Four Last Songs

Richard Strauss wrote Four Last Songs for Soprano and Orchestra. Many think he is related to Johan Strauss of Vienna Waltz fame – but nothing could be further from the truth. But is anything further from the truth than anything else? Truth is relative, some seem to believe. A moveable feast. A convenience. Their whole life is geared – at least subconsciously – to the fact that Truth is a matter of opinion rather than an intrinsic, unswerveable incontrovertibility. Life would be a misery if strait-jacketed by a so-called certainty of truth. Life is best when one can shift it about on the table, its various facets changing with the light or the angle of viewing it – ballooning one minute, shrinking the next. Truth can fall off the table and creep about of its own volition, now a rodent-like truth, later a ghostly truth, sometimes merging with the carpet itself or becoming just another indistinguishable aspect of its pattern.

Music, like Muse or Mansion, can carry an intrinsic truth, an ineluctable noumenon of its own. Not the music itself, but an emotion in its weave that no listener can avoid. Nobody can compare that emotion felt by one listener to the emotion felt by another. Reality is only viewed via a single mind. Your mind. That is the only truth, your relationship with your own mind. A mind that can only be the same mind that observes it.

So, dear Richard Strauss, how can there be more than one last song? Perhaps, the last song becomes the next last song that becomes the next last song that becomes the next last song, or halfway through the song, then halfway through the rest of the song, or halfway through the rest of the rest of the song, ad infinitum, ad absurdum, with the listener moving from mind to mind, self to self, last song to last song – and we can therefore live forever, square-dancing inside a sound-woven song-space with four unseen, unreachable corners.

We ended up not wanting to have names. We ripped off our unseen labels one by one. There needed to be an example set, however. Nobody would unname themselves without a lead to follow. A First Mover. The pre-emptive Clockmaker. If this were a story, the author would start with the example-setting character’s name – followed by a narrative of his rite-of-passage from name to namelessness. From Strauss, via Stress, to Self. A tale of bravery and hardship, of a dimmer-switch controlling the light of identity, of those who failed to follow and remained named, of those who did follow and became unnamed. Yet to name the leading character as he was once named would be to jam the dimmer-switch by wedging in what it was trying to dim. The others who remained named would gain prominence by having real characters’ names in the story while the rest floundered about unidentified – not only confusing the pecking-orders within the plot but the plot itself. To call them by false names or even by letters like A, B, C would, no doubt, cloud the issue even further. Meanwhile, it’s good for any story’s author to relax and concentrate on the plot’s landscape, its spirit of place, before worrying about the entrance of characters…

The public park in Colchester, with Norman Castle, flower-neatened gardens, an empty bandstand now bereft of Strauss wind music, all eventually leading down grassy slopes towards a small boating-lake. Nobody has hired a boat today. It must be one of those times when everyone is asleep at home. The Longest Day of the year. Light at Night like the Land of the Midnight Sun. Even here in England’s Essex. The dimmer-switch of the Sun turned right up.

Without people, there can be no story to tell. But now, at first dimly seen, are tall dark shadows wandering around the Castle. They are the nameless Masters of Existence trying to form gradually into real people. They have been given no belief in the story-premise that all the real people are at home sleeping with apocalyptic songs on their ear-buds. Yet the Masters, so-called, remain only partly formed into what they had hoped to become since the story had given them no names other than as fictionalised Masters of Existence, no names on which to hang their identities. The story refused them any such luxury. So mere shadows (if slightly flesh-corrupted) they remained, ever-circling the Castle like forgotten druids. Masters of Existence who could not even master existence for themselves!

Suddenly, there appeared, on the margins of the boating-lake, the legendary Clockmaker whose clocks had hands but no numbers but, more often, numbers but no hands, because, with the former, one could at least guess the time they told. A real flesh-and-blood person. Taught by Masters, but lacking their ambition of existence, the Clockmaker actually succeeded in becoming what they had desired but failed to be. The Clockmaker knew that any ambition destroys the goal of that same ambition.

And now is time for waking. We are here, stretching, fully-formed, truly nameless, stirred by pre-alarmed timepieces within our minds but pure of heart and unconstrained by the deadlines of finding identities to wrap ourselves in. Owning identities simply because we didn’t want identities, the only pre-condition for identity being not to have one. Thus spake Zarathustra. And the story can begin at last…

The song was left unsung. He scrutinised the faces before him in the audience, frozen as he was by their stares. Remarkably, the stage on the park’s bandstand where he performed was relatively unlit while the audience itself blazed with criss-crossing searchlights, a theatrical effect that sometimes worked, sometimes flopped. Tonight, it was the latter…

…except he happened to depend on this performance of performances to launch his career, indeed move it from wooden boards to electronic screens. An important talent scout was known to be sitting among all those faces on the grass and benches, but which icy stare, which particular slow hand-clapper…?

Singing was never his forte. Especially when singing, as Tenor, the Soprano part in Strauss. He was fundamentally a stand-up comic, simply throwing in a ballad or lightsome novelty number to recall the old-fashioned days when comics did just that — wrap their jokes amid a number of other all-round talents. But he was no Bruce Forsyth, especially as Bruce is now dead. Come to think of it, even the singer’s jokes were never anything to write home about. Dancing was the hardest thing of all.

He started clip-clopping on his metalled heels in an attempt to win back the audience and one member of that audience in particular. His steps grew heavy, the taps unrhythmical, the moves too easily followed, all his tricks gone wrong, as the bandstand’s searchlights grew angry and intense like tunnel-beacons through the otherwise dark skies of a new blitz and war.

Eventually, he knelt on the round sheltered stage, just as the lighting turned back upon him away from the now darkening audience amid a last firework-fizzing display.

“I beg thee, listen,” he intoned Shakespeareanly, amid the increasingly stony silence. He looked up, blinded by the lights, eyes wet and continued: “I was made from passion and taught by masters. Those who physically conceived me created the passion that created me and the angel-muses became the masters who taught me of their own existence beyond the scope of mere physicality. Whether mind or matter, spirit or flesh, or simply a mixture of both, a smile on pork-lips is still a smile. My jokes still jokes, even if there is no laughter to accompany them. My four last songs still songs, even given no applause. My steps still steps, given no real dance for them to become. A choreography of mis-timing is still a choreography to follow. My stories still stories, given no print to carry them…”

The lights dimmed one by one. Gradually, the applause in the dark audience grew from nothing until it eventually became unstoppable by deafening the rest of the soliloquy and its potential series of escapist punch-lines.

As a solitary weak beam lit magically upon his kneeling confessional, someone in the audience abruptly sat on their hands and hummed the Blue Danube Waltz into the silence. Counter-tenor, not castrato.