The books in a certain type of summer home have been there since before time, and nobody dares remove them. Browsing reveals hardbound but threadbare classics, curated by some well-meaning relative to appeal to “masculine and feminine” interests (think Dumas vs. Austen). There is a selection of British murder mysteries, though never an entire series; a humorous essay collection à la Erma Bombeck; and a few works of extremely local history. To round things out, someone will have slipped in one or two mass-market spy novels or romances from the 1980s. Children’s books are shelved separately: they are kept where there are naps, or wherever kids play during meals until they are old enough to sit at the grownup table.
My great-grandparents’ summer house in Gray Gables, Massachusetts, had these kinds of books. The brown specks of foxing accumulated on the pages of the oldest volumes, and if you rested an open book on your chest while sunning in a lawn chair, a musty-salty smell wafted from the dustjacket. We always returned books to the same shelves, season after season: a 1940s-era Saturday Evening Post collection of short stories lived in the White Room (white bedspreads), and the Hardy Boys were found above the headboard in the Brown Room (brown bedspreads). The living room had more decks of cards than books, but the shelf that held the binoculars also had these two thin volumes, stacked on their sides:
At some point during each vacation I remembered to seek out their primary colors and pull them down. Folded into a wicker armchair, I would set one book on the card table while the other propped against my knees. Each page held a familiar character, and as we got reacquainted, I tried to recall the meaning of the Italian phrases that had been explained to me in summers past.
My parents were both pretty skilled musicians. Though not professionals, they sang in community and church groups all through my childhood, and sometimes accompanied or performed on instruments too (flute for dad, piano and organ for mom). Here is how important music was in our house:
We kids weren’t allowed to watch cartoons as kids, but we were allowed to stay up until midnight if Tosca was on.
By the time I was in second grade, my sisters and I had learned to sing as the Three Ladies (my opera-obsessed mom taught us the German phonetically).
The epitome of Easter was feeling my dad’s rumbling bass as we sang How Lovely Are the Messengers around the family piano.
Maybe this is why I took Hoffnung’s brand of musical humor in stride, and never questioned its peculiar specificity. That said, you didn’t need a musical background to enjoy his drawings. Every year I “got the joke” on more pages, but the inherent silliness was enough to make me love him right from the beginning. Take the members of The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra (and it pleases me more than you know to report that there is more to see over on Instagram):
You don’t need any special expertise to enjoy his drawing of “The Double Trumpet.”
It did not surprise me to learn, much later, that Hoffnung was both an artist and a musician. Having escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 as a young man, he worked in England and New York as (variously) an art and German teacher, a magazine illustrator, and freelancer. It wasn’t until he paired his musical and visual interests that he began to gain recognition. Hoffnung became a larger-than-life personality in post-War London, learning to play his beloved tuba and diving headlong into the creative circles of the era.
He was a bit of a visionary. As he explained once in an interview, “I always felt there was a place for caricature in music.” Well before there was a P.D.Q. Bach, Hoffnung was arranging extremely silly music festivals at the Royal Festival Hall, in partnership with some very respected musicians. Here is the program for the 1958 concert, as outlined on Wikipedia:
Introductory Music played in the Foyer (Francis Chagrin)
Hoffnung Festival Overture (Francis Baines)
Metamorphosis on a Bed-time Theme (Allegro commerciale in Modo Televisione) (libretto by Alistair Sampson. Music by Joseph Horovitz)
Sugar Plums (realized by Elizabeth Poston) (Dolmetsch Ensemble)
The Famous Tay Whale (a dramatic poem by William McGonagall, music by Mátyás Seiber, declaimed by Edith Evans)
A movement from Concerto for Conductor and Orchestra (Francis Chagrin)
Punkt Contrapunkt ("Bruno Heinz Jaja" alias Humphrey Searle)
Excerpts from The United Nations (Malcolm Arnold)
Waltz for Restricted Orchestra (Peter Racine Fricker)
Let's Fake an Opera or The Tales of Hoffnung (William Mann and Franz Reizenstein)
Hoffnung was a master of integrating all his passions into his life, and he spread his enthusiasms widely. His sense of humor, his visual art, and his music all came together in these Hoffnung festivals, which were wildly popular. Here is how his wife Annetta describes one (from Gerard Hoffnung: His Biography):
Although the emphasis of humour in the concerts was manifest in the music itself, Gerard allowed his visual sense of fun full scope. A sedan chair, carried by four elegant bewigged pages in rococo uniform, was used to transport some of the more privileged participants onto the platform. Thirty-eight fanfare trumpeters from the Royal Military School of Music, in full regalia, brought visual as well as aural colour to the proceedings. One of the additional surprises arranged by Donald Swann in the Andante from the Surprise Symphony by Haydn was a dancer who wafted daintily across the platform. A large bouquet, indeed, almost a hamper, of vegetables was presented to the pianist Yvonne Arnaud, beloved actress, comedienne and musician, after her performance of the Concerto Populare.
Oh to have been in one of those audiences!
After I started doodling regularly again a few years ago, I recalled Hoffnung and tracked down the red and yellow books from my childhood. I also picked up copies of Hoffnung’s Acoustics, Hoffnung’s Companion to Music, and a few more of his musical collections—but I was particularly delighted to discover Hoffnung’s Constant Readers. I had just begun to create my own readers for Courtney Cook’s Survival by Book, and seeing Hoffnung’s take on such characters was like a little “thumbs up” of encouragement from my past.
In fact, the more I learn about Hoffnung and his short life (he died at age 34), the better I feel about working more lighthearted creativity into my own life. Hoffnung absolutely had a serious side—he became a Quaker and was a progressive activist—but his sense of fun was contagious. He fearlessly mixed his mediums and pushed the forms. He followed his interests where they took him, and his small drawings had an outsized impact on those around him. As I do my own experiments with words and pictures, trying out new platforms and collaborations, Hoffnung seems like a pretty good role model to keep in mind. If he could jump in with both feet, why not the rest of us?
Learn More
I highly recommend the memorial anthology O Rare Hoffnung: A Memorial Garland, not only for its insights on the artist, but for how well it captures a very particular time and place, and a very particular circle of people. I found it fascinating.
This website honoring Hoffnung is almost disconcertingly long form! It has so much information that it can quickly become an immersive deep dive. Where else would you find an image like this?
If you’re feeling particularly flush with cash, or just like to window shop, you can view some wonderful (and sometimes more personal) examples of Hoffnung’s work at the Chris Beetles gallery:
This delightful clip pairs Hoffnung’s drawings with music, forming a very silly love letter to the communication between conductor and chorus:
And finally, please enjoy this 1957 Desert Island Discs recording, in which Roy Plomley interviews Gerard Hoffnung.
Artist Inspo: Gerard Hoffnung
You had me at the beginning. I could smell those old Perry Masons, Agatha Christies, Readers Digests, that lined the pine shelves of my grandparents’ summer place in Vermont. Yes, there were classics too but they were not as plentiful as escape books. My grandmother studied opera and was going to go to Italy to study further but she met and married my grandfather. She spoke about it wistfully but she also had a playful sense of humor and would have loved Gerard Hoffnung.