The San Francisco Symphony may have returned to Davies Symphony Hall many months ago, but for this music lover April 28 was the night that confirmed my wistful belief: It all sounds better live.  The program offered excitement that I did not realize I had craved for more than two years.  Klaus Makela made his SFS debut conducting Peru Negro (written 2012) by Jimmy Lopez Bellido; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1935) by Alban Berg; and Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Opus 93 (1953) by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Maestro Makela, a Norwegian, has received many honors in a short time. At age 25, he is Chief Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Oslo Philharmonic and Music Director and Artistic Advisor of the Orchestre de Paris. This program demonstrated that he is adept at understanding and leading music from widely different eras and composers. Similarly, the SFS demonstrated along with Maestro Makela that they can make brilliant music that glows and lives no matter the style or era.

Klaus Mäkelä conducts the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall on April 28, 2022

The program opened with composer Jimmy Lopez Bellido onstage to introduce his music. He explained that while in the US, living in Berkeley, he took time in Lima, his home town. He delved into the sounds of street vendors making songs announcing what they offer. In a question- answer form, the songs grow into stories told by the orchestra. He noted that the African and traditional Peruvian modes were more parallel than intertwined, but he sought to bring them together, and he achieved that goal. He also explored his fascination with rhythms with African origins. The piece was simultaneously delightful and challenging. The closing percussion was thrilling.

Composer Jimmy López Bellido takes a bow following the performance of his “Perú Negro” by the San Francisco Symphony

Berg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was dedicated to 18 year old Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler Werfel and architect Walter Gropius. Berg had known Manon since since was very young. She died from polio, a heartbreaking event for Berg as well as for Manon’s parents and friends. The Concerto is major work, about 22 minutes long. Its four movements of expanding emotions reflect characteristics of Manon from the opening Andante through Allegretto, Allegro and the final Adagio. The violin soloist, Ms Vilde Frang, also a Norwegian, played with expressive power and passion. The end is more tragic for having heard the Allegretto and Allegro before it. Ms Frang was embraced by the deeply moved audience.

Violinist Vilde Frang performs Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony

Shostakovich’s music is always great, and this is the right time to hear him, especially Symphony No. 10. When the content of this program was chosen, it is unlikely that anyone thought that Stalin or his political off-spring could be on so many minds. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the echoes of Stalinesque behaviors in suppression of a whole country can be seen on every channel. Stalin and his helpers followed, criticized, and punished Shostakovich through his life. The death of Stalin, in 1953, could have meant the liberation of his composing creativity if Shostakovitch had not been so worn down and terrified for his family. However, in No. 10 the composer paints an audible picture of experiences in such a dictatorship.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The long first movement is full of fear and uncertainty. It is like an entire population stumbling and crashing into stone walls. The second movement is said to be a portrait of Stalin. It is fast and angry. One would not want this music to chase after oneself. The final movement is something completely different even after the astonishingly “different” beginnings. It has quiet moments that say “let’s meditate about this” and daring, playful times that seem to promise escape. The SFS woodwinds added heart piercing and glorious solos to this expressive movement. Just when a listener might think the direction could take us down to the depths, there is a coded message from Shostakovich. He found a way to spell his initials in musical notes. He does it right here knowing his survival is a triumph.

Photos of Klaus Makela, Jimmy Lopez Bellido, and Vilde Frang by Stefan Cohen, courtesy of SF Symphony

In honor of Peter Stansky’s 90th birthday, Lively is posting reviews of his books. Professor Stansky, an historian of modern Britain, has been Chair of the Stanford history department and served in many leadership positions. These reviews are by Leslie Friedman and appeared in the publications of The Institute for Historical Study.

Edward Upward: Art and Life. Peter D. L
Stansky (Enitharmon Press, London, 2016)
Long-time member of The Institute for Historical Study member Peter Stansky, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University, has written a classic biography of Edward Upward, a man of mystery. A leading light of the English literary world in the 1930s, he is widely unknown, even though he lived to be slightly older than 105 (1903-2009), was author of twelve books, and still has, posthumously, seven books in print. Stansky’s is the first biography of this important figure. Stansky succeeds at highlighting the details of
Upward’s life while also focusing on the refrain that repeats throughout his life and has universal impact: which must one put first—art or life?
The book’s title demonstrates Stansky’s conclusion that Upward achieved in both.
Edward Upward was born in Essex. His father was a doctor. His father’s family had made
money through the first wholesale grocery import business in England. Welcome to
English, hair-splitting class definitions. To have money is good, but trade is middle class. A
doctor is a professional, but, at the opening of the 20th century, medicine did not have the
cachet it would later achieve. Edward Upward was in the middle (or upper) middle class with
enough advantages to have the childhood of a young gentleman.
He attended a prep school, a reputable public school, Repton, and Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge. He hated these schools. He had good times at sports, saw his early poetry
published in school journals, and won the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse at
Cambridge. However, schools were for him replicas of Hell. Still, he became a
schoolmaster. He felt the need to support himself; being a schoolmaster gave him security.

EDWARD UPWARD

Upward saw beating and bullying in schools as a parallel to England’s class system which he
despised. His sense of injustice led him to Marxism-Leninism and, later, membership in
the Communist Party. Whatever his socio-political analysis of school life, he gained an education and friendship that deepened his creative gifts and refined his literary perceptions. Christopher Isherwood, novelist and short story writer, arrived at Reptona year after Upward. Isherwood describes him in his memoir, Lions and Shadows: “Everything about him appealed to me. He was a natural anarchist, a born romantic revolutionary.” (Stansky, 55) Stansky conveys the friendship between Upward and Isherwood in its many levels of understanding and the help they gave each other throughout their lives. Isherwood revered Upward. They were each
other’s first readers of new writing. Isherwood introduced poet W.H. Auden and Upward, in
1927. Auden was three years younger than Isherwood whom he knew from prep school. Though Auden later abandoned the left, Upward’s politics influenced him. Auden
adopted aspects of Upward’s fantasies into early  poems. In fact, when Auden gave Upward his
book, Poems, in 1930, the poet wrote in it that he wondered how much he had “filched” from
Upward by way of Isherwood. (Stansky, 131)  These literary relationships, as described by
Stansky, put Upward at the center of 1930s English writers, the “Auden Circle.”
Together at Corpus Christi, Upward and Isherwood wrote stories of a fantasy world they
invented. It had a map, characters fulfilling basic village roles, but the stories’ events were
surreal. In the stories of Mortmere, Isherwood and Upward became Starn and Hynd,
professional pornographers. The Mortmere fantasies are obsessed with sex, violence, and
potty jokes. They were the works of brilliant men in their teenage to young adult years.
Upward wrote that Isherwood wrote “about shit-eating and I about necrophilia.” (Stansky, 93)
Upward destroyed his own writing but kept Isherwood’s.

Christopher isherwood

Stansky notes that Upward cites Wilfred Owen, Katherine Mansfield, and Emily Brontë as the
greatest influences on him when an under-graduate. Emily Brontë and her sister Anne,
when ages sixteen and fourteen, created the fantasy island world of Gondal which was then
matched by Charlotte and Branwell with their fantasy island, Angria. These worlds were
preoccupied with war, spies, and romance. One wonders if “Hynd and Starn” knew about
Gondal and Angria and decided to make their own complete world which was on the Atlantic
coast of England rather than in the Pacific like Gondal and Angria. Stansky succeeds in
describing Mortmere’s significance in the English literary tradition of imaginary worlds.
Upward became a master at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, South London, in 1932 and stayed
until he retired in 1961. The year 1932 was also the year he joined the Communist Party and met his future wife, Hilda Percival, a teacher. Having met Hilda when she gave a talk at a
Party meeting, he recognized she had a different status than previous women he had known. He felt she connected him to the Workers, though Stansky shows she better fit the lower middle
class. Hilda and Edward Upward had a happy family life, including two children. Together
they continued to work for their local Party: going to meetings, selling publications,
spreading the word. His love for Hilda grew throughout their lives. “I am very lucky to have
Hilda,” he wrote to Isherwood. “Marrying her was one of the few really sensible things I’ve done in my life.” (Stansky, 241)

In 1932 Upward also went to the USSR with a group primarily of teachers. The trip helped to put Upward on a watch list for MI5 and the Special Branch of the Police. He had gotten their attention when he contributed to a Daily Worker fund in 1931. Hilda made a trip to Russia in 1933. There were files on both of them. Upward’s life seems quiet, devoted to family, teaching, and faith in Communism while his inner life could be in turmoil. His inner debate did not stop even after he and Hilda left the Party, in 1948. Could he focus on writing and shortchange political action? Would he be just another bourgeois individualist? He led a peaceful life but believed that violent revolution was necessary to change English society. He wrote The Spiral Ascent, his trilogy, in plain, straightforward prose. He abandoned his surrealist style so that workers would have no trouble understanding exactly what he wrote. In 1958, when Upward had a breakdown and might have given up writing, Isherwood wrote to Hilda, sad that his friend might abandon this part of himself. “I feel this not only because I love him but because I’m only a writer myself because of him. At the beginning he taught me everything and I’ve always felt his talent is far greater than mine, even if he hasn’t used it as much.” (Stansky, 287-288)

Edward Upward older.
Stansky presents good and bad reviews of Upward’s writing and shows how it was
received in the literary world. He doesn’t take sides but does create sympathy for his subject.
Upward was dedicated to writing but had to fight himself to do it.
In addition to being a bourgeois amongst Communists, Upward was a heterosexual among
homosexuals. His best friend, Isherwood, and others of the Auden Circle had active homosexual love lives and partnerships. None of this appears to have ruffled Upward. When
young, he wrote about his need for sexual encounters and described, in less than politically
correct language, to Isherwood how it was working out with the women he saw. He and
Isherwood exchanged this kind of information without hesitation.
Upward believed he needed to be politically active to be able to write. Yet, after the Hogarth
Press published his novel Journey to the Border, in 1938, until he broke with the Party 10 years
later, he could not write. This biography offers insights that will especially excite readers
interested in the 1930s, the literature of the time, the particular character of the English
Communist Party. Upward was a man of mystery in the contradictions within his seemingly calm life. However, it is hardly necessary that a communist should be wild eyed and badly
dressed. Some of these contradictions are stereotypes in the mind of the beholder. His
anxiety over the choice between art and life may have been resolved through writing how he
found, as in the name of the last book of his trilogy, there was “No Home But the Struggle.”
Having written that book, he brought the two into one.
– Leslie Friedman

Thanks to Maria Sakovich, editor, and The Institute for Historical Study for permission to republish this review.

Twenty Years On, by Peter Stansky (Pinehill Humanities Press), 2020

Peter D.L.Stansky, Professor Emeritus, Modern British History, Stanford University

This is a delightful book. Stansky’s felicitous style allows him to write profound observations which never hit the reader like a blow on the head. Instead, one feels historical memory and imagination light up as connections such as those between architecture in California and the Arts and Crafts movement in 19^th century England become clear. The book is a collection of essays and lectures Stansky has presented over the past twenty years. His field is modern British history focusing on the intersection of political, social, cultural, and artistic history and where each defined area influences and modifies the others.

The essays’ subjects were the interests of his books: the Arts and Crafts Movement, especially William Morris; George Orwell; Bloomsbury; writers and artists of the 1930s, especially concepts of boundaries and frontiers; World War II, especially Churchill and the London Blitz; what it means to be English. There is a contemporary subject: history over television. How does history fare when the need for drama is nearly so important as accuracy?

The book is entertaining, informative, and learned. This reader’s favorite is the Preface in which Stansky tells how he decided to be an historian and why of England (I will not divulge details best enjoyed directly). Reading these essays does not replace reading the books, but it reveals the germs of ideas that propel the books. Provocative ideas in one subject suggest relationships with ideas in other chapters of life as well as of history.

Stansky wrote two books on Orwell with the late writer and editor, William Abrahams: The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1979). Turn to Orwell’s writing to correct notions of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” One thinks the blight corroding truth is easily recognized; then falls into an enthusiasm created by Big Brother. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, about his time in the Spanish Civil War, is proof. Which side has the good guys? Hard to tell.

Stansky shows that Orwell himself saw political confusion and aggression amongst socialist and communist parties. Spain led Orwell to the political direction of his life. He became committed to Democratic Socialism, he wrote, “as I understand it,” and opposed totalitarianism.

Stansky and Abrahams give fidelity to Orwell’s texts the greatest importance. They reject the “St. George” approach to Orwell. Others define him by his virtues, but that does not address his powerful writing or its purpose. Saints, suffer though they might, are easily dismissed when not understood.

Bloomsbury writers and visual artists seem light hearted after Orwell, despite premature deaths in the Spanish Civil War and Virginia Woolf’s suicide lying ahead. Stansky presents the vision behind these artists’ works: the world is not what it seems. He points out that major thinkers in the same time period, Einstein, Freud, and, in an earlier time, Marx, demonstrated that through physics, psychology, social-economic theory. They changed the way one could perceive the world. Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing reveals lives not by appearance but in progress.

According to Stansky, history must tell the story of what happened and also explain the story’s “significance.” He does that in studies of the London Blitz and Churchill, that stout, determined Englishman who saved the world. Was it a time of mythic heroism or of “panic and fear?” These contradictory views show Stansky a truth about the English. During the Blitz, they were encouraged to stay calm. Keeping on was the victory. There was bad behavior and terror, but they won by waiting. Then, Hitler took his planes and went East.

review by Leslie Friedman

This review first appeared in the Institute for Historical Studies, Winter, 2021. Thank you to Maria Sakovich, editor, for permission to publish it in the livelyblog.