Poetic Truths: David Matthews brings a composer’s perspective to a study of creative inspiration

Review of Chris Walton, Lies and Epiphanies: Composers and Their Inspiration from Wagner to Berg (University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer, 2014).

March 2015, Volume 9, Number 1, 82–6.

The mysterious quality that brings music to life – inspiration here might be called ‘the breath of life’ – is not the subject of this book; in any case it is almost impossible to explain. Chris Walton’s engaging study is concerned instead with inspiration in its engendering aspect. He takes five late Romantic composers – Wagner, Mahler, Berg, Furtwängler and Strauss – and, by closely examining received accounts of how particular works came into being, he suggests that what has hitherto been accepted as objective truth is not to be taken at face value. In the 19th century, composers, no longer subject to patrons but now free agents in a competitive artistic world, began to write about themselves and their work as a means of generating attention. Wagner was one of the first to do this, and the way he chose to write about his work, for instance in his autobiography Mein Leben, was sometimes, as he probably would have admitted, ‘a poetic embellishment’, as Walton puts it, of the literal truth.