Hans Keller

Whereas clarity does not always produce clarity in its recipient, confusion invariably inspires confusion. C.G. Jung, a mind of confused genius, was a hell-send for Michael Tippett, a veritable genius of confusion – who now, celebrating the 75th year of his consistently lively life, inspires sundry confusions in his commentators, and even in those who comment on his commentators: ‘Michael Tippett’s music resists close analysis,’ declares the distinguished Hugo Cole in the opening sentence of his review of the two books here under consideration. For one thing, ‘close analysis’ is a pleonasm, proving the writer at least momentarily incapable of analysing his own thought, and never mind Tippett’s.

I don’t trust Mr Solomon Volkov an inch, and as for Miss Antonina Bouis, the question of trust hardly arises: Shostakovich is supposed to have said that ‘Hamlet was screwing her’ (i.e. Ophelia) in Nikolai Pavlovich Akimov’s (1901–1968) production of Hamlet which, at the time (1932), ‘was highly regarded in the American literary press’ – or so Mr Volkov informs us. On every page, the reader is confronted with this two-tiered question: did Shostakovich actually say anything of the sort? If so, what precisely did he say? Is there a Russian equivalent for ‘to screw’ in this sense, and if so, how ‘equi-’ is it? What, for that matter, is the Russian for the ‘Leningrad con man’ highlighted a page or two later? Moreover, why does Shostakovich talk about what didn’t happen, and not about what did? He goes on about not having written a Hamlet opera with Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, and about having written the music for Akimov’s production of the play, but there’s not a word about his extensive music for the Hamlet film, which we in the West have seen and heard. Was it, in parts, derived from the incidental music? It can’t have been extracted from it, because, inevitably, it’s much longer.