Thomas Adès’ Oper Powder Her Face

In 1963, shortly after British Minister of War John Profumo resigned because of his affair with a model, the tabloid press reported on another scandal that drove up circulation figures. This time, the focus was on Margaret Whigham, daughter of a Scottish millionaire and second wife of Ian Campbell, Duke of Argyll. She was a renowned beauty who had only associated with the super-rich since her youth, while he was a roughneck and a drinker who eventually filed for divorce, accusing his wife of dozens of affairs. As proof, he presented several stolen Polaroid photos showing the Duchess in compromising situations with naked men. From then on, Margaret Campbell was known to the British tabloid press only as the »Dirty Duchess«. Her fortune dwindled and she had to move from her luxurious apartment to a hotel, until she could no longer pay the bills there either and died in a London nursing home in 1993 at the age of 80.

Shortly after Margaret Campbell's death, her glamorous life, which was also marked by setbacks and disappointments, inspired two young British artists to embark on a project that made opera history. In their chamber opera Powder Her Face (1995), writer Philip Hensher and musician Thomas Adès, then only 23 years old, interpreted the figure of the duchess as a mirror of divided English society: on the one hand, the class-conscious, arrogant upper class of the rich and powerful; on the other, the bourgeois counterworld of staff, media and judiciary, which brings about the downfall of the main character. None of the characters who encounter each other here in eight scenes from different phases of Campbell's biography can claim moral superiority. Ultimately, it is the Duchess, as a tragic figure, who at least asserts her personal dignity.

Thomas Adès, then a rising star on the English contemporary music scene, wrote an extremely colourful and intelligent score for a fifteen-piece chamber ensemble, peppering it with »social music« from the respective era of the plot – including tangos, waltzes reminiscent of Maurice Ravel, songs à la Kurt Weill and jazz interludes. In 2007, Adès compiled three numbers from the opera into a small suite for large orchestra (later followed by two further suites) for the Aldeburgh Festival, which he directed. In doing so, he replaced the original parts for three saxophones and accordion with more common instruments and transferred the vocal parts to the orchestra. The musical framework of the overture and finale is formed by a quirky tango, which repeatedly loses its balance with its angular rhythms and melodic slides. Adès arranged the capricious waltz, sung by a waitress at his protagonist's first wedding in 1936, as the middle piece. And nothing describes Margaret Whigham's fate better than the half-admiring, half-pitying comment of the staff: »She doesn't look happy. She looks rich.«

Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto

The conductor, composer and brilliant music educator Leonard Bernstein loved powerful comparisons. He claimed that each of his colleague Samuel Barber's works was, in one way or another, a search for »absolute beauty«. Of course, this did not describe Barber in his entirety, but there is more than a grain of truth in the quote. The Adagio for Strings, perhaps the most famous American classical piece, is positively awash with beauty and melancholy. And despite its tempo marking »Allegro«, the first movement of Barber's Violin Concerto also seems like an endlessly sung hymn to the summer idyll in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, where the composer began work on his concerto in August 1939.

One month later, Hitler ignited the Second World War with Germany's invasion of Poland. On the advice of the US authorities, Barber returned to Pennsylvania and completed the work in the solitude of the Pocono Mountains. Yet nowhere do the first two lyrical concert movements reflect the threatening state of the world: Barber seems almost defiant in his insistence on the autonomy of art and its »absolute beauty«. Only the finale strikes a different, haunting tone. And its surprising brevity is also the reason why, despite the popularity of the concerto, there have been repeated debates about its formal structure.

At the time, the 29-year-old Barber was one of the most promising young composers in the United States. He was the son of a wealthy doctor and a pianist from the small town of West Chester in Pennsylvania. Unlike many of his colleagues who went to Europe to study, Barber enrolled at the newly founded Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and, as a highly talented composer, pianist and singer, received numerous prizes and scholarships. He used these to finance his trips to Europe, which he usually undertook with his long-time partner, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti. In 1937, Barber's Symphony in One Movement was the first work by an American to be included in the programme of the Salzburg Festival, and shortly afterwards the world-famous Arturo Toscanini conducted the premiere of the Adagio for Strings.

Barber was the new star of the classical music scene, and he knew his worth. When soap manufacturer and patron of the arts Samuel Simeon Fels commissioned him to write a violin concerto, Barber demanded a fee of $1,000 (equivalent to about $23,000 in today's purchasing power), which was considerable for a newcomer. Fels commissioned the work for the young Curtis graduate Iso Briselli, who was, however, under the strict supervision of his conservative violin teacher. And because the latter insisted on a reworking (especially of the finale), Barber withdrew his work and gave it to the experienced violinist Albert Spalding, who premiered it in February 1941 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Compared to the violin concertos written shortly before by Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg and Béla Bartók, Barber's work seems like a commitment to »new simplicity« in music. The solo violin's immediately striking allegro theme, with its few core motifs, proves that melodic invention is more important here than its further development; the dance-like secondary theme plays only a subordinate role. The nocturnal mood of the middle movement, tinged with dramatic overtones, is abruptly dispelled by the timpani opening of the finale, which sets in motion a breathless, tumbling perpetuum mobile. Almost without pause, the violin indulges in brilliant triplets, while the orchestra's interjections sound like the running and squeaking noises of an over-revved machine. Only after an attack by the brass and a daring violin stretta does the haunting come to an end.

While Samuel Barber's concerto reveals little about the global political dangers of 1939, the beginning of English composer Gustav Holst's Planetary Suite seems like a premonition of another terrible catastrophe of the 20th century. Even before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Holst had composed the music for Mars, the Bringer of War – essentially a march, but one that, with its irregular five-four time and lack of a »singable« melody, leads not to victory but to doom. The rhythmic intensity of this music and its dissonant clusters may have been inspired by Igor Stravinsky, who had conducted his ballet Le sacre du printemps in London. But the mercilessness with which Holst set to music an advancing, all-consuming death machine shocked his contemporaries. When The Planets was first conducted by the young Adrian Boult at a private performance in London in September 1918, the invited guests were horrified, as Imogen Holst, the composer's daughter, recalled: »They found the roar of Mars almost unbearable after having lived through four years of a war that was still going on.«

It is not only the spectacular first movement that gives The Planets the character of a piece of its time, which by no means – as the title suggests – escapes the terrible reality into planetary expanses. Holst follows the »ugly music« (Leonard Bernstein) of Mars with the supernaturally beautiful sounds of Venus, the Bringer of Peace: The armoured mass of Mars dissolves into delicate individual lines, harps and celesta accompany a kind of lullaby, and the songs of the solo violin and oboe create a paradisiacal idyll. According to his own statement, the composer expressed his longing for peace here, which was only fulfilled much later.

However, the original plan for the seven-movement »series of mood pictures« had a different emphasis. Gustav Holst, born in Cheltenham to a family of musicians with Scandinavian, Baltic, German and English ancestors, was a man of many interests who was fascinated by everything that »inspired him to music«. This included the fashionable esoteric teachings of theosophy as well as Indian and ancient Greek culture and the socialist ideas of the influential poet and universal artist William Morris. Holst earned his living as a teacher at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, London, and at Morley College for adult education – he only had time to compose at weekends and during the holidays.