There being too much Politics at present for exhausted Macdara to tackle, let us turn again to Music for relief.

Your correspondent is known for three slogans: one, there is no such thing as a bad margarita; two, bad camp is unforgivable; three, beauty is not reactionary. If he had to expand upon these wise words, he would add to the first only that he has left overly diluted margaritas out of the question, as they at least passed through the stage of being good even if they ended up Spoiled. To the second, he would comment that this is the line he takes every year when naive Gays ask him if he is going to watch the Eurovision; he also uses it of the programming produced by certain national broadcasters, whose highest aim is to create cute little catchphrases that miserable families and sordid colleagues can huddle around in place of actually communicating. Let him take a little more time to unpack the third statement.

Although Macdara wishes to accomplish certain things with his writing, namely global communism and the end of Imperialism in Ireland and elsewhere, yet it is true that chief amongst his objectives, in writing under various names, is to create Beauty. Now Macdara’s idea of beauty is, he hopes, not of the commonplace kind. He is very much a Modernist, if that isn’t clear (and it may not be, on a site dedicated to eighteenth century Pastiche). But he wants to leave the world something, a piece of writing a few words long or very long, perhaps, that makes a suffering planet that bit more beautiful. 

It cannot be the case that that which is ugly is more true or more real than the beautiful. This is to say that we should not feel suspicious of sheer beauty. In showing us perfection, the beautiful is a guide to a better world. Surrounded by imperfection, what is beautiful is like some miraculous cut into the place that we know is for us, if only we did not have to work so hard, so much of the time. A world made for us, where we work only at that which we wish to work at, not calling it work at all.

Almost chief amongst the creator of beauty in this world so far is Brahms. What is beautiful in his music, for the present writer, is not the sound as such, but rather the force of what he writes, the intellectual-creative force. Because Brahms’s music seems like an artist’s attempt to wrestle with his own creativity: he finds in the pre-composition silence that he must write music—he is under a compulsion, a curse, a geis—and, having started, he must work out through form a means to bring it all to an end: he twists his music through the best configuration to get, by way of this great argument, back to silence again; the listener hears the logic fully worked out, the music its medium. Eduard Hanslick almost said as much when he listened to a two-piano performance of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony prior to the orchestral premiere, and said, apparently—for Macdara can only find the quote in translation—“For this whole movement I had the feeling that I was being given a beating by two incredibly intelligent people”.

Macdara, during his first period of experiencing the physical manifestations of sustained anxiety, would worry about the tightness in his chest. This tightness disappeared during exercise, strongly suggesting that a heart attack was not imminent. One evening he attended a thrilling performance of the Fourth Symphony by the National Symphony Orchestra; in all honesty, the orchestra was a little ropey that night, the brass at least, so Macdara, despite knowing the piece well, was kept on edge by some unexpected eruptions of noise, and left afterwards with no tightness in his chest, as if he had completed a full workout. 

We have a little insight into Brahms’s view on creativity from a letter he sent to Clara Schumann about his discovery of the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita for Violin No. 2. The letter was composed in 1877 and he writes of the effect of playing the Chaconne on piano with the left hand only, one of those extraordinary ideas that seems so perfect and natural once somebody has had it: he sent the arrangement to Clara with the letter and published it two years later. Eight years after the letter his Symphony No. 4 was first performed, with its unusual closing passacaglia (a form closely related to the chaconne, and perhaps even identical with it). For this letter Macdara can supply the original quote:

Die Chaconne ist mir eines der wunderbarsten, unbegreiflichsten Musikstücke. Auf ein System für ein kleines Instrument schreibt der Mann eine ganze Welt von tiefsten Gedanken und gewaltigsten Empfindungen. Hätte ich das Stück machen, empfangen können, ich weiß sicher, die übergroße Aufregung und Erschütterung hätten mich verrückt gemacht. 

Your correspondent suggests the following translation:

The Chaconne is for me one of the most wonderful, inconceivable pieces of music. On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and greatest emotions. If I had been able to produce, bear, the piece, I know for sure that the overwhelming excitement and shock would have made me go mad. 

This is the response of an artist to the beauty created by another. Brahms fought his own battles to produce beauty, and avoid madness thereby; he put his mind to it.

He ends the paragraph quoted above by advising that, in the absence of a violinist, so ist es wohl der Schönste Genuss, sie sich einfach im Geist tönen zu lassen: it is probably the greatest pleasure to let it simply sound in the mind. This word, Geist, we can end upon, the perfect Brahmsian word: spirit, ghost, essence, mind, wit, and only one letter off geis! Haunted Brahms, spellbound Brahms, heroic Brahms, realised—released—the music that seemed too much for just one man, leaving the world the greater. It may be possible to say that all Beauty is Revolutionary, it may not be necessary to say as much.