In praise of... The Longevity of Geniuses

My memory of this week has, frustratingly, been defined by the constant battle against a vicious cold/flu (tbc – probably a mixture of both) attack which, as of now, seems to have no end in sight. Year after year, I had hoped to evade the winter germs, but what with daily commute on a variety of public transports combined with a sealed ‘open plan’ office (one of the major blights of modern civilisation), it was doomed to be hope in vain. The only comfort is that colleagues who piously queue up to get their flu jabs each autumn don’t ever seem to manage to prove the potency of the injection at all. I’ve always defiantly opted out of the jabs, so if we’re all getting the same germs anyway, at least I can (somehow) be content with the thought that I don’t have the extra shot of unidentified chemical substance in my system on top of everything else.

Out of a week’s mental state of near-total blur (inevitable, when your nostrils are hopelessly blocked – they are located quite close to the brains after all), two events stand out, and they do have something significant in common. On Tuesday we had Steve Reich back in town, who graciously took his bow again and again after the breathtaking performance of his 1970 classic ‘Drumming’ by the Colin Currie Group at Queen Elizabeth Hall. [Disclaimer: Colin is a dear friend and this article is not going to focus on the concert itself. For totally objective reviews who all heap praises on the performance, check the London broadsheets.] That composition date immediately gives the game away: it was hard to believe that this magical piece was written 40 years ago. The cultural landscape has shifted away – quite a long way away – from the modernist rigours that Reich and his peers were working against at the time. But the work itself has truly passed the test of time, and in each of the three live performances I have heard of it over the last four years (one with Reich and Musicians, two with the CC Group), it was as fresh, mesmerising, challenging and exhilarating as ever – all of these things at the same time. And if the size of the returns queue on Tuesday was anything to go by, I am not alone in being an addict to this music.

But I digressed. I was really going to remark on the Steve Reich conversations that I witnessed that day – one that I was actually a part of (a business meeting discussing programming plans for a major feature of his music next year), and the second was his post-concert talk with Colin on stage. I had to intermittently try to convince myself that we were really talking about those concert plans in the context of his forthcoming 75th birthday (the last big birthday four years ago was celebrated ‘in style’ with festivals in New York, London and elsewhere). Seventy-Five?! Not that long ago, most people would be very happy to live to that age, even in developed countries. But this guy talks and moves about with the sharpness, lucidity, humour, agility and energy that most thirty- year-old guys walking down the street will never possess. At the meeting, I would have happily sat there for hours more to hear him elucidate on Baroque music, African music, DNA, and the atomic bomb, but we had to stop because he had another four meetings to attend to before the evening concert. (And I was still trying desperately to breathe like a normal person.)

As if to prove my point, the other musical celebrity for the thinking man that I encountered, the very next day, was a sprightly octogenarian. It was National Theatre’s Platform event (40 minutes of on-stage interview, followed by Q&A) with Stephen Sondheim, the first of many events to take place in London this year to mark his 80th birthday. This was one of the rare Platform events to be held in Olivier, the largest of the three auditoria in the building, and all eleven hundred seats were packed to the rafters before the talk began. As the great man walked on to the stage, the assembled fans erupted with applause – he got a standing ovation before having even uttered a word! In the next sixty minutes, he gave the most fascinating and thoughtful account of his early days working with Oscar Hammerstein, (briefly) of his formal studies with Milton Babbitt (!), of the working method he used while collaborating with the stellar roll-call: from Hammerstein to Bernstein to Harold Prince. This was, as much as anything else, a chance to hear a living, breathing encyclopaedia of the history of musical theatre recollect the highlights of a half-century’s repertoire, and I was especially heartened to discover that the attentive audience was far from a roomful of grey heads. As with the previous evening’s audience at the Reich concert, it was a rather even spread of ages and genders. The twenty-year-olds seemed to have no less connection to a work like Sunday in The Park with George or Sweeney Todd than their grandparents, and Sondheim answered their questions not with the manner of an elderly statesman, but as a cerebral, witty, genial creator of those timeless works who could easily beat anyone forty years his junior in a debate.

With great creative people like these, you do expect the intelligence to ripe beautifully with old age, but the agility and quick-wittedness that both these guys exuded embody an eternal youthfulness so startlingly, that you have to believe the potency of creative power itself – more than anything that science has come up so far, it gives us the hope of eternal youth. Reich has his composing schedule utterly full for the next few years – the concept of ‘taking a break’ probably shouldn’t exist if you’re perpetually inspired by life itself – and Sondheim coyly revealed at the end of the talk that he had ‘been working on something’ for the last few years which would see the light of day soon. And I remind myself of Louise Bourgeois (89), of Paula Rego (75), of David Lodge (75), of Alan Bennett (76), of Elliott Carter (102) – all of whom are reaching new heights in their respective genre with each new work they give us. If we’re at least able to easily comprehend the senescence that these names are associated with, consider the fact that Stephen Spielberg is 64, Paul McCartney 68, Dustin Hoffman 74 (I know, I was quite startled by this too when I searched online)… The list goes on and on. The lesson seems simple: Create, and Live a Long Youth. In this order.