Music and the word

Leo Gough talks to comic novelist PAUL MICOU about music in novels, the resilience of opera, and how Sting stole his pop career

Why do you write novels about music? Are they based on real people?

PM: Just two of my novels have been “about” music. This must be because I did nothing but play and study music for at least twelve years of my early life. If I had spent every hour God sent studying, say, heart surgery, I would have written about doctors. No character in any of my novels is based on a real person, though it could have fooled the late Michael Dibdin, a wonderful novelist who died too young this year. In a generally positive review of my novel The Death of David Debrizzi, Dibdin honed in on a particularly vivid character, Chanat, a romantic composer and pianist. “Obviously based on Alkan,” Dibdin wrote, or words to that effect. Well, it wasn't obvious to me, as I had never heard of Alkan.

I had an embarrassing conversation with a film producer years ago, when he asked me how I knew so much about music. Apparently he had been delighted by the musical details in the novel he was tempted to option. “It's a trick,” I said. This response has haunted me ever since. What I really wanted to say was that he was wrong; I had in fact left out details. I had managed to make it seem to him that he was reading about music, when he was really reading about characters who interested him, and who happened to be musicians. Music in novels -- like much of sex in novels -- usually repels me, because the author tries graphically to describe something that is debased by technical description, and that in any case everyone has already experienced in their own lives. I feel the same way about long scenes of preparing and eating food. Unless the music, or the sex, or the food are not an insight into the character, then I become detached from the story. Likewise weather.

Is opera dead?

Opera can't just “die”, it would have to be murdered with a hundred-strong chorus backing up its demise. I was struck by how many obituaries of Pavarotti raised the idea that opera had died in the mid-twenties. This can't possibly be true, I thought to myself, as even I have been to the opera a dozen times, and I remember having written the libretto for one that premiered in Warsaw and went on to Covent Garden (composer: Roxanna Panufnik). Asking if opera is dead is like asking if Brahms is dead. The answer is yes, and, of course, no.

I'm absolutely not an aficionado of opera, but it occurs to me -- from my experience with rehearsals and performances of the one opera I was involved with -- that you just can't stop those singers from singing. It is a powerful and gaudy talent they have, and they'll use it on you no matter what.

What is happening in contemporary classical music? Do you approve?

PM: For some reason I was invited to a “contemporary classical music” concert several years ago at Queen Elizabeth Hall. The great Finnish conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, raised his baton. For the next three quarters of an hour, the orchestra abused their instruments -- violins turned upside down to be struck with backs of bows; trombones likewise mistreated; oboists sucking rather than blowing. When this infernal noise subsided the elderly woman sitting next to me asked, “were we supposed to like that?” I'm sure I replied, “You don't have to,” but just in relating this story I am proving that for all these years I never forgot that performance, I certainly never forgot the tip-toe poise of Salonen, I only forgot the name of the composer.

I have a friend who is a top-notch “contemporary” composer. He's not fooling around, and he has sold out the Hollywood Bowl. When we get together we talk about Bach, like everyone else. I'll play the guitar for him; he'll play the piano for me. He's a perfectly wonderful musician. What he composes, on first listening, sounds like a Tube train entering Victoria Station. Then later, you listen again. These people have absorbed the canon, they have practised and prepared themselves, and what are they supposed to do? As my friend would agree, even as he plays the Preludes and Fugues with lifelong wonder, you do what you can.

Who are your favourite composers?

PM: In order of exposure: Herb Alpert, Handel, Bach. I should throw in Peter, Paul and Mary, I suppose. This is because when I was very young my parents gave cocktail parties, so the routine would go: Herb Alpert, Peter, Paul and Mary, then I'd fall asleep. And in the morning it would be Handel and Bach to recover our senses.

Beethoven called Bach 'the father of harmony'. Chopin slept with an edition of the Preludes and Fugues. Any musician can be moved just by looking at the man's notation. It is so perfect and balanced and humorous and exalting that this music simply cannot be improved. There must be millions of people who, like me, listen to or play Bach every day of their lives in the manner of devotion. There is no end to Bach's genius, and no end to hearing it but death, if even then.

Why does everyone rate Sting so highly? What is your opinion of his medieval album?

PM: You call him “Sting”, I call him “Gordon”. I don't know why “everyone” rates him so “highly”; my issues with Gordon are entirely personal. He stole my pop career, for a start. I was a guitarist in an excellent rock band playing the college circuit in the early eighties, when suddenly a man who looked a bit like me showed up, performing in an even better band called The Police. A few years later Mark Knopfler and I were stuck in a lift with Gordon, and neither of us would look at him. Later on a woman I was fond of told me she had stayed in the “town” Gordon owns in Italy, and that he inspired her to tears. Competitive as always, I threw myself into mastering the classical guitar, only to have Gordon, not me, come out with the medieval album you mention, which on principle I have not listened to. Also, Gordon nearly got me killed in a terrorist attack. This occurred in Paris. I was drawn to a film (“Stormy Monday”) because I wanted to know if my doppelgänger could act. He proved, infuriatingly, that he could. But two minutes after I left the cinema the four front rows of the theatre were blown up by (if I recall) Corsican terrorists. I'm definitely not saying that Gordon was a Corsican terrorist, but the experience cemented the idea in my mind that he had it in for me.

Is your Wikipedia entry accurate?

PM: My Wikipedia entry sums up the weaknesses of this project: it conflates my biography with my father's (we share the same name), so that I am both a novelist and a retired United Nations bureaucrat. I strongly resent the word “bureaucrat” as it is applied to my father. And I don't like being told I'm eighty years old, so if anyone knows how to do this, they can go in and make me, oh, twenty-eight.

Paul Micou is an American comic novelist based in Europe. His first novel, The Music Programme, set in an imaginary African country, is a hilarious satire on international development, seen through the goings-on at a scheme devoted to classical music. A later novel, The Death of David Debrizzi, is a book within a book, charting the rivalries surrounding a French concert pianist. Other novels include The Cover Artist, Rotten Times and The Leper's Bell.