Eric Clapton, Romain Rolland, and Rabindranath Tagore

Romain Rolland

Among those who reflect on such things, Eric Clapton’s 1994 ‘Blues Tour’, supporting his album ‘From the Cradle’, has often been considered one of the highlights of his career, and it is illuminating, almost thirty years later, to look back at the review in ‘The New York Times’ of one of the tour’s early nights:

‘The blues grew up at clubs and house parties, not arenas, but Mr. Clapton didn't try to turn Madison Square Garden into a juke joint. He performed on a sterile, video-ready stage set, with a busy crew that brought him a different guitar every song or two. Dressed in white, bespectacled and earnest, he was a blues disciple giving a recital…

Mr. Clapton's musical foundation is in 1950's and 60's electric blues, particularly Chicago blues. He still emulated the original guitar styles, mimicking Albert King's epigrammatic stingers in ‘Crosscut Saw’, Otis Rush's careening glissandos and screaming bent notes in ‘Groaning the Blues’, Freddie King's sustained high notes and speedy filigrees in ‘Someday After a While,’ Elmore James's leisurely but aching slides in ‘It Hurts Me Too’…

But for Mr. Clapton, those sources are springboards, not constraints. By the end of the concert, his guitar was incendiary; his version of Eddie Boyd's ‘Five Long Years’ sped and spiralled and streaked into the high register until the notes seemed to be melting, white hot. He sang like a student of the blues; he played like a master’.

In the following month Clapton returned to New York, this time to the Irving Plaza, a smaller music venue near Union Square, and the bootleg recording of the performance there, ‘Club Full of Blues’, confirms that both his playing and singing were still at their most confident and passionate. A few days afterwards, two gigs at the Fillmore, San Francisco, were recorded and filmed, and they are now being officially released under the title ‘Nothing But The Blues’.

As one of the iconic rock musicians of the 1960s, almost all Clapton’s influences, as well as the challenges that he has faced and overcome, have been exhaustively documented and explored. It is not widely known, though, that he has much affection for Jean-Christophe, the ten-volume novel by Romain Rolland, published in the journal ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ from 1904 to 1912. Once very popular, and the main reason why Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1915, the book is now more or less forgotten in the West, although it is apparently still admired and cherished in China and Iran.

The author described Jean-Christophe as a ‘musical’ novel in which emotions, rather than action, dictate the course of events. Lacking a traditional plot, much of the story concerns the fictitious protagonist, a musician, and the course of his life, which mainly unfolds in Paris, although real political and social events provide a background. It recounts the many crises faced by Jean-Christophe Krafft, a character based partly on Beethoven and partly on Rolland himself, who finds deep inspiration in art and love despite his turbulent personality and disillusion with society. Surrounded by suffering, decay, and death, Jean-Christophe gives thought to everything that happens to him, deciding that the only way to find meaning in life is to search for joy beneath its sorrow. He discovers that personal love is both difficult to sustain and ultimately unfulfilling, and although friendship and art provide some release from troubles that are otherwise difficult to bear, he concludes that they, too, have limitations. Nevertheless, after finding some peace in a remote corner of Switzerland, Jean-Christophe eventually returns to Paris to enjoy musical triumph.

In 1915, Rolland wrote to Hermann Hesse, about whom he knew little except that he had published an article on Beethoven that he found sympathetic, and it was the beginning of an ongoing dialogue. They shared a love of music and devotion to individual and social freedom, and although there were differences of opinion between them, Hesse was more than willing to sign Rolland’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of the Mind’, a rallying cry and statement which asserted that the duty of writers and intellectuals was to provide stability and moral leadership in the chaos and disintegration that were dominating Europe in the wake of World War I. ‘Truth only do we honour; truth that is free, frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of race or caste’, it declared.

Like Hesse, who later dedicated his novel Siddhartha to him, Rolland began to turn his attention to the East, and especially to the culture and spirituality of India, which he believed might help to revitalise the West’s depression. With great admiration for Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of non-violence, he wrote his biography, as well as others on the Indian religious teachers Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. He also sent  a letter to the poet Rabindranath Tagore, a fellow winner of the Nobel prize, asking him to sign the ‘Declaration’. Tagore replied enthusiastically, saying that he would be pleased to ‘join the ranks of those free souls’ who had conceived and endorsed the project. Their exchange on the ethical responsibilities of thinkers and writers brought about a warm and lengthy fellowship; Rolland once told a mutual friend, the musician Dilip Kumar Roy, with regard to Tagore, that ‘no living artist has made on me such a pure and almost spiritual impression’, and Tagore said to the historian Kalidas Nag that ‘of all men I met in the West, it was Romain Rolland who struck me as the nearest to my heart and most akin to my spirit’.

For further exploration:

Eric Clapton’s ‘Have You Ever Loved a Woman’ played at the Fillmore, San Francisco, in November 1994: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30j-MewhIhs

On Jean-Christophe: http://nicholastamblyn.com/jean-christophe/

On Romain Rolland and Rabindranath Tagore: https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/writers-who-stood-up-for-what-they-believed-in/story-hzH5tv89ziCVBKco8rnSkN.html

Eric Clapton, 1994