Programme Notes for my Granddad's Funeral: A Musical Eulogy

Funerals don't usually require programme notes, and my granddad's would never have been an exception to that rule had he not sent me the following email in 2014:

I was asked by your Father to make my musical choices known in advance.

I have been addicted to Johan Vorsen's Entry of the Boyars for more than sixty years so what better way to start. You might shorten it a bit.

For the middle I would like Walton's Façade Popular Song. I do not have a copy. Too mean to buy. It is, if you did not already know, a sneer at crooners.

For my last, literally, I have chosen one of Elgar's Enigma Variations.

I trust that you will find these acceptable and spare you your organ playing,

Love

GD

If it isn't already abundantly obvious, he was an odd man. Dad always accused him of "talking in crossword clues": note, for starters, how I am supposed to deduce that he is talking about his own funeral from the thinly veiled (albeit justified) attack on my organ playing alone. He was notorious for sending weird emails like this. When word got back to him that I'd been beaten up outside a gay bar when I was in second year, he sent me one with the subject line "Assault" that simply read: 

George

Perhaps your assailant wants to go inside to avoid the cold weather.

GD

Har de har har.

Nan's ashes were practically still warm when he sent me the former, more bewildering litany of subtext with its two attached .mp3 files. If I remember correctly, dad only told him to pick his own funeral music because he had taken such marked exception to the ABBA songs that we had played at nan's. The only childhood memory I have of nan listening to music involved her fussily trying to tune in to Jazz FM while erratically jerking her Ford Galaxy people-carrier, packed with grandchildren, through Camberley town centre, only to immediately shut it off because it was "a racket". Allegedly, though, she liked ABBA, and the bittersweet strains of "Mama Mia" did actually make for very poignant funeral music in all sorts of ways. Granddad's distaste did not stop at the act of curation. As if the Walton wasn't a bizarre enough choice, the fact that he didn't even own a copy of it ("too mean to buy") and yet was armed with the dubious reading that it is, "if you did not already know, a sneer at crooners" strongly suggests to me that he essentially picked it as an elaborate troll of his newly dead wife's apparently low-brow taste in music.

He was not a musician. He had a modest collection of CDs, many of them from the BBC Music Magazine, and almost all of them mediocre recordings of canonical favourites (I had a habit of permanently borrowing his better ones). He never came to a single one of my concerts, not even when I played at the Royal Festival Hall (aboutt 40 miles from his house). I once gave him a DVD of me playing at the Bridgewater and he returned it, weeks later, with the cellophane wrapping still intact. 

Granddad's outer two music choices broadly make sense, I suppose, but were still weird in less obvious ways than the Walton. He may well have been "addicted" to Entry of the Boyars, but Halvorsen's actual, full name clearly elided him somehow. The piece itself is grandiose. Originally composed for the stage, its theatricality derives from some imagined 18th-century Bucharestian pageantry. Imagining a boyar (bearish, bearded, resplendent in robes and elaborate hat) as I saw granddad's coffin carried in to such a jaunty clarinet solo almost elicited a macabre, Outnumbered-esque giggling fit.

He didn't look much like a boyar to me. Always such a skinny man, and his mannerisms were endearingly odd. He habitually sucked air in through sideways-parted lips, exaggeratedly lifting his bushy eyebrows and drawing the corners of his mouth down when interrupted or surprised, and poising tense, splayed fingers under limp wrists while stepping on unbent knees and making high groans in his throat like some sort of avian t-rex whenever nan nagged him about something. A few short days earlier, I had seen his corpse stretched out in a care-home bed: mouth gaping, skin taught and grey, catheter bag hanging dark orange and ominous. I had never seen a corpse before, but I had seen nan looking like an animated one. In her final days she was chap-lipped, jaundiced, and skeletal, raving through a paranoid, morphine-induced haze. Grandad was pronounced dead minutes before I arrived; if we hadn't stopped at the chippy on the way, perhaps I'd have seen his last, sideways-sucked breath.

What did wipe the smirk off my face, though, was the sweetness of the march melody's shift into the major mode (at 1.04) as they set down the coffin and bowed. Because he was a sweet man, and to see him enthusing about maths, or stroking a cat, or with a baby cousin on his knee, was to see sweetness personified. I'm glad we faded it out before the B section, though (at 1.28). A bit of ugly side-drum action really isn't enough to prepare a gear-stick shift from G major to E flat. All those false relations would have been too grotesque again. Anyway, nan and granddad both drove automatics with almost evangelical zeal. They hated gear-stick shifts.

The Elgar that granddad picked so melodramatically ("for my last, literally"!) was of course "Nimrod": a shameless utterance of "when you burn my body at 980°C you had damn well better all cry", even if nobody did except me. For that reason, it's really the only piece of music from granddad's email that most people would consider to be appropriate for the occasion, so much so that it's clichéd. Perhaps because of these other two grandiose clichés, and I said so at the time, "Popular Song" was sort of perfect. It took some explaining, but then again, so did he.

My eponymous Programme Notes for my Granddad's Funeral, then, were an email to my dad in response to his concern that "Popular Song" was "frankly a bit weird". Which it is. Feeling as though I ought to give poor dad at least something to say before having to unleash so much tweeness in a crematorium, though, I made granddad's excuses. I wrote about how Façade is a relic of 1920s decadence, how it wouldn't have seemed quite so weird 80 years ago when elocution was still almost a viable parlour performance art, how the Edith Sitwell poetry is a modernist stream-of-consciousness that you just have to roll with. "I think it's fantastic", I wrote, "albeit a bit bitchy (not to mention racist)", adding that, "in the context of granddad I think it works well, but I do expect it to raise eyebrows". 

"Fantastic, albeit a bit bitchy" sums granddad up fairly well. Although I was treated to more of his fantasticness than most people were (he was a shameless favouritist) and his bitchiness frequently graduated into outright, callous selfishness. My least favourite Granddad Email™ by far is this one he sent to dad when nan was dying and he was in perfect health:

Mother wishes to enter a hospice. I think that the morphine is confusing her.

I know that I shall very soon need to enter a nursing care home and would like you to start enquiries. Anchor looks suitable and the location does not matter to me.

I am not able to read and understand large PDF,s. Please help.

He was sharp. No trace of Alzheimer's. But I can probably count the times I saw him out of the house in his last fifteen years on one hand, and he even threatened not to come to nan's funeral. For him, there were so many groundhog days. But despite being so ludicrously resistant to change, retreating as he did into his eerie 1970s time capsule of a house, he didn't bat an eyelid at my coming out as trans. 

Nevertheless, the dawning realisation that he would not be the first in the family to die struck him as a deep injustice. Surviving bowel cancer in his forties seemed to have instilled in him an unshakeable morbidity, and family members disagree over whether or not he once, before I was born, tried to kill himself by jumping down the stairs. All of the decay of that '20s decadence in Façade, and the freaky death-drive modernism of Lewis Carroll's Alice stories that he so voraciously loved and would gleefully quote, seemed to propel him, motionlessly, into a living paradox. He refused to talk to psychiatrists because he once did some IT work for MI5 in the sixties. He was convinced that he could be mined for state secrets, and would be carried away in a helicopter by men in black. And so sitting, paranoid, in the same spot, day in, day out, Façade's saccharine silliness somehow still rang true.

Apart from a little excursion in the B section (0.48), it never leaves F major. Instead it minces around it, winking at flat-G neopolitan seconds and sharp-G slides to the third. Flapper-dancer harmon mutes, dampened cymbal hits, quaint bass clarinet solos, and a triangle to finish. What belligerently silly music.

Lily O'Grady, Silly and shady, Longing to be A lazy lady, Walked by the cupola's gables in the Lake's Georgian stables, In a fairy tale like the heat intense, And the mist in the woods when across the fence The children gathering strawberries Are changed by the heat into negresses, Though their fair hair Shines there Like gold-haired planets, Calliope, Io, Pomona, Antiope, Echo and Clio.  

Then Lily O'Grady, Silly and shady, Sauntered along like a Lazy Lady; Beside the waves' haycocks her gown with tucks as of satin the colour of shining green ducks, And her fol-de-rol Parasol Was a great gold sun o'er the haycocks shining, But she was a negress black as the shade That time on the brightest lady laid.  

Then a satyr, dog-haired as trunks of trees, Began to flatter, began to tease And she ran like the nymphs with golden foot That trampled the strawberry, buttercup root, In the thick cold dew as bright as the mesh Of dead Panope's golden flesh, Made from the music whence were born Memphis and Thebes in the first hot morn, And ran, to wake In the lake, Where the water-ripples seem hay to rake.  

And Charlotine, Adeline, Round rose-bubbling Victorine, And the other fish Express a wish For mastic mantles and gowns with a swish; And bright and slight as the posies Of buttercups and of roses, And buds of the wild wood-lilies They chase her, as frisky as fillies. 

The red retriever-haired satyr Can whine and tease her and flatter But Lily O'Grady, Silly and shady, In the deep shade is a lazy lady; Now Pompey's dead, Homer's read, Heliogabalus lost his head, And shade is on the brightest wing, And dust forbids the bird to sing.

It's a bewildering surface, "made out of the overtones of words", writes Frank Howes. "The flow of images is determined by the exigencies of rhyme rather than of idea: the sound makes the sense". The text isn't just nonsense noises, though: Debora van Derme describes it as "scenes of libidinous Arcadian merriment that seem to have come straight from the Victorian fairy paintings of John Anster Fitzgerald and Richard Dadd and in which wanton satyrs and goblins chase nymphs and maidens". In other words, it's pretty camp. Edith Sitwell, one of English literature's most illustrious faghags, sauntering in satin gowns and alluding to the decapitation of Rome's gayest emporer, while my eternally slipper-shod granddad did live indeed as a "lazy lady". "Dead Panope's golden flesh" had turned out to be due to liver disease. His "Homer was read", his "brightest wing" was shaded, and his last decade was dusty and devoid of birdsong. The night he died, I remember being knocked sideways by the blunt insight of a careworker who can't have been older than nineteen. "Well", she said, "he wasn't very happy, was he?".

Like with nan, I have no memory of granddad ever listening to music, and it seems to have been a very private thing for him. A year or so after she died, he told me that he listened to Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony every day. Every day. The same recording, every single day, through his tinny television speakers. It doesn't get much more Pathétique than that.

I wonder whether he knew that Tchaikovsky was gay. I doubt it somehow. But nevertheless, the sheer decadence of granddad listening to his Pathétique while he sat on the sofa and waited to die is overwhelming. Sometimes, at moments of weakness, I indulge little hints in his behaviour like this and wonder whether I might not have been the only queer in the entire family after all. Whyever would this outrageously camp Walton not come with its own, typically granddad, subtext? If anything encourages me in this line of conjecture, it's the 1931 Frederick Ashton choreography of it, complete with bum-slapping:

A bit like how I never saw either of them listening to music, I never saw much living evidence that my grandparents loved one another. Residue of their love would arise with ghostly revenance every now and again: the inside cover of granddad's Collected Lewis Carroll (now mine) bears a message from 18-year-old nan that addresses "my beloved Brian"; more disturbing (and yet somehow less surprising?) is the family rumour that they had a suicide pact. In a way, granddad fulfilled his part of the bargain, but his was surely the most passive suicide ever seen. Like Oskar in The Tin Drum deciding never to grow any older, he took to the Never Never of his bed and waited for life to stop.

Who was this nonsensical person, and what was the strange connection that we had? Perhaps, in a sense, it was queer after all, if only in the sense of being strange: the strangeness of one who relishes confusion, covets pain, and talks to cats. The strangeness of inappropriate music choices, annoying emails, and decaying before you've had a chance to die. The strangeness of talking in crossword clues. The strangeness of speaking of love.