Stephen Hough recalls how he nearly lost his latest work – and his life – in a car crash. Christopher Morley reports.
Pianist Stephen Hough uses the adjective mirabilis (wonderful) in the title of the Mass, Oremus Missa Mirabilis, he has composed, which is to have its debut at Lichfield Cathedral on Sunday.
But given the extraordinary back story to its completion, it would not have been inappropriate to have dubbed it miraculous.
“Why Mirabilis? Purely personal,” he explains. “I gathered my year’s worth of sketches for this Mass together in September 2006 and wrote three of the movements in three days.
“The following day I had a serious car crash, overturning on the motorway at 80 mph. I stepped out of the one untouched door in my completely mangled car with my Mass manuscript and my body intact.
“I wrote part of the Agnus Dei in St Mary’s Hospital, waiting for four hours for a brain scan.
“I was conscious, while I was somersaulting like a screeching metallic acrobat on the M1, of feeling regret that I would never get to hear this piece.
“Someone had other ideas.”
Stephen, the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Instrumentalist of the Year, obviously has special affinities with the wonderful building where he will be in residence this weekend.
Last summer he gave a memorable performance with the CBSO in the cathedral, and he wrote vividly on his blog about the changing landscapes on the drive between Birmingham and Lichfield.
“I think there’s always something special about performing in a space with as much resonance (in every sense of the word) as Lichfield Cathedral,” he says.
“Every performance has to be a partnership with the building. This particular weekend is special because I’m performing and being ‘performed’ ... in the same glorious space.”
He will be giving a recital on Saturday evening, and hearing on Sunday morning the premiere in a liturgical setting of a Mass he has composed. One thinks back to Liszt, virtuoso pianist, composer, and, like Hough, a deeply religious thinker.
“Instead of setting the words simply in a descriptive way, I wanted to explore aspects of the psychology which underlies the whole nature of belief and doubt,” Stephen explains. “But I, like most Catholics, have said these words quickly, without thinking fully of the depth (or daring) of what is being expressed.
“And what about those who have ceased to believe and yet still rattle off blithely the bold print in the Missal?
“In parts of my Mass the music is deliberately and sentimentally intimate – as if two people are sharing a drink in a Parisian café, with a whiff of Poulenc perhaps in the harmonies, or maybe even the sound of a distant 1950s pop tune coming from a neighbouring café’s jukebox.”
Obviously being a man of faith is important to Stephen. Does he ever experience conflicts of conscience arising out of the sometimes cynical and expedient schemings of the musical world?
“I don’t think there is a profession without such machinations – and perhaps the Church is the worst of all.
“As a musician my daily bread and butter is some of the greatest art ever created, so there’s an antidote to cynicism at hand in every moment. I quite like the mess of the world, and there is perhaps a danger in hoping for things to be too neat and tidy.
Saturday evening’s piano recital (Bach, Franck and Chopin), will see him donating his services in order to raise funds for the Percy Young Memorial Trust. This is a charity created to endow scholarships for Lichfield Cathedral choristers, in memory of one of this country’s greatest and most prolific writers on music (as well as being a chronicler of the history of Wolverhampton Wanderers, a football club Dr Young followed with a passion).
But there is also another string to the tireless piano-playing and composing Hough bow, that of a writer. He blogs on the Daily Telegraph website, he uses Twitter, he keeps a diary – all of this in addition to practising and travelling, as a world-renowned virtuoso is obliged to do.
“I’ve always loved writing and have jotted down thoughts over the years on scraps of paper or sometimes in diaries. So my blog and Twitter have become substitutes for that, an electronic and public place to share thoughts and engage in discussion about them.
“I composed a lot of music when I was young, and then stopped in my early 20s. I’ve taken it up again seriously in the past five years.
“I tend to make lots of sketches and spend a lot of time thinking through the material when I’m travelling or walking about or even in the early hours when I wake up.
“Then comes the point to gather everything together and make sense of it. This can happen best when I have uninterrupted time at home (or backstage on free days). It can be very frustrating to have ideas piling up when there’s no time to complete them.”
Last summer Stephen Hough performed all of Tchaikovsky’s works for piano and orchestra at the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, including an account of the Second Concerto with Andris Nelsons and the CBSO which critics described as at last waking up a sleepy season.
Since then the Hyperion label has released a CD set of Stephen performing all these works, and he reveals his fondness for the composer.
“I’ve learned all the concertante works over the past few years and fell in love with them and with the composer as a man. I find Tchaikovsky an incredibly open-hearted person. Someone who lets you into his inner world, someone who isn’t afraid for you to see the dark side as well as the light. I also love the way his music contrasts the intense emotional turbulence of the adult world with a sort of innocent longing for lost childhood.”
With all these accomplishments – playing, writing, thinking, composing – I ask Stephen if it would be fair to call him the next generation Alfred Brendel, the great Austrian pianist, recently retired from the concert-platform, who has been awesomely active in most of those fields.
“Gosh! I’m not sure about that. I think everyone is different. But just tonight I read a quote from a letter of Wagner to Hans von Bulow’s mother which is strong-worded but pertinent: ‘There is nothing so repugnant to me as a musician who is that alone, without any higher general culture’.”
* Stephen Hough plays at Lichfield Cathedral on Friday at 7.30pm. His Mass is performed during the 10.30am service the following day.
