With rather splendid timing, on Thursday Radio 3 broadcast a live concert of the Hallé Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, at the start of Manchester’s celebration of the great humanist’s 250th birthday. The Ninth ends with the setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy. “All men shall become brothers,” writes Schiller, words set thrillingly by Beethoven in a choral explosion at the end of the piece that has become the anthem of the European Union. One hopes there were tears at Bridgewater Hall.
Edward Gregson, the British composer charged by Radio 4’s PM programme with the tricky task of composing a piece to mark the UK’s departure from the union, uses Beethoven’s theme as the basis for his Notes Between Friends, a brief, melancholic duet for piano and cello (played by the composer and Peter Dixon, principal cello of the BBC Philharmonic). Gregson insists he has been even-handed in his treatment – the brief called on him to give “a middle-of-the-road view” of Brexit, “not too joyful, not too sad” – but in reality this is about as far from an ode to joy as it is possible to imagine. It feels like something that might be played at a secular funeral.
Gregson was chosen because as a young composer he had been commissioned in 1973 by the Royal Albert Hall to write a Fanfare for Europe as part of a gala concert celebrating the UK’s entry into the European Economic Community. His new piece does include a couple of Last Night of the Proms favourites, Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem, at the end. But the references could not be briefer or expressed more mournfully. He says the mood is one of “relinquishment”, which seems about right. We are giving something up and gaining nothing in return, and the cello’s plangent final notes speak eloquently of what is lost, barely offset by a final phrase on the piano that sounds like something from Scott Joplin.
The piece, which is less than two minutes long, is a stunt, dreamed up by someone who had the clever idea of getting the composer whose fanfare marked our accession to bookend our departure with an elegy. Because an elegy, despite the protestations of balance, is what it is. Given the events in the European parliament this week, a snatch of Auld Lang Syne, a burst on the bagpipes and a few choice words from Ann Widdecombe, the Brunnhilde of the Brexit party, would not have gone amiss.
You wonder what Beethoven himself might have made of the commission: asked for a little piece of occasional music based on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, he spent four years on the task and produced an epic hour-long set of variations. If the PM programme had commissioned Beethoven to produce a piece marking our departure, it would probably have been ready just in time for our re-entry.
What Gregson’s brief composition really underlines is how embarrassed we are to be leaving – what a non-event the whole thing is. A Brexit celebration in Parliament Square featuring speeches from Widdecombe, Nigel Farage, Brexit cheerleading shock jock Julia Hartley-Brewer and the bloke from Wetherspoons, plus some fake bongs, hardly sets the pulses racing. The “party of a lifetime” will be free of booze and fireworks, and rain is forecast. Where are the visionary speakers, the marching bands, the joyous crowds, the great festival of Britain marking our newfound freedom, or even the gala concert at the Royal Albert Hall? At the very least, where are the sparklers and tins of Bulldog bitter?
Gregson’s understated 100-second squib is perfect for the sense of ennui that marks the country’s mood as we finally leave the EU, with no sense of what our destination will be. This is a case of Let It Be rather than Magical Mystery Tour. We have no idea where we are going and we no longer care very much. Our collective will – the will of the people? – has been broken. It is desperately hard to be inspired by entry into an 11-month transition period.
The UK has been blessed over the years with much great ceremonial and “state” music – Purcell, Handel, Britten, Walton – but even these nonpareils would have struggled to write a memorable piece to mark our possible move towards a Canada-plus trade deal. Gregson, who was born in Sunderland (which we now revere as the spiritual home of Brexit and the former centre of a thriving car industry), has done us all a favour by not attempting anything grandiose – a choral symphony, an opera in five acts, a Sibelian cantata celebrating the life of Boris Johnson. A short rumination based on competing (and irreconcilable) visions of the world – universal brotherhood v nationalist self-expression – captures our bored, resigned, elegiac feelings exactly. I feel an early night coming on.
