Four Last Songs

Aging and Creativity in Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten

Linda Hutcheon, Michael Hutcheon

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226255620
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience's expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world's greatest composers.Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi's Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner's influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a "life review" of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finishedhis only opera, Saint François d'Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments.With its deft treatment of these composers' final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.

Chapter One

Setting the Stage

Several years ago, on a visit to the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, we came upon an early sixteenth-century tapestry from the Southern Lowlands called “The Hunt of the Frail Stag” (fig. 1). Here the stag, which represents humanity, is pursued by passions, sickness, old age, and death. In one of these allegorical fragments, the stag is driven from a lake by a huntress (Old Age) and her hounds. A text on a banner informs us (translated from the Old French):

Then Old Age mounts an all-out assault

That drives him from the lake

And unleashes upon him Pain and Doubt,

Cold and Heat, and thus brings on

Care and Trouble to seize him.

And Age with wrinkled flesh

And Heaviness make him flee

Toward Sickness, the dreaded one.1

Clearly, we decided, this was proof that age and its trials have concerned artists ever since enough people survived into their later years to contemplate the issue. Our response to this image was a complex one, however. We recognized in it an undercurrent of concern, not to say dread, about aging that is prevalent in our own times—witness the ubiquitous rueful jokes about memory or physical changes associated with age. But, thanks to the examples of family and friends, we also knew well the possibility of full and fulfilling later lives. This allegorical tapestry evoked in us an appreciation of one of the many dichotomies of aging: a sense of worry, even fear, on one hand, matched by the prospect of a contented older age, on the other. How did these divergent responses come to coexist? We asked ourselves the obvious question: how should we think about our aging selves and our futures?

Fig. 1. Old Age Drives the Stag out of a Lake and the Hounds Heat, Grief, Cold, Anxiety, Age, and Heaviness Pursue Him (from The Hunt of the Frail Stag). Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

As we entered our sixties, it occurred to us that there were few models for what is essentially a new period of life beyond what has been, for a century, the usual time of retirement. Recent ways of thinking about later life were unappealing to us: for example, both midlife styles (where we simply continue to do what we have always done) and the multiple roles postulated in what is being called “postmodern” aging (as defined in terms of a specifically consumer culture). Because continuing creativity in older age is an important value for us, we decided to examine the lives of members of earlier generations, specifically (given our interests) composers, in order to understand the role that their later years played in the context of their entire artistic life course. In the process we have ranged widely in our reading from the many dimensions that comprise gerontology through to the various disciplines of the humanities. This range reflects our belief that understanding creativity and aging demands multiple perspectives on everything from biography to identity, history to aesthetics, politics to social and cultural value.

This, then, is a book about aging and creativity. We realize that these two words do not always go together in most people’s minds. As Kathleen Woodward pointedly puts it, “Neither in Freudian analysis nor in other major discourses of western culture do we find old age represented . . . in terms of new forms of creativity in later life.”2 However, the lives of such artists as Michelangelo (1475–1564), Goethe (1749–1832), and Elliott Carter (1908–2012) attest that creativity and later life are by no means mutually exclusive. Much fine scholarly work has been done on the last works of visual artists, writers, and composers. Four Last Songs (with its obvious reference to the late orchestral lieder of Richard Strauss) offers a series of case studies of the last works and late careers of four composers who led long creative lives. They are all canonical figures: Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) (with the inevitable presence of Richard Wagner [1813–1883]), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), and Benjamin Britten (1913–1976). In each case the composers’ own attitudes to their aging and their creativity, the works of their late years, and the reception of those final works form part of our focus.

As a literary theorist and a physician, we have previously used opera as the cultural vehicle and focus of three coauthored books.3 Here once again we have turned to music and particularly opera, but this time it is in order to study not disease, the body, or death, but rather the intersection of aging and creativity in Western European culture of the last two centuries. Opera is an art form with a four-hundred-year continuous history, a complex form that brings together (even before its staged production) multiple arts: music, drama, and poetry. But because it is a staged as well as a complex dramatic form, it is by definition an expensive art form to produce. Therefore its creators have always been compelled to seek out topics of wide and powerful appeal—playing to not only the desires of their audiences, but their anxieties as well. Therefore, from its origins in Renaissance Italy, opera has, famously and not surprisingly, explored themes of concern to most people’s lives, then and now: love (in all its tragic and comic consequences) and death (and, along with it, both grief/loss and redemption). These central themes, combined with opera’s visceral intensity as a staged art form, help explain its ongoing popularity and suggest a continuity of human concern that transcends time and place. However, as we shall see, history and culture do intervene in opera’s treatment of the human universal of aging.

This is not really a book about how to age well, though its case studies might indeed offer some exemplars: all these composers were successful creative artists and very public figures, not to say national icons, in their respective countries (Italy, Germany, France, and Great Britain). Our primary interest here is in the intersection of aging and creativity, and we have chosen to study aging composers who wrote at least one major opera at the end of their lives. The commitment of time and creative energy required to compose such a long, complex, and public musical work inevitably left exposed and sometimes even threatened the creative (and psychic) resources of Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten in different ways. Another reason for choosing composers who wrote operas late in life is that with that particular art form they had at their disposal a double means of expression—words and music. As a musical genre, opera is “texted”—that is, as we have seen, there is a dramatic story in words and actions as well as music to consider. It was the practice of each of these composers not only to compose the music, but also either to write the narrative of the libretto himself or to influence the story’s development in major ways. The combined use of words and music opened channels of adaptation, self-expression, and perhaps even catharsis, all with the potential to help them explore their own aging and mortality in a creative way. Yet they too had to face challenges that came with their age, as well as their times—times that were changing socially, politically, and aesthetically, as of course all times do. But cultural eras bring specific challenges that are shared by those who live through them. Verdi and Wagner were of the same age cohort; later, so too were Messiaen and Britten; Strauss straddled the middle.

We have chosen nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers for a number of reasons. In this period they had much more control over their choice of both subject matter and style of musical composition than did court (or even commercial) composers of earlier times. Also, by then the composer had superseded both the librettist and the singer as the central artistic figure in operatic production. But another important reason is that the late nineteenth century also saw the discovery and definition of old age as a social, economic, and medical construct. And thus were born, in the twentieth century, both geriatrics and gerontology as disciplines.4 From the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, medical advances and increased life expectancy have meant that a new period of later life has come into being for an increasing number of people, one as long as or, for some, longer than childhood. But it has been much less explored by theorists. In fact, you could say that an entire new generation has now been added to the life course.5 There has been an increase in the absolute numbers of older individuals and also an increase in this group as a percentage of the total population. Finally, this aging population is itself aging: its average age is increasing as people live longer.6 This book focuses primarily on what has been called the “Third Age”—that new period in later life in which older people remain independent, active, and capable; it will also, however, deal with the adaptations required by the next, the “Fourth Age” of increasing dependency and entry into “old old age,”7 often caused by a break that signals “the irreversible exclusion of normal life, thus the end of normal life.”8 For some people, this may be what is feared even more than death itself.

The remainder of this introductory and orienting chapter will outline some of the basic issues and perspectives that underpin those that follow, with their stories of particular composers and their creative lives: the paradoxical cultural views of age and aging, the historical construction of the concept of “old age,” and the notion of the composer’s personhood and the role in it of creativity.

The Dichotomies of Aging

Later life is a fraught topic in our current culture, with its commercialized, antiaging, death-denying ethos that aims to keep everyone young forever.9 But the aging population today is paradoxically represented as both a privileged, wealthy cohort and a “gray tsunami” of future debt, debility, and health-care crises.10 The fact is that at the end of the twentieth century, we saw “the simultaneous survival of the largest number of fit people in their sixties and seventies ever known, and of the largest numbers of chronically ill older people ever known.”11 From the scholarship across the disciplines on this topic, however, we can see that the elderly—across all times and places—have always been considered both rich and poor; they have been both venerated and denigrated; they have been treated both kindly and harshly in their families and communities. In many cultures they have been represented as both wise and foolish, as both powerful authorities and infirm burdens.

There is something about aging that generates this polarization of viewpoints, which may reflect our society’s ambivalent attitudes: people want to live longer, but they don’t want to age. In the twenty-first century, it has become almost a moral imperative to live as long as possible; but in our youth-oriented culture, no one wants to be “old,” or, perhaps more to the point, to be seen as old. While much has been written about the limitations that come with aging, arguably many things can be gained for those who are fortunate enough to live into a “ripe” old age with the experience and knowledge that accompany the years.12 Aging can be—and is—experienced in many different ways, but it is likely to bring changes that are physical, social, psychological, and sometimes cognitive. With changes come challenges to which we must all respond. Our ability to adapt to these alterations will determine how fulfilled we are in our later years. Indeed, these can be years not of stasis or decline, but of development. They can yield the polarities of either isolation and insularity or what has been called generativity,13 with the elderly becoming teachers of the young, seeing their pedagogical task as one of conserving, passing on, and perhaps even leading forward. Even if their aim in doing so is to define and create their personal legacy, generativity is always also a commitment to the next generation.

Yet the most widely held view of aging in relation to creativity in particular is a rather different one, articulated most influentially by Kenneth Clark in his 1970 Rede Lecture, The Artist Grows Old. From this perspective, old-age creativity is characterized by a “sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into . . . transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.”14 Nevertheless, the critical literature in all the arts offers us multiple examples of major exceptions to this “rule” of intransigent elder rage and depression:15 those artists blessed with serenity, resignation, contemplation, enhanced powers of intellect and understanding, and the play of accumulated knowledge and experience that are also said to come with age.16

Edward W. Said, in his posthumously published On Late Style, joined Clark in seeing as important only the unreconciled impatience that comes with older artists’ feeling of imminent mortality: “But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of ‘ripeness is all’?”17 For an artist at any age, the approach of death can add a new restlessness and urgency, a sense of unfinished business; but with increasing age, it becomes clearer that time is no longer “an inexhaustible commodity.”18 The awareness of the impending end can thus be a catalyst for creativity, the opportunity for epiphany and metaphysical transcendence.19 What has been called the “swan-song phenomenon,” as a means of coping with mortality, is what makes some creative artists concentrate on producing masterworks that will act as their final aesthetic legacy.20 Yet, not surprisingly, there is the parallel dichotomous view, most famously articulated by Simone de Beauvoir, that age and mortality have only a negative effect on creativity, reducing strength and deadening emotion.21 But what about creative artists who at the end of their lives, freed from public responsibility and expectations, claim to work only for their own pleasure? These are some of the many contrasting, often contradictory poles of opinion that have come to constitute Western culture’s view of aging, especially in relation to creativity.

The Young History of “Old Age”

The four composers we study here all lived in a modern Western culture that has become not only increasingly youth-oriented but also arguably gerontophobic, in the double meaning of the word: fear of growing old and fear of the elderly. This dual negative can be witnessed in society’s frequent deva...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Setting the Stage
• 2. Creative Responses to the Challenges of Aging
• 3. Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) A Generational Tale of Cultural Nationalism
• 4. Richard Strauss (1864–1949) A Life Review in Music
• 5. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) Faith in God and Art
• 6. Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) The Life Narratives of the Ever-Young “Working Composer”
• 7. Conclusion: The Particularities of Aging and Creativity
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index