Hoist's Music
THIS is the companion volume to Miss Hoist's biography of her father, published by the Oxford University Press in 1938. With these two books to consult, the student and even the historian cart be confident of being in possession of all the data necessary for the valuation of Hoist's music, for the author's deep filial affection and temperamental sympathy are combined with a ruthless and exacting critical standard. She makes it very clear that her devotion to music overrides all personal considerations ; and in this she is a whole-hearted disciple of her father, whose whole career was marked by a passion for perfection and an equally passionate rejection of all the small compromises and adjustments that are virtually insepar- able from being a human being.
This ideal of absolute incorruptibility was both the glory and the tragedy of Hoist's character, and explains the strength and the weakness of his music. What Miss Hoist does not attempt to explain—and is probably only to be explained by psychological factors outside the layman's scope—is the existence of such polar extremes in Hoist's music. She gives merciless critical analyses of the early Wagnerian works, and finds traces of gauche or impersonal handling of emotional situations in almost everything that Hoist wrote. But what explains Hoist's progression from an obstinate preference for rich, highly-coloured Wagnerian emotions and sonori- ties to the extreme asceticism of his maturity ? When did senti- mentality become for him "the supreme crime in art " ? And why ?
There can be little doubt that Hoist will live as the poet of the "cold distances," the singer of Saturn, Neptune and Egdon Heath. But there is a terrible pathos in the story of his hearing, at the age of fifty-five, Schubert's C major quintet ; of how, "hearing the warmth of the music, he began to thaw . . . and while thawing ... began to realise all that he had lost by clinging to his austerity." The hint of desperation in the word "clinging," the suggestion of a running counter to some deep natural instinct, is surely deliberate ; and it suggests that the grotesque contrast between, say, Sita and Egdon Heath, is, in Miss Hoist's mind, only explicable by a deep mental or emotional conflict. Hoist never lived to achieve that happy balance between the cold distances of Egdon Heath and the warm human presence of Schubert's quintet ; but it is interesting to follow with Miss Hoist the traces of a gradual change of attitude in his last works.
The book is admirably written. In fact the discussions of indivi- dual works are often a model for writers upon music, combining as they do technical analyses both penetrating and poetical with shrewd common sense. No exaggerated claims are made for any work ; and there may even be some who will feel that Miss Hoist rates her father's whole achievement as a composer too low. Cer- tainly she is aware of the historical importance of his work, of his "making the mistakes which had to be made" before music in England could emerge from German tutelage ; and her last chapter is significantly entitled "The End of the Struggle and the Beginning of the Renaissance," a significance enhanced by the dedication of the book to Benjamin Britten. If Hoist's selfless musical life is indeed to be regarded primarily as the life of a " precursor," there are nevertheless works which have a greatness not simply historical. The blemishes in The Planets and the occasional flaws in The Hymn of Jesus, the touch of exaggeration in Egdon Heath need not be denied ; but they are as nothing compared with the positivc achieve- ment in those works—to mention only three major and obvious examples.
The publication of this book has already brought about a renewal of interest in Hoist's music ; and now—nearly twenty years after his death—his reputation has surely passed through the trough which follows the death of any artist and is due for the general reassessment for which this book provides invaluable material.
MARTIN COOPER.
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