Today on Shift, with summer holidays just in view, we bring you stories of artists from across the musical spectrum who showed that no matter how good things were at home, the creative grass was, in fact, a good deal greener on the other side -- of the border, the ocean or the planet.
The ties that bind
The life of an artist is a lonely and thankless existence. You spend entire days on projects no one will see. You suffer through poverty with no hope of deliverance. You mine your soul for truths that go ignored. How then does an artist cope? Support. An artist needs family, friends, loved ones, partners and colleagues before they can begin to create.
But once all that support is in place, sometimes the only way to get anything done is to run away and leave it all behind.
Friends with expectations
By 1906, if Sergei Rachmaninoff went for a walk he had to plan on not getting anywhere. After a slump following the failure of his 1st Symphony, he'd been so successful with the 2nd Piano Concerto that he was flooded with offers. Could he conduct here? Could he play there? Surely he'd come over soon? The party simply wouldn't go on without him. Being easily the gloomiest celebrity alive, he couldn't keep up.
So, what did he do? He left.
Rachmaninoff packed up his wife and baby daughter and went to Dresden, where he knew nobody and where, he hoped, he could finally get something done. It worked. The 2nd Symphony, the 1st Piano Sonata and a cheery little tone poem called The Isle of the Dead were all created there.
Dig my Long Island Sound
In 1939, when Benjamin Britten left an increasingly turbulent England for Canada and the U.S., he was in very good company. For one, he was travelling with the tenor Peter Pears. The two were not lovers when they left, but found each other in Toronto the Good, (there ought to be a plaque in the Royal York Hotel) and never let go.
Once they landed in New York, they found there were other creative Brits who'd crossed the pond: W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood among them. The ex-pats whose company they most enjoyed, however, were William and Elizabeth Meyer -- a music-loving psychiatrist and translator who had escaped not the UK, but Nazi Germany. The Meyers kept a spacious and airy home on Long Island and provided Britten with his first U.S. job: music director of an amateur chamber orchestra that regularly attracted audiences smaller than the crowd on stage.
Still, the Meyers were invaluable supporters, and were especially important when Pears and Britten simply couldn't stand the engaging, inspiring and often riotous company they kept at the artist's collective in Brooklyn, where they lived with Auden, novelist Carson McCullers and the stripper (who became a bestselling mystery writer) Gypsy Rose Lee. That's her, below, showing how to always leave 'em wanting more.
And here is just some of the miraculous music Benjamin Britten wrote while escaping at the Meyer's house in Long Island: Les Illuminations.
Dark in the City of Light
Duke Ellington found life easier in Paris. He had toured America for most of his adult life, but it was in Paris that, as a man of colour, he could truly relax and feel the ease that went along with his astounding life of accomplishment.
For most of his long life, in at least half the states in his home country, he would be forced to come and go by the back door and was barred from staying in the hotels that housed the white fans who paid many dollars to hear him play. But, in Paris, he was a star whose colour prevented him from doing nothing at all.
So, in 1963, as the civil rights movement began to surge across America, Duke took his legendary band to Paris and recorded what many still consider his greatest live recording. Never mind that it wasn't released until a decade later, the free-swinging joy of the Great Paris Concert speaks for itself.
Check out Duke's characteristic charm in the intro below. It wasn't just that Paris audiences were racially aware, they were hip, too.
From Berlin to Belize
Pop music is full of great escape stories:
- The Stones escaping Britain, and the taxman to the Villa Nellcôte to record 1972's Exile on Main Street.
- David Bowie Bogarting to Berlin to record (with Brian Eno) Low, Heroes and Lodger.
- Danny Michel (after covering Bowie) blowing off Canada for his 2011 album Sunset Sea, recorded in Belize, where he was enough of a local to have to do his own laundry. His website claims his next album was also recorded in Belize, which, if the pattern holds, should have him escaping to somewhere cold, sparse and tense in the near future.
Escape your grind and tell us who we missed
Got any great escape stories of your own to share? Have you found peace somewhere else, or is it better to stay put? What about favourite artists - any exceptions to the rule? Is there a musical George Bailey you can tell us about, or is it always better to be somewhere else?
Tell us now -- or go away!
Related:
Benjamin Britten’s visit to Canada and US inspired overtures
Q&A: Danny Michel inspired by Garifuna music of Belize
E is for Ellington, Duke Ellington