Lessons in Harmony by Jonathan Coe review – what can music tell us about national identity?

In 1907, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams confided to the critic Edwin Evans that he was finding his own music “lumpy and stodgy”. His musical education at the Royal College of Music, and indeed classical music in England in general at that time, had tended towards the Teutonic – Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – and their heavy contrapuntal style dominated his work. To free himself, he told Evans, he planned to spend some months studying under French composer Vincent d’Indy, who taught at the Paris Conservatoire. Evans’s colleague, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, had other ideas. He proposed that, rather than the traditionalist d’Indy, Vaughan Williams should take lessons with his close friend Maurice Ravel, by then one of the most admired young composers in France.

The two men could hardly have been more different: Ravel petite, fastidious, intensely private, an avid collector of intricate mechanical toys; Vaughan Williams bulky, dishevelled, bluffly nonconformist, and possessed of a fascination for English folk music that Ravel found incomprehensible. But though they got off to a poor start (in their first lesson Ravel set Vaughan Williams to compose a little minuet in the style of Mozart, an exercise the Englishman refused in no uncertain terms to consider), the three months they spent together in Paris marked the start of a friendship that would profoundly touch both men and their music.

In a recent interview, Jonathan Coe admitted that “ever since I discovered that my two favourite composers … were friends and supporters of each other, I’ve wanted to write a novel about them”. Their music clearly delights him – the book comes with a splendid playlist – but what surely made this story irresistible to Coe, that great chronicler of Englishness, was how both Vaughan Williams and Ravel came, in their work, to embody something quintessential about their respective countries. Widely celebrated for its clarity, elegance and formal emotional control, Ravel’s music exemplifies the pinnacle of French cultural values, while Vaughan Williams drew on ancient hymns, chorales and folk music to create work in a consciously English tradition. “‘Englishry’ is in the very blood and bones of his music,” the Times declared in 1952, an assessment supported by Ravel, who described his friend as “a real artist, who only realised his richness when he learned to be English!”

Lessons in Harmony takes the form of an unpublished memoir written by Ravel’s devoted friend Pierre “Mylo” Mylonas, loosely based on Calvocoressi, after Ravel’s death, and “discovered” accidentally decades later. Coe, himself an accomplished musician, has described the book as a fantasia, a freeform composition that does not follow strict traditional structures, and the novel has all of the exhilarating immediacy of improvisation, shifting suddenly in tempo and mood, modulating frequently to unexpected keys. An inserted section written by another of Ravel’s pupils about a visit to London that Mylo had to miss is interpolated with Mylo’s exasperated corrections, while a virtuoso vignette involving the shifting of a piano might have come straight from Buster Keaton.

Lessons in Harmony is the story of an unlikely and transformative friendship. It is also a masterful examination of national identity and how it shapes us. Mylo, born to a Portuguese father and Greek mother, shuttling between London and Paris, is a man without a homeland, an often penniless polyglot moored by a single fixed point: his private passion for Ravel. Beneath the surface of his beguilingly partisan account lies a mesh of conflicting dualities: of nature and artifice, tradition and modernity, slapstick and seriousness, egoism and generosity of spirit, selfhood and country. Ravel and Vaughan Williams may remain as chalk and cheese but, as the understanding between them deepens, and works its way into their music, the lines between them soften and blur. Mylo himself is altered by the changes in them – opened up. It is only with the advent of the first world war, with national identity hardened and pressed into the service of mass slaughter, that the connection stutters, redrawing borders and forcing a retreat.

Ravel and Vaughan Williams both served in that terrible conflict, Ravel in the trenches and Vaughan Williams as an ambulance driver. They fought on the same side, facing the same enemy, but, though they remained in touch, their friendship never quite recovered. Two decades later the world was at war once again. In the opening pages of Coe’s subtly tender and generous novel, Vaughan Williams asks his friend Evans if he thinks it is possible for music to represent the soul of a nation. At its close, as Mylo recalls the triumphant premiere of his Fifth Symphony at the Proms of 1943, the opinion of the critics is a resounding yes. In the darkness of war, Vaughan Williams stands as a beacon of hope, an expression of a deep shared Englishness, an inspiration and a benediction. Whether great music can ever be that simply categorised, and whether indeed we who listen to it can hope to live up to so noble an ideal of nationhood, Coe leaves it to us to judge.