Version immersion

The thin man in the dark suit and hat approaches the microphone. At 75, he looks frail and his voice is croaky. But as soon as the crowd at London's O2 Arena recognises the song, it goes wild. "I've heard there was a secret chord," he begins, "that David played and it pleased the Lord..." This is Leonard Cohen, performing what many consider his greatest song: Hallelujah.

Such is its popularity today, you might think it came to him in a flash and was an instant hit. But its genesisOrigin or beginning. The book of Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and opens with one of the most famous first sentences of any literary work: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." was long and painful, as a new documentary called Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song explains.

Cohen is believed to have spent five years writing the song before he recorded it in 1983.

The published version has seven verses, but notebooks found after his death in 2016 contain multiple revisions. Lines such as "When David played, his fingers bled" had been crossed out.

According to his girlfriend at the time, Dominique Isserman, he would play different verses to her each morning before changing it yet again. She describes it as "a riddle... like a bird flying round the room".

Estimates of how many verses he actually wrote range from 80 to 180. "To find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat," he told an interviewer.

At one point he was reduced to sitting in his underwear, banging his head on the floor of his room at the Royalton Hotel in New York. Even after he recorded the song on his album Various Positions, he continued to sing different versions of it at live performances.

Struggling with the lyrics was only part of the agony Cohen suffered over Hallelujah. When he took Various Positions to Columbia Records, they turned it down. "We know you are great," they told him, "but we don't know if you are any good."

According to Dominique Isserman, Cohen was "absolutely crushed". Various Positions was finally released by another company 18 months after he recorded it.

Even then, Hallelujah did not gain widespread recognition, though it was performed by Bob DylanAn American singer and songwriter who released his first album in 1962, aged 20. Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. and recorded by John CaleA Welsh musician who helped to found American rock band the Velvet Underground. and Jeff BuckleyAn American singer-songwriter and guitarist. . In 1994, suffering from depression and alcoholism, Cohen retreated to a Buddhist monastery in California.

He remained there for five years. Then, shortly after leaving the monastery, he learnt that his song was to be used on the soundtrack of Shrek, in a scene where the hero worries about his mission to rescue Princess Fiona. "I just thought it was right for the complex mix of feelings, not often there in a family movie," says the film's director, Vicky Jenson.

Shrek brought Hallelujah to a new, worldwide audience. Other artists hurried to record it. Alexandra Burke won The X Factor with it.¹

Other geniuses too have struggled with their creations. WB YeatsAn Irish poet and dramatist who is often considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. wrote that "a line will take an hour maybe", and said that poetry was harder work than scrubbing the floor or breaking stones.

But John KeatsAn English Romantic poet who died in 1821 aged 25 from tuberculosis. insisted that "if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves on a tree, it had better not come at all".

Yes: Even the greatest writers and artists seldom get things right the first time. To bring their work to perfection, they have to spend hours polishing it and trying out different versions of it.

No: The most essential element in any great creation is inspiration, which Matthew Arnold called a "spark from heaven". You can work as hard as you like, but without it you will get nowhere.    

Or... Different types of creativity need different degrees of inspiration. Writing a poem might be 90% inspiration and 10% polishing. With a novel or a painting, the proportions could be reversed.