Max Richter - Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works

A Closer Listen

The last time Max Richter was featured at A Closer Listen, he was awarded the Album of the Year.  This produced enormous expectations for the follow-up, yet to no one’s surprise he’s come through again.  Of course, once one has recorded an 8 1/2 hour album (Sleep), a single disc must seem a much easier challenge.

As far back as The Blue Notebooks (2004), Richter has been known to place snippets of dialogue in his music.  This may be part of what drew him to film work, or vice versa.  Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works is yet another extension of his career, the highlights of a score to a Royal Ballet production that one can still catch at London’s Royal Opera House through Valentine’s Day.  One hopes the full score will become available soon as well, because even Richter’s incidental music is worth hearing.  Like the ballet, the album has a three-point structure, based on Virginia Woolf’s novels Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves; but it works better without apparent division, as a reflection of Woolf’s life from metaphorical birth (the chimes of Big Ben) to her wrenching suicide note.  Ironically, the texture of the album echoes that of Matana Roberts’ COIN COIN Chapter Three: river run thee, the album that Richter narrowly beat in 2015 to take the top prize.  The tracks blend together in suites, and touch upon sonic collage.  Field recordings are integrated, along with Woolf’s own voice, telling her story through juxtaposition and sonic suggestion.

The mood ranges from gorgeously lush (“In the Garden”) to somber (“War anthem”) to devastatingly aching (“Tuesday”).  Once the album has been played, that final extended track looms over the entire enterprise like a cloud whose rain has already begun to fall, but has not yet hit the earth.  For those unfamiliar with her story, Woolf penned a final, crushing note to her beloved husband, then drowned herself by walking into a river, weighed down by a large stone in her coat.  As Gillian Anderson reads the note, one can’t help but protest, “No!”, to somehow stop, or even pause, what has already occurred.  And yet, and yet, and yet …

Richter’s victory is to provide a soundtrack to Woolf’s life, and even deeper, her heart.  Her moments of joy are fleeting, but identifiable.  Her moments of depression contain their own apologetic beauty.  Even her suicide note was examined as a work of art, by Woolf’s own words a paltry piece of writing.  The music struggles with thoughts of grace given to sorrow, as the act so painful to others has been remembered with forgiveness.  “Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.”

If the Mrs. Dalloway suite is the overture and The Waves the culmination, the playful Orlando makes the weight of emotion bearable.  Straddling the center of the album, these shorter pieces speak to possibilities and imaginations.  Electronics come into play in note and shadowed drone.  One is grateful for the respite, even during the suite’s stormier passages.  “Transformation” is as regal as Michael Nyman’s score for Prospero’s Books, while a church organ lends “Morphology” a spiritual aspect and sudden strings make “The tyranny of symmetry” seem like an attack.  Moods tumble quickly in these pieces, which are often less than two minutes apiece.  While intended to reflect the tumultuous novel, they also recall Woolf’s manic depressive life, so many moods battling for prominence until the end, when there only one remained.

It takes a strong disposition to make it through the album, especially given the length of the final piece.  After Woolf repeats an earlier thought, she discards her words, as if disgusted with the failings of her prose.  In her wake, a long, slow, intricate build, the author weighed down as the orchestra continues to rise.  But no protest ~ no string, no bell ~ is strong enough to stave her fate.  In the end, there is only the lapping of waves, the sodden words bleeding their ink on the shore.  (Richard Allen)

Available here

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Max Richter’s Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works opens with these lines, spoken by Virginia Woolf herself. It’s an extract from the only surviving recording of the author, which the BBC broadcast in 1937 from a programme on craftsmanship, which was part of a series called Words Fail Me. Eventually, words would fail Woolf - becoming incapable of sustaining her - but Richter’s record primarily deals with three of Woolf’s books that demonstrate her virtuoso use of them. This music was created to accompany Wayne McGregor’s ballet triptych, and like the ballet, the score is presented in a three-part structure.

The first part is built around Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, which centres on a day in the life of high-society woman Clarissa Dalloway, and features shell-shock-suffering WW1 veteran Septimus Warren Smith. The opening four tracks that relate to this novel are largely acoustic, and the most traditional on the record. Yet much like Woolf’s fiction Richter seems to echo the stream of consciousness prose, and the exploration of memory and perception in her work. The initially ponderous 'In the Garden' builds and gains traction from a simple piano line to incorporate a trio of string instruments. As the violin, viola and cello intertwine around each other the track rises in complexity and emotional capacity. On 'War Anthem' the cello’s deep resounding throb gives way to lighter ascending stings full of heart-rending sorrow. But it’s despair leavened with intense beauty. To complete this section 'Meeting Again' revisits and amalgamates the musical motifs and themes of the previous two tracks for a mournful lament.

Sarah Sutcliffe’s reading, 'Memory is the Seamstress', shifts the tone, scored as it is by electronics. And 'Modular Astronomy' breaks from the previous acoustic trio for a discordant and distorted synthesised soundscape. This second section soundtracks Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, which follows the adventures of an eponymous sex-switching, century-hopping poet. Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West is attributed as the chief inspiration for the novel, and her son Nigel Nicholson described the work as, 'the longest and most charming love-letter in literature.' Richter matches the emotional and psychological complexities of Woolf’s groundbreaking novel admirably. Given how radical the material was for its time in its exploration sexuality, and Woolf’s position as a modernist, Richter ably reflects this progressive prose by combining traditional acoustic instrumentation with ambient electronics. The Orlando tracks flit between the dramatic orchestration of 'Transformation' and 'The Tyranny of Symmetry' through to the pulsing electronics of “Persistence of Images,” and “Genisis of poetry”s” flexing synths.

The final section concerns her most experimental work the 1931 novel The Waves. It begins with Gillian Anderson’s recital of Woolf’s last words, the suicide note written to her husband Leonard Woolf. Her words are backed by an eerie string line, and the sound of crashing waves that mirror both the book’s title and lyricism, and Woolf’s own watery end. The third and final part of the record consists of one sole track 'Tuesday' that runs over 20 minutes. It seems fitting, as it reflects a novel that consists of six characters' internal monologues that blur into one another. The music swells and recedes, ebbs and flows; the crests crowned with Grace Davidson’s pure and high vocal. The result is utterly immersive and makes for a highly emotive conclusion of fitting breadth.

You could easily apply Woolf’s musings on words to music, as after centuries of music-making instruments, notes, chords, styles, genres and sounds are loaded with meaning and memory. But to his credit, Max Richter has crafted something that feels like a timeless nod to the past, and yet an inventive ode to Woolf’s modernism. He has followed up the exceptional Sleep with yet another dazzling work that is “full of echoes, of memories, of associations” that celebrate and reflect this towering writer.

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Two years ago, the choreographer Wayne McGregor premiered “Woolf Works,” a narrative dance piece based on three Virginia Woolf novels (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves) at the Royal Opera House. He enlisted Max Richter to pen an original score for over two-hour, three-act affair. The production, by and large, was polarizing, eliciting high praise and violent rebuke. The New York Times singled out Richter’s score, which “frequently veer[ed] into cinematic manipulativeness.” It is hard not to read this an indictment of Richter, but in reality, it highlights how his score is able to stand apart from the piece it belongs to. Now available for the first time, a slightly truncated version of Richter’s score proves something he has been talking about quite a bit in the later years of his career: that his work is unified by an obsession with storytelling.

The score opens up with “Word,” the first movement in the first act (inspired by Mrs. Dalloway). The piece is composed of a chorus of bells, gongs, and sampled human bustling (the bell of Parliament’s Elizabeth Tower, traffic in Gordon Square). Seconds later, through the haze, the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice plays. She reads a portion of the essay part of a BBC broadcast called “Words Fail Me,” waxing poetic on the ghostly nature of the English language (“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations”) and the impossible negotiation between private meaning and public discourse in prose writing. It is a stunning way to open the score, and gives credence to Richter’s invisible hand shaping the narrative of the dance.

After the introduction, the next three pieces cleave closer to convention. Apparently, much like Dalloway, the sounds are supposed to evoke the novel’s revolutionary focus on the “texture of the ordinary day,” and here, Richter takes that to mean something closer to rote string arrangements, where dips and dives are telegraphed like a routine ballroom dance. Some of it is quite beautiful, foregrounding his graceful piano playing. “War Anthem,” in particular, is quite similar to some of his earlier work, like “On the Nature of Daylight,” epic scale and all.

The more adventurous side of Richter is made more apparent in the dance’s second act, based on Orlando, Woolf’s most personal work. Inspired by the novel’s transformational conceit, (it tells a fictional biography of a 16th-century male poet who turns into a woman, and lives till the present day) he turned to the “La Folia,” a Portuguese folk dance so wild and noisy that it was associated with madness. Richter's singular ability to meld electronics into classical arrangements breathes life into this idea, and on pieces like the “The Explorers” or “Modular Astronomy,” he deploys electronics that are both silken and pointedly mechanical. He uses glitches, hiccups, and washes of noise to elevate pockets of lonely strings and keystrokes to heights of anachronistic beauty. Other works like “Entropy” recall the squeamish grace of Oneohtrix Point Never.

The score concludes with the sounds of waves lapping in the middle of the ocean, and Gillian Anderson’s voice floats into focus, giving dramatic reading of Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband Leonard. After almost 40 minutes of instrumental music, the introduction of an august British voice is startling. For a second, it can feel too on-the-nose (of course the section about The Waves has waves), and maybe even manipulative to use the letter to elicit an emotional response. But, as Anderson’s voice dissolves into the oceanic strings, the next 21 minutes build to a plaintive, melancholy peak. Richter said that his 8-hour piece Sleep was a much easier work than Woolf Works, and it shows; he was asked to make a musical world for three vastly different novels, united by an almost private language of symbols and themes. His goal with the score was to “evoke the experience of jumping between languages” in order to mimic what Woolf so often does in her writing. Like McGregor, he set an impossible bar, and even if he doesn’t clear it, the fall leads to something arresting nonetheless.