Page 19 - The Keble Review 2016

‘What we do not want to become
is little mice in a hamster wheel burning money’
iarrive to interview Anne-Sophie Mutter at LSO St Luke’s 40 minutes early. I am nervous. I’ve been a fan of Mutter since I saw her play Andre Previn’s Double Concerto with
Yuri Bashmet and the LSO at the Barbican in 2012, when I was 15 years old. Back in LSO territory under very different terms,
it feels strange to now be sitting opposite the internationally renowned musician. I quietly garble a sentence or two about being her biggest fan into my lap. Mutter laughs, and thanks me.
I needn’t have been nervous. One of the first things she does is compliment me on my faux snakeskin boots. ‘They cost me £3’, I say. ‘And they didn’t cost the snake anything’, she replies, giggling.
The ensuing conversation is peppered with laughter. Mutter
is chatty, excited to tell me about her plans following her appointment as Honorary Fellow at Keble. Her decision to take the fellowship clearly springs from a genuine desire to reach out to young musicians: ‘It was a mixture of the honour itself, but also the opportunity to bring my scholars over and build a more living corpus of string playing at Keble’. She correctly observes that Oxford’s musical terrain slopes steeply in the direction of choral practice. ‘I know the choir life in Oxford is very alive and deeply rooted in tradition, but I was surprised that Oxford’s orchestra does not consist of scholars’, she remarks. She plans to ‘teach other excellent string players from around the University – bring them into Keble to restart the thought of more string playing
in College’. Mutter’s eagerness to connect with the student generation was obvious during her visit to Keble in November 2015. Watching her walking round the Hall and chatting to students after the recital, the words from her address that evening rang through my mind: ‘I try to send ambassadors of music out into the world, because music is far more than merely an idle pastime or a hobby. Rather, music offers us the chance to change the world for the positive by working together.’
Music as a unifying force is an idea Mutter consistently comes back to while we chat. Her recital fell days after the terror attacks in Paris, and this was evidently significant to her; she dedicated her performance of the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria to its victims. ‘That seemed to be one of the moments where all our thoughts were really there, with the cause and music and room and people’, she says. When I ask when and why she decided she would become a violinist, she describes the moment at which the violin stopped being something she was merely good at and loved (‘someone starts to love the tennis racket for whatever reason – for me it was the violin’), and became something more: ‘I suddenly understood that music has another function’. She stops to consider for a while before saying, slowly, ‘entertaining is really not the right word, but sharing the music with an audience, and touching them...that is what made being a musician so meaningful for me. That it can bring people of different cultural roots together.’ ‘In a world that is so extremely divided, as Europe is now’, she adds, ‘making music together with people of all sorts of backgrounds will help open a dialogue. A communication. Only through this can we come to grips with all the needs and worries and issues that we are exploding with.’ Since we spoke, a great
deal of the world’s political landscape has irrevocably changed, and Mutter’s words have never felt more pertinent; as I write, news of terrorist attacks in Nice and Munich unfold, post- referendum Britain reels after a Brexit vote, refugees queue in the Calais dust.
A cynic might wonder whether Mutter’s vision of music is a little idealistic. They might wonder if music can and should be a comfort in a world of turmoil, if it can make a tangible difference to people’s lives. Mutter responds by saying ‘an artist has to be someone who is putting question marks into society’. So, music acts not only as a comfort, but as an inquiry? ‘All of us should question what we read, what we consume, what we think we are, and where our place is in life. But as an artist, it is your duty to do that.’ One only has to think of the artists produced by the Soviet Union – the Prokofievs, the Shostakoviches – to realise music interrogates and informs life. ‘Art is not just a product to consume; it should be much more’, Mutter adds. ‘In the arts,
in literature, in almost anything, you can find soul food. You shouldn’t overlook that we are more than just flesh and blood.’
I ask what advice she would give to any students, musicians
or not, studying at Keble. ‘Learning is a wonderful, wonderful present to yourself and will always be good for you’, she replies. But, she says, ‘all of this helps us to become profound human beings, not only work rabbits. What we do not want to become is little mice in a hamster wheel burning money.’ This is something we, Oxfordians heralding from a place so often governed by a work-oriented mindset, can learn from. ‘You need grades and everything – of course you need them. But it is not necessarily what makes us valuable human beings.’ What strikes me most during my conversation with Anne-Sophie is her absolute and unending passion for what she does. I see it in the way she gesticulates as she searches for English phrases, in the way her eyes light up when she speaks about her work, in her willingness to share her laughter with me. ‘I think passion is the key to life’, she says, smiling. ‘Passion; stubbornness; keep at it.’
Anne-Sophie Mutter was made Keble Honorary Fellow on 26 November 2015.
Ell Potter
English 2014
Ell Potter is a third year English student at Keble College. She has been an active member of the Keble Choir and has served as president of the Martin Esslin Society, overseeing the O’Reilly Theatre in the 2015/16 academic year.
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