It’s snowing, heavily but intermittently, when I meet Stephen Hough at a café in north London, and he ought to be in Milan. It isn’t the weather that prevented his going, though; just plain, old-fashioned Italian inefficiency.
“They’d double-booked the hall,” he tells me, smiling broadly. “My agent rang up last week to make sure everything was in place and they said, ‘Err, sorry, we’ve got a wind ensemble playing that night, not Signor Hough.’ Though had that not been cancelled, I wouldn’t have been able to meet you, so that’s good.”
This last sentence is typical of Hough: unfailingly optimistic and resolutely cheerful, he exudes warmth. Fittingly for a certified genius (he was the first classical musician to be awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, in 2001) Hough’s conversation is lateral, associative, allusive and always surprising. We began by talking of writing in general. “Really, it was doing those Telegraph blog posts that sharpened up my writing,”
Hough explains. “I’ve always loved writing and always written, but I found the wonderful thing about doing that was having deadlines, often three a week. They make one’s writing quicker and sharper, and they teach one about the importance of self-editing. I was so grateful for the opportunity to write those blogs, and really I could write about whatever I liked – though I’m glad it has finished; I have so many other pressures. It was good discipline, which I enjoyed. I’m hoping the blog posts will come out in book form, and am halfway through editing them.”
Typically, before talking about his new novel itself, Hough enthuses about the publishing process. “It’s being published by a pair of Israeli academics who grew up in England. I had to choose from over 200 papers and pick the exact font.” This he says with relish usually reserved for the rarer breeds of beef. “It took me three years to write, though the seed was planted years ago. When I was a teenager I read all those dense French Catholic novels – by Mauriac, Bernanos, Julien Green – all of which saw sinners as part of the fabric of the Church. There are lots of prostitutes in Catholic countries because sinners are close to God, so they’re tolerated more in that Latin way than they are here.”
This is one of the main themes of the novel, going along with “a lot of my theological musings, even some biblical commentary, but nothing of my personality. Though of course there are glimpses of my background; I wanted to appear in a Hitchcock way.”
The Final Retreat is, essentially, the notebook of Fr Joseph Flynn, a middle-aged priest living in Altrincham, Cheshire, who has lost his faith. His bishop sends him on an eight-day silent retreat where Fr Flynn has nothing to do but write and examine himself. “It’s more about mood and atmosphere than plot,” Hough explains. “This is a man for whom the idea of thinking about faith is abhorrent, though I think you sense during the eight days his spiritual development. It’s a modernist experiment – more like looking at the underside of a tapestry than the scene it portrays.”
He returns to the honesty of the sinner, which this novel extols. “Look at the story of the woman caught in adultery. I also look at the Church’s treatment of Jews, of homosexuality, at the nature of baptism, the sacraments, the Mass, and at childhood.”
He says the book also explores the “extremes of conscience”: how the man who was at an altar celebrating Mass can be found, an hour later, in the company of a male escort.
Strong stuff, then, especially given that it is an avowedly Catholic novel. Is he worried about the criticism this aspect of the book will receive from the Church? Here Hough is emphatic. “It’s not erotic, but it’s certainly explicit,” he says. “Of course it’s not gratuitous, but I think it’s important to have this portrayed clearly.”
How, then, does a musician go about actually writing a novel? “It was written with musical construction in mind, though it’s much more Sibelius than Tchaikovsky. Themes come and go in snatches – you never hear the full, flowing melody. I think of it as being much like Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony in that way. There are 60 chapters, though it could almost have been written as a prose poem.”
Never a man to do one thing when eight could happen, while finishing the novel Hough undertook a commission for a choral piece. Hallowed, written for and inspired by the British Museum’s Living with gods exhibition, was commissioned by John Studzinski’s Genesis Foundation. The piece will receive its premiere at the Museum next week in a performance by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen, to whom it is dedicated. It melds Genesis 22:17-18 (KJV, of course) with an 8th-century Chinese poem, a Navajo Indian text and the Pater Noster, and is more conventionally tonal than Hough’s recent compositions. (“I want it to be performable by good amateur choirs,” he says.)
As we finish, Hough, humming with energy, tells me of three new musical commissions on which he’s working beside the collection of Telegraph blog posts, recording projects and fresh recital programmes. Then, with a flourish of red gloves and a flash of a smile, he dashes off into the snow, and a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto.
David Oldroyd-Bolt is a freelance writer and commentator on politics, culture and religion. The Final Retreat is published by Sylph Editions. The premiere of Hallowed will take place in the Parthenon Gallery of the British Museum on Tuesday March 13 at 8pm (see genesisfoundation.org.uk)
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