Vol. 9 No. 15 · 3 September 1987
pages 8-11 | 7046 words
Donald Mitchell remembers Hans Keller
I only need to hear a few bars from Mozart’s G minor Symphony (K. 550) and in a flash Hans is as vivid a presence as he was when he was alive. Not any old bars, mind you: to be precise, bars 125 to 136 of the finale, where in a remarkable unison passage which propels us into the development Mozart exploits (almost) the total resources of the chromatic scale.
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[*] The Great Haydn Quartets: Their Interpretation. Dent, 272 pp., £16.95, May 1986, 0 460 004638 1.
†Criticism, edited and with an introduction by Julian Hogg. Faber, 166 pp., £4.95, 17 August, 0 571 14803 4.
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Letters
Vol. 9 No. 17 · 1 October 1987
From Robert Stewart
SIR: Normally the remark that the love of sport is an ‘adolescent enthusiasm’ would be worthy of no attention. The opinion, stupid though it is, is a commonplace among the literati. But that it should appear in so attentive a piece as Donald Mitchell’s (LRB, 3 September) and be made in rebuke of so healthy a man as Hans Keller was invites reply.
Of sport three defences (that it should need defence!) may briefly be made. 1. It asks of the species, purely and with no ulterior end, that it should test its limits. Anyone can kick a ball. Rules ask whether he can kick it for a defined purpose within defined limitations better than his opponent. It is a supreme mark of the questing intelligence of the species that men thought of imposing, and take delight in honouring, limitations on the kicking of a ball. 2. It reminds us, with grace and passion, that life itself is a game, glorious for the sole reason that it is a game, and, because it is a game, to be played gloriously (as Hans Keller played it) according to rules down to the final whistle. 3. It reveals to us that one of life’s chief pleasures, perhaps the chief pleasure of all, is to draw out the best in others. Anyone who plays a sport knows – despite the horrors of modern professional sport (to which Keller was hardly blind) – that the greatest pleasure which sport confers is to finish a game knowing that you have drawn from your opponent the best play of which he was capable and that he has done the same for you. Of what other activity in our society is this so unreservedly true?
Does Mr Mitchell think that Neville Cardus’s love of cricket was adolescent? Might he not pause to ask himself why it is that football drew from Keller and cricket from Cardus such excellent prose? He could begin, in the knowledge of A.J. Ayer’s love of football and G.H. Hardy’s love of cricket, by considering what music, philosophy, mathematics and sport have in common: namely, that each is a useless, exhilarating abstraction.
Robert Stewart
London N5
