At the age of nearly ninety-eight,
native New Yorker Elliott Carter is an utterly astonishing
man. For seventy years Carter has pursued his uncompromising
compositional path. For many years the journey was a particular
lonely one as he pioneered an unswerving modernist aesthetic
to a largely unsympathetic audience both in the USA and
internationally. Only in comparatively recent years has
he come to be deservedly recognised as one of the towering
greats of late twentieth century music. Fortunately this
recognition has coincided with a glorious Indian summer
of inspiration and, two years from his hundredth birthday,
Carter is as musically and intellectually alert as ever.
Film director
and Frank Zappa enthusiast Frank Scheffer first became involved
with Carter in 1982, his initial curiosity stemming from
an interview in which Zappa expressed his admiration for
the work of the elder statesman. A subsequent visit to the
1982 Holland Festival at which Carter was the featured composer
was soon to provide Scheffer, then about to graduate from
the Dutch Film Academy, with the determination to capture
Carter’s extraordinary life in film.
As Charles Rosen
aptly points out early on in the film, one of the fascinating
elements of Carter is his now solitary link with a world
that no longer exists. His friendship with such figures
as Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse provides a fascinating
and illuminating link to the past. His essentially classical
training, most notably with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, helped
ensure that his doctrine was and remains very much European
in its outlook. As Rosen puts it, Carter synthesises the
traditions of the early and late twentieth century whilst
bridging the Atlantic in a way that no other composer before
or since has achieved.
At various points
in the film Charles Rosen, Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez
contribute their thoughts on Carter and his work although
it is Carter himself that provides the narrative thread
running throughout. It is a narrative that whilst leaving
no doubt as to Carter’s well known intellectual rigour,
paints a picture of a charming, humble and thoughtful man
who is deeply concerned that his work serves to reflect
the tolerant society that he hopes can one day be found.
An appropriate sentiment given what could be considered
the parallel levels of complexity in both Carter’s music
and the socio-political climate of the late twentieth and
early twenty first centuries.
The passage
of the film takes us on a journey that commences with Carter’s
earliest recollections of the outbreak of the First World
War and a New York prior to the domination of the motor
car. Sunday afternoon visits to spend time discussing music
with “Mr Ives” are charted whilst Carter is seen reliving
his time spent in Paris under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger.
This was a relationship that originated from a suggestion
by Walter Piston and which proved to be seminal in Carter’s
musical development, as the composer explains in some detail.
Considerable
time is devoted to the rich seam of inspiration Carter has
found in the latter years of his life, perhaps summed up
in his only excursion into the world of opera, the one act
What Next? Written as the composer approached the
status of nonagenarian, the work is an astoundingly lucid
summation of Carter’s concerns with human interaction borne
out in music and as such will always remain one of his most
personal and striking works.
Numerous musicians
closely associated with Carter’s music play an integral
part, amongst them the Arditti Quartet, pianist Ursula Oppens
and cellist Fred Sherry. The discussions between composer
and performer are always engaging but do not cross the boundary
into technical analysis, rather concentrating on Carter’s
vision of how his music should be played; a one to one with
Ursula Oppens on a passage from the Piano Concerto
is particularly fascinating in this respect.
The most poignant
moments in the film however are often personal ones. Carter
lost his wife during the latter stages of filming (Scheffer
subsequently inscribed his work to the memory of Helen Jones-Carter)
and the footage that shows the composer and his wife in
the New York apartment they occupied for many years reveals
a couple deeply devoted to each other. As Carter relates,
his wife was the only person who understood the requirements
of being his secretary, hence she devoted her married life
to looking after his affairs and allowing him maximum time
for composition; devotion indeed.
Frank Scheffer
must be congratulated for a film that succeeds on two clear
levels. Firstly Carter’s life and work is captured with
wonderful insight and warmth, placing his achievements in
a historical context that reinforces his unique status in
today’s musical world. Secondly, this is a hugely impressive
piece of film-making in its own right. Imbued with a sense
of atmosphere that remains from start to finish, the camera-work
is beautifully done. This includes the occasional use of
black and white footage of the composer and scenes of New
York coupled with slow motion sequences that seem entirely
natural given the composer’s preoccupation with the passage
of time and his well documented views on time in the context
of his music.
The result is
one of the most striking filmic composer portraits you are
ever likely to see and comes with unreserved recommendation.
Christopher Thomas
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