I first went to Mantua 40 years ago, alone after a breakup and feeling rather sorry for myself. The city seemed to reflect my mood: a bit dour, surrounded by Lombardian flatness, somewhat off the beaten track (a branch line from Milan). Arriving by train, as I did back in 1985, you miss the rather magical approach by car (or horse) as the mediaeval-turned-Renaissance city appears, fronted by three artificial lakes. Historically, it was a swampy place, prey to malarial outbreaks. But as I sat, aged 20, in the Piazza delle Erbe and drank a grappa for the first time, a warming sensation flooded my brain and my spirits lifted.
I was back in Mantua recently for another soothing grappa and one of the most amazing chamber music festivals I’ve ever taken part in, the Trame Sonore. The idea of its founder, the violinist Carlo Fabiano, is to make the whole city resound with chamber music over a period of a week or so. To that end, there are approaching 150 concerts listed in the programme.
Informality is the rule. People can arrive and leave during the concerts, which are never much more than 40 minutes. Dress is casual, which is pretty necessary in the coruscating heat of late spring. I heard the cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and the violinist Ilya Gringolts play Kodály and Holliger, the violist Lawrence Power and pianist Alexander Lonquich play Shostakovich (it’s 50 years since he died, so there was a lot of his music on offer). Both concerts took place in the 11th-century Rotonda of San Lorenzo, and we watched from above in a unique atmosphere of intense concentration. Late at night, I heard Altstaedt play and direct a Haydn cello concerto fizzing with energy in a theatre where a teenage Mozart performed. At the very end of my stay, Lonquich played one of Beethoven’s late sonatas, and I was moved again by that miraculous Beethovenian fusion of the intellectual and the emotional.
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As for my part in the proceedings, I wanted to bring Britten’s version of italianità once again to Italy—and so, with Lonquich, I performed his erotic-cum-spiritual masterpiece, the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, written for his lover, Peter Pears, and first performed for a presumably gobsmacked Wigmore Hall audience in the middle of the Second World War. The Italian audience, understanding the words a bit better than Londoners of the 1940s, seemed to get it.
I rehearsed in the very frescoed room, putto bedecked, where Monteverdi himself rehearsed in the early 1600s. I sang parts of his courtly entertainment L’Orfeo in the Gonzaga palace, for which it was written. And I performed some of his church music, accompanied by an organ he played on.
The wealth of the Gonzagas was extraordinary, reinforced by strategic marriages and celebrated in an unparalleled display of artistic patronage. I’d never realised before how vast the Gonzaga palace is, with room after room of 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century splendour. The jewel of jewels is the legendary Camera degli Sposi, the chamber frescoed by Andrea Mantegna between 1465 and 1474. Its colours remain fresh and dense, its celebration of dynastic power and influence vivid and at the same time unsettling. We look to art for a sort of transcendence; here it is both gorgeously transcendent and a not-so-subtle expression of prestige and predominance.
The Gonzagas went on to commission Giulio Romano’s fabulous Palazzo Te, a pleasure palace decorated with mannerist frescoes culminating in the grotesque figures of the Sala dei Giganti. And while Monteverdi was serving the family as an underpaid and overworked court musician—he managed to escape to a better job in Venice in 1613—Peter Paul Rubens arrived in Mantua to work not only as a painter but also as a diplomat and adviser: a figure on a much grander scale than the harassed composer.
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One thing that had drawn me back to Mantua was Alfred Brendel’s involvement with the festival as guest of honour over a number of years. I’d been hoping to see him there, but, in the end, he was unable to travel and, of course, a few weeks later he died, aged 94.
I’d first met him nearly 30 years ago, when I sang for the 50th birthday party of a mutual friend. I had not been professional for long, and it was terrifying to deliver, with the pianist Julius Drake, our versions of Schubert songs to the greatest Schubertian pianist of the age, sitting just six feet away. In the sonatas or the collections of Impromptus and Moments Musicaux, Alfred captured as no one else Schubert’s unique juxtaposition of the cosy and the titanic, the unearthly and the material, the cheerful and the desperately tragic.
At the end of that little, informal recital (the songs were written for just such a gathering), Alfred was charming and disarming but wondered if, in Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied”, I had sung “kipferln” (an Austrian biscuit) instead of “gipfeln” (a mountain top). I sang the song in the Austrian mountains just the other day, in a hall where Alfred often played and lectured, and silently dedicated the song to him:
Over every mountain-top
Lies peace,
In every tree-top
You scarcely feel
A breath of wind;
The little birds are hushed
in the wood.
Wait, soon you too
Will be at peace.
