Jane Manning leaves behind a discography of unparalleled musical influence
I saw soprano Jane Manning, who died on 31 March aged 82, perform onstage just once. It was 1976 and my first ever visit to the Wexford opera festival. She sang the difficult, narrator role of Governess in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Her interpretation revealed the precise musical weapon of a soprano voice, all buttoned-up in a Miss Prim persona. Manning was disturbing in her intensity.
If I had paid more attention to her back history I would have understood why. I did not twig at the time that I was privileged to be witnessing one of the relatively few operatic appearances of the doyenne performer of 20th century avant garde music.
In Wexford, she had taken on a difficult role in an opera. Britten had written in homage to Arnold Schoenberg. Manning was to move on from there, becoming the definitive 20th century interpreter of Schoenberg, performing his 1912 Pierrot lunaire song cycle over one hundred times, eventually without needing a score. It is a fiendish work.
This feat was the equivalent of reciting the Manhattan telephone directory from memory, error-free, such is the complexity and subtlety of the piece. Manning left the score aside not because it impressed audiences, but because, latterly, Pierrot lunaire had become part of her DNA.
Such was Jane Manning’s reputation for meticulous attention to detail that she became the go-to performer for a dazzling range of modernist composers. Among those who flocked to her studio were Judith Weir, Anthony Payne, Elisabeth Lutyens, Brian Elias, James MacMillan, Colin Matthews and Matthew King.
She created the role of Max in Oliver Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are (1980), memorably staged by Maurice Sendak. Gave the premiere of John Cage’s Europera III (1990), touring it throughout Europe, and Judith Weir’s one-woman opera King Harald’s Saga (1979), which required her to assume eight roles in ten minutes.
No-one could accuse Jane Manning of courting popularity. She was intellectually committed to difficult music and dedicated her career to becoming its go-to prophetess. Once committed, she rarely let go. After adopting a work, she was apt to refine her interpretation, featuring it in her regular repertoire, sometimes performing a favoured familiar up to fifty times. Her discography was comprehensive; the song cycles of Messiaen, all Satie’s vocal music, and pieces by Berg, Dallapiccola, Ligeti and Schoenberg. Webern was a favourite.
I cannot recall if Manning ever featured in BBC Radio 2’s Sunday night easy listening show, Your Hundred Best Tunes. I suspect not. She never did “popular” for the sake of it. No cross-over artist she. The accusation was levelled that she had confined herself to a musical cul de sac. Unfair. Far from being confined to a cul de sac Jane Manning struck out to scale heights others dared not even attempt. She was the Annie Oakley of classical music’s wild new frontier. Never missed a target. Dauntless.
Pierrot lunaire is not merely a song cycle. The melodrama rests on a refined art form; Sprechstimme, music in a spoken style. Unnatural. Supremely effective when pulled off with skill but plagued with risk. Not least, the likelihood that performers will veer off at sharp corners into the soft undergrowth of actually singing. Ruins the effect.
Based on twenty-one poems by Albert Giraud – the only well-known Belgian apart from Hercule Poirot – the work ranges over life’s experiences in three cycles. Part I – love, sex and religion; Part II – violence crime and blasphemy; Part III – the journey home, haunted by memories of the past. Rummaging amongst the song titles reveals that all has not necessarily gone well for the moonstruck Pierrot on his flinty path. A Pallid Washerwoman; Theft; Gallows Song; Beheading; Parody. This is not encouraging material.
And that’s the cheery selection. The work sits alongside Schubert’s Wintereisse and Die Schönne Müllerin in its narrative and dramatic purposes but is completely shorn of their drawing room propriety. It is hard liquor untempered by water.
When first performed in 1912 Pierrot was roundly boo-ed by some in the Berlin audience. Predating Schoenberg’s move to full blown atonality, Webern was able to say with some justification that the audience could not complain. They went away “whistling the tunes”. Hmm… I think that’s a generous interpretation.
Any member of the audience who did not leave a Jane Manning performance reeling, feeling physically mugged by her soaring swoops, hisses and whispers, had missed the point. Her work was so challenging that Manning had to take care not to damage her voice when performing the vocal gymnastics required. But so great was her skill that listeners had no hint of the complexity underpinning the unforced delivery they hear.
The work has attracted the attention of a few enterprising popular singers – Cleo Laine in 1974. In 1996 Björk, never one to resist a challenge, performed Pierrot lunaire at the Verbier Festival. Asked to record it afterwards by conductor Kent Nagano, she declined. Björk had been introduced to Pierrot by way of a Jane Manning recording and chose not to walk on hallowed ground. This was territory Manning had truly made her own. Quite a Homer’s nod.
For readers with strong stomachs, I suggest watching Canadian “underground” film director Bruce laBruce’s film version of 2014, which featured gender diversity, castration scenes and dildos, as well as a female to male transgender Pierrot. Watching laBruce’s antics makes a return to Jane Manning’s 2013 recording a blessed relief.
Slight diversion time. What is an “underground” film director anyway? A self-styled oxymoron certainly, as what more “overground” act can there be than producing and promoting a film? Maybe an attempt to clad the naked second rate in the clothes of illicit mystery? Come to think of it, that was the schtick of The Velvet Underground, pop’s antimatter to The Beatles in the 1960s.
A sad exhibition dedicated to their history lingers on in downtown Manhattan. I went 18 months ago, persuaded I needed to hone up on an act that had passed me by in my youth. It was dire and the music so derivative that I had to abandon any attempt at a review on the grounds of a lack of material to even come close to a word count target. Actually, I shall put that right and review The Velvet Underground now: “They are rubbish”. There. Got that out of my system.
In 1988, Jane Manning set up an ensemble, Jane’s Minstrels, along with her by then husband, composer Anthony Payne. It will take a lot to convince me that the innocuous moniker, Minstrels was anything other than a tongue in cheek joke. Aren’t minstrels just happy troubadours?
This lot were evangelists, proselytising the cause of music’s mould breakers. The players – the number varied around a core of half a dozen instrumentalists – were bright young things fresh from music college and the ensemble quickly gained a reputation for taking on the avantgarde. If Peter Maxwell Davies’ Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot is not avantgarde, please tell me what is.
Jane Manning’s talent was to hammer home the purpose of modern music – often unapproachable – using a lifetime of conscientiously honed skills to make it compelling. Without her coaxing I would be inclined to leave much of the repertoire she addressed on the shelf, dismissing it as a faddish, cacophonous din. That would have been my loss. Her contribution to the modern music of the 20th century was incomparable. The discography she leaves is a historic legacy.