few bits and pieces, and seventeen songs. Phidylé is probably my first choice of these because it expresses an approach to the love of men and women that France is famous for. An unnamed man and Phidylé are in a classic place of love:

L’herbe est molle au sommeil sous les frais peupliers;

Aux pentes des sources moussues,

Qui dans les prés en fleur germant par milles issues,

Se perdent sous les noirs halliers.

She is asleep, and this is in accord with his wishes:

Rest, O Phidylé! The midday sun shines on the foliage

And invites you to sleep!

Among clover and thyme, alone in full sunlight

Hum the fickle honeybees.

Again he considers her, and again he tells her to rest; we sense that he can feel her amorous power, waiting to be released when she wakes.

I shall charm the woods, O white Phidylé

With your intimate praise;

And the nymphs, at the threshold of their caves of ivy,

Will blanch, hearts troubled.

The singing has been quiet, perhaps pianissimo, until this point, but when the last verse begins the singer is required to be not so much louder, or stronger, as radiant!

But when the sun, turning in its resplendent orbit,

Finds its heat abating,

Let your loveliest smile and your most ardent kiss

Recompense me for waiting!

From the groves and vales of sophisticated European understanding to the folk song settings of Percy Grainger is a long step, but one which we are now going to take. He had the widest sympathy for places, poems, and ways to set them, and one of his most adventurous, indeed unforgettable settings is his Tribute to Foster (The Camptown Races). It starts out simply enough:

The Camptown ladies sing dis song

Doodah, doodah,

De Camptown race track five miles long,

Oh! Doodah day!

I came down dah wid my hat cav’d in,

Doodah, doodah,

I go back home wid a pocket full of tin,

Oh! Doodah day.

The second verse takes us even further from the world of Christian Europe with its cultivation and refinement:

De long-tail filly and de big black hoss,

Doodah, doodah,

Dey fly de track and dey both cut across,

Oh! Doodah day!

De blind hoss stickin in a big black hole,

Doodah, doodah,

Can’t touch de bottom wid a ten foot pole,

Oh! Doodah day!

There’s another verse of this, then Percy reaches his subject; the music slows down:

In Pittsburgh town a man did dwell,

Doodah, doodah,

His name was Foster as I’ve heard tell,

Oh! Doodah day!

Foster’s dead and gone away,

Doodah, doodah,

His songs dey lib for ever and aye,

Oh! Doodah day!

Grainger’s letters make it clear that his love of folk song was based on a feeling that the musical impulse was purer and sweeter when it was spontaneous, natural, and undeveloped. Something in him resisted the complexities and (to him over-) development of music in the German tradition. He loved Grieg. Frederick Delius, an Englishman whose rebellion took him in another direction, loved Percy Grainger, and Percy, having brought his version of The Camptown Races to Stephen Foster’s feet, as it were, changes his musical language in order to develop this last thought. First, he alters the chorus:

Gwine to still be sung

‘s long as de worl’s heart’s young.

Then he slows the music down and uses a quartet of solo voices to reflect on Foster’s work with the native songs he’d heard:

Foster’s songs warn’t “darkie” quite,

Doodah, doodah,

Yet neider war dey jes plain “white”

Oh! Doodah day!

I never hear this music without thinking of the voices in Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and what a comparison is that! The versification may be Percy at his silliest, but the musical setting is, for me, the highest point of everything he ever wrote.

But Foster’s songs dey make you cry,

Doodah, doodah,

Bring de tear-drop to yo eye,

Oh! Doodah day!

After this unforgettable excursion, the composer brings us back to an earlier, simpler time:

Dese songs dey trabbel the worl’ around,

At las’ dey come down to Adelaide town,

When I was a tot on my mammy’s knee,

She sang dat race-track song to me.

Gwine to still be sung,

‘s long as de worl’s heart’s young.

The combination of folk song or at least a version of it, and his mother, is, in Grainger’s world, powerful indeed:

Sung it to me sweet as a lullaby,

Hear dat song till de day I die.

In ending his tribute to Stephen Foster, Percy doesn’t continue his homage to the tonal systems of the 9th symphony. He’s met high art on its own terms and now he drops back to his own quirky ways. The music swirls around before plunging down a musical plug-hole. No tonic chord, no bang, no whimper, just a gargling sound as it slips away! What an amazing thing he’s given us; to prove himself right he’s had to prove himself wrong!

Before I turn to my last composer, I want to bring forward a singer: the German bass Hans Hotter. He visited Melbourne in the early 1950s when I was a university student. I went to the Town Hall to hear him as Wotan singing the gods’ entry to Walhalla from Wagner’s Das Rheingold. This is thrilling. Then I hear that he’s to sing Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise in the university’s Melba Hall. I stroll down from Trinity, my residential college, and am told that the concert is sold out, but wait! People are looking for more chairs!

These are found, and put on the stage, not far from pianist and singer. I get a seat, and a booklet with the words Hans Hotter sings. In later years I hear him in recordings of many things, notably as Gurnemanz in Wagner’s Parsifal, and each time my recollection takes me back to the night when I heard him from just a few feet away, fortunate youth! I am talking about this one day with my next door neighbour who, noticing the name, tells me that he thinks he has a recording of Hotter singing ‘some songs’; I might be interested.

I am. I’m lent this LP, a Schubert collection, and the song I play most, the only one I want to play because it takes me to some level that I can’t reach any other way, is An Die Musik (To Music):

Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,

Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstricht,

Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden

Hast mich in eine besser Welt entrückt!

I think of the singer, hands held in front of him to make his breathing easier, and of his commitment to the beautiful art that, as the song says, can take us to a better world. There are only two verses.

Often a sigh from your harp,

A sweet sacred chord from you,

Gave me heavenly visions of happier times.

Franz Peter Schubert, dying too young from syphilis, in his solemnity, joy and gratitude, gave it his simplest, noblest music:

O dearest art – for all this I thank you. (Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!)

I began with Father singing, as he put seed in the soil of New South Wales, about Paris and Capri, places he’d never seen. I visited both of them, 36 and 45 years later. Europe was new to me in 1979, familiar and much admired in 1988. I had spent many years listening to European music; I still do. But Schubert, Mahler, Gabriel Fauré, Henri Duparc, Carl Nielsen (a man very much after Father’s heart had he known him), even the Australian among them – Percy Grainger – didn’t speak a language Father knew. That was Father’s limitation, not theirs: humanity is something shared by all, whether we understand each other or not. The simplest way to understand this is to recall another song, Lili Marlene, popular with German soldiers in world war two:

Underneath the lantern

By the barrack gate

Darling I remember

The way you used to wait

Twas there that you whispered tenderly

That you loved me

You’d always be

My Lili of the lamplight

My own Lili Marlene

Soldiers know that their lives are being distorted, that fighting and killing, which may be natural for some, are not what they want for themselves. They yearn for better. They yearn for love, and they know that it may be that the only love they’ll ever find is in music. A strange thing happened, years ago, when I was a boy on a farm and the world was at war. Lili Marlene was recorded and played on German radio, in the language of the enemy, of course, but picked up by the people they were fighting – the English, Americans, Australians et cetera – and sung by them as well. An English version was recorded, played night and day, and then the German version found its way onto the Allies’ air waves too. The German version was better, I thought, as a boy, but what did I know? Nations were singing the same song at the same time as they were fighting each other. That this is evidence of stupidity is obvious. It also means that the fighting, feuding nations were on some level, however hidden, aware of their stupidity. Perhaps it is the glory of music that it makes us more than human by reminding us of how human – by which I mean anything from fallible to horrible – we are, most of the time.