Pianist and broadcaster Keelan Carew nominates Russian composer Nicolai Medtner

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. It's sometimes the case on Great Lives that the figure we celebrate is one of a cluster of enormously talented high achievers.

0:48And so it is today in the world of Russian composers. But rather than list them, I'm in the happy position of being able to leave that to the great American showman Danny Kaye, who'll deliver the list rather faster than I could.

1:20Well, our man is in there somewhere. And my guest today, helping extract him from that formidable roll call of great Russian composers, and celebrate his life for us is the pianist and broadcaster Keelan Carew. Keelan, which of that lot have you chosen and why? I think he's sandwiched in there around Balakarev, but I would like to pursue the great life that is Nikolai Metner. In a nutshell, why? For me, Metner is one of those absolutely timeless figures that is really a defence of what the artist is for and what the artist should be. and for that very reason alone, if he did nothing else other than all of the fabulous music he leaves us as a legacy, that is such a virtue in itself, I would happily stand my reputation on the line for Metna's own.

2:11As a musician and particularly a pianist, I assume you rate the music and you've just said that you do. But what of the man himself? I discovered him through the music. I started, I heard the concerti and then the sonatas and fell in love with the work first. And then naturally one wants to know the great man behind the great work. And so I dive into biographies and comparative biographies and that sort of thing. And it turns out he was an immensely complex character, you know, not a perfect figure by any means, although he has champions. But then you hear confessions from contemporaries of his, Rachmaninoff or Beno Mizeevich, who are less than all too pleased with his particularities and his excessive eccentricities from time to time.

2:56So, yeah, I'm not sure I'd actually want to meet him, but I'm very grateful for his au revoir. Let's, at this point, hear something from both the man and his music. This is Nikolai Metner himself performing part of his third piano concerto, recorded in 1947 with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

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3:58The pianist and composer Nikolai Medna, playing part of the first movement of his third piano concerto, a recording made possible by the generosity of, who else, the Maharaja of Mysore, but more of that later. I have to confess, when I learnt that we were featuring a 20th century classical composer, grumpy stick-in-the-mud that I am, I was expecting something rather more unlovely, but not so. he had very clear views on modernism and he was not a fan. Is that right, Keelan? That is more than correct, Matthew, yes. There is a manifesto, if you like, that he wrote called The Muse and the Fashion and his great colleague and friend Rachmaninoff published this and it is basically this 150-page diatribe about what's wrong with all this modern music.

4:48He's writing about the 30s, so at this point you have the avant-garde of Dadaism and Schoenberg and Stravinsky and Metna wasn't having any of it. Yes, it's curious, isn't it? He seems totally out of his time. His music is very lovable now and had he been born 50 years before, he would have been utterly celebrated as the most wonderfully romantic composer. But just in that early 20th century gap, he misses out on his flowers, as it were. Well, we're handing them over now. You virtually have a bouquet in your hand. Also joining us in the studio is the composer and pianist Francis Pott, perhaps best known for his choral music, but also a writer for piano and for many years a champion of Metner's work.

5:31Francis, welcome. Can we get a bit more on Metner's early life? We know he was born and trained in Moscow in the dying years of the Russian Empire, and that tends to conjure up images of a strict and disciplined schooling. Would that be fair? Yes, it would. Nikolai Metner was born in January 1880, although if you go by the Julian calendar, as Russia did until 1918, he was born in 1879. As with most things with Metner, there's no simple answer. Nikolai was the fifth of six children. His father was the managing director, I think you would call it, of a Moscow lace factory. So they were a prosperous family.

6:17and the family had originated in Denmark and then moved to Germany and then from there to Estonia. And Nikolai's grandfather moved to Moscow and married a German Lutheran immigrant of Spanish descent. And Nikolai was very much supported in his musical endeavours by Emil, the eldest, of whom I'm sure we're going to talk later. When Nikolai was 12, he came back from school and insisted suddenly that he was going to the Junior Conservatoire in Moscow. He just told his parents he was leaving school, did he? He seems to have announced it as a statement of fact rather than a request, and that tells you something already about his character, I think.

7:01There was a streak of naivety about him, but also of obstinacy, and I think we recognise that in the way later on he insisted on programming his own work to the exclusion of most other things, even when, as Keelan says, the tide of modernism had made him unpopular. Stubborn, Keelan. Stubborn to a fault, I think. It led to some serious struggle for Metner, but worthwhile again, ultimately, as we sit here now, with this just wonderful, magical corpus. I mean, you hear that music there. It doesn't sound like anything else, but it clearly knows how to conjure these wondrous images for us. He was a sort of prodigy, wasn't he?

7:39Yes, undoubtedly very gifted from a very young age and, like many prodigies, very sure of themselves, very confident, very hard to teach. I want to pick up on a tantalising reference that Francis made to his older brother Emil. And then there was Emil's wife, Anna. Could you tell us about that, Francis? Well, we're leaping ahead a bit. In 1896, the Metna family went on holiday to Kuntseva outside Moscow. and there they met the family called Bratenchi with three sisters, Maria, Anna and Eliana. Karl Metner married Eliana Bratenchi and Emil began to go out with Anna Bratenchi when they returned to Moscow.

8:27He took her to the theatre and to concerts and Nikolai traipsed around in their wake as an unwilling chaperone. Goosbury. Goosbury indeed, yes. or perhaps not entirely unwilling since quietly on the side he fell in love with Anna himself. And thereafter the sequence of events begins to unfold rather like the plot of a bad opera. Eventually Mother Metner, Alexandro Karlovna Metner, who was the matriarch of the family, perceived what was happening and forbade him to have any more to do with Anna. A few years passed and out of sight seemed to be out of mind. And in 1902, Emil was offered the post of government censor in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, which is about 300 to 400 miles east of Moscow.

9:20And he announced that he wouldn't take the post unless Anna consented to be his wife. And so he proposed to her and she kind of accepted. She said, I can never be a proper wife to you. Make of that what you will for the time being. And so Emil and Anna married and were living in Nizhny Novgorod. In the meantime, Nikolai had become engaged to somebody else. And so there was all the more reason to suppose he'd forgotten about Anna. But in 1903, Nikolai and his father travelled to visit Nikolai's fiancée. But on the way, they stopped off at Nizhny Novgorod to see Anna and Anna. And old suppressed feelings bubbled up, as they will.

10:06And we don't know why Anna entered Nikolai's room, but she did. And she found him in the depths of despair. And in the ensuing conversation, their true feelings for one another were revealed. And how does it end? Well, it doesn't end for a very long time because Anna and Nikolai confessed to Emil their true feelings for one another. And Emil forgave them, but enjoined them not to reveal their position to their parents, and in particular to their mother. And it was this need to keep up a veneer of bourgeois respectability and gentility, which governed everything. But the parents didn't become formally aware of the position until 1909.

10:51and this is despite the fact that Emil and Anna and Nikolai were all living under the parental roof in 1906. Emil made no move to annul his marriage until 1914. 1914, what happened? Well, the first thing that happened was that war broke out between Germany and Russia. Emil had moved via Munich, where he was briefly interned, to Zurich and took Swiss citizenship. But Anna and Nikolai were together at this point. Anna and Nikolai were together, but they married only in 1919 after the death of Nikolai's mother. With Emil's permission? Well, yes, implicitly so. I mean, Emil was absent from the scene, but he'd annulled his marriage.

11:38Yes, but he can't have been very pleased about it, can he? He seems to be behaving extremely generously. This is all the while why I think he's sort of financially supporting Nikolai as well. So, you know, just patronising your baby brother while he, not steals, but, you know, ends up with your former wife. It's a mini scandal, mini scandal. If you were making a biopic, I'm afraid this is what it would all be about. There would be a lot of this. It's an amazing story. Did it affect his music? Do you think either of you? This is the curious thing, because as far as I can tell, he just seems to just almost ascetically and religiously just continue churning out music.

12:20I mean, it's prolific, really. There isn't a composer in his generation that produces that number of piano sonatas, the 100 plus songs. Amongst all this tumult of his dates, you know, 1880 to 1951, which are some of the worst dates to be a European, I think, in world history. And none of it seems to bother him or affect him. He's just quietly got his corner of the world. I think there's evidence that Nikolai did write in a way that reflected his life experience. I mean, we have to consider him as a really rootless person. He went from Russia, revolutionary Russia, to Germany. Then he went to France.

13:00Then he spent six months in the States at Rachmaninoff's behest, which was a success, but he didn't stay there and he didn't speak English at that point. then he was back in France and then he made six visits to England between 1928 and 1935 and finally settled in England in 1935. I think it's hard to imagine from a sort of existential point of view that the music couldn't have been affected by the light. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

13:43This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:04I want to read you this observation made by one of Metna's colleagues, Alexander Osofsky. As an individual, he was unusually attractive, infinitely modest, quiet, delicate, shy like a little girl, with a sensitive, lofty soul. He was, in truth, a man not of this world, being in no way adapted to practical life. Now, that's odd because you don't have to read much about him to discern a stubborn individualist who, for example, just told his parents he'd finished with his school and was going off to study music, who later refused kind sponsors' advice on how to make his career in music, who was very good at touring but decided he didn't want to tour.

14:51Keelan, are we talking the poetic soul of an artist or a complete nightmare to live and work with? If only those things were mutually exclusive, I think. And unfortunately, they often come with one another. Yeah, to be completely speculative, by the sounds of that description and other attestments to Metna's sort of, to be uncharitable airheadedness, but to be charitable, you know, how much he was just constantly looking inward. I mean, words he uses a lot is mystic depth. Make of that what you will. You know, to be completely speculative, I would say he was sort of neurodivergent or something like that.

15:28because he seems very withdrawn or ignorant of much of what was going on around him or simply not interested. But the music, again, where his output lies, it's often on very fantastical themes. We know he's a serious man of letters. He's constantly reading Pushkin and Goethe and the great literature of history, and much of the music reflects that and these mystical, magical tales. Nothing of the politics and the world that's actually going on around him. He's just removed himself and he's lucky that he can because of his privileged position, wealthy family, wealthy colleagues that can support him.

16:06And, you know, Rachmaninoff secured that tour for him because Rachmaninoff was someone who paid attention to the critics and the audiences and profited immensely from it. Rachmaninoff admired him immensely, didn't he? Yes, Rachmaninoff regarded him as the true light. And when Rachmaninoff helped Metner out and Metner thanked him, He simply said time and again, it's my duty. You're listening to The Great Life of Nikolai Metner, nominated by Keelan Carew. Metner left what was by then the Soviet Union a few years after the revolution. We've followed his travels around the world. Keelan, you strike me as an artist who's responding to the changing environment in classical music.

16:52Metner wasn't, was he? He wasn't really responding at all. or part of the reason maybe why he never became a sensation. Does that frustrate you about him? Only because I can't afford to do the same thing! Which is very telling. I think he's fortunate that he's supported by others. There is a serious element of charity here, and as someone that comes from a completely different background, I can only respect the work. I can enjoy that, and I meet him there, but I can't say I would have liked to have met him or been his agent. That would have been nightmare work. You say a completely different background in a way, yes, but you two have quite a mixed roots, mixed background.

17:35That's one thing I do relate to him on, actually. Yeah, there's a cosmopolitanism. So, yeah, my mother's side of the family is as thoroughly English as we can tell. My father's side are from the Caribbean, Barbados. You know, there's already that being another place, but also being thoroughly British and growing up here. And Metna shares that heritage via his German-European roots and then finding home in Russia, and a Russia that he loves but has a complex relationship with. I can relate to that vacillation of one's identity. He was just ravenously consuming culture across the world, which is hence why I suspect he ends up in this relationship with the Maharaja from another completely different world.

18:16These kindred spirits through history pop up that are just so excited by existence, you know, and that, you know, I find a real kindred spirit in Metna. Tell me a little bit about the Maharaja, Francis. Well, the Maharaja appears only in 1946 when Metna was in the last five years of his life. And by then Metna was suffering from a heart condition. But the Maharaja had apparently come across some of Metna's music while he himself was a student at Oxford. And then some years later, he had a sister who was studying music in Berlin and he found a score of Metna's on her piano and said, would you play this to me?

18:58And she played it. And he became fascinated by Metna. And so he wrote to his trade envoy in London saying, I'd like to sponsor a series of recordings and the setting up of a Metna society. We all need a Maharaja. Yes, I haven't found mine yet. Not me! We've taken him to London, where he lived for the rest of his life. Why did he choose London, do you think? He'd moved to Berlin from Russia, and he hated the Berlin musical climate, and doors were closed to him for some of the reasons, Gulen, you've mentioned already, the tide of modernism leaving him behind. Yes. He didn't make much headway in France either.

19:41And while he was in France, he began to make visits to England. And he met a young pianist called Edna Isles, whose father was a businessman in Birmingham. And Edna played to him the solo part of his second piano concerto. And the beginnings of a sort of mentoring relationship were formed. But the main thing that's brought him to London was a Russian architect by the name of Mikhail Breitkovich, who'd been the mayor of Odessa at the time of the Revolution in 1917 and had ended up in England and was a passionate music lover. And he was also a property developer, so he was putting up houses round the north London suburbs and he offered Metner a house at a knock-down rate.

20:28He was with Anna, wasn't he, Metner? So he offered a couple of houses. Yes, they were together inseparably. and to go back to what we were saying earlier about Nikolai being detached from reality, Anna did everything for him. Again, it's so strange. I can't condone his personality. And he doesn't sound, again, he doesn't sound responsible at all. I don't think you like him. No, I don't think I do. I've sort of convinced myself. But again, I'm a big believer in the Roland Barthes, death of the artist. You know, there is the artist and then there is the artist. Of course, there's a causation and correlation.

21:03but the fortune of knowing an architect that can give you a house in North London. Well, I think it's overstating his luck to say that he was fortunate. I mean, he had a really rough time and they left Russia with only the clothes they stood up in. That's true. But people were kind to him. People were kind to him. The Maharaja was kind to him. He was and Metna was duly grateful. I mean, he did thank people. Yes. You can't question his work ethic as well. He was slavishly productive and consistent in his work. The recordings he was making with the Maharaja's help made an impression on a 16-year-old piano student called Gerald Kingsley who would go on to become a celebrated music publisher.

21:50In 1950, he wrote a fan letter to the great composer and was surprised to learn from the record producer that he was living just a few minutes away in Golders Green. He told our producer what happened next. This is a letter I received back from Nikolai Metna. Dear Mr Kingsley, thank you very much for your kind letter. I shall be very glad to meet you. Will you please phone Thursday the 18th between 1 and 2, Speedwell 2150. And that was the start of our friendship. we discovered that his recreation what he really liked to do was to sit beside of the river our family had a car so we used to take him to Twickenham or Maidenhead at weekends so that he would be able to do that and he and his wife were very happy sort of basking in deck chairs and eating ice creams but certainly I remember he was always very keen on ice creams and Anna was very keen that in fact things should be rather rationed.

22:58But he was just a very quiet, internal, modest man. He had no bitterness, owing to the fact that his music was not known at all. I think he was just particularly happy that the music had reached me, that I was immersed in this music, and he felt sort of very humble about it. He was a very humble man. Gerald Kingsley, one of the last people to have known the subject of today's programme, Nikolai Metner. We're so lucky today to have both a pair of distinguished pianists and a very fine piano to hand. So I'll be bold. Could you, Keelan, show rather than tell? Assuade our listeners and me that we can be beguiled by Metner, that we can be swept away as perhaps we are by Rachmaninoff.

23:51Oh, gosh. Have a go. I'll try my darndest. I'll give you one theme from one of his sonatas. So this is from the Sonata Romenescenza, and I think it's just one of his most obsessively charming themes.

24:42Beautiful. That was sort of filmic, that music, wasn't it? Yes, it was. And Nicolai wrote it in 1919 to 1920. and in January 1920 he and Anna were homeless after the worst of the revolution and they'd been lent a cottage by Anna Trojanowskaia, a painter which they lived in at Bugri, south-west of Moscow, in the forest. And I'd like, if I may, just to read a little of Barry Martin's translation of Anna Trojanowskaia's recollection of this. She wrote, It was an evening in January 1920 when a proper lamp was burning on the piano, something we thought a rare luxury and comfort. Nikolai Karlovich called us to him.

25:30We stood by the piano, Anna Metner's head resting on my shoulder, and he played to us for the first time in full his Sonata Reminiscenza.

25:43Our total solitude in the forest, the winter behind the dark windows of his room and the richness of the piano sonority under his hands. All this made an absolutely magical impression on us.

25:58Nikolai Metner died at his home in Golders Green on 13th November 1951. He's buried alongside his brother Emil in Hendon Cemetery and, as we've heard, he leaves a substantial volume of work for the piano and the voice, a growing number of recordings of his work. But he still flickers in that dimly lit world of the classical music aficionados. It's a pity it couldn't flare rather than flicker, don't you think, Keelan? It is, it is. And interesting you say the word eclipse again. Countless times by musicians and pianists I respect enormously, I've heard this abominable line that sort of dismisses Metna out of hand, where they say, ah, yes, Metna, good music, but it's like Rachmaninoff without the tunes.

26:49And, I mean, I play these sorts of examples to put that to bed as soon as I can. I mean, it's a appalling sort of dismissal and shrinking of his output. There's that great line from Mahler, isn't there? The tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. And I think myself and many colleagues like Francis and whatnot, you know, we're all holding on to that Metna's little flame. We all constantly think there's going to be this breakthrough moment where, I don't know, Metna ends up in a movie or, you know. Yes, are we waiting for the film? I don't know if there'll be the film about his life before many of the other films.

27:22He could be waiting quite some time. Yes, yes. Or, you know, the right hit in the Spotify algorithm or whatever it takes these days for him to, you know, sort of bloom into popular consciousness. But I think he will continue being the slow burn because his music does not often immediately grab you when you first hear it. There are excerpts and moments, you know, the iconic opening of the first concerto and that sort of thing that do grab you. But most of the time it takes repeated listening. And that takes a patience from all of us and inner patience that becomes immensely rewarding. I think you have a quote from the music critic, Ernest Newman, that might sum up the case for Metner's music.