略讀《法國浪漫主義時期的音樂與文學》Hector Berlioz『柏遼茲回憶錄 』

Elliott Carter is more than one of the most important composers of our time; he remains a vital link with a long-gone musical era. At the age of 97, and still composing (currently he's working on a song cycle scheduled for performance next autumn), he has been involved with new music on both sides of the Atlantic for nearly 80 years. "I've been in the middle of this all through my life," he says, and in the process he got to know many of the composers - such as Stravinsky, Ives and Varèse - who had forged the language of modernism in the first decades of the 20th century, as well as those like Boulez and Nono who led another musical revolution in the years after the second world war.

He may be the greatest composer the US has produced since Ives, but Carter's outlook has always been at least as much European as it is American, and it was audiences on this side of the Atlantic who first recognised the importance of his knotty, demanding music. Carter is a New Yorker: he was born there in 1908, and the city has remained his home throughout his life; he lives now in an apartment on the edge of Greenwich Village. But since childhood he has made regular visits to Europe, and expects to be in London once again next week - a 90% chance, he says - for the BBC's celebration of his music at the Barbican.
Carter's connections with Europe are deeply ingrained. He learned to speak French before he could read: "My father was an importer [of lace] from France, and he took me there many times when I was a child, so I am almost as familiar with Paris as I am with New York." Though Carter was given piano lessons (which he found boring at the time), his parents had no musical ambitions for their son, and expected him to make his career in the family business. It was not until his late teens, when he heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring for the first time in 1924, that Carter realised what he really wanted to be was a composer.
Another European city he visited in the 1920s with his parents was Vienna, where he bought copies of the latest works by Schoenberg and other members of the Second Viennese School. Back in New York an enlightened music teacher took him to contemporary music concerts and, crucially, introduced him to Charles Ives ("He was not as isolated a man as he is sometimes made out to be," Carter says). Ives gave the schoolboy copies of the Concorde Sonata and the collection of his songs that had been privately printed, and became the guiding spirit behind Carter's first efforts at composition.
Nevertheless, when he became a student at Harvard University, Carter studied English, having decided the music department there was hopelessly conservative. He concentrated on composition only as a graduate student, when for one semester his teachers included Gustav Holst, whom he remembers as a rather melancholy old man. But by the time he left university he was still nowhere near to becoming the composer he wanted to be. "I tried to write the music that I wanted to write but couldn't do it, and I then realised those composers had a classical training, and so it was easy for me to be convinced that I should do that, too."
So in the 1930s, Carter spent three years in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger. He arrived in 1933, at the time of the Reichstag fire, and found the city full of refugees from the Nazis, and "a very sad place". Boulanger's rigorous harmony and counterpoint exercises took him back to first principles, but also imbued him with the disciplines of neoclassicism, which ran counter to the much wilder, expressionist pieces he had got to know and tried to imitate in New York. "She wasn't encouraging if you wrote very dissonant music," Carter says. "But, meanwhile, the world of music had changed. It wasn't hard to think when we saw pictures of Hitler that it was expressionism that had gone on and produced such a terrible result in Germany, that it was a working out of that kind of extravagance that had become terrifying. So we thought that it was time to be more orderly and more consciously beautiful, and neoclassicism did seem to have a perfect logic about it."
The lessons he absorbed during his years of study with Boulanger remain paramount in his music today. With her he learned to write counterpoint in up to eight parts, and the virtuosity with which he was to invent the teeming lines of his greatest pieces, in which individual instruments often acquire a dramatic character of their own, was a direct result of his training. "To Nadia notes mattered a great deal, everything had to be justified. It was a whole world in which you had to think how every note fitted in; we were concerned not just with the detail of things, but with the total effect."
The music Carter composed when he returned to America was more or less faithful to the neoclassical ethos. But in his crucial pieces of the immediate postwar years - beginning with the 1946 Piano Sonata and culminating in 1951 in the arching sweep of the First String Quartet, the work that really established Carter's international reputation ("In this country you play it and people walk out, but in Europe it made a big impression") - he began the journey of self-discovery towards writing the music he wanted to compose. It was a process that lasted until 1980, during which period new works emerged with almost painful slowness. "Every one of those pieces is a new sort of thought. This was the way I was developing, until finally I felt that I had found my vocabulary and there was no longer any need to experiment."
During that period, too, it was his supporters in Europe rather than the US who championed Carter's music. The composer and conductor Pierre Boulez was an early convert, and, in Britain, William Glock, controller of music at the BBC from 1959 to 1973, was a fervent supporter. "William played all my music on the radio at one time or another and that was very influential, and I also taught at Dartington Summer School when Peter Maxwell Davies and Harry Birtwistle were students there." Stravinsky publicly admitted his admiration for Carter's 1962 Double Concerto for piano and harpsichord, proclaiming it a masterpiece, and the two composers became good friends. His mind, Carter says, is now filled with memories of Stravinsky: of the older composer's kindnesses to him and his wife, of having dinner in a New York restaurant when Frank Sinatra approached Stravinsky for his autograph, and of one of his last meetings with the composer in New York a couple of weeks before Stravinsky's death in 1971, when the only music the old man wanted to listen to was Mozart's Magic Flute.
Carter's music is still more highly regarded across Europe than in the US, yet he has always been in an important sense an American composer. He has regularly drawn inspiration from US writers such as Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery and Hart Crane; the new song cycle he is working on uses texts by Wallace Stevens. And Carter maintains that his musical language has always been intrinsically American: "I've always thought that in some very important way my pieces came from jazz - with a regular beat background and improvisations on top of that." But first and foremost he remains an unrepentant modernist, backing up his uncompromising stance with a cast-iron classical training. His music has its own cast-iron integrity, too, a fierceness and emotional power that is sometimes hard to square with the genial man one meets; great composers aren't supposed to be so courteous, and so charming, as Elliott Carter unfailingly is.