Just now, it’s hard to look at the world without a sharp twist of despair. Across the planet, vast (and increasingly violent) divisions seem to be opening up every day and there’s a rising feeling that the situation isn’t going to improve any time soon. When it all looks so bleak, we naturally search out those things we know can bring us a little comfort.
For me, the reliable shelter in dark times has always been music. It’s my consolation, my anchor and my joy. But a while back, even this lost some of its power to console.
My faith in music had a mini-wobble. A wobblette, if you will. It was a few years ago and I’d wangled a backstage tour of the gorgeous Musikverein in Vienna, the holy of holies for classical music.
It’s the sort of place where even the people serving ice cream have triple PhDs in musicology. While I was there, I looked down at my phone and realised it was November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. On spotting the date, I asked if they could tell me what was playing that day in 1938, the year of that brutal pogrom.
A tour guide dutifully found the programme and was kind enough to send me a contemporaneous review. I learnt that Karl Böhm had conducted Anton Bruckner’s Symphony Number 5 that evening. According to the critic in 1938, he’d done it well.
Bruckner, a superb 19th-century Austrian composer, had always been a favourite of mine. But it was the reviewer’s final casual comment that threw me. According to him, “a wonderful night.