‘It consists of many parts created by many different components. Everything has a purpose and role, and the result is amazing.’ This is composer Antonín Dvořák discussing not an orchestra nor a symphony, but something equally dear to his heart: the steam engine.
The Czech composer was a big fan of locomotives, which burst forth into the same mid-19th-century world as his music. Indeed, he once famously declared, ‘I would give all my symphonies for inventing the locomotive.’
Dvořák is just one of a handful of composers who harboured extra-musical obsessions throughout their lifetimes. Let’s meet some of these compulsive composers, starting with the rail-obsessed Romantic himself…
Eight fascinating composer obsessions
Antonín Dvořák: Trains
Dvořák’s life story and that of the locomotive ran, for a while, along similar tracks. The railway reached his hometown of Nelahozeves during his childhood, bringing workers from across the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the construction project.
From the family home, across the street from the train station, the young Antonín Dvořák would watch the new iron dragons pull past, laden with soldiers and civilians. This love of trains persisted throughout his life, and on moving to Prague, he designed a morning walk that took him above the tunnel through which trains would pull out from the city’s imposing main station.
‘His precious information was greeted with a snort of laughter’
Dvořák once asked his student and future son-in-law Josef Suk to make an early-morning trip to note down the engine number of the Vienna express train. Suk duly set his alarm clock and headed off, opera glasses in hand, to get the crucial information. After the train had whistled through, he dashed to Dvořák’s flat to show him the number. However, his precious information was greeted with a snort of laughter: instead of the engine number, Suk had noted the tender number at the rear of the train. Rookie error.
Where, if at all, can this love for locos be heard in the great composer’s music? It’s not always obvious, though for many the gently rocking motion of his famous Humoresque, Op.101 No. 7 recalls the movement of a train. And if you think that the main theme from the first movement of his great Seventh Symphony has a certain rhythm of the rails, you’re onto something. ‘I got this theme when the festival train from Pest was arriving in the State Station in 1884,’ reads Dvořák’s note on the score.
Alban Berg: The number 23
Writing to his teacher and mentor Arnold Schoenberg in 1915, Alban Berg was struck by the date stamps on two telegrams from the latter. He wrote, ‘A certain number keeps cropping up: a number which has great significance for me. The number 23.
‘I will keep quiet about the many times I have come up against this number and only give you one or two examples from the recent past: I received your first telegram on 4/6 (46 = 2×23). The telegram contained the number Berlin Südende 46 (2×23) 12/11 (12+11 = 23). The second telegram contained the numbers 23/23 and was sent at 11.50 (11.50 = 50 x 23).’
‘The condition would continue to trouble him for the rest of his life’
Whew. Still with us? Berg was very probably seeing 23 more than needs be here, but that’s the point: he had long since decided that this number had a special meaning for him. Various theories have been advanced to explain his obsessive interest in this particular number.
He may, for example, have got it from the German doctor, psychoanalyst and Sigmund Freud associate Wilhelm Fliess, who believed that the human body went through 23-day cycles or ‘biorhythms’. Others maintain that Berg’s obsession dated from 23 July 1900, when – still recovering from his father’s death – he suffered his first asthma attack. The condition would continue to trouble him for the rest of his life.
Whatever the cause, the number 23 acquired immense significance for Berg. His six-movement Lyric Suite, for example, is made up of a sequence of 23-bar phrases. An encoded depiction of Berg’s love for the author Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the Lyric Suite also uses the number 23 to represent the composer himself, while Hanna is assigned the number ten (she’s represented, for example, by a particular ten-bar section).
Maurice Ravel: Mechanical toys
Igor Stravinsky famously referred to Maurice Ravel as ‘the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers’, and it’s true that the latter’s music has an extraordinary intricacy and attention to detail. No surprise, then, that he maintained a lifelong fascination with mechanics.
‘[Maurice] admired everything which was mechanical, from simple tin toys to the most intricate machine tools,’ his brother Édouard recalled. ‘He would thus spend entire days in front of street vendors’ stalls, and was delighted to come with me to factories or to [exhibitions] of machinery. He was happy to be in the midst of these movements and noises.’ Indeed, his most famous work, Boléro, can sound like a large and complex piece of machinery clicking and whirring into life.
Ravel lost many friends in World War I, losses compounded by the deaths of his mother and his fellow composer (and sometime rival) Claude Debussy. His response was to shut himself away in Le Belvédère, his home south of Paris, and surround himself with objets d’art and mechanical toys.
A favourite among the latter was a small mechanical bird in a golden cage, given to him by the sculptor Léon Leyritz. When its handle was turned, the avian automaton would give a beautiful rendition of the song of the nightingale. Ravel named the toy bird ‘Zizi’, and would sit and listen to its mechanical song for hours at a stretch.
Rued Langgaard: Carl Nielsen
Rued Langgaard’s obsession was, alas, rather less life-enhancing than trains or wind-up nightingales. The Dane never got the recognition from his country’s musical establishment that his idiosyncratic, visionary music might have deserved, but found his work overshadowed by that of a compatriot whose music had, perhaps, greater immediacy: Carl Nielsen.
Of Langgaard’s 16 symphonies, eight string quartets and many other orchestral and chamber works, none were commissioned and only half even got a performance during his lifetime. And Langgaard clearly blamed his rival composer for much of his undeserved obscurity.
This antipathy came to a head in 1948, when an embittered, 55-year-old Langgaard wrote Carl Nielsen, vor store komponist (‘Carl Nielsen, our Great Composer’), a sarcastic choral work which he had the chutzpah to send to the State Broadcasting Company for consideration. Dedicated to ‘the world of music in Denmark’, the piece consists of just 32 bars, to be ‘repeated for all eternity’. Get the point?
Never one to let a grudge lie, in one of Langgaard’s final writings he referred to Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4, ‘The Inextinguishable’, as a symbol of all that was evil. ‘Life will drown “the unquenchable” in pure light and beauty of sound,’ he wrote in hope.
Charles Koechlin: Cinema
Born in 1867, Koechlin had to wait until the age of 65 to see his first film, the 1930s German comedy-drama The Blue Angel. The experience made a huge impact on the Frenchman, who promptly became a silver screen addict.
That same year, consumed with his new passion, Koechlin penned his Seven Stars Symphony, each of whose movements depicts a leading celluloid star. These include Greta Garbo, who gets an other-worldly ‘pagan hymn’ played on the eerie ondes Martenot, and Charlie Chaplin, the subject of a brilliantly nuanced 15-minute character study in music.
‘Koechlin always avoided meeting the object of his infatuation’
Another of the seven stars is the Anglo-German actress Lilian Harvey, for whom Koechlin developed a particular obsession. He went on to dedicate more than 100 works to her – these included the storyline and score to a film, The Portrait of Daisy Hamilton, in which he saw himself and Harvey in the starring roles.
Married with five children, Koechlin always avoided meeting the object of his infatuation. Instead, he sent his wife to meet her – and to show her some of his latest musical tributes.
Anton Bruckner: Numbers (and death)
Anton Bruckner is now widely believed to have displayed some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He certainly did exhibit a condition known as numeromania: a compulsion to count things. Bricks and windows in buildings, bars in each section of his vast symphonies: Bruckner would enumerate them religiously.
He would also plan the number of bars for an entire symphonic movement before composing its first note. This rigour has led many reviewers to comment on the mathematical precision, even the architectural quality, of his symphonies.
This obsessive personality also led to a profound interest in death and dead bodies. When his mother passed away, Bruckner had a photograph taken of her on her death bed and kept it in his teaching room as his only memento of her. There are also accounts that, when the corpses of Beethoven and Schubert were exhumed and moved to a different cemetery in Vienna, Bruckner made sure that he was there to touch and kiss the skulls of both.
Alexander Scriabin: The occult and the ‘mystic chord’
Scriabin spent much of his life obsessed with the occult and religious symbolism. For example, he was a devotee of Theosophy, the 19th-century movement that aimed to furnish its followers with psychic and spiritual powers.
This lifelong fascination reached its musical culmination with the so-called ‘mystic chord’, which he believed represented divine powers in musical form. A hexachord (six-note chord), the ‘mystic chord’ is built on intervals of a fourth – A, D sharp, G, C sharp, F sharp and B. Scriabin, who claimed to see colour in sound (he was one of a handful of composers to experience synaesthesia), believed that the chord had a ‘smoky’ colouration.
The chord made its first appearance in his 1910 tone poem, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, where it opens the piece with a strange mix of calm and foreboding. Loosely based on the Greek myth of Prometheus, this 20-minute work is scored for an orchestra, piano soloist, optional choir… and, for one New York performance only, a clavier à lumières – a ‘colour organ’ which would project a different coloured light for each note.
‘Alas, the ambitious project died with its creator’
For the remaining five years of his life, the ‘mystic chord’ would feature in almost all of Scriabin’s compositions, including four of his five remaining piano sonatas. The composer’s lifelong interest in mysticism was designed to be heard (and seen) at its fullest in Mysterium, a large multimedia piece that he left unfinished at his death. Scriabin envisaged a multi-sensory, seven-day experience, performed in the foothills of the Himalayas and bringing spiritual enlightenment to audiences. Alas, the ambitious project died with its creator.
Erik Satie: well, where do we start?
Of all composers, Erik Satie is perhaps most deserving of the label ‘obsessive’. Witness his dress phases over the years: a fondness for priestly robes was followed by seven identically coloured velvet suits. His final ‘look’ was the neat bourgeois gentilhomme, sporting bowler hat, wing collar and umbrella.
Food was also bound by strict (and unusual) rules. In his Mémoires d’un amnésique, he stipulates he eats only ‘food that is white: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, fruit-mould, rice, turnips, camphorated sausages, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad and certain kinds of fish.’
More broadly, Mémoires evokes a rigid daily itinerary: ‘I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:23 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy ride on horseback round my domain follows from 1:19pm to 2:53pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07pm. From 4:27 to 6:47pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, swimming, etc.). Dinner is served at 7:16 and finished at 7:20pm. From 8:09 to 9:59pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10:37pm.’