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The composer Thomas Adès and I were standing outside Symphony Hall in
Birmingham, England, one afternoon this summer, when Adès shook his head and said,
“Oh, she is terrible, isn’t she?” The woman in question was Alma Mahler, the famously
seductive widow of Gustav Mahler, whose Second Symphony was about to share a bill
with Adès’s new orchestral piece, “Asyla,” at a City of Birmingham Symphony concert.
It doesn’t matter how we got on this subject or why Adès disliked a woman who died
before he was born: he is always brimming with opinions. What struck me was his use of
the present tense. He was talking as if Alma Mahler were still alive. He leaned over
conspiratorially—he’s a tall, bulky fellow, with a tubalike voice—and his eyes darted
mischievously to one side. I had the curious impression that Alma and Gustav Mahler
were standing over by the sandwich counter. When I asked Adès how he felt having his
music played next to Mahler’s, he put his hand over his mouth in mock horror, as though
he were afraid of offending his hundred-and-thirty-eight-year-old colleague.
“Well, I’ve had my things played next to his several times,” he said, with another
sidelong glance. “I’ve been paired with the Mahler Third, the Mahler Fifth, the Mahler
Eighth. This one, the Second”—he lowered his voice. “Have you noticed that it’s quite
insanely loud?” He arched his eyebrows expectantly, as if challenging me to find this
description of Mahler’s heaven-storming “Resurrection” Symphony in some way
insufficient. I laughed the all-purpose, clueless laugh of the American abroad, and we
headed for the sandwich display, from which Gustav and Alma had politely disappeared.
Thomas Adès is twenty-seven. His confidence is, at first, unnerving. Mahler is not
the giant in whose shadow he labors; he’s the guy who wrote the symphony coming next.
Adès’s self-assurance might easily be mistaken for the bravado of a young man who has
had too rapid a success. He has outgrown his status as the wunderkind of a vibrant British
scene and become one of the most imposing figures in contemporary classical music. His
works now go around the world almost before they are published: his first opera, the
blistering comedy “Powder Her Face,” has been heard in England, Germany, Australia,
California, and Colorado, and it will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in
December. In addition, Adès is an uncommonly sensitive pianist and has a knack for
conducting. Some people think it’s all a bit much. “He’s a monster,” one disenchanted
observer said to me.
He’s not, and that may be the most maddening thing. Adès is not misanthropic,
unwashed, or unhinged, as contemporary classical composers sometimes are. He may
seem, on first encounter, guarded, intellectual, a bit suspicious. But he has a sweet,
exuberant side: he explodes in laughter at nothing in particular, does impersonations of
his outrageous literary friends, shows a working knowledge of pop culture, tries out
Wildean paradoxes. (Example: “I must remember to smoke more often.”) He
occasionally ventures from his flat, near Hampstead, into the wilds of nighttime London,
dancing to his favorite Pulp songs with polyrhythmic gesticulations. (I know this because
I ran into him one night in a place called Popstarz.) The news that classical music is a
dead or dying art hasn’t reached him. He assumes that his audience is both large and
sophisticated: he doesn’t traffic either in the antagonistic complexities of modernism,
which think nothing of the audience, or in the pandering simplicities of postmodernism,
which think of nothing but. His music is at once complex and direct. It is so good that his
confidence comes off as matter-of-fact.
Granted, Adès has got into trouble for insolence. “Prodigy with a notable talent
for sounding off” was the headline over an early account of him in the English press. The
writer, keeping his options open, said that Adès was either “the new Mozart” or “the
biggest piece of arrogance and pretension to hit British culture since Damien Hirst
pickled his first fish.” The problem wasn’t simply that Adès had fallen victim to the
obsessive cattiness of English criticism; he had, in fact, made several questionable
statements. He said that Benjamin Britten was not a major twentieth-century opera
composer. He described Shostakovich’s solemn Eighth Quartet as “a terrible con,” and
compared the minimalist religious music of John Tavener to “dog psychiatry—utterly
bogus.” He has learned to rein in remarks of this sort. It’s too bad, in a way, because
Adès’s disdain for received opinion is one of the vital signs of his mind. For him, the
great composers are not distant idols but noisy neighbors, and he has his ups and downs
with them. Lately, he’s been quarrelling with Brahms. “Oh, I used to like him,” he mused
on the train back to London. “I used to go to bed whistling the Clarinet Trio, just like the
next person. Then, one day, I woke up and said to myself, ‘It won’t do! No, it won’t do at
all! He’s wretched, he’s tedious, his finales are dutiful and are there only for the sake of
appearances.’” The tirade became more elaborate as I—a confessed Brahms lover—grew
visibly more crestfallen. Brahms also had committed the sin of declaring that the greatest
music had already been written. “No one has the final word,” Adès said, looking out the
window at the neat, bleak villages of the Midlands. “No one exhausts the possibilities.”
He recently returned to this theme, by E-mail: “Nabokov, in ‘The Gift,’ pictures someone
who claims there are no mountains left to climb—only to look up and see a tweedy
Englishman waving cheerfully from a higher peak.”
This sly and amusing person is, improbably, one of the most original composers
of our time. Originality is not a fashionable word; in the dogma of postmodernism, such a
thing is no longer possible. Composers, in particular, are haunted by a sense that
everything has already been said. By 1971, the year Adès was born, all avenues of avantgarde abstraction had been explored, and contemporary music had begun to retreat into
murky, depressed eclecticism. Although Adès is himself an eclectic, he refuses to
acknowledge the primacy of the past: he doesn’t leave ironic quotation marks hanging in
the air. He often begins with something more like noise than like music: rustlings,
growlings, high-pitched cries, unearthly basement tones. It’s like a scouring of the
musical canvas that previous composers have left for him to use. Then he starts tracing
motifs and patterns, sometimes building up complex arrays of activity and sometimes
drawing out a brief glimpse of an idea into a spacious vista.
“Asyla” is a piece in four movements which passes through violently contrasted
symphonic episodes while pursuing a single potent figure. What surprised me at the
performance in Birmingham was the reaction I had to the Mahler symphony that
followed. This was Simon Rattle’s farewell concert, after a brilliant eighteen-year reign
as the director of Birmingham’s formerly provincial and now world-class orchestra. The
power of the performance lived up to the occasion. But the Mahler, for all its
magnificence, sounded—well, loud. “Asyla,” too, had its moments of “insane loudness,”
but they were terse, abrupt, haunting. If Adès hadn’t bettered Mahler, he had certainly
challenged him. This was Rattle’s doing: the program was a contest between two distinct
personalities, the brazen Mahler and the byzantine Adès. I came away in awe of the
whole scene—the composer, the conductor, the musical world out of which they had
grown. I came away with a severe case of envy of English music.
Envy, perhaps, is too strong a word, but anyone who has put up with the chief
frustration of classical concert-going in America—the sense of being shut out of the
mainstream culture—has to feel a twinge of jealousy upon visiting London. It’s not that
London has more or better concerts than New York; it’s that musical events there are
somehow marked by greater urgency. London’s musical culture is less scattered, less
incoherent; it all seems to happen in one arena. The audience for contemporary concerts
overlaps the one that goes to early-music concerts, and elements of both show up at
mainstream orchestral series—often because the programming takes note of their tastes.
And in Britain a contemporary composer seems to have a bigger, brighter platform on
which to speak. If you have a piece performed by Simon Rattle or at the summertime
Proms in the Royal Albert Hall or on the BBC, everybody soon knows your name. In
America, few composers operate on a national stage, and it takes a painfully long time for
them to reach it. In Britain, a composer can gain attention almost overnight. That’s what
happened to Adès. He was first noticed in 1993, and by 1995 he was being celebrated
with an opera première at the prestigious Cheltenham Festival, a Composer Portrait
concert at the Aldeburgh Festival, and a performance at the BBC Proms. The same quick
fame was won by Oliver Knussen in the seventies and by George Benjamin in the
eighties. The cycle has some of the energy—and competitiveness—of televised sports.
The present bustle of British composing has been a long time coming. During the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the German-speaking countries produced most of the
major figures in the classical repertory, and Britain produced none. Throughout the
twentieth century, the country has run a patriotic race to catch up with the Continentals.
The first British contestant for musical greatness was Edward Elgar; the second one,
more convincing, was Benjamin Britten, who was the first English composer since Henry
Purcell to put his stamp on all genres, including opera. With Britten’s masterpiece “Peter
Grimes,” in 1945, the floodgates opened, and English composition acquired a worldliness
and an intellectual heft that it hadn’t possessed before the war. After Britten’s
breakthrough, a number of British composers acquired international reputations: Michael
Tippett, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies. They substituted a tougher, thornier
sound, in keeping with international trends, for the hill-and-dale tone-painting of Elgar,
Delius, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. “It would be terrible to think of myself as an
English composer,” Adès said to me when I asked him about his relationship to his
predecessors. Yet he did admit that the continuity of British traditions has boosted him:
“Stravinsky made great efforts later in life not to be ‘Russian,’ but he wrote what he
wrote by observing music from this very strong cultural balcony. Americans, I suppose,
have the curious situation of having as their two greatest musical artists an insurance
millionaire and a man who lived in a garage in Mexico.” (He was referring to Charles
Ives and Conlon Nancarrow. If you have never heard of Nancarrow, who wrote music for
player pianos, there’s the problem.)
There are some other cultural forces at work in Britain. The basic elements of the
classical vocabulary have wide circulation: they are still taught in schools and passed
along in choral groups and Church of England sing-alongs. Hymnal chord changes show
up all over in English pop music—in Britpop anthems and in the dour chanting that
accompanies techno dance rhythms. (This flexible border between high and low has
enabled Adès to make some astonishing transitions to popular modes.) And concerts are
cheaper. Although opera at Covent Garden is out of reach for most Brits, in the summer
anyone can put down three pounds for a Proms concert and stand on the floor of the
Royal Albert Hall. Last summer, on a few minutes’ notice, I picked up a cheap ticket for
a Berlin Philharmonic concert, under Claudio Abbado, and went down among the
Prommers—smiling elderly matrons, distracted young couples, watchful, solitary teenagers (Adèses of the future), and smelly record collectors with mad-professor hair (one of
them shouting, “Abbado! A mere time-beater! Listen to Furtwängler!”). I heard a new
piece by Wolfgang Rihm, the Schumann Piano Concerto, and the Brahms Third
Symphony. The crowd cheered everything enthusiastically, including the Rihm, and let
out the Prommers’ ritual yell of “Heave-ho!” when the piano lid was raised. Nothing like
this can be experienced in an American concert hall.
When I went to see several younger composers in London—among them, George
Benjamin and Julian Anderson—they smiled at some of my touristic impressions but
didn’t deny the basic brightness of the picture. They all named as their largest benefactor
the BBC’s classical outlet, Radio 3, which dominates contemporary programming and
commissions. “I don’t think I would have even started composing at all without the
experience of listening to it,” Anderson told me. BBC 3 has lately slid somewhat in
quality, but it remains the best classical radio on the planet, and it has resisted the worst
dumbing down from above. There was a scare over the summer when cultural
bureaucrats threatened to install, as the new head of BBC 3, a woman who had deemed
the renowned pianist Alfred Brendel “too serious” to appear on a musical chat show. The
higher-ups also gave consideration to a man who had promoted a semi-nude electric
violinist named Vanessa-Mae. Norman Lebrecht, who covers the classical business in
tragicomic tones for the Daily Telegraph, wrote, “The end is nigh for cerebral discourse
and twelve-note flute sonatas, for reedy interval speakers and bedtime authorities on
Welsh philology.”
George Benjamin, who produces intricate, ravishing scores at a gradual pace, has
been coördinating a BBC series called “Sounding the Century,” which has delivered a
stunningly wide panorama of twentieth-century music. “If Alfred Brendel is ‘too serious,’
we are all doomed,” Benjamin said. Last month, the new head was announced, and the
anti-Brendel, striptease-violin faction lost out. The job went to a serious, seasoned person
named Roger Wright. The composers exulted.
British composers haven’t always made the most of their opportunities. The
pastoral prettiness of prewar English music was duly followed by a prolonged cult of the
opaque, the ugly, and the needlessly complicated. But British modernism was never as
dogmatic as the European variety. “Perhaps because we came to it late,” Anderson said,
“we were able to pick and choose, and weren’t so caught up in the whole avant-garde
ideology.” In the seventies and eighties, as composers around the world attempted some
return to the old tonal language, British composers didn’t have so far to go, and their
music wasn’t marked by violent stylistic lurches. Alexander Goehr and Oliver Knussen,
for example, were able to weave common chords into their scores without arbitrarily
reinventing themselves as Minimalists or Neo-Romantics. Knussen’s recent Horn
Concerto is emblematic of the best of contemporary English music: it is in D minor, for
the most part, and yet it’s an unfamiliar D minor, full of weird lights and icy currents. It
draws equally on two seemingly irreconcilable traditions—the Romantic and the modern,
the nineteenth century and the twentieth. What it doesn’t do—and what Adès’s music
often does—is hit you between the eyes.
Thomas Adès’s baroque family history seemed to guarantee that he would turn
out to be interesting. One great-grandfather was a dashing Sephardic Jew of uncertain
nationality who lived in Egypt and is said to have been the model for the character
Nessim in Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet.” The patriarch on his mother’s side
of the family was descended from John of Gaunt and ran the Great Indian Railway. His
father translates various modern and ancient languages, and his mother is a noted
authority on Spanish art and Surrealism. He has two younger brothers, one of whom
plays the tuba and is starting to compose. In such a household, Adès’s creative urges
were, not surprisingly, encouraged and indulged: his grandmother once sat him down and
put Olivier Messiaen’s massive, delirious “Turangalîla” Symphony on the record player.
Still, it took a while for Adès to turn to composition full time. He studied at the Guildhall
School of Music, in London, attracting notice more as an all-around musician than as a
composer: he was a virtuoso percussionist (“They said I was going to be a great marimba
player,” he recalls, a little wistfully), and later he made startling progress as a pianist. A
school friend, Matias Tarnopolsky, remembers seeing a few of Adès’s early creative
efforts. “He showed me a clarinet piece in assembly,” Tarnopolsky says. “He was at
pains to explain to me that it was ‘in arch form.’” (Tarnopolsky is now the producer of
the BBC Symphony, and also writes program notes for Adès’s pieces.)
In 1989, Adès won second prize as a pianist in the BBC Young Musician of the
Year competition. “It was on TV, and it gave me quite a fright,” Adès says. “I suddenly
found myself at quite an advanced stage as a performer. I hadn’t taken the idea very
seriously. Everyone was commenting on this or that and I just didn’t care—I wanted to
go work on something new. Did I want to go through all this again, play the same things
again? I went home and said, ‘I’m going to become a composer today, and do it
properly.’ I started at the top note of the piano and went on from there.”
“Five Eliot Landscapes,” which he began that night, were later published as his
Opus 1. (Most composers in the twentieth century haven’t used opus numbers; Adès has
resumed the practice.) Opus 2 was his Chamber Symphony, which he wrote while he was
at King’s College, Cambridge. “I realized how much hard work composing was going to
be,” he told me. “One can’t compose slightly, much as one can’t get slightly pregnant.
But, when this piece was performed, suddenly it wasn’t work at all; it was fantastic fun.
Very frightening, too, at first. I remember starting the first rehearsal and thinking, I’m
making this noise! It was so—you know—modern. It really did sound like horrible
modern music: clicks here and pops there, scratching, screeching, one high note, one low
note. The thing was now out of my hands; it was an organism crawling around on the
instruments. I’ve never forgotten that moment. And after that, I didn’t think about it
again. I had no choice anymore.”
“Horrible modern music” it isn’t: the Chamber Symphony does begin with a
ghostly tapping woodblock, but the flute and the viola unfold a sinuous B-minorish theme
over the noise, and a little later the brass intone the “farewell” motto from Beethoven’s
“Les Adieux” Sonata. This is not to say that the piece uses conventional classical
harmony: there’s never a firm feeling of key, always a sense of one harmony unravelling
into a distant second. One instrument may play along a major scale while another moves
by half steps and a third goes by whole tones. Often, each instrument seems to be going
off in its own direction, but Adès keeps everything under control, pulling in wayward
strands, keeping thicker dissonances at bay, making the whole fiercely clear. Seemingly
unconnected elements move together in a kind of many-footed Chinese-dragon motion,
which is characteristic of Adès’s music.
This was his sound; there was no hesitation or groping, not even at the start. With
only two works down on paper, Adès was taken on by the small but élite publisher Faber
Music, which promoted him vigorously. He consolidated his gains with an even more
vivid and theatrical piece, called “Living Toys,” which had an intricate narrative
program, somehow connecting the adventures of a young Spanish matador with the death
of the computer hal, in “2001.” Adès likes colorful, pungent titles: other examples are
“These Premises Are Alarmed,” “...but all shall be well,” “Darknesse Visible,”
“Arcadiana,” and “Life Story” (a bluesy setting of a Tennessee Williams poem about a
one-night stand).
Before long, Adès was at work on his first opera, “Powder Her Face.” The libretto
was supplied by his friend Philip Hensher, a maverick novelist, who had lost his job as a
Clerk of the House of Commons for speaking too frankly about homosexuality in the
lower chamber. The conception for “Powder Her Face” was also destined to cause
trouble. The opera tells of the freewheeling society beauty Margaret Whigham, who was
later the Duchess of Argyll. Her divorce from the Duke, in 1963, set a standard for
graphic sexual detail in the courtroom which makes the Starr report look timid. (The
Duchess, who enjoyed oral sex, was photographed ministering to a male friend whose
face was missing from the frame. The court attempted to identify the stranger by way of a
“physical imperfection.”) Hensher seized the opportunity to create the first onstage blow
job in opera history, but he also twisted the story into something more generalized and
expressionistic: Margaret becomes a half-comic, half-tragic figure, a nitwit outlaw. There
were clear parallels with Alban Berg’s epic of degradation, “Lulu.” The aging Duchess,
in her unpaid-for hotel room, looks back on her life in a series of dreamy flashbacks: the
hotel staff play roles from her life and simultaneously mock her. At the end, the hotel
manager, doubling as Death, throws her out. The libretto reads like a nasty farce, but it
takes on emotional breadth when the music is added. With a few incredibly seductive
stretches of thirties-era popular melody, Adès shows the giddy world that the Duchess
lost, and when her bright harmony lurches down to a terrifying B-flat minor he exposes
the male cruelty that quickened her fall. Adès’s harmonic tricks have a powerful
theatrical impact: there’s a repeated sense of a beautiful mirage shattering into cold,
alienated fragments.
“Powder Her Face” put Adès at the forefront of English composers. He received a
commission for a major opera to be given at Covent Garden; pending an end to the chaos
in that house, it will appear in 2001. (The librettist is the poet James Fenton, and the plot
will have something to do with cults.) Since then, native enthusiasm for him has grown to
potentially stifling proportions. He has continued his piano career, taken up conducting,
succeeded Knussen as the artistic director of Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival, become the
director of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and signed with the EMI label.
He is in danger of taking on too much. He has written several works under severe time
constraints, and has suffered the consequences. There was a moment during the
composition of “Asyla,” last summer, when he thought that he was having a heart attack.
He checked himself into the hospital, and it turned out that he had started
hyperventilating from the exertion of copying identical rhythmic figures in dozens of
parts of his score.
The music he was working on during this crisis was a movement entitled
“Ecstasio.” It depicted a night out in a London club, and he was trying to replicate by
hand the blistering fast pulses of techno music—patterns that are meant to be spat out by
a computer. (Many composers these days create scores with a computer program that
does for composition what word processing does for writing. Adès believes that these
programs corrupt musical thought by allowing the composer to fill in every orchestral
detail bar by bar, rather than sketch a complete structure in advance.) The pressure he felt
during the writing of “Asyla” wasn’t just a matter of time: he also knew that the piece—a
commission for Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony—would be judged
as his first big orchestral statement.
This hurdle he passed as well. “Asyla”—the title is the plural of “asylum”—is
big, deep, and enthralling. It seems to work both by intellectual logic and by raw
emotion: you can sit forward and follow the progress of the dipping-and-rising notes of
the opening theme in various backward or mirror-image configurations, or else you can
sit back and experience its cinematic succession of scenes. The first movement is
dominated by a proudly limping theme that is not unlike the subject of Bach’s
Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, except that it keeps floating up instead of winding
down: it gets lost in high, hazy, luminous chords, even as violent dancing figures—a
forecast of “Ecstasio”—break in. The second movement is melancholy, depressive: when
it seems to reach a state of paralysis, Adès reshuffles the intervals of the principal theme
to produce a sprawling Wagnerian theme on the cellos. (When I ran into Simon Rattle
after one rehearsal, he wondered aloud, “Where do these ideas come from?”) The
magical, menacing “Ecstasio” is next: it begins with a distant whine, like a buzz in the
head, and then launches into block-rocking beats, hysterical chanting choirs, whoops, and
whistles. Adès has moved from the abstract argument of the first movement to something
like brutal realism here. On top of the dance beat he re-creates the club’s atmosphere: the
buzz of the crowd, the thrill of contact, the danger of contact, a couple of apparent
stumbles or accidents, and assorted noises in the brain, some of which—as the
movement’s title suggests—are drug-related. The mechanical music of the club
undergoes multiple distortions in the observer’s ears, and, in so doing, becomes
genuinely musical. It’s hard to tell whether the protagonist is having a good time. Shortly
before the end, there’s a precious sigh in the strings which sounds like a wistful thought
of bed. But the dance resumes.
One of Adès’s closest friends is the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, whose new book,
“The Spell,” contains a scene that parallels the dance sequence in “Asyla.” A wellbehaved civil servant falls in with a club-going kid, takes Ecstasy, goes out to a raunchy
London club, and finds his bourgeois values in free fall. Adès pointed this out to me by
way of recounting the pleasure he gets from contemporary London and from intellectual
company that doesn’t cloister itself from popular culture. But there are obvious
differences between what Hollinghurst is doing in his book and what Adès is doing in his
music. Hollinghurst is telling a story: he moves on to the next chapter. Adès has only an
impression of a place, an atmosphere. He told me that he’d had a great deal of trouble
finding appropriate music to follow the scary hedonism of “Ecstasio.” His solution was a
brief, halting, sickly-sounding sequence of chorales which climaxes very suddenly with
an imperious statement in the dismal key of E-flat minor. The music tapers into silence
immediately thereafter. This ending is intensely strange and intensely moving: the whole
orchestra joins in the tragic utterance, but the gesture feels self-conscious, solitary, like a
shout of anger on an empty street. It is, in the end, unexpectedly uplifting—happy anger,
a release.
That’s what I hear, at least. Certain works of art become our private property: they
speak to us by making us speak to ourselves. “Asyla” became for me an eerie kind of
mirror. I had been feeling shocks of recognition in Adès’s music ever since I first heard
it, in 1995, at the Aldeburgh Festival. Adès and I are about the same age, and I stopped
trying to write music at about the age when he took it up seriously. Sometimes during
“Asyla” I felt that I was hearing ideas that had once flickered in my head. This was pure
fantasy, of course, but it brought home to me with unusual immediacy Emerson’s dictum
that “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.” Adès’s themes
often seem uncannily familiar—sometimes because they are ingeniously disguised
variations and sometimes because they have the symmetrical, shapely quality that used to
be called “inspiration.” I have no idea whether “Asyla” has a similar effect on others or
whether I will get the same charge out of it in ten or twenty years. But I am certain that
works by this composer will enter the repertory of the future. The animal organism that
Adès let loose in the Chamber Symphony is multiplying; he acts like its bemused
caretaker. There were awesome moments during the rehearsals for “Asyla” when Simon
Rattle subdivided the orchestra, asking different groups of instruments to play separately,
and fresh little Adès pieces emerged.
The impact that “Asyla” had on me created some confusion in my talks with its
creator. Suddenly, there were a lot of selves about: the person in front of me, the voice
behind the piece, the version of myself which I heard in it. Adès resisted my attempts to
bring them all together—to track down a cogent story in “Asyla,” or even a system. I
pestered him by E-mail, and he retreated into gnomic aphorisms. “There is no atonal
music, there is no tonal music” was the last message I received. In a way, he was playing
a game: by releasing one bit of information and withholding the rest, he had created an
enticing mystery. But his resistance to my queries seemed to go deeper. I had run up
against a wall of reticence in a mostly voluble and generous personality. Adès doesn’t
like to see or hear his music described: he is unyielding on this subject. Any
generalization is a threat. Even compliments distress him—he can’t hear the particular
positive qualities that people single out. “I stopped listening after a certain point,” he told
me. “One person would come up to me and say, ‘There was such strong continuity in
your harmony.’ The next person would say, ‘Wonderful, I was expecting the harmony to
be more continuous.’ Composers say strange things. They mention only what’s useful to
them. I’m not friends with many composers. I like the reactions I get from nonmusicians. In Manchester, when we did ‘These Premises Are Alarmed’ ”—a brief,
spectacular curtain-raiser piece—“I had these fantastic teen-agers, very cool, heads
buried under anoraks, coming up to me, saying, ‘Loiked it when it got loud.’”
This may seem a higher, more perverse form of arrogance, to find fault with all
but one’s dimmest flatterers. But Adès’s perpetual dissatisfaction with descriptions of
himself may really stem from an uncertainty about who he is and where he is going. He
may still identify more with slouching teen-agers than with the eminences of musical
London. He is unsure of and protective of his second self—that wild, unpredictable,
electrifying voice. He doesn’t know whether he recognizes it as such. “I’m twentyseven—perhaps I will find my true voice at the age of fifty, or fifty-one, like Janácˇek,”
he mused. “Everyone will be very shocked. It will be a very small and ugly one.” He
burst out laughing. For once, he seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. Either
that or he had found a typically saturnine and serpentine way of saying, “You ain’t seen
nothing yet.” ©
On May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, the curtain went up on modern
music. Richard Strauss conducted his opera “Salome,” a shockingly faithful adaptation of
a play by Oscar Wilde. The piece had first been heard in Dresden, five months before, but
it was the Graz performance that amazed the musical élite. Gustav Mahler, the director of
the Court Opera in Vienna, attended with his wife, having been thwarted by imperial
censors in his attempts to stage “Salome” himself. Giacomo Puccini made a special trip
to see what his German rival was up to. Arnold Schoenberg brought along his pupil
Alban Berg. Strauss took particular note of the crowd’s demographics; he mentioned, in a
letter to his wife, Pauline, the “young people from Vienna, with only the vocal score as
hand luggage.” Strange to say, one of them was an Austrian teenager named Adolf Hitler,
who had just seen Mahler conduct “Tristan und Isolde” in Vienna. No less strange, there
was a fictional character in attendance—Adrian Leverkühn, the antihero of Thomas
Mann’s “Doktor Faustus,” a tale of a cold-hearted German composer in league with the
Devil.
You won’t find “Salome” highlighted in most histories of modern music. The
première of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in Paris, in 1913, is more often cited as the
century’s revolutionary moment. But “Salome” came first, and it killed the nineteenth
century, as T. S. Eliot wrote of “Ulysses.” The first notes—a slithering scale on the
clarinet—expose a crack in the musical order. The scale begins in C-sharp, wanders into
G, a key that is entirely alien to C-sharp, and then returns to the original C-sharp, as if
nothing had happened. The score is full of irrational chord changes, which function like
quick cuts in film. The cinematic effects redouble with the entrance of Herod, Salome’s
degenerate stepfather. He comes out on the terrace; looks for Salome; gazes at the moon,
which he describes as “reeling through the clouds like a drunken woman”; orders wine,
slips in blood, stumbles over the body of a soldier who has committed suicide; feels cold,
feels a wind—there is a hallucination of wings beating the air. It’s quiet again; then more
wind, more visions. The orchestra plays broken waltzes, expressionistic clusters of
dissonance, impressionistic washes of timbre. Later, when the soldiers prepare to sever
John the Baptist’s head, the bottom drops out altogether: rumblings and strangled cries
build into a gigantic smear of sound which saturates the spectrum of the twelve-tone
scale. As Salome admires the head, the harmony steadies itself, settling on a disturbingly
radiant C-sharp. Yet, at the moment of ultimate bliss, Strauss undermines a conventional
major-key progression by sliding an alternative progression beneath it. A nightmare
dissonance results—a mixture of the ordinary and the unspeakable. It’s like seeing an evil
face in a crowded room. Herod, disgusted by the spectacle that his own incestuous lust
has incubated, calls for Salome’s death. The opera ends with nine bars of noise.
The morning after the Graz performance, Strauss was pleased with himself. “It is
raining,” he wrote to Pauline, “and I am sitting on the garden terrace of my hotel, in order
to report to you that ‘Salome’ went well, gigantic success, people applauding for ten
minutes until the fire curtain came down, etc., etc.” The note of complacency in that
“etc., etc.” was ill-advised. Strauss would not occupy the vanguard of notoriety for much
longer. After the worldwide sensation, in 1911, of “Der Rosenkavalier”—a score as
gracious as “Salome” was vicious—he found himself trailing in the dust of rapid
historical developments. That gathering of musical celebrities in Graz was like the last
meeting of the crowned heads of Europe. Mahler died in 1911, and he seemed to take
Romanticism with him. Puccini’s “Turandot,” which the composer left unfinished at his
death, in 1924, ended an operatic succession that had begun in Florence at the end of the
sixteenth century. Schoenberg abandoned tonality in 1908, and so began the age of “new
music,” with its long manifestos and tiny audiences.
Strauss himself had an uneven, serpentine career after his glory years, which had
begun in 1889, with the libidinous tone poem “Don Juan.” He became, among the young
moderns, uncool. They hailed, as the landmarks of the new, not “Salome” and its
dissonant companion “Elektra” but “The Rite of Spring,” Schoenberg’s Second String
Quartet, and Berg’s “Wozzeck.” By the time of Strauss’s death, in 1949, he had become a
relic from a time capsule. When he was born, Germany had not yet been unified;
absurdly, he was still alive as Germany split into West and East. Stravinsky, the high
priest of the modern, supplied what seemed like the definitive epitaph. In his
conversations with Robert Craft, he said, “I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to
whichever purgatory punishes triumphant vulgarity. Their musical substance is cheap and
poor; it cannot interest a musician today.”
Fifty years after his death, Strauss occupies a far different historical position. In a
century dominated by schools, systems, and other group activities—atonality, twelvetone composition, futurism, objectivism, neoclassicism, total serialism, timbralism, neoromanticism, postmodernism—Strauss was an exuberant free agent. He lived in the hereand-now, writing swiftly and viscerally, in response to whatever subject seized his
interest. His music still sounds mysteriously fresh. Many younger composers envy his
spirited use and abuse of tonality, his way of electrifying the familiar. His tone poems
may not be as popular as they once were—encrustations of orchestral routine have
blunted their satiric edge—but his operas are enjoying a long-term renaissance. Lauren
Flanigan triumphed last season at New York City Opera in “Intermezzo,” Strauss’s
dazzling marital comedy from the twenties; Renée Fleming is poised to breathe new life
into “Rosenkavalier” at the Met; the Danish soprano Inga Nielsen wickedly reinterprets
the title role of “Salome” on a Chandos recording. Meanwhile, academics no longer
dismiss Strauss as a second-class topic. They are discovering in him layer upon layer of
irony and complexity.
Strauss obtained his independence at a price. He was proud, and he got his
comeuppance when the Nazis came to power. After accepting praise and honors from the
Third Reich, he was forced to endure a series of humiliations. He lent his prestige to
Hitler and did not get it back. Yet he somehow went on singing the song of himself—
more gently, more wistfully. In old age, oblivious of the fact that he had become
irrelevant, Strauss wrote a series of sublimely unhistorical farewells: the operas “Daphne”
and “Capriccio,” “Metamorphosen” for strings, and the “Four Last Songs.” These were
so potent as to render the idea of relevance irrelevant. They destroyed, single-handedly,
the modernist imperative of progress—the notion that music must always be made new.
Strauss, in fact, had gone neither forward nor backward; he was using the same extended
tonal language that he had used forty years before. A progressive had become a
reactionary by standing absolutely still. The world had left him behind, but over the next
fifty years it would move back his way, making him sound radical again. Stravinsky
would be crestfallen: Strauss is more than ever with us, a perverse hero for a perverse
century.
He did not look like a great composer. You have to wonder, as Romain Rolland
wrote, “how that can have come from this”—how the music could have come from the
man. To many of his contemporaries, he had the appearance of a boorish millionaire, a
hick made good. Strauss was born in 1864 in Munich, a lazy Southern place in the eyes
of other Germans. His father was a virtuoso horn player of lowly origins, his mother a
brewery heiress. He was a worldly, well-to-do man who seemed to care more about the
card game that followed the performance than about the performance itself. He composed
for a few hours a day, in whatever mood; he could write at a cocktail party or in a railway
car. He did not believe in God, and he saw no spiritual dimension in his art. He thought
that every work had to have at least one tuneful, kitschy moment to please the dumbest
members of the audience. Some of his commercial innovations were almost visionary:
like a Bavarian Michael Ovitz, he forced opera companies to accept package deals of his
works, so that a popular new opera like “Rosenkavalier” would have to be accompanied
by the less popular “Feuersnot.”
How do you write about such an unromantic cipher? Until this year, no thorough,
full-length biography of Strauss was available in English. The fiftieth anniversary of his
death, however, has brought two big new biographies, by the English critics Michael
Kennedy and Matthew Boyden. How troublesome the case of Strauss remains can be
seen in the fact that these books describe two entirely different people. Kennedy’s
“Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma” (Cambridge) gives us a reserved, selfdeprecating, affably mysterious figure—an oddball bourgeois who might have drifted out
of Mann’s ironical self-portraits. Boyden’s “Richard Strauss” (Northeastern) gives us a
cold, greedy, hateful monster.
If you read the two new biographies back to back and make no attempt to resolve
the contradictions that appear between them, you may begin to grasp the complexity of
Strauss’s character. Neither book will do on its own. Kennedy’s is too apologetic on the
matter of Strauss’s involvement with the Nazis. He is mistaken when he says that antiSemitism is never to be found in Strauss’s correspondence: the early letters are rife with
anti-Jewish slurs. Also, he makes Strauss’s Nazi years look rosier by omitting several
dismaying episodes. You would not know from him, for example, that the gala concert
that Strauss conducted at the 1938 Reich Music Festival was attached to the Propaganda
Ministry’s exhibition of “Degenerate Music.” Still, this book is earnest and effective in
its campaign to arouse sympathy for Strauss. The anecdotes are charming, the musical
descriptions evocative.
Where Kennedy covers up, Boyden goes on the attack. Unfortunately, his
biography is a botch. There is a case against Strauss to be made, but Boyden does it
neither competently nor honestly. He paraphrases other Strauss scholars without
acknowledgment, and sometimes lifts from them directly. For example, he telescopes an
essay by Timothy Jackson, on “Metamorphosen,” into three paragraphs. Jackson writes,
“Goethe’s view of metamorphosis, like the classical notion, is essentially optimistic.”
Boyden writes, “Goethe took an essentially optimistic view of the idea of
transformation.” Jackson’s name does not appear in the notes. The chapter on “Salome”
replicates—page by page, argument by argument, quotation by quotation—an essay on
the opera by Sander Gilman. (Gilman: “[Strauss] brings the ‘howling’ cacophony of the
orchestra to its peak when the first and second soldiers use the words ‘howling’ and
‘Jews.’” Boyden: “The cacophony reaches its peak when the first and second soldiers
intone the words ‘howling’ and ‘Jews.’ ”) Boyden makes tendentious errors throughout.
He claims that Strauss wrote his “Festival Prelude” for the Reich Festival of 1938, when
it was actually written in 1913. He reports as fact a rumored breakfast with Hitler which,
according to the Strauss scholar Bryan Gilliam, never took place.
Worst of all, Boyden delivers an astonishing insult to Strauss’s daughter-in-law, the late
Alice Strauss, whose Jewishness was well known to the Nazis. Boyden is anxious to
minimize the potential threat to Strauss’s family, so he calls Alice, variously, “the
daughter of a half-Jewish industrialist,” “quarter-Jewish,” or just “ ‘Jewish’ ”—in
sneering scare quotes. He implies, in other words, that her mother was not Jewish at all.
Why, then, do we later read that Alice’s maternal grandmother died in the Nazis’ show
camp of Theresienstadt? “A total of twenty-six of [Alice’s] relatives,” Boyden reports,
“were murdered in the name of the racial purification that Strauss believed central to the
deliverance of German culture.” There is no evidence that Strauss believed any such
thing. And it seems not to have occurred to Boyden that a death toll of twenty-six is
unusually high for the family of a quarter-Jew, or a quote-unquote Jew, or whatever he
wishes to call her.
It’s not news that a lot of bad books are being published these days. And, for decades,
musical biographies have fallen below the standards that apply to historical or literary
ones. Even so, Boyden’s and Kennedy’s books suffer from the basic Straussian problem:
people have a devil of a time squaring the life with the work. Two shorter biographies,
fortunately, do a better job. Tim Ashley, in a new volume in Phaidon Press’s 20thCentury Composers series, gives an exactingly fair account of the historical record. And
Bryan Gilliam’s “The Life of Richard Strauss” (Cambridge) supplies a rich, open-ended
discussion of Strauss’s intellectual background and musical personality. “If there is a
significant consistency to be found in Strauss’s compositional output,” Gilliam writes, “it
is in his desire to suggest the profundities and ambiguities to be found in everyday life,
even in the apparently banal.” Strauss weaves together “the cheap and the precious, the
commonplace and the sublime....The key may not be to reconcile or resolve such
contradictions, but rather to look at them in a dialectical way.” In other words, Gilliam
asks that we listen to Strauss’s music as if it were the result of a conscious plan. Oddly,
this hasn’t been done before. The music has almost always been treated as an eruption of
craftsmanship in the service of no particular creative idea.
The personality that Strauss presents in music is not the remote, saturnine one we find in
letters and memoirs. It is brash, passionate, fearful, wistful, sardonic, spiteful, and a bit
deranged. The voice is recognizable in just a few bars of any piece of his that you might
hear on the radio. It insists in almost childish fashion on the basic building blocks of
music, on major and minor triads. But as the triads ricochet against each other in
unexpected ways they break free of the step-by-step progressions of the harmony books.
Triads collide across the distance of a tritone—e.g., C major and F-sharp. The music
often seems to be in two keys at once; progressions from the C-major realm may be
interlaced with progressions from the F-sharp one, in a dizzying chain of harmonic non
sequiturs, or chords from parallel realms may pile up into bracing bitonal dissonances.
Strauss’s musical personality also gives itself away in its endlessly inventive handling of
the orchestra. Even those who detest Strauss have to concede that he was one of the most
original orchestrators in history. Instruments snarl, wail, growl, and shriek at the extreme
upper or lower ends of their ranges, making noise as well as music. And, despite the
heaviness of the apparatus, the Straussian orchestra is light on its feet—it is always
skittering from one short episode to the next. It is, more often than not, a vehicle of wit,
even when the subject matter is deadly serious. Strauss the composer was a prankster, an
ironist, even an anarchist.
I don’t use the word “anarchist” casually. None of the new books on Strauss—not even
Gilliam’s—show the full intellectual chaos that lay behind the bourgeois façade. To see
its origins, one has to delve into one of his most obscure works—his first, failed opera,
“Guntram.” Completed in 1893, this was the work with which Strauss positioned himself
as the potential successor to Wagner; he had already made his name as a brilliant writer
for orchestra, but he must have sensed that his untidy talent was best suited for the stage.
“Guntram,” for which Strauss wrote his own libretto, was, as one of his mentors
lamented, Wagnerian in technique but anti-Wagnerian in content. The plot is worth a
brief summary. Guntram, a medieval troubadour, falls in love with a woman who is being
brutalized by her husband. Guntram kills the husband in an act of self-defense and is
nonetheless put on trial by the shadowy singing society to which he belongs. But
Guntram refuses to submit to an outside judgment. He leaves the order, leaves his
beloved, walks away from the world. To understand why this scenario upset the Bayreuth
circle, imagine Parsifal getting fed up with the Knights of the Grail and abandoning them
to their own devices, or Brünnhilde throwing Siegfried on the funeral pyre and washing
her hands of the whole business. The critic Arthur Seidl, who was friendly with Strauss,
stated in a review that the opera was an allegory of Strauss’s ambivalence toward the
Wagnerians, and that the ending symbolized his break from them.
“Guntram” is a flawed opera, but the finale is a wonder: voice and orchestra trace
irregular, ethereal melodic arcs that are characteristic of Strauss’s mature style. Decades
later, Strauss acknowledged that Seidl’s analysis was correct—that this was his
“renunciation of community,” his rejection of the Bayreuth cult. And it was more: it
trumpeted the radical individualist philosophy of Max Stirner, an early-nineteenthcentury philosopher who influenced Nietzsche. In his book “The Ego and Its Own”
Stirner argues that all forms of organized religion, as well as all organized societies,
imprison individuals within illusions of morality, duty, and law. The individual, the
egoist, has every right to resist those illusions and live life as he pleases. Strauss became
interested in this unashamedly thuggish philosophy in 1892, while he was finishing the
“Guntram” libretto, and, according to Seidl, he was still talking over Stirner’s ideas on
the afternoon of the opera’s première. If you look at “The Ego and Its Own” and
“Guntram” side by side, you see some arresting similarities. Stirner attacks the “beautiful
dream” of social duty; Guntram echoes that phrase and adds, contemptuously, “Dream
on, good people, about the salvation of humanity.” Stirner faults Socrates for submitting
to the laws of the community rather than passing judgment on himself; Guntram, in line
with Stirner’s thinking, becomes his own judge and declares, “The laws of my mind
determine my life.”
For an allegedly bourgeois composer, Strauss had eyebrow-raising literary tastes. He
wrote songs on texts by Richard Dehmel, a Nietzschean poet infamous for his erotic
hallucinations; Oskar Panizza, who was jailed for “crimes against religion, committed
through the press” (Panizza once described “Parsifal,” not inaptly, as “spiritual fodder for
pederasts”); and John Henry Mackay, Max Stirner’s biographer, who later, under the pen
name Sagitta, wrote novels celebrating man-boy love. For his second opera, “Feuersnot,”
Strauss asked the Berlin satirist Ernst von Wolzogen to adapt an obscene Flemish legend
about a woman who sets fire to a city by emitting flames from her buttocks. The
translation of Wilde’s “Salome” that Strauss used for his opera was made by Hedwig
Lachmann, the wife of the anarchist philosopher Gustav Landauer, who would later
become Commissar for Education and Enlightenment of the short-lived Soviet Republic
in Bavaria. (By a quirk of cultural history, Lachmann and Landauer were the
grandparents of the director Mike Nichols.) It was no surprise that Strauss came to be
seen as an exemplary decadent. A physician wrote to the New York Times in 1907,
“‘Salome’ is a detailed and explicit exposition of the most horrible, disgusting, revolting
and unmentionable features of degeneracy that I have ever heard, read of, or imagined.”
Strauss himself did not share the radical tendencies of certain of his collaborators,
although his rugged setting of “The Stonebreaker’s Song,” a proletarian poem by Karl
Henckell, anticipates Weill’s settings of Brecht twenty years later. What Strauss really
wanted was all-around outrage. He was accused of putting on sensations in order to
increase box-office receipts, but his purposes went deeper: he had a simmering contempt
for authority and for the pomposity that attended it. Several of his tone poems begin with
grand heroic statements and then dwindle toward silence. “Don Juan,” “Till
Eulenspiegel,” and “Don Quixote” all end with the sudden death of the central figure.
“Ein Heldenleben” closes on a note of resignation. “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” whose
mind-blowing fanfare is always quoted out of context in films and on TV, spirals
downward into shudders of disgust and a miasma of unresolved harmony.
Indeed, scholars who have lately studied the programs behind the tone poems suspect that
Strauss treated the whole symphonic ideal—the romantic striving after transcendence—
as an ironic exercise. James Hepokoski describes “Zarathustra” as a “chain of free, selfcontained sections that lead into successive ‘blind alleys.’” Strauss himself pictured “Don
Quixote” as “a variation form ad absurdum,” and he sarcastically called “Ein
Heldenleben” (“A Hero’s Life”) a contemporary update of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” with
extra horns and no funeral march. In the screechily dissonant section entitled “The Hero’s
Enemies,” he transcribes the horrible noises that critics perceived in his works—a kind of
satire of modernism, before the fact. There are moments when Strauss’s music implodes
on itself.
Compare Strauss in this respect to Mahler, whom he called his “antipode,” his friendly
rival. Mahler hungered for transcendence and remained the more faithful Wagnerian.
Mahler was also attracted to the Christian promise of redemption, which did not interest
Strauss. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be redeemed from,” he once said. Yet he
threw his reputation behind Mahler’s symphonies, overlooking his friend’s attacks of
jealousy. (Mahler is often quoted as having said, “My time will come.” What he actually
said was “My time will come when his is up”—the “he” being Strauss.) Mahler was the
poet of power, of epiphany, of self-transformation. Strauss became the poet of selfdisempowerment. He, too, enjoyed displays of pomp, but he seldom let them prevail. Tim
Ashley, in his biography, argues that the “Alpine Symphony,” Strauss’s last big work for
orchestra, is a kind of ironic memorial to Mahler. Despite affectionate quotations from
Mahler symphonies, the music sinks back, in a state of mental and physical fatigue,
toward the vaporous cluster harmonies with which it began.
In short, this music is not free of nihilism. Outside the fabulous carnival of sound is a
cold and empty space. You feel it when the midnight bell starts tolling in “Also Sprach
Zarathustra,” when the Marschallin, in “Rosenkavalier,” is unsettled by the ticking of the
clocks, when Salome gazes into the cistern where John the Baptist is about to be killed. “I
hear nothing,” Salome whispers, and the orchestra plays that sound.
Yet Strauss offers an enormous consolation in the warmth and strength of his lyric
impulse. More often than not, the consoling voices in his operas are those of women.
Perhaps the most surprising result of his lifelong contrarianism was his unstinting display
of sympathy for his female characters. Some of this may be attributed to the influence of
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose great sequence of Strauss librettos, from
“Rosenkavalier” to “Arabella,” fastidiously avoided the usual stereotypes. But the real
explanation probably lies in the solidity of Strauss’s marriage to the singer Pauline de
Ahna, who affected contempt for her husband in public and showed an almost desperate
devotion in private. Anyone who saw Lauren Flanigan’s performance in “Inter-mezzo,”
at City Opera, can have no doubt of the intensity of Strauss’s regard for Pauline: in that
scrupulously autobiographical opera, the dynamic wife commands center stage while the
phlegmatic husband putters in the background.
Strauss’s operas are, in their old-fashioned way, proto-feminist documents. In them, it is
usually the woman who actively desires, and the man who is passively perceived. Salome
savors the body of John the Baptist; the Marschallin enjoys and then lets go of the boy
Octavian; Zerbinetta, in the first version of “Ariadne auf Naxos,” says that the young god
Bacchus has “cheeks like a woman’s, eyes like a deer’s”; the Countess, in “Capriccio,”
receives the advances of two men, the Poet and the Composer, and can’t decide between
them. Renée Fleming, who has a staggeringly beautiful new record entitled “Strauss
Heroines,” says, in an interview included with the disk, “It amazes me that the
monologue in Act I”—the Marschallin’s meditation on lost youth in “Rosenkavalier”—
“was written by a man.” In contrast, Strauss’s male characters tend to be flighty, vicious,
or obtuse. In “Salome,” masculinity falls to pieces in the figure of Herod—that male
hysteric who hypocritically surrounds himself with contentious Jewish and Christian
theologians and pauses in his lust for his teen-age stepdaughter only to comment on the
beauty of a dead soldier.
After the turn of the century, when Strauss began to write prolifically for female opera
singers, his outlook brightened. He rhapsodized more and mocked less. His irony became
wistful in “Rosenkavalier,” with its boozy waltzes, and positively lighthearted in
“Ariadne auf Naxos,” with its pseudo-authentic chamber orchestra and freewheeling play
of styles. By the twenties, he even fancied himself, mistakenly, an operetta composer—
“the Offenbach of the twentieth century.” In the thirties, he worked out his “late style,” in
which tonality becomes evanescent, mercurial. No convincing account exists of what is
really going on in pieces like “Daphne,” “Capriccio,” and “Metamorphosen”;
contemporary harmonic analysis, which pushes past the surface of music in search of
roots, can’t seem to cope with Strauss, for whom surface play is everything. It’s hard to
tell what foundation the music really rests on: the root harmonies, underneath the wild
chord changes, are either banal or nonexistent. Glenn Gould, an eloquent Strauss
enthusiast, furnished one of the best descriptions of the composer’s fairly indescribable
method. “Through all of Strauss’s works,” Gould wrote, “there runs one prevalent
ambition, the desire to find new ways in which the vocabulary of key-signature tonality
can be augmented without at the same time being allowed to deteriorate into a state of
chromatic immobility.” There’s the crux: Strauss rearranges the major-and-minor-key
system without dismantling it altogether. When he does make his way back to
conventional harmony, he often gives it a not quite believable air. “Rosenkavalier,” a riot
of weird, wonderful modulations, ends with an emphatic textbook cadence, but the put-on
artlessness of it is guaranteed to make you smile.
Nearly every twentieth-century musical history you can find will state something to the
effect that Strauss “flirted” with atonality in “Salome” and “Elektra” and then “retreated”
to tonality. In the eyes of certain critics, Strauss was guilty of feminine weaknesses:
stylistically, he was thought to be capricious and superficial, and several times he was
called womanly in print. But the famous flirtation with atonality was a mirage—a
distortion on the lens of modernist criticism. “Salome” and “Elektra” seem to turn toward
atonality only because atonal composers copied them. Schoenberg’s “emancipation of the
dissonance” was, in part, an excision of Straussian dissonances from their surrounding
chordal patterns. When Schoenberg and Berg heard “Salome” in Graz, they were
listening closely. (Berg heard the opera six more times the following year in Vienna, and
his debt would become clear in “Wozzeck.” That work’s sinister “primary” chord, which
is generated from a modified whole-tone scale, is essentially identical to the motif of
Salome’s madness.) The vituperation that Schoenberg and his followers heaped on
Strauss displays something of the anxiety of influence: Strauss had to be knocked down
because he had given them too much. The same anxiety may color Stravinsky’s
invective. It is telling that Stravinsky was particularly incensed by “Ariadne auf Naxos,”
whose neo-Baroque manner predates his own efforts in that line.
What irritates the modernist sensibility is Strauss’s love of disorder, his horror of clean
forms. Those who accepted Adolf Loos’s condemnation of ornament as crime sentenced
Strauss to death. True, his works contain awesome lapses of taste—usually in the latter
half of a piece, and usually in a bland major key. Yet what is bad in Strauss cannot be
separated from what is human in him. In a century overpopulated by “the lunatics of one
idea,” as Wallace Stevens put it, Strauss is majestically messy and down to earth. At the
end of his life, he said, “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class secondrate composer.” He was probably right. Then again I have a hard time thinking of
composers of the last hundred years who rose any higher. Should I consider Schoenberg
first-rate when his music never makes me smile? Should I venerate Stravinsky when his
music never makes me cry? Perhaps all major twentieth-century composers have been a
shade second-rate. They have lacked the unself-conscious assurance of the older masters.
There is no longer a climate in which such assurance could grow: the music-mad culture
that produced Mozart and Beethoven is unthinkable. Around the time of that shattering
performance of “Salome” in Graz, the audience began to split apart. Composers were no
longer addressing humanity; they were writing for a subculture. Strauss was among the
first to see it happening. He may even have thought about it on the morning after
“Salome” as the rain pattered on the terrace and he remembered the young men who
called themselves his admirers.
When Strauss met Hitler, at the Bayreuth Festival in 1933, he was in a position of
weakness. It had been twenty years since the runaway success of “Rosenkavalier,” and
his ego had begun to fail him. Hitler drew him in by promising to enact various pet
Straussian reforms. New royalty schemes would reward classical composers over popular
ones; composers’ copyrights would be extended; spa orchestras would be prevented from
murdering Wagner overtures; youths would not ruin their voices by yelling patriotic
songs. These were the changes that the blinkered, self-involved Strauss wanted from the
new world order. He became president of the Reich Music Chamber and proceeded to run
it in a haphazard fashion. As erratic as ever, he veered this way and that, showing
defiance one day and craven obedience the next. After he was forced to resign his official
position, in 1935, he wrote, in a private document, “I consider the Streicher-Goebbels
Jew baiting...the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher
intelligence and greater talent.” A few days later, he hailed Hitler as “the great architect
of German social life.” He never formulated a coherent response to what was happening
around him. “Strauss acts like a completely detached bystander,” one Nazi operative
complained. The émigrés, who wanted him to renounce the regime, said the same thing.
During prior spells of German aggression, Strauss had kept himself more or less aloof. In
the First World War, he had failed to contribute to the war effort and had worked chiefly
on “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” the sprawling fairy-tale opera that he and Hofmannsthal
intended as their masterpiece. “It is sickening to read in the papers about the regeneration
of German art,” he wrote to Hofmannsthal, “or to read how Young Germany is to emerge
cleansed and purified from this ‘glorious’ war, when in fact one must be thankful if the
poor blighters are at least cleansed of their lice and bed-bugs and cured of their infections
and once more weaned from murder!” He seemed almost to be attacking Thomas Mann,
who, in his conservative phase, had celebrated the war as “cleansing,” as “festive.” Come
1933 and it was Strauss who was attaching his name to chauvinist pamphlets, one of them
an attack on Thomas Mann. What had happened to the proud anarchist? He had met, it
turned out, his spiritual match. Hitler presented himself not as a dictator but as a music
lover, flattering Strauss with his knowledge of musical matters and his boyhood interest
in “Salome.” Nazism was a fly trap for aesthetes of Strauss’s type: no matter how refined
their tastes, they disappeared without a trace into the general aesthetic of kitsch and
crime.
Strauss liked to believe that as an artist he remained a law unto himself. “Guntram,”
again, was the key to his thinking. In it, a secret order of musicians sought to “improve
mankind through art,” in the composer’s words. The composer himself sought something
else. “Even though Wagner succeeded in the case of ‘Parsifal,’” he wrote, “that does not
mean to say that every other artistic undertaking which intends too strong an ethical
tendency from the first does not already...contain the seeds of death in itself.” Looking
over the history of political art, one might be inclined to agree, and to make no exception
for “Parsifal.” Wagner thought that his operas would usher in a better world, and they
might well have made the world better for individual listeners. But when one enthusiast
tried to use Wagner as a social tool—“Out of ‘Parsifal’ I am building my religion,” Hitler
said—the ethical tendencies of the work began grinding in reverse. During the Nazi
period, Strauss kept turning over in his mind the relationship of the artist to society. In a
memoir, he paraphrased the plot of “Guntram” this way: “Guntram judges himself and
abrogates the right of the group to punish him.” In 1935, he wrote, in a letter to his
librettist Stefan Zweig, “The ‘Volk’ exists for me only at the moment it becomes the
audience.” The Gestapo intercepted the letter, and Strauss’s resignation from the Reich
Music Chamber followed.
In 1936, Strauss set to work on the opera “Daphne,” and once again he took up the theme
of “renunciation of community.” Daphne is a solitary nymph who feels a stronger
connection to natural things than to human beings. Nonetheless, she falls in love with the
human Leukippos and also draws the attention of the god Apollo. After Apollo kills
Leukippos in a jealous rage, Daphne wishes only to stand by her lover’s grave in sorrow,
as a “symbol of never-ending love.” The gods, taking pity, change her into a laurel tree
that will stand on that spot. Strauss’s orchestra depicts Daphne’s transformation in bright,
quivering patterns, and her voice returns just before the end in wordless arabesques.
Apollo is lost in wonder at the song: “Are we still gods, or were we overshadowed long
ago by human emotion, obliterated long ago by such gentle greatness?” The
metamorphosis of the lonely nymph feels like a metaphor for the artist renouncing the
world, and the impression is strengthened by echoes of the music of “Guntram.” Both
works begin in G major and end in F-sharp/G-flat, and both have melodies that weave
gently around a triad and quicken into downward-falling triplets. The endings, in
particular, share an atmosphere of untouchable serenity. Strauss has rewritten his
youthful Wagnerian showpiece—and much of Wagner, besides—as a happy-sad pastoral
scene.
Strauss knew that he had created something glorious in the ending of “Daphne.”
In his last years, he played it over and over on the piano. What did he think it meant?
Some scholars hear a kind of mute protest, the announcement of “inner emigration.”
They have also heard a hint of regret in the black-as-night string chords of
“Metamorphosen,” which Strauss wrote as a memorial to a ruined German culture at the
end of the war. I’ve tried to hear those things, but I can’t. Strauss could express profound
sadness, but he was still too proud to show remorse. More likely, he thought of “Daphne”
as the final, unfettered triumph of his individuality. But under Hitler the individual had
been annihilated—he had been absorbed into the larger evil. Both “Daphne” and
“Metamorphosen” are great music from a gray soul, pure music from an impure place.
The only explanation for them is, perhaps, a mystical one. After decades of thrashing
about, Strauss’s separate creative personality had acquired not only a mind but also a soul
of its own. Its powers of communication had reached some stage of critical mass. While
the man himself sank into a fatalistic belief that Western culture had come to an end, his
music was singing out with foolish love to an audience of the future.
If, as Leonard Bernstein once said, Mahler is the prophet of a century of death,
Strauss shows how a weakened, wounded, obdurately human art can survive the
catastrophe. Music, he suggests, cannot mirror all the terrors of the age. It cannot even do
them justice. Instead, it should do what it has always done—play upon the emotions and
conjure emotions from notes. “The mystery of love,” Salome says, “is greater than the
mystery of death.” The music of emotion is greater than the music of disaster.
Strauss died on September 8, 1949. At his funeral, three singers sang the final trio
from “Der Rosenkavalier.” Pauline Strauss reached out her arms and slid from her chair,
her knees scraping the gravel. She cried, “Richard! Richard!” His body had already
turned to ash. ©
3/20/00
On a January evening in 1936, Joseph Stalin entered a box at the Bolshoi Theatre,
in Moscow. His custom was to take a seat in the back, just before the curtain rose. He had
become interested that month in new operas by Soviet composers: a week earlier, he had
seen Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s “The Quiet Don,” and liked it enough to summon the composer
for a conversation. On this night, the Bolshoi was presenting “Lady Macbeth of
Mtsensk,” a dark, violent, sexually explicit opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. Stalin enjoyed
himself less. After the third act—in which tsarist policemen are depicted as buffoons who
arrest people on hastily fabricated pretexts—the Leader conspicuously walked out.
Shostakovich, who had been expecting the same reception that Stalin gave to
Dzerzhinsky, went away feeling, he said, “sick at heart.” Two days later, Pravda
published an editorial under the headline “muddle instead of music,” which condemned
Shostakovich’s opera outright. “From the first minute,” the anonymous author wrote, “the
listener is confused by a deliberately disordered, muddled stream of noise.” The
composer was playing a game that “may end very badly.”
In 1936, Shostakovich was twenty-nine years old, and he was the brilliant young
man of Soviet music. His First Symphony, which he completed at the age of eighteen,
had been taken up by orchestras around the world. He had dedicated himself—
industriously, if not enthusiastically—to works on Communist themes. His first opera, a
setting of Gogol’s “The Nose,” typified the impertinence of art in the early Bolshevik
years, and his second, “Lady Macbeth,” was hailed—before Stalin saw it—as the
prototypical Soviet music drama. For the benefit of the proletarian establishment,
Shostakovich declared of his opera, “I wanted to unmask reality and to arouse a feeling of
hatred for the tryannical and humiliating atmosphere in a Russian merchant’s household.”
At the same time, his satire of the police must have struck a sympathetic chord with
audiences who were living under Stalin. It’s impossible to say whether Stalin himself
took offense at the police scene, or the graphic bedroom sequences, or the spasms of
dissonance produced by the orchestra. Perhaps he simply felt, with his genius for
destruction, that this young man needed a comeuppance.
Shostakovich lived the next two years of his life in a state of abject fear. Pravda’s
denunciation of “Lady Macbeth” coincided with the beginning of the Great Terror, and
Shostakovich was immediately declared “an enemy of the people.” He is said to have
slept in the hallway outside his apartment, so that when the N.K.V.D. came to take him
away his young family would not have to witness the scene. He finished his Fourth
Symphony, a surreal, desolate piece in a Mahlerian vein, and withdrew it when cultural
officials warned him that he was still on the wrong path. In April of 1937, he set to work
on a new symphony, in a simpler style; two months later, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a
Marshal of the Soviet Union, who had been a supporter and friend of Shostakovich’s for
many years, was shot for his part in a nonexistent conspiracy. As the N.K.V.D. rounded
up Tukhachevsky’s circle, Shostakovich was called in for questioning. In an impeccably
Gogolesque turn of events, the composer found that his appointed interrogator had been
arrested, and that no one else was interested in his case.
When the Fifth Symphony had its première, in November of 1937, it sent the audience
into convulsions. During the third movement, the proudly sorrowing Largo, many broke
into tears. During the finale, people around the hall got to their feet, as if royalty had
entered the room. The ovation afterward lasted for forty minutes. The game had not
ended badly, for the moment: Shostakovich had written a piece that had aroused the love
of the masses, and he had done so in a clear style that passed muster with socialist-realist
aesthetics. The Fifth went on to achieve enormous popularity in the West. Shostakovich,
in the remaining forty years of his career, proved to be one of the few twentieth-century
composers who could hold audiences in thrall, and interest in him has only intensified
since his death. This season, in New York, he is everywhere: “Lady Macbeth” is
currently playing at the Metropolitan Opera; many of the symphonies have appeared on
programs around town; and the Emerson Quartet has just recorded and performed the
fifteen string quartets. Back in 1982, when the Fitzwilliam Quartet played the cycle at
Alice Tully Hall, there were many empty seats. When the Emerson repeated the feat last
month, the hall was full, and people were begging for tickets.
But something funny has happened to this composer on his way to immortality.
Audiences are listening to him more intently than ever, but they are being urged to listen
in a very different way. Shostakovich, once pegged as a propagandist for the Soviet
system, is now exalted as its noblest musical victim. He has been canonized as a moral
subversive, a conscientious ironist, a “holy fool.” The ending of the Fifth Symphony,
which was once described as a paean to Stalin’s Russia, is now described as a sub-rosa
denunciation of it. Such a hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation of meaning is curious, to
say the least, and the arbitrariness of the change—the music is still said to represent
Stalin but, now, critically—suggests that the new interpretation may be no more valid
than the old one. The Fifth has become a hall of musical mirrors in which our own
unmusical obsessions are reflected. The notes, in any case, remain the same. The
symphony still ends fortissimo, in D major, and it still brings audiences to their feet.
When I began listening to Shostakovich, in college, I came across a record of a Soviet
radio broadcast of one of the composer’s public speeches. I put it on, expecting to meet
the masterful personality behind the Fifth Symphony. Instead, I heard a man speaking
hurriedly in Russian while an interpreter, sounding like a voice-over man in a driver’s-ed
film, intoned such deathless phrases as “We are all a vital part of the times we live in”
and “Soviet art rests foursquare on the ideas and principles proclaimed by the great
Lenin.” This was an introduction to the enigma of Shostakovich, who made an art of
saying nothing memorable in public. After any performance of his music, he would
declare, “Brilliantly done.” When he was shown something by another composer, he
would say, “A remarkable work.” He mastered Soviet doublespeak, and artfully mocked
it in his correspondence: “1944 is around the corner,” he wrote to his friend Isaak
Glikman. “A year of happiness, joy, and victory. This year will bring us much joy. The
freedom-loving Peoples will at long last throw off the yoke of Hitlerism, and peace will
reign throughout the world under the sunny rays of Stalin’s Constitution. I am convinced
of this, and therefore experience the greatest joy.”
This façade was shattered in 1979, with the publication of “Testimony: The Memoirs of
Dmitri Shostakovich, as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov.” Volkov, a young
Leningrad musicologist, had interviewed the composer in the early seventies and
smuggled his manuscript out of the Soviet Union. In “Testimony,” Shostakovich rages
against Stalin and offers provocative reinterpretations of several of his most familiar
works. The book introduced many readers to Shostakovich’s biting wit, and they began to
hear the same tone in his music. A revisionist school of interpretation developed, as
critics went hunting for subversive messages in Shostakovich’s ostensibly socialist-realist
symphonies. The quartets were likewise glossed as “private diaries” of the composer’s
anguish under Soviet domination. It was in this light that the Emerson played the cycle;
the program notes quoted from such great dissident figures as Osip Mandelstam,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Joseph Brodsky, implying that Shostakovich belonged in
their company. The Emerson also participated in “The Noise of Time,” a production by
the Théâtre de Complicité, in which Shostakovich’s music under-scored a multimedia
collage of his tormented life.
Not everyone has bought into this outspoken posthumous dissidence. A year after
“Testimony” appeared, an American scholar, Laurel Fay, wrote an article questioning the
book’s authenticity. A second camp was formed—one that declared that Shostakovich
had never strayed too far from the Party line, and that to call him a “dissident” made a
mockery of the term. The musicologist Richard Taruskin declared that several of
Shostakovich’s major works conformed all too well with Soviet ideology. In his book
“Defining Russia Musically,” he wrote that the satire of the merchant class in “Lady
Macbeth” coincided chillingly with Stalin’s murderous campaign against the kulaks. Fay
recently published “Shostakovich: A Life” (Oxford), which paints the composer as a
fearful, accommodating figure.
In the last few years, the war for the mind of Shostakovich has only escalated. Polemics
and counter-polemics are flying over the transom. Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, two
Volkov admirers, have responded to Fay’s attacks on “Testimony” with a seven-hundredand-eighty-seven-page volume entitled “Shostakovich Reconsidered,” and buried in it is
a good case for the memoir’s authenticity. The authors observe, for example, that the
composer’s signature appears on the first page of the Volkov manuscript, on which it is
written, “Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses.”
Shostakovich, therefore, could have been under no illusions about the kind of project he
was engaged in. Unfortunately, “Shostakovich Reconsidered” is a pedantic, fanatical
mess of a book, a kind of hardbound Web site, in which fresh information is lost in reams
of third-hand factoids and musicological daydreaming. All participants in the debate, in
fact, have graphomaniac tendencies. Ian MacDonald, another critic of the revisionist
persuasion, has posted a fifty-thousand-word review of Fay’s biography on the Internet.
Fay is preparing a response to “Shostakovich Reconsidered”—an article about a book
about an article about a book. “Muddle Instead of Music” would be a good title for an
omnibus anthology of the whole affair.
Here is a possible compromise: “Testimony” does tell us what Shostakovich was thinking
about at the end of his life, but Shostakovich at the end of his life was a desperately
embittered man, whose pronouncements on his own work are not always to be trusted.
“Testimony,” in other words, may be authentic, but it may not always tell the truth. By
the early seventies, when Volkov conducted his interviews, Shostakovich was wracked
by illness and clouded by medication. He had acquired a poor reputation among those
who were trying to resist the excesses of the Soviet regime, and, in 1973, he enraged the
dissident community further by signing a letter of denunciation against Andrey Sakharov.
The composer may have wished to improve his image in the eyes of the younger
generation, of whom Volkov was a representative. So he went back over his published
work and argued that what had seemed doctrinaire was in fact subversive. This is what he
said of the Fifth Symphony:
I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced,
created under threat, as in “Boris Godunov.” It’s as if someone were beating you with a
stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise,
shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is
rejoicing.” What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear
that.
It is strange for an artist to hector his audience in this fashion. Shostakovich was usually
as vague as possible when he spoke about his music, and his belated, belligerent
specificity about the meaning of the Fifth seems to protest too much. Nothing in the score
supports such a reading. And even if the composer had wanted a sardonic ending,
attempts to perform it sardonically have proved unconvincing. A hundred orchestral
musicians cannot play their hearts out in a major key and sound insincere about what they
are doing.
Shostakovich’s revisionist account of the Fifth has caught on because the circumstances
of its creation make us uncomfortable. It’s hard to accept that a composer wrote his bestloved work under the gun of a totalitarian regime. Listening to the Fourth and Fifth
Symphonies side by side—one sprawling, dissonant, and spooky; the other strict,
conservative, and uplifting—leaves no doubt that in 1936 and 1937 Shostakovich did
make an abrupt and partly involuntary stylistic swerve. Yet most of us prefer the
straitjacketed Fifth to the wildly gesticulating Fourth. Most of us, like it or not, share
Stalin’s taste for the tonal and the tuneful. The revisionist interpretation, conveniently,
gives us the luxury of listening on two levels—the intellectual and the emotional. First,
we ponder the theory that Shostakovich set out to write a meretricious grand finale,
hedging it in with ironies and ambiguities. Then we connect emotionally with the
unironic, unambiguous power of the sound. We nod our heads sagely at the program
notes, and sway in our seats to the thudding of the drums. If we are inspired, we can jump
to our feet at the end—sardonically, of course.
This raises a question about the famous première in 1937, at which people stood up in
awe while the music was still playing. If, as the revisionists claim, all good Russians
understood the coded message “Your business is rejoicing,” why didn’t they remain
seated? More likely, they were getting to their feet because the music was rejoicing, in
spite of everything—proudly, darkly, improbably. Shostakovich deployed an arsenal of
preëxisting musical devices to give his finale maximum impact. He looked back, in
particular, to the transcendent finale of Mahler’s Third Symphony, which is as cosmically
free of irony as anything ever written. Mahler’s coda is in the same key as
Shostakovich’s, and it has the same repetition of triads, the same device of timpani
repeatedly pounding a two-note figure (D and A), even the same touches in the
orchestration (trumpets piercing the general mass of sound). It’s telling that conductors
slow the drumbeat in the last three bars of the Fifth, in defiance of Shostakovich’s score
but in accordance with Mahler’s—they are getting the two symphonies confused. This is
not to say that Shostakovich’s ending is an altogether happy one. By adding a fiercely
pulsating A in the strings and the winds, he gives his celebration a seething edge. But it is
a celebration all the same.
Evidence for the ultimately triumphal character of the Fifth crops up in, of all places,
“Shostakovich Reconsidered.” That book excerpts some lectures by Maxim
Shostakovich, the composer’s son, who has long been an authoritative conductor of the
symphonies. “The Fifth Symphony is his ‘Heroic’ Symphony,” Maxim writes. He quotes
his father as follows: “The hero is saying, ‘I am right. I will follow the way I choose.’ ’’
The interpretation that Shostakovich offered his son contradicted what he told Volkov—
the ending, he implied, was sincere and in his own voice. The symphony, in other words,
is the conventional Romantic story of an individual overcoming adversity. That Soviet
propagandists co-opted it as a glorification of Stalin shouldn’t stop us from hearing glory
of a different kind. The hero of this symphony has the freedom to imagine joy, if not to
experience it. Call it an angry joy—a lunge for a better world.
The Fifth Symphony is a statement of awesome confidence, but it emerged from
conditions of fear. During the remainder of Shostakovich’s career, fear took its toll. The
success of the Fifth, and the even greater wartime success of the Seventh Symphony, the
“Leningrad,” made the composer a potent propaganda resource for the Soviets, and he
began to feel trapped in his position. After the war, he failed to produce the Beethovenian
“Victory” symphony that Stalin had been expecting, issuing instead a largely frivolous
Ninth Symphony with a vaudeville finale. A second campaign against formalism erupted
in 1948, and Shostakovich suffered another sickening fall from grace. A new trend
emerged in his dealings with the regime: instead of lying low, as he had done after the
“Lady Macbeth” crisis, he went out of his way to humble himself in public. At the 1948
proceedings against formalism, during which most of the accused composers avoided
personal appearances, he read aloud a speech that was stultifying in its banality and
disconcerting in its masochism. He later claimed that the text of this speech had been
forced on him, but other participants in the affair were apparently able to speak in their
own voice. Prokofiev, for one, sent in a reply that was prickly and condescending in tone.
Shostakovich suffered under the Soviet system, but so did many other people. After a
point, the fact of oppression fails to justify his actions. During the Khrushchev thaw, he
became, if anything, more deeply implicated in the Communist hierarchy. He recited
every speech that was put in front of him, he signed manifestos and denunciations
without reading them. In 1960, he joined the Party, an unnecessary action, for which he
gave conflicting explanations (one being that he was drunk). There were elements of
defeatism in his philosophy. “Don’t create illusions,” he would tell his colleagues.
“There’s no other life. There can’t be any.” The text of “Testimony” is laced with
hopelessness: life is miserable, it says, nothing can change, one must grow hard, death
waits at the end. Shostakovich condemns two “patented saviors,” two men of “false
religiosity,” who thought they could save the world. They are, incredibly, Stalin and
Solzhenitsyn.
In the late sixties and early seventies, Shostakovich did write many works in which
resistance to authority was a running theme: the texts of his vocal works spoke of poets
murdered by tsars, rebels dancing on the scaffold, exiles expressing the conscience of a
country. In his Fourteenth Symphony, he set a poem by Apollinaire entitled “The
Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople,” in which the “evil
butcher of Podolye” is denounced in tones distinctly reminiscent of the Scherzo from the
Tenth Symphony—the piece that “Testimony” calls a “portrait of Stalin.” But such music
was more the projection of a dissident career than the enactment of one. It offered no
hope for action and change. For genuine dissidents, such as Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky,
Shostakovich was part of the problem. In an interview, ironically, with Solomon Volkov,
Brodsky attacked the effort to locate “nuances of virtue” in the gray expanses of
Shostakovich’s later life. Such a career of compromise, Brodsky said, destroys a man
instead of preserving him. “It transforms the individual into ruins,” he said. “The roof is
gone, but the chimney, for example, might still be standing.”
Ruins, however, can be beautiful to behold. Shostakovich was never able or willing to
write another convincingly “heroic” symphony, but he found other avenues of
expression, most significantly in chamber music. He wrote his first string quartet in 1938,
in the wake of the Fifth Symphony, and the quartet medium became for him a refuge
from the anxiety of symphonic public speaking. In the new realm, he could explore the
technical limits of his musical language, which is based on an intricate array of Russian
modal scales, and also test the psychological limits of his narratives, in which seemingly
simple and innocent ideas are revealed as their opposites. A banal melody is often heard
over a changing and blackening array of accompaniments, so that its meaning is altered
and destroyed; in the same way, a plain chord twists around and falls apart as long lines
of eighth notes snake through it. Shostakovich is a master manipulator of mood: he can
show panicky happiness slipping into inchoate rage, and then crumbling into lethargic
despair. In the hands of the Emerson Quartet, which played with unprecedented
brilliance, the quartets seemed, even more than the symphonies, a complete emotional
world.
The Emerson ended its series with a recital of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Quartets. These works have a pared-down, thinned-out quality, as if a gust of wind had
blown random pages off the musicians’ stands. When the quartet played the Fifteenth
again, as part of Théâtre de Complicité’s “The Noise of Time,” the piece acquired a
positively unreal and deathly aura: the members of the ensemble wandered about the
stage, with silent figures shadowing and mimicking them. The Emerson’s performance,
staggering as it was, may have made too much of the obvious gloom of the Fifteenth,
which, like so much of Shostakovich’s later work, also has its share of quotations, quirks,
and private jokes. The vacant tread of the opening, in the muted, claustrophobic key of Eflat minor, is descended from the Andante of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, while the
second theme, in open-air C major, brings to mind the lofty first theme of Bruckner’s
Seventh Symphony. Such out-of-nowhere quotations in late Shostakovich produce a
feeling of free-floating movement and deep musical space. Even as it comes to the end of
the line, the music begins all over again, with the basic building blocks of tradition.
Shostakovich’s career was a spectacular one, mixing scenes of triumph and terror. But it
is not enough to match up the events of the life with the events of the music, because the
music is still more triumphant and more terrifying. You can hear the agony, and you can
think about the agony in Shostakovich’s life, but Shostakovich wrote agonized music
from the beginning to the end of his career, no matter who was running the country.
Russian composers long ago perfected techniques of agony, formulas of lamentation.
Tchaikovsky’s musical suffering led biographers to emphasize the suffering in his life,
and, when the biography was exhausted, enthusiasts embraced a spurious rumor that the
composer had committed suicide. Something similar has happened with Shostakovich.
The strong feeling in his music has led people to imagine a man who was engaged in a
great battle with the system. But the hard facts reveal a smaller, weaker figure—a man
who strived at all costs to create conditions in which he could work in peace.
Perhaps the most revealing observation Shostakovich ever made about himself came in a
letter to his favorite pupil, Boris Tishchenko, less than two years before his death. He told
Tishchenko that he had been thinking about Chekhov’s story “Ward 6,” the tale of a
doctor who halfheartedly performs his duties at a squalid provincial hospital. “When I
read in that story about Andrey Yefimovich Ragin,” Shostakovich wrote, “it seems to me
I am reading memoirs about myself.” This was a strange comment, since he was at that
moment engaged in dictating his memoirs to Volkov. But certain passages of “Ward 6”
eerily illuminate the rants of “Testimony”:
Dr. Ragin was a great believer in intelligence and honesty, but he lacked the strength of
character and the confidence in his own right to assert himself in order to see to it that the
life around him should be honest and intelligent. He simply did not know how to give
orders, to prohibit, or to insist. It was almost as though he had taken a vow never to raise
his voice....When deceived or flattered or handed a quite obviously fraudulent account for
signature, he turned as red as a lobster and felt guilty, but he signed the account all the
same.
Late at night, Ragin broods over his condition: “I am serving a bad cause, and I receive a
salary from people whom I deceive. I am dishonest. But then I am nothing by myself, I
am only a small part of a necessary social evil.... It is the fault of the time I live in.” He
finds solace in the thought that suffering is universal and that death destroys all human
aspirations in the end. Immortality, he says, is a fiction. When he dies, of a sudden stroke,
he is mourned by no one. At that point, the resemblance to Shostakovich breaks down. ©
MUSICAL EVENTS about the St. Lawrence Quartet... The members of the St. Lawrence
String Quartet—Geoff Nuttall, Barry Shiffman, Lesley Robertson, and Marina Hoover—
have a firm foothold in the world of American chamber music. They are the ensemble-inresidence at Stanford University, and they regularly train younger quartets themselves.
Yet they have not lost their contrarian streak, and they have a way of catching audiences
off guard. There is a restless freedom to their playing, as if the dinner-party conversation
of chamber music were about to break down into altercation, demonstration, or
confession… There are at least a hundred full-time professional string quartets in North
America, plus an untold number of amateurs. To make a living in this field, you have to
be willing to play almost anywhere and at any time. Even a group as famous as the
Emerson follows the same exhausting routine: fly into a strange town, rent a car, test out
the hall, play the concert, go to the post-concert reception, get a few hours’ sleep, return
to the airport, and fly to the next date… Writer describes a concert in El Paso… Nuttall
is the St. Lawrence’s "secret weapon," as the rest of the group admits. An opera maven
and pop-music fan, he plays his solo lines with an airy, vocal freedom, exhibiting a
distinct personality that is lacking in many better-known soloists. "He has a way of
generating intensity in all of us, with his revved-up excitement at whatever he’s playing,"
Hoover told me. His phrasing often upsets the central pulse of a movement, and the
others either follow his lead or scramble to restore rhythmic order. As a result, despite the
rigorous discipline of the quartet’s rehearsal process, many passages sound riotously
improvised… Writer follows them to Joplin, Missouri…
Full Text:
Eleven years ago, the Emerson String Quartet was auditioning younger ensembles for a
training program at the Hartt School of Music, in Connecticut. Piles of performance tapes
came in, and the Emersons decided to listen to them while driving between destinations
on a European tour. One tape, from a young Toronto quartet, juxtaposed the expected
Beethoven with a contemporary Canadian work in which the players were required to
yell at the top of their lungs. The screaming began just as the Emersons were negotiating
a difficult stretch of Alpine road. "We’d heard this perfectly good Beethoven, and we
were saying, ‘Very nice,’ when the screaming started, and we almost lost control of the
car," the violinist Philip Setzer recalled. "We could all have died right then and there. Of
course, we had to meet the crazy kids who sent in the tape."
A decade later, the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet—Geoff Nuttall, Barry
Shiffman, Lesley Robertson, and Marina Hoover—have a firm foothold in the world of
American chamber music. They are the ensemble-in-residence at Stanford University,
and they regularly train younger quartets themselves. Yet they have not lost their
contrarian streak, and they have a way of catching audiences off guard. There is a restless
freedom to their playing, as if the dinner-party conversation of chamber music were about
to break down into altercation, demonstration, or confession. "They’ve got something,"
David Finckel, the cellist of the Emerson, says. "Performers either have something or
they don’t, and the St. Lawrence does. I’m not sure what it is. Partly, it’s the ability to
play the most familiar music as if it were new and unusual. Everything the quartet does
becomes contemporary music. Listening, I forget that I do the same thing for a living."
There are at least a hundred full-time professional string quartets in North America, plus
an untold number of amateurs. To make a living in this field, you have to be willing to
play almost anywhere and at any time. Even a group as famous as the Emerson follows
the same exhausting routine: fly into a strange town, rent a car, test out the hall, play the
concert, go to the post-concert reception, get a few hours’ sleep, return to the airport, and
fly to the next date. The St. Lawrence has made successful débuts in London and
Amsterdam, and it has also won the acclaim of Canadian fishing villages, Uruguayan
mountain towns, and Kansas City public schools. Perhaps its most unusual appearance
was in Vietnam, at the Hanoi Opera House, a replica of the Palais Garnier, in Paris. The
wealthier patrons were seated in the auditorium, but a crowd of thousands watched a
telecast of the concert outside, many of them leaning on their scooters.
The one place where the Lawrences have been little seen is New York. One of my
earliest assignments as a local critic was to cover their New York début, in 1992; they
appeared in the Young Concert Artists series, at the 92nd Street Y, and I was struck by
the intelligent passion of their playing. Although they made rapid advances in the
business—they signed with Columbia Artists Management, Inc., or CAMI, a powerhouse
agency, and got a recording contract with EMI—they never returned in a flashy way. The
star system in New York, it turns out, is a finicky one, lavishing immense resources on a
tiny élite. Whole weeks of the season are taken up with Yo-Yo Ma projects, Maurizio
Pollini perspectives, and James Levine marathons. Every concert becomes an "event,"
festooned with thematic concepts, panel discussions, booklets, and theatrics. To hear a
concert where the event is nothing more than the sheer give-and-take of music-making,
you almost have to leave town.
Last month, the St. Lawrence Quartet played two concerts in El Paso, Texas, and one in
Joplin, Missouri. There were the usual hassles on the road. A sandstorm delayed the
flights out of Dallas-Fort Worth, and when the members of the quartet got to the hotel, at
midnight, the reception desk had no record of their reservations. It was one of those
sleepy, lost-in-time places—call it the Vista Grande—where guests are a confusing
novelty. WhenIarrived, I was handed a cryptic message that said, "Barry: Call Alex."
Still, the vista was grand. You could look out over basketball courts, medical facilities,
and pueblo-style suburbs to the brown expanse of the Rio Grande, with Juárez looming
on the other side.
The next day, at around noon, the Lawrences gathered in the lobby. If you had been told
that they were musicians, but not of the classical kind, you might have guessed that they
were a veteran indie-pop band, some well-travelled cousin to Yo La Tengo. Nuttall, the
athletic first violinist, found a Y.M.C.A. and had been lifting weights. Shiffman, the
second violinist, and Robertson, the violist, had been practicing. Hoover, the cellist, was
with her husband, Richard Bernstein, and their seven-month-old baby, Benjamin. Hoover
often looks harried: travelling with a baby is hard enough, but a baby and a cello together
can spell real trouble. Flight attendants have tried to bar her cello from planes, even
though she always buys a seat for it. The attendants apparently have a vision of the
instrument flying around the cabin and causing a crash. Hoover is the most organized of
the Lawrences—she is the one who knows when the next plane leaves—and she has a
way of barrelling past human annoyances as if they simply were not there.
Kwang-Wu Kim, the artistic director of El Paso Pro-Musica, was waiting for the quartet
in the lobby. He is, in classical-music parlance, the "presenter." The Lawrences have had
all kinds of experiences with presenters: some good, some bad, some indifferent. They
have worked with a music-loving radiologist who goes over programming minutiae while
on break from the hospital; a philosophy professor who has a seventy-person concert hall
in his home; and an eclectic Florida promoter who puts on chamber music one night and
Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme the next. Presenters who are more accustomed to
unruly popular acts are pleased by their demeanor. One impresario found them refreshing
after a recent run-in with a well-known folk-music personality, who had abruptly
disappeared from her hotel after noticing that an instance of "improper land management"
was visible from her window.
The Lawrences think highly of Kwang-Wu Kim. "He’s a genius," they said to me
beforehand. A pianist, professor, and all-around explainer, Kim has degrees in
philosophy from Yale and in music from Peabody. He has attracted a Who’s Who of
American chamber players to El Paso during the past eight years. He has also ventured
into the El Paso schools, retrieving out-of-tune pianos from janitorial closets and
introducing kids to the classics. In July, he will become the president of the Longy
School of Music, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and El Paso was already mourning his
departure.
Kim and the Lawrences traded complaints about the unhelpfulness of CAMI. "The people
there sent me the wrong programs, and then they told me that they didn’t understand the
need for sending copies of the program notes in advance," Kim said. The Lawrences
collectively rolled their eyes: management’s aloofness from their daily lives is a long-
running problem. The subject of audience turnout came up. "We’re not sure if this is
going to be our biggest audience of the year," Kim said. "Somehow, we forgot that this
weekend is Passover. Also, Matchbox Twenty is playing tonight at the University of
Texas, which means that the students probably won’t show up. And we couldn’t get an
article into the local paper. They told us that they were concerned about already giving
too much attention to classical music, which is pretty funny, because they don’t pay any
attention to classical music at all."
For the two concerts, more than three hundred people appeared, most of them well-to-do
and middle-aged. At one point, Kim gave a farewell talk, and the full extent of his genius
was revealed. He was a blast of positive energy, flattering the audience with a sense that
this series was no less important than the East Coast world from which he came. "I was
the laughingstock of the Peabody Conservatory when I announced that I was going to El
Paso," he said. "They were horrified. Their basic attitude was ‘Another one bites the
dust.’ Well, we need to stop making value judgments about place. There is absolutely no
difference in real musical value between a concert in Carnegie Hall and a concert at the
Fox Fine Arts Center in El Paso. Music is a universal act of human conversation, and an
identical act of conversation is happening in each place. Haydn didn’t write his quartets
for New York City, and they are equally at home in El Paso."
In New York, it is considered a bit undignified for performers to address the audience,
but the members of the St. Lawrence have found it natural to talk about what they’re up
to. They have a gift for describing musical abstractions in down-to-earth terms. Nuttall
warned the El Paso crowd that a contemporary piece—Jonathan Berger’s "Miracles and
Mud"—would appear on the first half of the program. "We like to put the modern work
second, just before intermission," he said. "That way, you can’t come late and miss it, and
you can’t leave at intermission and skip it." There was knowing laughter from the crowd.
He explained the idea behind Berger’s work, which has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and played the two recurring folk themes that represent the warring peoples.
This demonstration seemed to make Berger’s tangy, Bartókian dissonances more
palatable. Three-fourths of the quartet is generally enthusiastic about contemporary
works; Robertson tends to be initially skeptical. "The viola part is often more interesting
in the modern pieces," she told me, "but sometimes I’m happier droning on one note in a
Haydn quartet, because I know exactly where that note belongs, logically and
emotionally."
Nuttall then talked about Haydn’s "Quinten" Quartet, which opened the concert. "I have
most of the hard licks," he said. "I’d happily play Haydn all the time, but the others get
bored with repeating the same simple figures." He did a run of notes in his sweet-toned,
Heifetz-like style. When he plays, he has a habit of kicking one leg back and half getting
out of his chair. His hair tends to change length and color; in El Paso, it was cropped
short, with blond highlights. "He looks like some dude from the beach," a man at the
back of the room whispered. Nuttall’s looks are a plus when he is addressing youngsters
in educational programs, but the Pro-Musica regulars were a little suspicious. Still, his
way of vibrantly zeroing in on details seemed to win them over. "In the final movement,"
he went on, "Haydn does this thing to the solo line which is actually pretty cool. He puts
in this weird fingering so you end up having to slide from one note to another, and
suddenly you’re playing in Gypsy style—portamento. It’s as if Haydn were telling
conservatory-trained violinists to forget their training and loosen up."
Nuttall is the St. Lawrence’s "secret weapon," as the rest of the group admits. An opera
maven and pop-music fan, he plays his solo lines with an airy, vocal freedom, exhibiting
a distinct personality that is lacking in many better-known soloists. "He has a way of
generating intensity in all of us, with his revved-up excitement at whatever he’s playing,"
Hoover told me. His phrasing often upsets the central pulse of a movement, and the
others either follow his lead or scramble to restore rhythmic order. As a result, despite the
rigorous discipline of the quartet’s rehearsal process, many passages sound riotously
improvised. "They play with unself-conscious joy," says the composer Osvaldo Golijov,
whose work "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind" was performed by the St.
Lawrence last week in Santa Fe. "They can excite people who show up at chamber-music
concerts by a fluke. I saw this happen with a group of Argentine soccer players."
The St. Lawrence’s art of cultured chaos had a bracing effect on Tchaikovsky’s Third
Quartet, which was the centerpiece of the El Paso concerts. Tchaikovsky and Schumann
are two composers whom the Lawrences have investigated thoroughly; they recorded two
Schumann quartets two years ago for EMI, and in the fall they will release a disk of
Tchaikovsky. Both composers have been accused of writing unidiomatic chamber music,
but the Tchaikovsky roared to life on this occasion. In rehearsal, the players concentrated
on clarifying its complicated, three-against-two rhythm. In performance, they threw
everything back up in the air, flirting with disaster in the opening movement. In the
funeral-march Andante, Nuttall’s solos sobbed in the middle distance, sounding like 78r.p.m. records of turn-of-the-century divas; Shiffman’s obsessive, one-note patterns
gnawed at the fabric of the harmony. The finale played like a scandalous, drunken wake.
Cocktail-party chatter is the last thing you might want to engage in after such a
performance, but the post-concert reception is a fact of life on the chamber circuit, and
the Lawrences go at it gamely. The El Paso crowd turned out to be more interesting than
most. The players were buttonholed in the lobby by the Reverend Paul Green, who
congratulated them on raising the cultural temper of the town, and by J. O. Stewart, Jr.,
who underwrote the concert. Stewart was an impressive man with a hawklike face and a
handsome pair of cowboy boots who recently sold his company, El Paso Disposal, for a
hundred and forty million dollars. "I worked in the trash business for thirty years," he
said, "so I may be a trashy guy, but that was a fine concert, and I liked the new thing, too.
Maybe I can get used to that stuff. Like I always say, you can only play with one tennis
racquet at a time."
There was a late-night dinner at the home of Charles and Ellen Lacy, in the hills above El
Paso. Nuttall, who lived in Texas when he was a child, stayed the longest, drinking wine
with a group of reformed good old boys. "I like those guys," he said, as we drove back to
the Vista Grande. "They know how to kick back. They’re not stuffy, even though they
have some weird-ass politics. But I wish there had been a few more young people. Where
were the University of Texas students? At Matchbox Twenty, I guess. Kind of kills me
that there’s ten thousand people seeing them and a hundred people seeing us. I don’t see
why the difference should be that dramatic. I mean, Rob Thomas is a good singer and all,
but we’re—we’ve got the deeper songs."
After the second concert, which took place the following afternoon, the Lawrences left
for Joplin. In travel mode, they go their separate ways, not worrying if the others are on
schedule. In the vastness of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, I noticed that Nuttall had
wandered off. "Where’s Geoff?" I asked. "We never ask that question," the others replied.
It was well after midnight when we reached Joplin. It’s a midsize town in the
southwestern corner of the state, not far from the country-and-Western playground of
Branson. Shiffman caught sight of a poster for Shoji Tabuchi, a Liberace-style fiddler
who plays in Branson. The poster read, "Shoji: Need We Say More?" "This is great!" the
violinist said, jumping up and down in a fit of ironic excitement. "We should have this
kind of marketing. ‘The St. Lawrence String Quartet: Need We Say More?’ "
Joplin offered a recapitulation of themes already developed in El Paso. This series was
also called Pro Musica, and it, too, had a decisive personality at the center. Cynthia
Schwab, an exacting Manhattan native, has been working to create a musical oasis in
Joplin for twenty years. "The three things in life that mean the most to me are God,
hockey, and music," she said. In her garage, a New York Rangers banner hung next to a
poster for the Leipzig Chamber Orchestra. Last fall, Schwab approached the St.
Lawrence with a surprising proposal: for the twentieth anniversary of her series, she
wanted the group to play an all-contemporary program.
The Joplin concert took place in a handsome old church at the center of town. The star
attraction was the Third Quartet of R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer who writes
peculiarly captivating avant-garde pieces. The Schafer quartet has long been one of the
St. Lawrence’s favorites. It begins with the cellist playing alone, somewhat despondently.
One by one, the others enter—from behind the stage and from the back of the hall. War
erupts between the violins, with savage accusations traded back and forth. In the second
movement, all hell breaks loose: the Lawrences reprise their notorious yelling act,
screaming gibberish in tandem with fast-moving dissonant lines. It’s a spellbinding
spectacle, and it is also a hilarious send-up of the emotional infantilism of the
ultramodern repertory. Then, in the final movement, the mood turns solemn, as the
quartet plays a prayerful unison melody in ghostly quarter tones. At the end, the music
disappears over the horizon of audibility, leaving a mystical silence.
The citizens of Joplin had a mixed reaction to this astonishing piece. A third of them
didn’t buy it, and they expressed their dismay by leaving at intermission, trudging in
stony silence to the church parking lot. There were enthusiastic yelps, however, from a
group of younger people in the back rows. They turned out to be music students, some of
whom had worked with the St. Lawrence in its quartet-training program at Stanford, and
they had driven three hours from Kansas City to see their mentors play. Four of them
belonged to a quartet called the Yurodivy, which is Russian for "holy fool." The leader of
the Yurodivys was Francisco Herrera, a large fellow in a purple sash. "Did you hear the
intonation in the third movement?" he asked. "Incredible. There’s no kitsch in their
playing. They absolutely believe in what they’re doing."
At the inevitable post-concert dinner, Cynthia Schwab made it clear that the Yurodivy
crew could not be accommodated. The mood turned glum. Nuttall, in particular, looked
crestfallen. He poked at his dessert unenthusiastically. "I’m sorry your young friends
weren’t able to come," Schwab eventually said, after conversation glided to a halt. "I had
to get you over here, and I have responsibilities to my board members." Nuttall shook his
head and replied, "You should be bringing more young people like them to your concerts.
They are the audience of the future."
It was now close to midnight, and the Lawrences had to catch a 7 A.M. flight the next
morning. They piled into their rented Dodge Caravan and drove off. From this tour, each
of them had earned, after expenses, a low four-figure sum that wouldn’t have covered the
hotel bill for Pollini’s piano. As I headed to my motel room, I thought of the Yurodivys,
driving back to Kansas City in the dark, and of Cynthia Schwab’s reception, and of the
many ways in which classical music entangles itself in a web of money and status. And I
realized that the four musicians of the St. Lawrence are remarkable not simply for the
quality of their music-making, exalted as it is, but for the joy they take in the act of
connection.
A CRITIC AT LARGE about Giuseppe Verdi, on the 100th anniversary of his funeral…
In this anniversary year, something like four hundred productions of Verdi’s operas have
been mounted around the world. I have seen nine of them, in the major New York houses
and at two great theatres in Italy, and, to my surprise, the Central Park "Otello" is the one
that sticks in my mind… The appeal of Italian opera is difficult to put into words, but it
has something to do with the activation of primal feelings. Operatic characters have a
way of laying themselves bare, and they are never more uninhibited than at the climax of
a Verdi tragedy… The Verdi year has supplied two major bits of information: first, that
the audience for opera in America is steadily growing, and, second, that many of the
directors who now dominate the opera scene do not know what they are doing… For a
glimpse of Verdi’s two-faced genius, you need look no further than his most famous tune,
"La donna è mobile" from "Rigoletto"… Verdi had an earthy nature, a preference for
action over theory. He was born in 1813, in a village outside the town of Busseto, south
of Milan. At first, he seemed destined to succeed his teacher as the musical director of
Busseto, but his personality proved too unruly for the role… The Met’s production of "Il
Trovatore" last season, for example, was so monumentally opaque that the director,
Graham Vick, later removed his name from it, in the spirit of the "Allen Smithee" movies
that are periodically flushed out of Hollywood. Here are some notes I made at the time:
"Toy soldiers, colorful costumes, but no sets to speak of. Rorschach patterns? Sliding
walls—inept. Enough!" Vick’s fiasco was mild in comparison with what has been
appearing lately on European stages. Directors like to claim that the conventions of
Italian opera are hackneyed and that contemporary audiences need novel reinterpretations
if they are not to grow bored. Operagoers are pictured as jaded fanatics who cannot stand
to see another mad scene or midnight oath. There are, of course, such people, and they
get a proper thrill when Macbeth comes on in Sex Pistols regalia. But many others,
especially those coming to opera for the first time, like the old stuff… A singer who
wishes to breathe new life into Verdi often has to get around not only the director’s
concepts but also the conductor’s. Most conductors are trained by the modern
conservatory mentality to resist the manifold changes of tempo—rubato, rallentando,
stretto—that Italian singing encourages. You might expect to hear remnants of that
tradition at La Scala, the original Verdi house, but Riccardo Muti, La Scala’s longtime
music director, is enamored of an inflexible, hard-driving sound. There are signs of a
renaissance of Verdian writing among contemporary composers, whether in the gaudy
Latino pageants of Osvaldo Golijov’s "Passion" or in the moody political tableaux of
John Adams’s "Nixon in China." Any progress in contemporary opera in the next ten or
twenty years is likely to come from a close study of the Verdi canon…
Full Text:
According to "The Guinness Book of Records," Vincent La Selva, a native of Cleveland,
is the only man ever to have conducted all twenty-eight operas of Giuseppe Verdi in
chronological order. La Selva runs a company called the New York Grand Opera, which
recently succeeded in presenting the entire Verdi canon, in Central Park, free of charge.
The cycle began in 1994, with a boisterous rendition of "Oberto," and ended this summer,
with "Aida," "Otello," and "Falstaff." I saw the "Otello" on a sticky night in July. Several
thousand people were on hand, and several hundred others were trying to get in. A
policeman was shouting, "No more seats! No opera!" There was a lot of pushing and
pleading, as at a rock show. "My name has to be on the list," said a youngish man in an
Atari shirt. Many people ended up camping out on the grass, listening to the music as it
wafted over the loudspeakers. Verdi seems to have lost little of the mass appeal that
brought forth hundreds of thousands of mourners on the day of his funeral, a century ago.
In this anniversary year, something like four hundred productions of Verdi’s operas have
been mounted around the world. I have seen nine of them, in the major New York houses
and at two great theatres in Italy, and, to my surprise, the Central Park "Otello" is the one
that sticks in my mind. It was by no means the best-sung Verdi of the season; for an
"Otello" of grand, tragic dimensions, you would have to hunt down a ticket to see Plácido
Domingo at the Met’s opening-night gala, scheduled for next week. Nor were the
acoustics satisfactory. The singers had microphones clipped to their costumes, and every
few minutes one of them would let out a mechanical squawk or disappear from the mix.
During the Homage Chorus, in Act II, the mandolin was deafening and the chorus was
inaudible. But the production had an excellent, pearly-voiced Desdemona in Judith Von
Houser, and a fiercely idiomatic conductor in La Selva. This was Verdi 101, stripped of
directorial brainstorms and interpretive ego trips. By the end, I had forgotten about the
tackiness of the scenery and fallen under Verdi’s spell.
The appeal of Italian opera is difficult to put into words, but it has something to do with
the activation of primal feelings. Operatic characters have a way of laying themselves
bare, and they are never more uninhibited than at the climax of a Verdi tragedy. "Otello,"
the peak of the canon, is a crescendo of anger; yet the ultimate moment of the opera,
during which Central Park seemed to fall silent, is a surpassingly lyrical one. When
Otello kills Desdemona, the act is framed by two repetitions of a bewitching nine-bar
theme, which first appeared in the love duet of Act I. It is a beautiful object, but it is a
token of Otello’s insanity. His love for Desdemona was, he says, a "mirage"—not
because she betrayed him but because he never saw her as a real person. His note-fornote recapitulation of the love music marks the point at which he chooses the mirage over
life itself. All the orchestra can offer, by way of a final statement, is three soft, black
chords. "Fall down the steps," Verdi writes. Edward Perretti, the tenor singing Otello,
followed the instruction exactly. Everyone shuddered.
The Central Park "Otello" was an unexpectedly haunting experience, because it took the
drama at face value. It made no attempt to deconstruct or recontextualize, and in that
respect it was rare among contemporary productions. The Verdi year has supplied two
major bits of information: first, that the audience for opera in America is steadily
growing, and, second, that many of the directors who now dominate the opera scene do
not know what they are doing. If, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, Verdi was the last great popular
artist, the last who perfectly fit his time, then he is a spectacular misfit in the
contemporary highbrow ghetto, where intellectuals make a virtue of being ironically
detached. Chances are, any Verdi opera you saw this year took the form of a revisionist
production that was at odds with the composer’s raging sincerity. One prominent director
has been quoted as saying, "Nobody comes to Verdi for the plots." More likely, people
come to Verdi because he meant every word.
In the nineteenth century, German musicians began to describe their art in idealistic
terms, as a lofty pursuit that disdained the crowd. Giuseppe Verdi, despite his reclusive
habits and porcupine personality, saw no shame in the pursuit of public adoration. "The
box office is the proper thermometer of success," he remarked. In this respect, you can
compare him to a major Hollywood artist like Hitchcock, who kept an eye on the bottom
line even as he immersed himself in formal schemes. Like Hitchcock, Verdi was a
gripping storyteller, a master mechanic of the wheels of fate. But the Italian’s empathy
went deeper. The example for him was Shakespeare, and even if he had never set
Shakespeare to music the comparison would have been made. Verdi’s works, like
Shakespeare’s, thrilled both the groundlings and the connoisseurs.
For a glimpse of Verdi’s two-faced genius, you need look no further than his most
famous tune, "La donna è mobile," which has sold vast quantities of pasta in television
commercials. More than a pretty melody, it is packed with double meanings, some of
them quite ugly. The irony of the aria is hinted at in the opening bars, as the players stop
and start again, like actors clearing their throats. The first line translates as "Women are
fickle," but the sentiment is less than straightforward, being the rationalization of a fickle
Duke who uses women for amusement. Gilda, who has fallen for the Duke, overhears the
song, grasps its tone, and is plunged into despair. Rigoletto, her father, plots revenge,
forgetting for a while that he himself facilitated the Duke’s adventures and was cursed by
one of his victims. At the end of the night, an assassin hauls out a sack that is supposed to
contain the Duke’s corpse. Just as Rigoletto bends over it, a familiar tenor is heard
singing a familiar tune offstage—"La donna è mobile." So whose is the body in the bag?
Maledizione! That chirpy tune becomes the cutting edge of the curse that brings Rigoletto
down.
In his old age, Verdi styled himself a man of the people, a self-taught peasant genius.
Recent biographers have pointed out the many ways in which this image departed from
the facts. His father, a small-time innkeeper and landowner, was, if not rich, prosperous
enough to be able to give his son a thorough musical education, and the young man had
the help of many aristocratic friends. Still, there is some truth to the peasant image. Verdi
had an earthy nature, a preference for action over theory. He was born in 1813, in a
village outside the town of Busseto, south of Milan. At first, he seemed destined to
succeed his teacher as the musical director of Busseto, but his personality proved too
unruly for the role. Instead, thanks in part to the intervention of a sympathetic soprano
named Giuseppina Strepponi, he attracted the interest of La Scala, which presented
"Oberto" in 1839. The breakthrough year was 1842, when "Nabucco," his third opera,
had a run of fifty-seven performances at La Scala—more than any opera before or since.
Even as Verdi became a national hero, furnishing anthems for the risorgimento, he made
his plots more intimate, favoring situations in which characters pursued passions that
were against the social grain. In the space of three years, he produced "Rigoletto," "Il
Trovatore," and "La Traviata," without which no modern opera house could function. In
the eighteen-fifties and sixties, under the influence of French grand opera, he produced a
series of sprawling tableaux—"I Vespri Siciliani," "Simon Boccanegra," "Un Ballo in
Maschera," "La Forza del Destino," "Don Carlos," and, in 1871, "Aida"—in which a
deepening pessimism became evident. Fate was now hammered out by earthly monsters
of authority, the worst of them being the Grand Inquisitor in "Don Carlos." Finally, after
a period of seeming retirement, Verdi produced "Otello" and "Falstaff," in which the belcanto tradition was recast in dizzyingly heightened form.
Verdi was not yet dead when he began to be dismissed as a dated figure. The younger
Italian intellectuals flocked to Wagner, who had set about obliterating the operatic
conventions that Verdi cherished to the end. While his works never lost their popularity,
they were often treated as genre pieces that history had left behind. The Wagner
comparison consistently hurt him. Wagner wrote in a self-consciously idiosyncratic style,
and in any given moment you could hear his open-ended processes at work. Verdi’s was
an art of juxtaposition, of jagged contrasts: innocent tunes punctured by repeated,
discordant notes; robust marches pushed into the background by desolate monologues. To
the analytical mind, such music can look crude, even vulgar, on the page. Only in live
performances, when the momentum begins to build and the voices become urgent, does it
catch fire. But how do you go about analyzing momentum and urgency? Verdi is a
challenge for academic sensibilities.
In the postwar period, a phalanx of singers and conductors brought about a major Verdi
revival, with the art of Maria Callas setting the standard. The early operas came back into
circulation; the more austere dramas, such as "Stiffelio" and "Simon Boccanegra," were
taken out of mothballs; "Don Carlos" was finally heard complete. Scholars began to take
Verdi seriously; and Mary Jane Phillips-Matz’s doggedly researched biography,
published in 1993, revealed the man in all his gnarled complexity. It was during this same
period, however, that directors began the practice of rewriting Verdi’s librettos from
scratch, and the revival entered a state of crisis from which it has yet to emerge.
Earlier this year, Matthew Gurewitsch, writing in the Times, asked several leading
American opera directors to articulate their visions of Verdi, and he got some eyebrowraising replies. Francesca Zambello, who once set "Aida" in a nuclear-winter landscape,
said, "If I have to think of a work of Verdi that moved me on stage, that’s going to be
pretty hard." Christopher Alden, who created a "Rigoletto" with bouts of transvestism and
public sex, said, "You have to throw cold water on an audience. You have to wake them
up, poke holes into the operas so that the inner life will flow out." Mark Lamos, whose
"Rigoletto" also featured a graphic orgy scene, said, "To be blunt, I find Verdi’s operas
about as stageworthy as his Requiem."
The assumption behind this kind of sloganeering is that Verdi’s librettos are stodgy and
ridiculous. With their wild coincidences, improbable deaths, and hyperventilating exits,
they do seem silly at first glance. Even the most artful synopsis reduces a plot-heavy
work like "Simon Boccanegra" to gibberish. And surtitles are of only limited value: while
they help to draw the audience in, they also place far too much stress on the words, which
are raw material for singing rather than freestanding literary texts. (It would be similarly
unnerving if song lyrics were projected at a rock show, useful as the service might be.)
Only when the performance is under way does the beauty of the libretto snap into focus.
Verdi’s beloved maledictions, vendettas, and forces of destiny actually add plausibility
rather than take it away; they make the violent accents of operatic singing seem like a
natural reaction under the circumstances.
If directors were replacing nineteenth-century conventions with riveting scenarios of their
own, then their attacks on Verdi’s stageworthiness, however arrogant, could be set aside
as so much bluster. The fact is that most of them display the faults they assign to Verdi:
their work is, more often than not, stilted and cryptic, as if obeying some extraterrestrial
social code. The Met’s production of "Il Trovatore" last season, for example, was so
monumentally opaque that the director, Graham Vick, later removed his name from it, in
the spirit of the "Allen Smithee" movies that are periodically flushed out of Hollywood.
Here are some notes I made at the time: "Toy soldiers, colorful costumes, but no sets to
speak of. Rorschach patterns? Sliding walls—inept. Enough!" Vick’s fiasco was mild in
comparison with what has been appearing lately on European stages. The opera world
was recently buzzing over a "Ballo in Maschera," in Barcelona, that opened with an
added scene of conspirators sitting on toilets and went on from there.
Productions of this kind invite outrage, and the best response is to ignore them. More
interesting are the productions that go subtly, incrementally wrong. One such was a
"Rigoletto" at City Opera, under the direction of Rhoda Levine. A lot of it worked—at
least, early on. John Conklin’s sets, for example, nicely displayed the opera’s contrasting
social worlds, with the Duke of Mantua’s palace dominated by a gaudy red, and Rigoletto
trapped in gray brick middle-income housing. We seemed to be in a stylized space
between the Renaissance and the present day. There was an effective visual elaboration
of Gilda’s central aria, "Caro nome," with sinister figures hovering in the background.
"Caro nome," like "La donna è mobile," is more complicated than it appears; for all its
sweetness, it has an eerie unreality, and the soprano’s coloratura can come off as so much
whistling in the dark. At the end, tremolo strings glisten like the threads of a spiderweb in
which Gilda is about to be trapped.
But the production got fidgety as it went along, and at the climax it lost the plot entirely.
As Rigoletto despairs, we see the assassin, Sparafucile, kicking back in his apartment,
having a beer. Then the Duke himself wanders in and joins him. None of this is in the
libretto, for good reason. We don’t need to be told what Sparafucile and the Duke are
doing next: they are stereotypes, albeit richly detailed ones, and they will go on playing
lethal games with other people’s lives. The bigger problem is that Levine’s pantomimes
detract from the dénouement of the story. Rigoletto is the one character who is permitted
to look into himself, and in the final scene the governing irony of his life is revealed to
him: his public role, that of cruel jester, has ruined his private one, that of protective
father. This is Sophoclean irony, and it is a comedown to see it paired with the kind of
sardonic twist that passes for irony on cable TV—an assassin relaxing after his kill.
Directors like to claim that the conventions of Italian opera are hackneyed and that
contemporary audiences need novel reinterpretations if they are not to grow bored.
Operagoers are pictured as jaded fanatics who cannot stand to see another mad scene or
midnight oath. There are, of course, such people, and they get a proper thrill when
Macbeth comes on in Sex Pistols regalia. But many others, especially those coming to
opera for the first time, like the old stuff. They want to see frenzied states of mind,
bizarre occurrences, a mother accidentally throwing her baby on the fire. The directors
themselves are the bored ones. They need to make a statement and, afraid of embracing
anything positive, set about attacking an imaginary establishment. Verdi, the melancholy
patriot, sends them into conniptions of negation. All they can do with his patriotism is to
mock it; all they can do with his despair is to trivialize it.
Director-dominated opera is known as Regietheater, and it is telling that the word exists
only in German. Regietheater first became popular as a way of evading unsavory political
associations created by the work of Richard Wagner, and, once again, the invidious
comparison comes into play. Wagner’s hypnotic world-weariness can serve as a
soundtrack for almost any set of images: Nordic gods, Nuremberg rallies, "Apocalypse
Now." Verdi, on the other hand, is the most site-specific of composers. His arching
phrases imply a certain mode of address; his rhythms a particular way of stalking to and
fro; his orchestration a certain kind of space. For his shattering ironies to come through,
you need to start with a veneer of ordinariness. In "Un Ballo in Maschera," the entire
action is predicted in the opening bars, in which carefree music in a major key is
shadowed by chromatic passing tones. A lot of productions are masked balls from the
outset, so you never know when anyone is putting on a disguise.
For too long, opera directors have got away with installing themselves in the progressive
zone of musical life, dismissing all resistance to their work as anti-intellectual
conservatism. In truth, they are the dumb, lumbering establishment, the ones with the
tired script. The time has come for opera people to just say, "Basta." And the most
effective protest will come not from critics and audiences, whose grumbling can always
be explained away, but from singers, without whom nothing can happen.
A Verdi aria is like a camera that zooms in on a person’s soul. Take the moment in "La
Traviata" when Violetta, the fallen woman, leaves her lover, Alfredo, under pressure
from his father. Alfredo believes that she is merely going into the garden, but he will
soon receive a letter saying that she has left forever. "I will always be here, near you,
among the flowers," Violetta says to him. "Love me, Alfredo, as I love you. Goodbye."
When a great soprano unfurls these phrases—I am listening to Maria Callas, recorded at
La Scala, in 1955—you hear so much you can hardly take it all in. You hear what
Alfredo hears, the exaggerations of an overwrought lover: "I love you even though I am
going into the garden." You hear what Violetta cannot bring herself to say out loud: "I am
leaving you, but will always love you." And you hear premonitions of her deathbed plea,
at the end of the opera: "Remember me after death." This world of meaning is carried
along by a simple tune that you know even if you have never seen an opera.
Each Verdi score contains a series of pivot points that singers are expected to make into
purely vocal epiphanies. They sometimes amount to no more than four or five notes, in a
steeply curving pattern. Verdi hounded his librettists to find the right words for these
climaxes; he demanded banner headlines of emotion. "Amami, Alfredo" is among the
most indestructible of them, appealing as it does to the diva’s imperial urges. But Callas’s
treatment of the line is so unnervingly vehement that it risks anticlimax—where can the
opera possibly go from here? Only when you listen again do you understand: Violetta’s
spirit is broken, and from now on she will sing as if she were already dead. Rather than
indulging in personal excess, Callas is setting forth, in the manner of a German-trained
director, her concept of the opera. Only, she is doing it musically, with her voice.
This is what Verdi expected from singers: emotions so strong that they become ideas. To
study archival recordings is to realize how deliberately the old singers marshalled their
resources toward the few notes that truly mattered. The EMI label recently reissued a
classic compilation entitled "Les Introuvables du Chant Verdien," which is almost
guaranteed to transform even the huskiest young fan into a tiresome old opera queen who
complains that no one can sing Verdi anymore. At the same time, these recordings
demonstrate that there never was a single Verdi style. Frida Leider delivers penetrating
Verdi in German; Francesco Tamagno, the original Otello, sings in what sounds like a
slight French accent (presumably an Italian dialect); Nellie Melba croons mercilessly.
What the legends had in common was a way of seeming to reach the limit and then
pushing over it. Caruso would swell his voice tremendously at moments where it ought to
have given out; Rosa Ponselle would sustain a line over supernatural spans of time, so
that the music acquired the steady glow of moonlight. Their feats seem physically
unrepeatable: no one has lungs like that now.
But the exercise of praising long-gone singers at the expense of present-day ones is
ultimately pointless, even destructive. Nothing could be more alien to Verdi’s art than the
solitary accumulation of artifacts. And, in truth, there are a lot of good Verdi singers
around. Olga Borodina’s performances of the major Verdi mezzo parts are as voluptuous
and intelligent as any on record. Among sopranos, Maria Guleghina and Patricia Racette
sing with dramatic fire, while Mariella Devia and Barbara Frittoli maintain a sense of
high Verdi style. Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Franz Grundheber, and Mark Delavan are giving
distinctive performances of the baritone roles. The young bass René Pape is as
formidable in Verdi as he is in Wagner. As for the tenors, convincing successors to
Domingo and Pavarotti have yet to appear, but there are some promising possibilities:
Giuseppe Sabbatini has some of Pavarotti’s elegance, Salvatore Licitra some of
Domingo’s presence. And more singers seem to be coming up: in a program of Verdi
scenes given by Mannes College students, a young mezzo named Carmelita Mitchell
smoldered in the role of Azucena.
A singer who wishes to breathe new life into Verdi often has to get around not only the
director’s concepts but also the conductor’s. Most conductors are trained by the modern
conservatory mentality to resist the manifold changes of tempo—rubato, rallentando,
stretto—that Italian singing encourages. You might expect to hear remnants of that
tradition at La Scala, the original Verdi house, but Riccardo Muti, La Scala’s longtime
music director, is enamored of an inflexible, hard-driving sound. The "Ballo in
Maschera" that I heard there last May inhabited much the same sound world as Richard
Strauss’s "Elektra," and somewhere in the middle of the onslaught was Licitra, who sang
with a long, stylish line while etching words sharply into the air. When he tried to linger
over a possible epiphany, you could feel Muti tugging him onward, like a parent
marching a child past a candy store. The performance felt like a succession of "singer
moments" awkwardly inserted into a semi-symphonic narrative. Verdi resists
brainstorming conductors as much as he resists brainstorming directors.
The Metropolitan Opera tends to be a happier place for singers, especially when James
Levine is on the podium. In and around the "Trovatore" disaster, the house offered two
authentically singer-driven evenings last season: "Aida" in the winter, with Borodina
finding a world of heartbreak in the vengeful Amneris, and "Nabucco" in the spring, with
Guleghina seizing the vocally hazardous role of Abigaille. The "Nabucco" was, in fact, a
triumph for all concerned; the director, Elijah Moshinsky, and the designer, John Napier,
put together a creatively conservative production that was monumental in appearance and
functional in practice. In one diva-ready set piece, Abigaille, Nebuchadnezzar’s
perpetually enraged daughter, is asked to descend from a huge statue of the god Baal
down a long gold staircase. Guleghina took a devil-may-care attitude toward the role’s
precipitous leaps of register and dynamics, issuing wild notes as well as beautiful ones.
But, in an echo of Callas’s most famous ploy, she let the crisis in her voice shape the
drama. The entire evening had an unchecked, carnival air, hearkening back to legendary
old nights at the Met.
All the Verdi evenings I attended over the past year had one element in common: an air
of alertness in the audience that was not evident at, say, symphony concerts. That
soupçon of buzz at the Met or at City Opera was a reminder that opera is experiencing a
remarkable period of growth. According to surveys, nearly a third of the operagoing
American audience is under the age of thirty-five—a statistic that destroys the stereotype
of the classical-music audience as a mob of blue-haired ladies. You see more indirect
tremors of change in the culture at large: a new attraction to diva personalities; attempts
at rock opera and even hip-hop opera; best-selling albums by quasi-operatic singers like
Charlotte Church and Russell Watson. All this suggests a yearning to connect with the
grand original. Verdi answers a need for emotional realism that pop music once offered
in abundance but is now failing to provide.
The missing link, of course, is new opera that aspires to Verdi’s populist ideals. The
composer was, despite his universal appeal, a nineteenth-century artist, and his works
cannot be given a contemporary gloss. The energy that has been channelled into opera
direction ought to have gone into the creation of new opera. Yet Verdi has a special
legacy in twentieth-century music; "Otello" and "Falstaff," in particular, pointed toward a
kind of modern, free tonality, one that was developed by composers as various as Strauss,
Mahler, Nielsen, Janácˇek, Stravinsky, Britten, and even Alban Berg. There are signs of a
renaissance of Verdian writing among contemporary composers, whether in the gaudy
Latino pageants of Osvaldo Golijov’s "Passion" or in the moody political tableaux of
John Adams’s "Nixon in China." Any progress in contemporary opera in the next ten or
twenty years is likely to come from a close study of the Verdi canon. How could a living
composer write a "Donna è mobile"? What language would he use, for the tune itself and
for the musical fabric that contains it? These seem like obvious questions, yet they are not
often asked in college composition courses.
The question for repertory opera is not so much whether it can get new audiences but
whether it wants them. Despite all the P.R. noise about attracting new and younger
listeners, the classical-music business has trouble letting go of its unconscious, passiveaggressive need to keep the larger world at bay. How else to explain the spread of
outlandish productions, a classic case of intellectual one-upmanship run amok? So many
profess to find Regietheater necessary and invigorating; so few actually like it. Classical
music is overrun by a connoisseur culture, whose members are invited to gravitate toward
the arcane ("You like Guleghina? Go listen to Giannina Russ") and to rationalize the
absurd ("Vick at least makes you re-think your assumptions"). The most curious defense
mechanism is the inability to accept good news at face value. Aficionados of classical
music, like Verdi heroines, are most comfortable embracing portents of doom. In the
same way that pop critics like to talk about the next big thing, classical critics are always
looking for the next last gasp; every few years, it seems, a new book appears on the
demise of classical music.
Why, then, is Verdi playing to thousands in Central Park in the dark? Complacent
institutions may come and go, but the music will remain. Plainly, there is a huge potential
audience for opera that can see no way of getting in the door. Vincent La Selva’s
performances of Verdi in the park set me thinking: What would it take to build a popular
opera house that would have none of the built-in class distinctions of the houses of
Lincoln Center? Given that most high-culture institutions are money-losing propositions
to begin with, why not imagine a medium-sized opera house that charged nothing? Major
corporations, always eager to attach themselves to edifying causes, might agree to take
the project on. If it ended up being called the FedEx Opera, so be it; opera has always
relied on the kindness of strangers. Merely to entertain the possibility seems a fitting
tribute to the composer’s tenacious spirit.
The greatness of Verdi is a simple thing. A solitary man, he found a way of speaking to
limitless crowds, and his method was to sink himself completely into his characters. He
never composed music for music’s sake; every note has a precise dramatic function. The
most astounding scenes in his work are those in which all the voices come together in a
visceral mass—like a human wave that could carry anything before it. Very often, these
scenes take the form of lamentations, and lately some of them have been ringing in my
head. The voices at the end of "Simon Boccanegra," crying out for peace; the voices at
the end of "Un Ballo," overcome by the spiritual greatness of a dying man; and, most
unforgettably, the voices of the Hebrews, in "Nabucco," remembering, in a unison line,
the destruction of Jerusalem. In the past century and a half, the quiet majesty of "Va,
pensiero" has spoken many times in periods of crisis, and its usefulness is not at an end.
In the modern world, we seldom find ourselves in the grip of a single emotion, and this is
what Verdi restores to us—the sense of belonging. _
A CRITIC AT LARGE about Giuseppe Verdi, on the 100th anniversary of his funeral…
In this anniversary year, something like four hundred productions of Verdi’s operas have
been mounted around the world. I have seen nine of them, in the major New York houses
and at two great theatres in Italy, and, to my surprise, the Central Park "Otello" is the one
that sticks in my mind… The appeal of Italian opera is difficult to put into words, but it
has something to do with the activation of primal feelings. Operatic characters have a
way of laying themselves bare, and they are never more uninhibited than at the climax of
a Verdi tragedy… The Verdi year has supplied two major bits of information: first, that
the audience for opera in America is steadily growing, and, second, that many of the
directors who now dominate the opera scene do not know what they are doing… For a
glimpse of Verdi’s two-faced genius, you need look no further than his most famous tune,
"La donna è mobile" from "Rigoletto"… Verdi had an earthy nature, a preference for
action over theory. He was born in 1813, in a village outside the town of Busseto, south
of Milan. At first, he seemed destined to succeed his teacher as the musical director of
Busseto, but his personality proved too unruly for the role… The Met’s production of "Il
Trovatore" last season, for example, was so monumentally opaque that the director,
Graham Vick, later removed his name from it, in the spirit of the "Allen Smithee" movies
that are periodically flushed out of Hollywood. Here are some notes I made at the time:
"Toy soldiers, colorful costumes, but no sets to speak of. Rorschach patterns? Sliding
walls—inept. Enough!" Vick’s fiasco was mild in comparison with what has been
appearing lately on European stages. Directors like to claim that the conventions of
Italian opera are hackneyed and that contemporary audiences need novel reinterpretations
if they are not to grow bored. Operagoers are pictured as jaded fanatics who cannot stand
to see another mad scene or midnight oath. There are, of course, such people, and they
get a proper thrill when Macbeth comes on in Sex Pistols regalia. But many others,
especially those coming to opera for the first time, like the old stuff… A singer who
wishes to breathe new life into Verdi often has to get around not only the director’s
concepts but also the conductor’s. Most conductors are trained by the modern
conservatory mentality to resist the manifold changes of tempo—rubato, rallentando,
stretto—that Italian singing encourages. You might expect to hear remnants of that
tradition at La Scala, the original Verdi house, but Riccardo Muti, La Scala’s longtime
music director, is enamored of an inflexible, hard-driving sound. There are signs of a
renaissance of Verdian writing among contemporary composers, whether in the gaudy
Latino pageants of Osvaldo Golijov’s "Passion" or in the moody political tableaux of
John Adams’s "Nixon in China." Any progress in contemporary opera in the next ten or
twenty years is likely to come from a close study of the Verdi canon…
Full Text:
According to "The Guinness Book of Records," Vincent La Selva, a native of Cleveland,
is the only man ever to have conducted all twenty-eight operas of Giuseppe Verdi in
chronological order. La Selva runs a company called the New York Grand Opera, which
recently succeeded in presenting the entire Verdi canon, in Central Park, free of charge.
The cycle began in 1994, with a boisterous rendition of "Oberto," and ended this summer,
with "Aida," "Otello," and "Falstaff." I saw the "Otello" on a sticky night in July. Several
thousand people were on hand, and several hundred others were trying to get in. A
policeman was shouting, "No more seats! No opera!" There was a lot of pushing and
pleading, as at a rock show. "My name has to be on the list," said a youngish man in an
Atari shirt. Many people ended up camping out on the grass, listening to the music as it
wafted over the loudspeakers. Verdi seems to have lost little of the mass appeal that
brought forth hundreds of thousands of mourners on the day of his funeral, a century ago.
In this anniversary year, something like four hundred productions of Verdi’s operas have
been mounted around the world. I have seen nine of them, in the major New York houses
and at two great theatres in Italy, and, to my surprise, the Central Park "Otello" is the one
that sticks in my mind. It was by no means the best-sung Verdi of the season; for an
"Otello" of grand, tragic dimensions, you would have to hunt down a ticket to see Plácido
Domingo at the Met’s opening-night gala, scheduled for next week. Nor were the
acoustics satisfactory. The singers had microphones clipped to their costumes, and every
few minutes one of them would let out a mechanical squawk or disappear from the mix.
During the Homage Chorus, in Act II, the mandolin was deafening and the chorus was
inaudible. But the production had an excellent, pearly-voiced Desdemona in Judith Von
Houser, and a fiercely idiomatic conductor in La Selva. This was Verdi 101, stripped of
directorial brainstorms and interpretive ego trips. By the end, I had forgotten about the
tackiness of the scenery and fallen under Verdi’s spell.
The appeal of Italian opera is difficult to put into words, but it has something to do with
the activation of primal feelings. Operatic characters have a way of laying themselves
bare, and they are never more uninhibited than at the climax of a Verdi tragedy. "Otello,"
the peak of the canon, is a crescendo of anger; yet the ultimate moment of the opera,
during which Central Park seemed to fall silent, is a surpassingly lyrical one. When
Otello kills Desdemona, the act is framed by two repetitions of a bewitching nine-bar
theme, which first appeared in the love duet of Act I. It is a beautiful object, but it is a
token of Otello’s insanity. His love for Desdemona was, he says, a "mirage"—not
because she betrayed him but because he never saw her as a real person. His note-fornote recapitulation of the love music marks the point at which he chooses the mirage over
life itself. All the orchestra can offer, by way of a final statement, is three soft, black
chords. "Fall down the steps," Verdi writes. Edward Perretti, the tenor singing Otello,
followed the instruction exactly. Everyone shuddered.
The Central Park "Otello" was an unexpectedly haunting experience, because it took the
drama at face value. It made no attempt to deconstruct or recontextualize, and in that
respect it was rare among contemporary productions. The Verdi year has supplied two
major bits of information: first, that the audience for opera in America is steadily
growing, and, second, that many of the directors who now dominate the opera scene do
not know what they are doing. If, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, Verdi was the last great popular
artist, the last who perfectly fit his time, then he is a spectacular misfit in the
contemporary highbrow ghetto, where intellectuals make a virtue of being ironically
detached. Chances are, any Verdi opera you saw this year took the form of a revisionist
production that was at odds with the composer’s raging sincerity. One prominent director
has been quoted as saying, "Nobody comes to Verdi for the plots." More likely, people
come to Verdi because he meant every word.
In the nineteenth century, German musicians began to describe their art in idealistic
terms, as a lofty pursuit that disdained the crowd. Giuseppe Verdi, despite his reclusive
habits and porcupine personality, saw no shame in the pursuit of public adoration. "The
box office is the proper thermometer of success," he remarked. In this respect, you can
compare him to a major Hollywood artist like Hitchcock, who kept an eye on the bottom
line even as he immersed himself in formal schemes. Like Hitchcock, Verdi was a
gripping storyteller, a master mechanic of the wheels of fate. But the Italian’s empathy
went deeper. The example for him was Shakespeare, and even if he had never set
Shakespeare to music the comparison would have been made. Verdi’s works, like
Shakespeare’s, thrilled both the groundlings and the connoisseurs.
For a glimpse of Verdi’s two-faced genius, you need look no further than his most
famous tune, "La donna è mobile," which has sold vast quantities of pasta in television
commercials. More than a pretty melody, it is packed with double meanings, some of
them quite ugly. The irony of the aria is hinted at in the opening bars, as the players stop
and start again, like actors clearing their throats. The first line translates as "Women are
fickle," but the sentiment is less than straightforward, being the rationalization of a fickle
Duke who uses women for amusement. Gilda, who has fallen for the Duke, overhears the
song, grasps its tone, and is plunged into despair. Rigoletto, her father, plots revenge,
forgetting for a while that he himself facilitated the Duke’s adventures and was cursed by
one of his victims. At the end of the night, an assassin hauls out a sack that is supposed to
contain the Duke’s corpse. Just as Rigoletto bends over it, a familiar tenor is heard
singing a familiar tune offstage—"La donna è mobile." So whose is the body in the bag?
Maledizione! That chirpy tune becomes the cutting edge of the curse that brings Rigoletto
down.
In his old age, Verdi styled himself a man of the people, a self-taught peasant genius.
Recent biographers have pointed out the many ways in which this image departed from
the facts. His father, a small-time innkeeper and landowner, was, if not rich, prosperous
enough to be able to give his son a thorough musical education, and the young man had
the help of many aristocratic friends. Still, there is some truth to the peasant image. Verdi
had an earthy nature, a preference for action over theory. He was born in 1813, in a
village outside the town of Busseto, south of Milan. At first, he seemed destined to
succeed his teacher as the musical director of Busseto, but his personality proved too
unruly for the role. Instead, thanks in part to the intervention of a sympathetic soprano
named Giuseppina Strepponi, he attracted the interest of La Scala, which presented
"Oberto" in 1839. The breakthrough year was 1842, when "Nabucco," his third opera,
had a run of fifty-seven performances at La Scala—more than any opera before or since.
Even as Verdi became a national hero, furnishing anthems for the risorgimento, he made
his plots more intimate, favoring situations in which characters pursued passions that
were against the social grain. In the space of three years, he produced "Rigoletto," "Il
Trovatore," and "La Traviata," without which no modern opera house could function. In
the eighteen-fifties and sixties, under the influence of French grand opera, he produced a
series of sprawling tableaux—"I Vespri Siciliani," "Simon Boccanegra," "Un Ballo in
Maschera," "La Forza del Destino," "Don Carlos," and, in 1871, "Aida"—in which a
deepening pessimism became evident. Fate was now hammered out by earthly monsters
of authority, the worst of them being the Grand Inquisitor in "Don Carlos." Finally, after
a period of seeming retirement, Verdi produced "Otello" and "Falstaff," in which the belcanto tradition was recast in dizzyingly heightened form.
Verdi was not yet dead when he began to be dismissed as a dated figure. The younger
Italian intellectuals flocked to Wagner, who had set about obliterating the operatic
conventions that Verdi cherished to the end. While his works never lost their popularity,
they were often treated as genre pieces that history had left behind. The Wagner
comparison consistently hurt him. Wagner wrote in a self-consciously idiosyncratic style,
and in any given moment you could hear his open-ended processes at work. Verdi’s was
an art of juxtaposition, of jagged contrasts: innocent tunes punctured by repeated,
discordant notes; robust marches pushed into the background by desolate monologues. To
the analytical mind, such music can look crude, even vulgar, on the page. Only in live
performances, when the momentum begins to build and the voices become urgent, does it
catch fire. But how do you go about analyzing momentum and urgency? Verdi is a
challenge for academic sensibilities.
In the postwar period, a phalanx of singers and conductors brought about a major Verdi
revival, with the art of Maria Callas setting the standard. The early operas came back into
circulation; the more austere dramas, such as "Stiffelio" and "Simon Boccanegra," were
taken out of mothballs; "Don Carlos" was finally heard complete. Scholars began to take
Verdi seriously; and Mary Jane Phillips-Matz’s doggedly researched biography,
published in 1993, revealed the man in all his gnarled complexity. It was during this same
period, however, that directors began the practice of rewriting Verdi’s librettos from
scratch, and the revival entered a state of crisis from which it has yet to emerge.
Earlier this year, Matthew Gurewitsch, writing in the Times, asked several leading
American opera directors to articulate their visions of Verdi, and he got some eyebrowraising replies. Francesca Zambello, who once set "Aida" in a nuclear-winter landscape,
said, "If I have to think of a work of Verdi that moved me on stage, that’s going to be
pretty hard." Christopher Alden, who created a "Rigoletto" with bouts of transvestism and
public sex, said, "You have to throw cold water on an audience. You have to wake them
up, poke holes into the operas so that the inner life will flow out." Mark Lamos, whose
"Rigoletto" also featured a graphic orgy scene, said, "To be blunt, I find Verdi’s operas
about as stageworthy as his Requiem."
The assumption behind this kind of sloganeering is that Verdi’s librettos are stodgy and
ridiculous. With their wild coincidences, improbable deaths, and hyperventilating exits,
they do seem silly at first glance. Even the most artful synopsis reduces a plot-heavy
work like "Simon Boccanegra" to gibberish. And surtitles are of only limited value: while
they help to draw the audience in, they also place far too much stress on the words, which
are raw material for singing rather than freestanding literary texts. (It would be similarly
unnerving if song lyrics were projected at a rock show, useful as the service might be.)
Only when the performance is under way does the beauty of the libretto snap into focus.
Verdi’s beloved maledictions, vendettas, and forces of destiny actually add plausibility
rather than take it away; they make the violent accents of operatic singing seem like a
natural reaction under the circumstances.
If directors were replacing nineteenth-century conventions with riveting scenarios of their
own, then their attacks on Verdi’s stageworthiness, however arrogant, could be set aside
as so much bluster. The fact is that most of them display the faults they assign to Verdi:
their work is, more often than not, stilted and cryptic, as if obeying some extraterrestrial
social code. The Met’s production of "Il Trovatore" last season, for example, was so
monumentally opaque that the director, Graham Vick, later removed his name from it, in
the spirit of the "Allen Smithee" movies that are periodically flushed out of Hollywood.
Here are some notes I made at the time: "Toy soldiers, colorful costumes, but no sets to
speak of. Rorschach patterns? Sliding walls—inept. Enough!" Vick’s fiasco was mild in
comparison with what has been appearing lately on European stages. The opera world
was recently buzzing over a "Ballo in Maschera," in Barcelona, that opened with an
added scene of conspirators sitting on toilets and went on from there.
Productions of this kind invite outrage, and the best response is to ignore them. More
interesting are the productions that go subtly, incrementally wrong. One such was a
"Rigoletto" at City Opera, under the direction of Rhoda Levine. A lot of it worked—at
least, early on. John Conklin’s sets, for example, nicely displayed the opera’s contrasting
social worlds, with the Duke of Mantua’s palace dominated by a gaudy red, and Rigoletto
trapped in gray brick middle-income housing. We seemed to be in a stylized space
between the Renaissance and the present day. There was an effective visual elaboration
of Gilda’s central aria, "Caro nome," with sinister figures hovering in the background.
"Caro nome," like "La donna è mobile," is more complicated than it appears; for all its
sweetness, it has an eerie unreality, and the soprano’s coloratura can come off as so much
whistling in the dark. At the end, tremolo strings glisten like the threads of a spiderweb in
which Gilda is about to be trapped.
But the production got fidgety as it went along, and at the climax it lost the plot entirely.
As Rigoletto despairs, we see the assassin, Sparafucile, kicking back in his apartment,
having a beer. Then the Duke himself wanders in and joins him. None of this is in the
libretto, for good reason. We don’t need to be told what Sparafucile and the Duke are
doing next: they are stereotypes, albeit richly detailed ones, and they will go on playing
lethal games with other people’s lives. The bigger problem is that Levine’s pantomimes
detract from the dénouement of the story. Rigoletto is the one character who is permitted
to look into himself, and in the final scene the governing irony of his life is revealed to
him: his public role, that of cruel jester, has ruined his private one, that of protective
father. This is Sophoclean irony, and it is a comedown to see it paired with the kind of
sardonic twist that passes for irony on cable TV—an assassin relaxing after his kill.
Directors like to claim that the conventions of Italian opera are hackneyed and that
contemporary audiences need novel reinterpretations if they are not to grow bored.
Operagoers are pictured as jaded fanatics who cannot stand to see another mad scene or
midnight oath. There are, of course, such people, and they get a proper thrill when
Macbeth comes on in Sex Pistols regalia. But many others, especially those coming to
opera for the first time, like the old stuff. They want to see frenzied states of mind,
bizarre occurrences, a mother accidentally throwing her baby on the fire. The directors
themselves are the bored ones. They need to make a statement and, afraid of embracing
anything positive, set about attacking an imaginary establishment. Verdi, the melancholy
patriot, sends them into conniptions of negation. All they can do with his patriotism is to
mock it; all they can do with his despair is to trivialize it.
Director-dominated opera is known as Regietheater, and it is telling that the word exists
only in German. Regietheater first became popular as a way of evading unsavory political
associations created by the work of Richard Wagner, and, once again, the invidious
comparison comes into play. Wagner’s hypnotic world-weariness can serve as a
soundtrack for almost any set of images: Nordic gods, Nuremberg rallies, "Apocalypse
Now." Verdi, on the other hand, is the most site-specific of composers. His arching
phrases imply a certain mode of address; his rhythms a particular way of stalking to and
fro; his orchestration a certain kind of space. For his shattering ironies to come through,
you need to start with a veneer of ordinariness. In "Un Ballo in Maschera," the entire
action is predicted in the opening bars, in which carefree music in a major key is
shadowed by chromatic passing tones. A lot of productions are masked balls from the
outset, so you never know when anyone is putting on a disguise.
For too long, opera directors have got away with installing themselves in the progressive
zone of musical life, dismissing all resistance to their work as anti-intellectual
conservatism. In truth, they are the dumb, lumbering establishment, the ones with the
tired script. The time has come for opera people to just say, "Basta." And the most
effective protest will come not from critics and audiences, whose grumbling can always
be explained away, but from singers, without whom nothing can happen.
A Verdi aria is like a camera that zooms in on a person’s soul. Take the moment in "La
Traviata" when Violetta, the fallen woman, leaves her lover, Alfredo, under pressure
from his father. Alfredo believes that she is merely going into the garden, but he will
soon receive a letter saying that she has left forever. "I will always be here, near you,
among the flowers," Violetta says to him. "Love me, Alfredo, as I love you. Goodbye."
When a great soprano unfurls these phrases—I am listening to Maria Callas, recorded at
La Scala, in 1955—you hear so much you can hardly take it all in. You hear what
Alfredo hears, the exaggerations of an overwrought lover: "I love you even though I am
going into the garden." You hear what Violetta cannot bring herself to say out loud: "I am
leaving you, but will always love you." And you hear premonitions of her deathbed plea,
at the end of the opera: "Remember me after death." This world of meaning is carried
along by a simple tune that you know even if you have never seen an opera.
Each Verdi score contains a series of pivot points that singers are expected to make into
purely vocal epiphanies. They sometimes amount to no more than four or five notes, in a
steeply curving pattern. Verdi hounded his librettists to find the right words for these
climaxes; he demanded banner headlines of emotion. "Amami, Alfredo" is among the
most indestructible of them, appealing as it does to the diva’s imperial urges. But Callas’s
treatment of the line is so unnervingly vehement that it risks anticlimax—where can the
opera possibly go from here? Only when you listen again do you understand: Violetta’s
spirit is broken, and from now on she will sing as if she were already dead. Rather than
indulging in personal excess, Callas is setting forth, in the manner of a German-trained
director, her concept of the opera. Only, she is doing it musically, with her voice.
This is what Verdi expected from singers: emotions so strong that they become ideas. To
study archival recordings is to realize how deliberately the old singers marshalled their
resources toward the few notes that truly mattered. The EMI label recently reissued a
classic compilation entitled "Les Introuvables du Chant Verdien," which is almost
guaranteed to transform even the huskiest young fan into a tiresome old opera queen who
complains that no one can sing Verdi anymore. At the same time, these recordings
demonstrate that there never was a single Verdi style. Frida Leider delivers penetrating
Verdi in German; Francesco Tamagno, the original Otello, sings in what sounds like a
slight French accent (presumably an Italian dialect); Nellie Melba croons mercilessly.
What the legends had in common was a way of seeming to reach the limit and then
pushing over it. Caruso would swell his voice tremendously at moments where it ought to
have given out; Rosa Ponselle would sustain a line over supernatural spans of time, so
that the music acquired the steady glow of moonlight. Their feats seem physically
unrepeatable: no one has lungs like that now.
But the exercise of praising long-gone singers at the expense of present-day ones is
ultimately pointless, even destructive. Nothing could be more alien to Verdi’s art than the
solitary accumulation of artifacts. And, in truth, there are a lot of good Verdi singers
around. Olga Borodina’s performances of the major Verdi mezzo parts are as voluptuous
and intelligent as any on record. Among sopranos, Maria Guleghina and Patricia Racette
sing with dramatic fire, while Mariella Devia and Barbara Frittoli maintain a sense of
high Verdi style. Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Franz Grundheber, and Mark Delavan are giving
distinctive performances of the baritone roles. The young bass René Pape is as
formidable in Verdi as he is in Wagner. As for the tenors, convincing successors to
Domingo and Pavarotti have yet to appear, but there are some promising possibilities:
Giuseppe Sabbatini has some of Pavarotti’s elegance, Salvatore Licitra some of
Domingo’s presence. And more singers seem to be coming up: in a program of Verdi
scenes given by Mannes College students, a young mezzo named Carmelita Mitchell
smoldered in the role of Azucena.
A singer who wishes to breathe new life into Verdi often has to get around not only the
director’s concepts but also the conductor’s. Most conductors are trained by the modern
conservatory mentality to resist the manifold changes of tempo—rubato, rallentando,
stretto—that Italian singing encourages. You might expect to hear remnants of that
tradition at La Scala, the original Verdi house, but Riccardo Muti, La Scala’s longtime
music director, is enamored of an inflexible, hard-driving sound. The "Ballo in
Maschera" that I heard there last May inhabited much the same sound world as Richard
Strauss’s "Elektra," and somewhere in the middle of the onslaught was Licitra, who sang
with a long, stylish line while etching words sharply into the air. When he tried to linger
over a possible epiphany, you could feel Muti tugging him onward, like a parent
marching a child past a candy store. The performance felt like a succession of "singer
moments" awkwardly inserted into a semi-symphonic narrative. Verdi resists
brainstorming conductors as much as he resists brainstorming directors.
The Metropolitan Opera tends to be a happier place for singers, especially when James
Levine is on the podium. In and around the "Trovatore" disaster, the house offered two
authentically singer-driven evenings last season: "Aida" in the winter, with Borodina
finding a world of heartbreak in the vengeful Amneris, and "Nabucco" in the spring, with
Guleghina seizing the vocally hazardous role of Abigaille. The "Nabucco" was, in fact, a
triumph for all concerned; the director, Elijah Moshinsky, and the designer, John Napier,
put together a creatively conservative production that was monumental in appearance and
functional in practice. In one diva-ready set piece, Abigaille, Nebuchadnezzar’s
perpetually enraged daughter, is asked to descend from a huge statue of the god Baal
down a long gold staircase. Guleghina took a devil-may-care attitude toward the role’s
precipitous leaps of register and dynamics, issuing wild notes as well as beautiful ones.
But, in an echo of Callas’s most famous ploy, she let the crisis in her voice shape the
drama. The entire evening had an unchecked, carnival air, hearkening back to legendary
old nights at the Met.
All the Verdi evenings I attended over the past year had one element in common: an air
of alertness in the audience that was not evident at, say, symphony concerts. That
soupçon of buzz at the Met or at City Opera was a reminder that opera is experiencing a
remarkable period of growth. According to surveys, nearly a third of the operagoing
American audience is under the age of thirty-five—a statistic that destroys the stereotype
of the classical-music audience as a mob of blue-haired ladies. You see more indirect
tremors of change in the culture at large: a new attraction to diva personalities; attempts
at rock opera and even hip-hop opera; best-selling albums by quasi-operatic singers like
Charlotte Church and Russell Watson. All this suggests a yearning to connect with the
grand original. Verdi answers a need for emotional realism that pop music once offered
in abundance but is now failing to provide.
The missing link, of course, is new opera that aspires to Verdi’s populist ideals. The
composer was, despite his universal appeal, a nineteenth-century artist, and his works
cannot be given a contemporary gloss. The energy that has been channelled into opera
direction ought to have gone into the creation of new opera. Yet Verdi has a special
legacy in twentieth-century music; "Otello" and "Falstaff," in particular, pointed toward a
kind of modern, free tonality, one that was developed by composers as various as Strauss,
Mahler, Nielsen, Janácˇek, Stravinsky, Britten, and even Alban Berg. There are signs of a
renaissance of Verdian writing among contemporary composers, whether in the gaudy
Latino pageants of Osvaldo Golijov’s "Passion" or in the moody political tableaux of
John Adams’s "Nixon in China." Any progress in contemporary opera in the next ten or
twenty years is likely to come from a close study of the Verdi canon. How could a living
composer write a "Donna è mobile"? What language would he use, for the tune itself and
for the musical fabric that contains it? These seem like obvious questions, yet they are not
often asked in college composition courses.
The question for repertory opera is not so much whether it can get new audiences but
whether it wants them. Despite all the P.R. noise about attracting new and younger
listeners, the classical-music business has trouble letting go of its unconscious, passiveaggressive need to keep the larger world at bay. How else to explain the spread of
outlandish productions, a classic case of intellectual one-upmanship run amok? So many
profess to find Regietheater necessary and invigorating; so few actually like it. Classical
music is overrun by a connoisseur culture, whose members are invited to gravitate toward
the arcane ("You like Guleghina? Go listen to Giannina Russ") and to rationalize the
absurd ("Vick at least makes you re-think your assumptions"). The most curious defense
mechanism is the inability to accept good news at face value. Aficionados of classical
music, like Verdi heroines, are most comfortable embracing portents of doom. In the
same way that pop critics like to talk about the next big thing, classical critics are always
looking for the next last gasp; every few years, it seems, a new book appears on the
demise of classical music.
Why, then, is Verdi playing to thousands in Central Park in the dark? Complacent
institutions may come and go, but the music will remain. Plainly, there is a huge potential
audience for opera that can see no way of getting in the door. Vincent La Selva’s
performances of Verdi in the park set me thinking: What would it take to build a popular
opera house that would have none of the built-in class distinctions of the houses of
Lincoln Center? Given that most high-culture institutions are money-losing propositions
to begin with, why not imagine a medium-sized opera house that charged nothing? Major
corporations, always eager to attach themselves to edifying causes, might agree to take
the project on. If it ended up being called the FedEx Opera, so be it; opera has always
relied on the kindness of strangers. Merely to entertain the possibility seems a fitting
tribute to the composer’s tenacious spirit.
The greatness of Verdi is a simple thing. A solitary man, he found a way of speaking to
limitless crowds, and his method was to sink himself completely into his characters. He
never composed music for music’s sake; every note has a precise dramatic function. The
most astounding scenes in his work are those in which all the voices come together in a
visceral mass—like a human wave that could carry anything before it. Very often, these
scenes take the form of lamentations, and lately some of them have been ringing in my
head. The voices at the end of "Simon Boccanegra," crying out for peace; the voices at
the end of "Un Ballo," overcome by the spiritual greatness of a dying man; and, most
unforgettably, the voices of the Hebrews, in "Nabucco," remembering, in a unison line,
the destruction of Jerusalem. In the past century and a half, the quiet majesty of "Va,
pensiero" has spoken many times in periods of crisis, and its usefulness is not at an end.
In the modern world, we seldom find ourselves in the grip of a single emotion, and this is
what Verdi restores to us—the sense of belonging. _
5/13/02
MUSICAL EVENTS about Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project in three concerts at Carnegie
Hall and the Met’s "Tosca"—sans an ailing Pavarotti, who backed out twice at the last
minute... With the Silk Road Project, a nomadic festival of the music and musicians of
Central Asia, Ma has hit the mother lode. This is an opulently detailed exposition of a
simple but potent idea: that music is on some level the same everywhere, and that
classical music is no longer a European art. Ma undertook the Silk Road Project after
becoming fascinated by the spread of musical styles, instruments, and playing techniques
along the old trading routes between the Far East and the Mediterranean. In the first
millennium, Central Asia had a magnificent cosmopolitan culture, and Ma wished to
summon up the ghosts of its glory by musical means. He decided to bring together
musicians of various Asian countries with leading composers from the region. He could
not have anticipated the element of heartbreak that would enter into this utopian mingling
of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist cultures in the months after September 11th.
There were so many kinds of virtuosity on display that Ma’s own contribution almost got
lost in the shuffle. Perhaps he wanted it this way; of all virtuosos, he is the most eager to
blend in, to be a worker among workers. Even so, his tone sang out with a force and
focus that I had not heard from him in a while... "FAT MAN WON’T SING," read the
collectible front page of the Post on May 10th. The paper was correct in predicting that
Luciano Pavarotti would cancel his rumored farewell appearance at the Met’s end-ofseason gala the following night. Patrons had paid up to eighteen hundred and seventy-five
dollars to hear the big man one last time. He had been contracted to sing two
performances of "Tosca"; he arrived in New York, sang the dress rehearsal, and came
down with what was described as "influenza." On both nights, he waffled, said no, said
yes, then cancelled shortly before the curtain went up. Joseph Volpe, the general
manager, was not amused. If this really is the end—and Volpe has a history of kicking
superstars into oblivion—it is something of a tragedy. Even in his present dilapidated
condition, Pavarotti has automatic access to a pure bel-canto style that sounds artificial in
the throat of every other singer, Plácido Domingo included. Pavarotti tended lovingly to a
fragile tradition; he helped carry the Met through a bleak financial period in the seventies
and eighties. Even in his "Three Tenors" dotage, he made opera matter to millions.
Salvatore Licitra, the rising star of La Scala, flew in from Milan at the last possible
minute to sing Cavaradossi in Pavarotti’s place. His tenor lacks the supernatural ease of
Pavarotti’s in its prime; the lower register is weak, the middle uneven. But he has
thrilling, ringing high notes—they are sung, not hollered—and he cannily shapes his
phrases to make his top-heaviness seem a dramatic necessity. In Licitra’s best moments,
he actually sounds like an ideal blend of the two mega-tenors, echoing both Pavarotti’s
fluency and Domingo’s fire. He has a combination of musicality and power that is
essential for the Italian repertory...
Full Text:
Everybody likes Yo-Yo Ma—no one can get enough of him. Kramer, on "Seinfeld," once
shouted his name for the sheer joy of it. Being universally adored has made it harder for
the cellist to leave the glamorous rut of a jet-set career, but in the past decade he has
struck out on his own, using his fame to underwrite his passions. He has made some
abstruse choices along the way; not everyone believed him as a tango player, and not
everyone made it through his filmic fantasias on the Bach cello suites. But any man who
has had to play Dvorˇák’s Cello Concerto over and over with a beatific smile on his face
deserves to do as he pleases in his spare time.
With the Silk Road Project, a nomadic festival of the music and musicians of Central
Asia, Ma has hit the mother lode. This is an opulently detailed exposition of a simple but
potent idea: that music is on some level the same everywhere, and that classical music is
no longer a European art. Here, at Carnegie Hall, under the auspices of a ChineseAmerican musician, were composers and performers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, China,
Iran, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. The European tradition was
represented by two Frenchmen (Debussy, Ravel) and a lone Russian (Shostakovich). The
only German music that was heard in three long evenings was Beethoven’s "Für Elise,"
courtesy of an errant cell phone.
Ma undertook the Silk Road Project after becoming fascinated by the spread of musical
styles, instruments, and playing techniques along the old trading routes between the Far
East and the Mediterranean. In the first millennium, Central Asia had a magnificent
cosmopolitan culture, and Ma wished to summon up the ghosts of its glory by musical
means. He decided to bring together musicians of various Asian countries with leading
composers from the region. He could not have anticipated the element of heartbreak that
would enter into this utopian mingling of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist
cultures in the months after September 11th.
The series began with the fantastically powerful and eerie voice of the Mongolian "long
song" singer Khongorzul Ganbaatar. This set a pattern of alternating "roots" music, as the
program notes called it, with works written for Ma and his ensemble. The great
Azerbaijani singer Alim Qasimov demonstrated his passionate assimilation of the
mugham, the Azerbaijani version of the monumental Islamic art-music genre the maqam.
The Ilyas Malaev Ensemble, a group of Bukharan Jewish musicians formerly of
Uzbekistan and now of Forest Hills, performed their own delicately ornamented variation
on the maqam while wearing the brilliant garb of Muslim court entertainers. Certain
modal patterns, especially that of the lowered second, were common to all this music,
suggesting that some Jews and Muslims once sang alike.
What can a composer add to this welter of tradition? Critics of cultural appropriation will
complain that style tourists like Debussy and Ravel used Eastern touches as exotic flavor,
and they will have a point. But a work such as Shostakovich’s Piano Trio digs deeper,
throwing itself wholeheartedly into a stomping dance out of deepest Yiddishkeit. The
best of the new works in the Silk Road series echoed the Russian master in dropping the
mask of modernist detachment. In "Dervish," the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz AliZadeh matched twentieth-century techniques with the piercing directness of mugham.
Vache Sharafyan’s "The Sun, the Wine, and the Wind of Time" melded Shostakovichian
string laments with the droning melodies of the Caucasian duduk (a woodwind). The
Iranian-born Kayhan Kalhor achieved the ultimate synthesis in his "Blue as the Turquoise
Night of Neyshabur"; this was a written-out work that surged with improvisatory energy,
erasing differences between Western and Eastern styles.
There were so many kinds of virtuosity on display that Ma’s own contribution almost got
lost in the shuffle. Perhaps he wanted it this way; of all virtuosos, he is the most eager to
blend in, to be a worker among workers. Even so, his tone sang out with a force and
focus that I had not heard from him in a while. The series ended with a scalding
performance of the Ravel Trio, in which Ma was joined by the pianist Joel Fan and the
violinist Colin Jacobsen, his hardworking Western-style collaborators throughout the
series. In light of what had come before, the Ravel felt like a palace perched on a jagged
ridge—an immaculate creation bound to ancient forces.
"FAT MAN WON’T SING," read the collectible front page of the Post on May 10th. The
paper was correct in predicting that Luciano Pavarotti would cancel his rumored farewell
appearance at the Met’s end-of-season gala the following night. Patrons had paid up to
eighteen hundred and seventy-five dollars to hear the big man one last time. He had been
contracted to sing two performances of "Tosca"; he arrived in New York, sang the dress
rehearsal, and came down with what was described as "influenza." On both nights, he
waffled, said no, said yes, then cancelled shortly before the curtain went up. Joseph
Volpe, the general manager, was not amused. Twice he had to apologize to a groaning
crowd. The second time, visibly fuming, he recounted his conversation with Pavarotti,
which included the superbly ominous sentence "This is a hell of a way to end this
beautiful career of yours." As Baron Scarpia would have said, "Va, Luciano."
If this really is the end—and Volpe has a history of kicking superstars into oblivion—it is
something of a tragedy. Anyone who thinks of Pavarotti as the butt of late-night talkshow jokes should remember that he was at one time an impeccably stylish singer of
Italian opera—perhaps the most naturally gifted lyric tenor of the past fifty years. Even in
his present dilapidated condition, he has automatic access to a pure bel-canto style that
sounds artificial in the throat of every other singer, Plácido Domingo included. Pavarotti
tended lovingly to a fragile tradition; he helped carry the Met through a bleak financial
period in the seventies and eighties. Even in his "Three Tenors" dotage, he made opera
matter to millions. Audiences responded not only to the voice but also to the face—that
bright, open, generous countenance. So it was sad to see him test the affection of his
public to the breaking point.
Salvatore Licitra, the rising star of La Scala, flew in from Milan at the last possible
minute to sing Cavaradossi in Pavarotti’s place. The young tenor overcame formidable
obstacles—the inevitable pressure of a Met début, the added pressure of replacing a
legend, the Antarctic ice-floe tempos of James Levine—to make a powerful impression.
His tenor lacks the supernatural ease of Pavarotti’s in its prime; the lower register is
weak, the middle uneven. But he has thrilling, ringing high notes—they are sung, not
hollered—and he cannily shapes his phrases to make his top-heaviness seem a dramatic
necessity. In all, he easily held his own against the campily gripping Tosca of Maria
Guleghina, not to mention the strangely muted Scarpia of James Morris.
Is this the tenor of tomorrow, the long-awaited successor to Pavarotti and Domingo?
Possibly yes, to judge from the "Tosca" and a "Ballo in Maschera" I heard in Milan last
year. In Licitra’s best moments, he actually sounds like an ideal blend of the two megatenors, echoing both Pavarotti’s fluency and Domingo’s fire. He has a combination of
musicality and power that is essential for the Italian repertory. He moves around an opera
stage as if he belonged there. He lingered for a long time during the huge ovation that
greeted him at the end: it was hard to tell if he was genuinely stunned or was savoring a
moment that he had long been expecting. A new Pavarotti? Be careful what you wish for.
_
5/27/02
MUSICAL EVENTS review of Mark Adamo’s "Little Women" at Glimmerglass Opera...
Decades have passed since an American work has been allowed to reach out to audiences
in this way. I say "allowed" because there are other pieces that have never been given a
chance. John Adams’s "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer," which have
gripped audiences elsewhere in the world, vanished from American stages shortly after
their premières. (Incidentally, Adams, who said two years ago that he was ready to give
up on opera altogether, has decided to return to the fray, with a work about the atom
bomb and the Cold War. Godspeed.) Adamo so far lacks a really distinctive personality
as a composer, but he has a distinctive way of jumping from one compositional mode to
another. Like Britten, he can turn on a stylistic dime, running the gamut from openthroated Broadway song to serpentine twelve-tonish writing. It is a wonderful gift, this
versatility, but does he always need to use it? The Glimmerglass production, which runs
until August 25th and will be mounted at the New York City Opera next spring, has
potent charm. Rhoda Levine, the director, and Peter Harrison, the designer, have given an
"Appalachian Spring" austerity to the family tableaux. All the singers move naturally on
the stage. At the second performance, Jennifer Dudley sang Jo in a warm, bright mezzosoprano and with an excellent quality of girlish pluck. Sandra Piques Eddy, as Meg,
showed a richly colored, flowingly expressive mezzo—she sounds like an important
voice in the making. Joshua Hopkins sang Friedrich in a honey-toned, unforced baritone.
Chad Freeburg, Christina Bouras, Caroline Worra, David Giuliano, and Josepha Gayer
thrived in the other family roles. John DeMain drew a rough-edged but enthusiastic
performance from the Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra...
Full Text:
Mark Adamo’s "Little Women," an adaptation of the eternally adaptable Louisa May
Alcott classic, opened at Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown, New York, over the July
4th weekend. In many respects, it fulfills a stereotype of American opera which has
become all too familiar: here is yet another unadventurous musicalization of a famous
novel, movie, or play, obeying to the letter what might be called the Aunt Jemima instantopera recipe, according to which three dollops of tonality and two pinches of dissonance
are folded into a bowl of finely ground literature. Adamo’s "Little Women" might have
been written almost anytime in the previous century, and it aches with nostalgia for an
ideal nineteenth century that never was. But, on its own terms, it is a beautifully crafted
work, and, as a first opera, it shows remarkable confidence. Adamo is a spirited, fastwitted composer, and if he can stop himself from writing more Merchant and Ivory singalongs he ought to have a major career.
Adamo’s "Little Women" is not exactly new, and that is what is newsworthy: it has
shown staying power. Since its world première, at the Houston Grand Opera, in 1998, it
has received more than a dozen stagings throughout the country, including productions
by Opera Omaha and Opera in the Ozarks. It has even turned up on PBS, which tends to
like its tenors in threes. Decades have passed since an American work has been allowed
to reach out to audiences in this way. I say "allowed" because there are other pieces that
have never been given a chance. John Adams’s "Nixon in China" and "The Death of
Klinghoffer," which have gripped audiences elsewhere in the world, vanished from
American stages shortly after their premières. (Incidentally, Adams, who said two years
ago that he was ready to give up on opera altogether, has decided to return to the fray,
with a work about the atom bomb and the Cold War. Godspeed.)
Why "Little Women"? Autobiographical young-adult narratives are historically not the
kind that have set fire to the opera stage. "Don Giovanni," "Rigoletto," "Tristan and
Isolde," "Peter Grimes": these are vibrant, violent stories, seething with lunacy and lust. It
is curious, given the proven taste of the operagoing public, that American composers so
often gravitate in the opposite direction, toward literary classics in which atmosphere
dominates over action. Even "A Streetcar Named Desire"—set to music by André Previn
a few years ago—pales in sheer incident next to red-meat bel canto; Verdi would have
found the play insufferably slow. We are drawn to the idea of putting "Streetcar," "The
Great Gatsby," or "Little Women" in an opera house because we think we want to
experience a favorite text suffused with music—but that is not what opera is. Opera is
anti-poetical, anti-novelistic, anti-intellectual. The greatest librettos are those that make
us laugh out loud when we see them written down.
Nonetheless, Adamo, who served as his own librettist on "Little Women," does a brilliant
job of molding Alcott’s tale into operatic form. He treats "Little Women" as a story of
adult addiction to nostalgia and regret; the heroine, Jo, can’t surrender either the fact of
her childhood or its idyllic aura. "The conflict of ‘Little Women,’" Adamo writes in a
program note, "is Jo versus the passage of time." Whether or not that’s true, the composer
is certain of himself, and therefore leagues ahead of better-known rivals who have tackled
famous subjects without quite knowing what to do with them. Adamo does not seem like
a musical tourist in a literary place; he lives here. He zips from one scene to another with
cinematic speed but is not afraid to linger over baldly melodramatic touches, such as the
telegram that announces the terminal illness of Jo’s sister Beth. We get strong snapshots
of the sisters, Beth, Meg, and Amy, as well as of Jo’s two suitors, Laurie and Friedrich.
Yet Jo herself emerges as a puzzlingly unattractive character. Her resistance to her
sisters’ marriages, to male advances, to all forms of change escalates into a strange
mental obsession—"Perfect as it was" is her mantra. Adamo compares her to the
Marschallin in "Rosenkavalier," suggesting that Jo, too, wants to stop all the clocks in the
middle of the night. But it is easier to empathize with a thirty-something woman in that
dilemma than with a teen-age girl. Clearly, Jo is channelling the adult sensibility of the
composer, and at times the exercise becomes too self-conscious. At one point, Jo asks the
music-loving Friedrich whether opera houses might somehow display the words to operas
on banners. The joke gets laughs but punctures the illusion of the piece.
Adamo so far lacks a really distinctive personality as a composer, but he has a distinctive
way of jumping from one compositional mode to another. Like Britten, he can turn on a
stylistic dime, running the gamut from open-throated Broadway song to serpentine
twelve-tonish writing. It is a wonderful gift, this versatility, but does he always need to
use it? After a while, the stylistic plan of the piece starts to feel ruthlessly schematic.
Plain major-key music represents Jo’s dream world; chromaticism, whole-tone
harmonies, and cluster chords represent reality and change. The melodic passages have
excellent hooks—the "Perfect as it was" aria is insidiously hummable in a Richard
Rodgers way— but after a minute or two they seem to run up against an invisible
boundary, beyond which the quasi-modernistic devices take over. Thus the best material
seems to appear in quotation marks, as if the composer were apologizing for writing
something so naïve. "Don’t worry," he seems to say. "I can do serious modern music,
too." In an odd way, he may not be taking his melodies seriously enough.
I wish Adamo had dug deeper into the luminous F major of "Perfect as it was." The result
might have come perilously close to musical theatre, but at this point we are more in need
of good musical theatre than of another dexterous synthesis of twentieth-century
techniques. Thirty years after the minimalist revolution, it would still be a radical gesture
for a composer to cut loose the comfortable accessories of dissonance and to let tonality
saturate a work. In composing, it doesn’t matter what materials you choose but, rather,
what pictures and patterns you make from them. Adamo has an active enough mind to
make fascinating music from the simplest possible material. This is the direction in which
the best parts of "Little Women" are pointing.
The Glimmerglass production, which runs until August 25th and will be mounted at the
New York City Opera next spring, has potent charm. Rhoda Levine, the director, and
Peter Harrison, the designer, have given an "Appalachian Spring" austerity to the family
tableaux. All the singers move naturally on the stage. At the second performance,
Jennifer Dudley sang Jo in a warm, bright mezzo-soprano and with an excellent quality
of girlish pluck. Sandra Piques Eddy, as Meg, showed a richly colored, flowingly
expressive mezzo—she sounds like an important voice in the making. Joshua Hopkins
sang Friedrich in a honey-toned, unforced baritone. Chad Freeburg, Christina Bouras,
Caroline Worra, David Giuliano, and Josepha Gayer thrived in the other family roles.
John DeMain drew a rough-edged but enthusiastic performance from the Glimmerglass
Opera Orchestra. The crowd exploded into applause at the end, and also after several of
the arias. I suspect that in five or ten years’ time Mark Adamo will be greeted with
ovations on the stage of the Met. _
7/2//02
MUSICAL EVENTS about Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and Lorin
Maazel’s debut as conductor of the New York Philharmonic... Describes Rattle’s Sept. 7
concert, which included Thomas Adès’s “Asyla” (“Asylums”), Mahler’s Fifth
Symphony, recorded by EMI, and another program the following week: Haydn’s
Symphony No. 88, Magnus Lindberg’s "Gran Duo," and Schubert’s Ninth Symphony...
Writer describes Lorin Maazel’s first concerts as the music director of the New York
Philharmonic, including a performance of Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture, his Ninth
Symphony and John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls”...
Full Text:
The Berlin Philharmonie, Hans Scharoun’s gold-yellow masterpiece of late-modern
design, was once a temple in a wilderness. Even in 1995, when I last visited Berlin, the
wreckage of history was all around: the gray crevasses where the Wall had stood; the
Wilhelmine villas crumbling in the woods; the eerie meadow covering the site of Hitler’s
bunker. Now the Philharmonie presides at the far end of the new avenues of Potsdamer
Platz, its tilted, tentlike forms grabbing the eye at every turn. The "new Berlin" takes its
cue from the Philharmonie, and the heightened glamour of the hall creates an exceptional
challenge for the musicians who work within it. The Berlin Philharmonic, commonly and
plausibly described as the greatest orchestra in the world, must now reach out to younger
generations of Berliners. The orchestra took up that challenge by electing as its next
conductor not another jet-set maestro but the passionate, obstinate, charismatic Simon
Rattle, who, in the eighties and nineties, turned down many job offers to remain with the
City of Birmingham Symphony. In Birmingham, Rattle brought a local orchestra to the
attention of the world; in Berlin, his task is to make a world-famous orchestra local again,
to prove that it matters to a financially unsettled city.
To conduct the Berlin Philharmonic is to be the unofficial chairman of the board of
classical music. The authority of the post derives not only from the splendor of the
orchestra—its intimidating blend of virtuosity and intelligence—but also from the lustre
of those who have led it in the past: Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm
Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan. It is not surprising that when Rattle took over from his
immediate predecessor, the diffident but deep-thinking Claudio Abbado, the city made an
extraordinary fuss. Walking around the city before the recent German election, you might
have thought that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his challenger Edmund Stoiber were
being upstaged by an eccentric write-in candidate named Sir Simon. ("Welcome Sir
Simon," the posters said, in English, not German.) The opening concert, on September
7th, attracted the Federal President and the mayor of Berlin, along with Harald Schmidt,
the German David Letterman. Ninety-eight music critics attended—an orchestra of
second guessers. The reviews ranged from the wildly enthusiastic to the mildly skeptical,
but no one questioned that Rattle had seized the moment.
Rattle has walked into the middle of a complicated situation. Back in the Cold War,
Berlin’s music was fodder for propaganda—East and West had rival opera houses, rival
concert orchestras, rival radio orchestras, and so on. Now these institutions must justify
their subsidies to a unified city. According to one ominous report in circulation, the
budget for opera may be cut from a hundred and fourteen million euros to fifty-five
million. Rattle cannily cemented his position long before arriving on the podium: he
refused to sign his contract until the orchestra had been made an independent foundation
and the players’ salaries raised. More recently, the papers were reporting an imbroglio
involving Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, the imaginative and aggressive Intendant of the
Philharmonic, who, not long ago, was causing consternation at Carnegie Hall. Ohnesorg
evidently removed two plantings from the Philharmonie’s foyer in order to make room
for a much needed intermission bar. Guardians of Scharoun’s architectural legacy were
aghast—the Philharmonie was being "degraded to banality," one said—and politicians
disliked the peremptory way in which Ohnesorg pushed through his plan. Bigger
problems may ensue if the Intendant continues to show "poor style," as Thomas Flierl,
the culture senator, put it.
The September 7th concert fell a little short of the impossibly high expectations that had
been created for it. Rattle began with Thomas Adès’s 1997 work "Asyla" ("Asylums"),
which also appeared on the conductor’s final program in Birmingham. The Philharmonic
made a festive noise but never fully mastered the urban rhythms of the piece, especially
the jagged syncopations of the bacchanalian third movement. And the orchestra missed
Adès’s undertow of dark emotion—the big E-flat-minor chord at the end, which should
have been in the players’ blood, came and went without causing a shudder.
Rattle sometimes brilliantly pulls a work to pieces, discovering unsuspected beauties in
each part, without quite finding a way to put it back together. This is what happened to
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which followed the Adès. You could hear the still points
around which Mahler’s structures turn: Rattle often builds toward a whisper in place of a
climax. But the result was a flurry of epiphanies rather than a single revelation. In the
scherzo, Rattle had the idea of moving the first horn up to a soloist position, in front of
the orchestra; the resulting concertino, while bracing to the ears, broke the symphony’s
flow. The Mahler was recorded by EMI for a disk that will be in the stores next month,
and it may have been unwise to rush through a recording while Rattle was still finding his
rhythm.
I would rather have had a recording from the following week’s program—Haydn’s
Symphony No. 88, Magnus Lindberg’s "Gran Duo," and Schubert’s Ninth Symphony.
Rattle is the best Haydn conductor working, and the rhythms of the symphony were an
ideal embodiment of muscular grace. The Lindberg piece, scored for winds and brass,
glowed in the acoustic space of the Philharmonie like a great silver mobile. But it was the
Schubert that was the breakthrough. The C-Major Symphony was a Karajan specialty,
and Rattle dared a comparison that he could easily have put off for a while. In the
Andante, something magical happened, and the Berlin Philharmonic really became
Rattle’s orchestra. In the middle of the movement, a frightening tension gathered, and the
climactic diminished-seventh chords turned almost expressionistically ugly. Then came
an enormous pause—framed by one of those total silences that you hear only in German
concert halls—and the solo cello sang out at a halting tempo, as if from another world.
For the first time, you could see how Rattle’s pointillistic epiphanies would work with the
orchestra’s tradition of rich-toned, chiaroscuro sound. Orchestra and conductor had
become one animal.
When I last checked in, Rattle was preparing Mark-Anthony Turnage’s "Blood on the
Floor," a symphonic suite, with jazz-fusion interludes, depicting the life and death of
heroin addicts. Later this season, Rattle will lead "The Rite of Spring" in a former East
Berlin bus depot, with a troupe of two hundred student dancers. He wants to take the
orchestra out of the Philharmonie and throw it into the life of the city. The Philharmonic
is to be both a traditional army of one hundred and an array of tactical units—wind
bands, string bands, chamber groups, avant-garde ensembles, jazz combos. The
astonishingly young-looking orchestra—the average age is around forty—appears eager
to take it all on. I am inclined to agree with what Nicholas Kenyon writes in his
biography of Rattle: "This could change the musical world."
Eleven days after Rattle’s début, Lorin Maazel conducted his first concert as the music
director of the New York Philharmonic. This will not change the musical world.
Maazel’s appointment came after a long and not very interesting soap opera in which all
the usual names were in play. Rattle went unmentioned because he has never conducted
the orchestra; according to Kenyon, he is leery of the Philharmonic’s reputation for
humiliating new conductors. The orchestra went for Maazel presumably on the ground
that this seasoned maestro exudes easy authority and takes a no-nonsense approach to
rehearsal. He has been in many places—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Vienna, Munich—and not
all his former colleagues speak of him fondly. He has a clear, electrifying technique and a
prodigious ear for detail. He is also unpredictable: performances of his that I have heard
over the years have ranged from the propulsive to the repulsive, with few subtle shades in
between.
A friend whose musical judgment I trust says that Maazel has mellowed in recent years,
grown more questing and generous. There was evidence of this in the program I heard
last Tuesday, which combined Beethoven’s Ninth with a new work by John Adams, "On
the Transmigration of Souls." The Andante of the Beethoven had a buoyancy that the
orchestra rarely achieved under the all too sturdy hand of Kurt Masur; the strings came to
life with singing lines and plush textures. But there were also many glimpses of Maazel’s
familiar tics. In the first movement, he repeatedly applied the brakes in passages that
Beethoven marked "a tempo"; that is, don’t slow down. The movement didn’t so much
end as grind to a halt. In the Scherzo, the timpanist was asked to produce various
attention-getting thwacks—again, at precisely those points where Beethoven wanted
something more subtle. The Finale had infectious energy—Marina Mescheriakova, Jill
Grove, Thomas Studebaker, and Peter Rose sang, together with the New York Choral
Artists—but Maazel’s heavy-footed tempos again slowed the work’s momentum. This
Beethoven Ninth came nowhere near the nobility of Masur’s best performances; instead,
it stomped toward pompous cliché.
On the evidence of the Adams première, we can at least look forward to exacting
performances of contemporary music, which Masur tended to make a mess of. "On the
Transmigration of Souls" sets to music the plainspoken, heartfelt language surrounding
the events of September 11th: the final words of victims, exclamations of grief, missingpersons signs, scattered phrases like "Windows on the World." Orchestra and chorus are
blended with a tape collage of voices and noises. Adams does not try to depict the
destruction of the World Trade Center blow by blow, nor does he write an official
requiem. Instead, his music captures, on some raw, unconscious level, what it was like to
be in the city on September 11th—to see millions wandering without purpose, to hear
those importuning voices, to feel grief in sunshine. At the climax, the massed voices—
here including the marvellous Brooklyn Youth Chorus, under the direction of Dianne
Berkun—sing the words "Light! Sky! Day!" obsessively, and the music climbs far into
the upper register, forming terrible bright chords of D major and C major combined. Then
it all vanishes, and a semblance of ordinary life resumes: sounds of cars, buses, voices,
footsteps.
If Maazel had begun his tenure with this extraordinary work, he would have signalled his
commitment to classical music as a contemporary art. But, on his very first night, he
conducted Beethoven’s third "Leonore"Overture in place of the Adams. By way of
explanation, the Philharmonic said that there was not enough rehearsal time to prepare
the Adams properly. Aren’t million-dollar maestros hired precisely for their ability to
surmount such obstacles? The Philharmonic’s reluctance to confront its black-tie
customers with contemporary sounds revealed at once the gap between this regime and
Rattle’s in Berlin. It is the distance between caution and courage, inertia and imagination.
_
10/7/02
MUSICAL EVENTS about the Royal Opera... Writer describes a recent Covent Garden
performance of Alban Berg’s "Wozzeck" and tells about new music director Antonio
Pappano, 42... The new "Wozzeck," directed by Keith Warner, with sets designed by
Stefanos Lazaridis, was a model display of Pappano’s philosophy... The orchestra’s
playing was extraordinarily clear. It made expressive points in quick bursts, without ever
overwhelming the singers... Covent Garden still has a long way to go before it fulfills the
dreams that were vested in it back in 1945. At that time, a group of highly placed
intellectuals, led by John Maynard Keynes, envisioned the Royal Opera and Ballet as the
crowning glories of a national arts program... ? Some critics want the Royal Opera to get
out of politics altogether and convert to what they call the "American system," where all
funds come from donors and subscribers. Perhaps if these pundits had to sit through the
Metropolitan Opera’s fifteenth "La Bohème" of the season, with a new Mimi fresh off the
plane from Sydney, they would have second thoughts...
Full Text:
English audiences produce an unmistakable noise at the end of a great night of theatre—a
revved-up, rapid-fire applause that is almost caffeinating in its effect. That noise erupted
after a recent performance of Alban Berg’s "Wozzeck" at the Royal Opera House in
Covent Garden, and it was a welcome sound, since England’s leading opera company has
too long been known as the place where everything goes wrong. In the nineties, as the
rest of London enjoyed a cultural renaissance, Covent Garden dwelled in a state of chaos,
each new cultural or bureaucratic horror sprayed across the morning papers. Executives
came and went; productions were cancelled or curtailed on short notice; extensive
renovations sucked up millions of pounds of public money; Labour politicians selfservingly denounced the house on behalf of the working class; and the London tabloids
mocked the entire spectacle ("The Greedy Beggar’s Opera," the Sun dubbed it). Several
ugly backstage scenes, complete with screaming, swearing, and the hurling of a
telephone, were broadcast to the nation via a merciless television documentary entitled
"The House." At one point, it seemed possible that the Royal Opera and Ballet would
simply go under.
This season, Covent Garden is a happier and healthier place. The critics are full of praise,
and the tabloids have let up on their needling. The solution, oddly simple on the face of it,
was to hire a powerful artistic personality around whom the company’s energies could
coalesce. The new music director, Antonio Pappano, is one of the best all-around
conductors of opera now working; unless the byzantine management structure makes a
victim of him, he ought to have a long and happy reign. The house that rode so high
under Georg Solti’s direction in the nineteen-sixties once again has the swagger of
success.
Pappano is forty-two years old; he was born in London and spent much of his youth in
Connecticut. He got his start as a rehearsal coach at the New York City Opera but soon
moved to European stages, gaining precious hands-on experience in Frankfurt. From
1992 until this year, he was the music director of the perennially adventurous Théâtre
Royale de la Monnaie, in Brussels. He has a pleasant, soft-featured face and speaks in a
flat-toned American accent that can only be described as pure Washington, D.C. Padding
around Covent Garden in slacks and a green Lacoste shirt, he has no air of
grandiloquence about him. He even seems a little bland. But when he speaks about his
plans for Covent Garden he assumes the air of someone who has decided what he wants
and has no time to argue.
"My job is to be a point of focus for this incredible community of artists and art-minded
people," he told me, in his not yet fully furbished Covent Garden office. "They need to
funnel all their talents in one direction, rather than in twenty directions at once. This is
what Covent Garden has lacked in the recent past. All that infighting you read about was
just filling a vacuum. At the same time, my job is to provide flash points for the
audience—dramatic moments where the music and the image come together as one. I’d
like to work with directors who challenge clichés without going to conceptual extremes."
The new "Wozzeck," directed by Keith Warner, with sets designed by Stefanos Lazaridis,
was a model display of Pappano’s philosophy. Purists could advance any number of
criticisms of this wholesale revision of Berg’s opera, in which an unlucky soldier is
driven insane by military discipline and medical experiments. At the start of Warner’s
scenario, Wozzeck is already cooped up in a gruesome white-walled asylum, and it seems
as though he is telling his story in flashback. The images are vague and disorienting, but
they strike home in uncanny ways. We see an assortment of objects—models of houses,
mushrooms, other nameless organic matter—sealed up in Damien Hirst-like glass tanks.
One of them contains nothing but water. When Wozzeck kills his wife, Marie, holding
her over the tank, the water turns red. Then, at the moment where the libretto calls for
him to drown in a river, Wozzeck climbs into the tank and submerges himself entirely.
The baritone Matthias Goerne gave a terrifyingly believable performance; he made
himself a baffled, agitated hulk of a man, his limbs going every which way as if they had
minds of their own. Katarina Dalayman sang Marie in grand lyrical paragraphs, like a
creature of Wozzeck’s better dreams. The mostly English supporting cast, including
Graham Clark, Eric Halfvarson, and Kim Begley, were an excellent gallery of grotesques.
The orchestra’s playing was extraordinarily clear. It made expressive points in quick
bursts, without ever overwhelming the singers. Some passages were a little scrappy,
suffering in comparison with the voluptuous detail that James Levine brings to this score
at the Met. The huge crescendo on a single note in Act III, for example, was something
less than a perfectly balanced pillar of sound. Then again, Warner’s production did not
highlight the moment, so no big effect was called for. It struck me, in this passage, that
Pappano was conducting with his eyes on the stage, tailoring his phrases to suit the
action. His hair-raisingly vehement conducting of the final D-minor interlude clinched
the production’s climactic coup de théâtre, in which bright lights bore down clinically on
the floating body in the tank. (The audience could see that Goerne was breathing through
a plastic tube, which somehow made the image all the more disturbing.) The idea of
shaping the music to fit the action may not seem like much of a breakthrough, but in the
modern opera world, where orchestra and conductor too often inhabit an impeccable but
irrelevant world of their own, it is a minor revolution.
Covent Garden still has a long way to go before it fulfills the dreams that were vested in
it back in 1945. At that time, a group of highly placed intellectuals, led by John Maynard
Keynes, envisioned the Royal Opera and Ballet as the crowning glories of a national arts
program. "Let every part of Merrie England be merry in its own way," Keynes
proclaimed, adding, for effect, "Death to Hollywood." Institutions, he said, should instill
confidence in the country’s artists and give them every opportunity. Yet the Royal Opera
has a very erratic track record with regard to English composers. In the early postwar
years, when Benjamin Britten gave the house two masterpieces, "Billy Budd" and
"Gloriana," he encountered a wall of indifference, and took his genius elsewhere. After
that, premières were sporadic and often ill conceived. Covent Garden can redress the
wrong by reaching out now to England’s brilliant contemporary talents, and it has in fact
sent one or two positive signals. This December, it will give the première of Nicholas
Maw’s "Sophie’s Choice," and in 2004 it will present "The Tempest," an opera by
Thomas Adès. Perplexingly, however, the conductor Lorin Maazel has been asked to
write a work based on Orwell’s "1984." English composers are scratching their heads
over that.
There is still some debate over the relationship between Covent Garden and Her
Majesty’s Government, which supplies about a third of the budget. Tony Blair’s culture
mavens have tried to score political points by distancing themselves from so-called
"élite" arts. But was their Millennium Dome really a better use of the people’s money?
Some critics want the Royal Opera to get out of politics altogether and convert to what
they call the "American system," where all funds come from donors and subscribers.
Perhaps if these pundits had to sit through the Metropolitan Opera’s fifteenth "La
Bohème" of the season, with a new Mimi fresh off the plane from Sydney, they would
have second thoughts. (America doesn’t have a "system"; it has grim reality.) If, on the
other hand, Covent Garden is to retain official status, it will have to discard its air of
lordly entitlement and appeal to a larger cross-section of the public. The only way to
bring in new fans is to lower ticket prices; paradoxically, it cannot do this without more
government support. To this end, the new "Wozzeck" was a promising test run for a
future pricing scheme, with the top tickets set at fifty pounds. On the second night of the
run, there were no empty seats. _
11/11/02
MUSICAL EVENTS about the Royal Opera... Writer describes a recent Covent Garden
performance of Alban Berg’s "Wozzeck" and tells about new music director Antonio
Pappano, 42... The new "Wozzeck," directed by Keith Warner, with sets designed by
Stefanos Lazaridis, was a model display of Pappano’s philosophy... The orchestra’s
playing was extraordinarily clear. It made expressive points in quick bursts, without ever
overwhelming the singers... Covent Garden still has a long way to go before it fulfills the
dreams that were vested in it back in 1945. At that time, a group of highly placed
intellectuals, led by John Maynard Keynes, envisioned the Royal Opera and Ballet as the
crowning glories of a national arts program... ? Some critics want the Royal Opera to get
out of politics altogether and convert to what they call the "American system," where all
funds come from donors and subscribers. Perhaps if these pundits had to sit through the
Metropolitan Opera’s fifteenth "La Bohème" of the season, with a new Mimi fresh off the
plane from Sydney, they would have second thoughts...
Full Text:
English audiences produce an unmistakable noise at the end of a great night of theatre—a
revved-up, rapid-fire applause that is almost caffeinating in its effect. That noise erupted
after a recent performance of Alban Berg’s "Wozzeck" at the Royal Opera House in
Covent Garden, and it was a welcome sound, since England’s leading opera company has
too long been known as the place where everything goes wrong. In the nineties, as the
rest of London enjoyed a cultural renaissance, Covent Garden dwelled in a state of chaos,
each new cultural or bureaucratic horror sprayed across the morning papers. Executives
came and went; productions were cancelled or curtailed on short notice; extensive
renovations sucked up millions of pounds of public money; Labour politicians selfservingly denounced the house on behalf of the working class; and the London tabloids
mocked the entire spectacle ("The Greedy Beggar’s Opera," the Sun dubbed it). Several
ugly backstage scenes, complete with screaming, swearing, and the hurling of a
telephone, were broadcast to the nation via a merciless television documentary entitled
"The House." At one point, it seemed possible that the Royal Opera and Ballet would
simply go under.
This season, Covent Garden is a happier and healthier place. The critics are full of praise,
and the tabloids have let up on their needling. The solution, oddly simple on the face of it,
was to hire a powerful artistic personality around whom the company’s energies could
coalesce. The new music director, Antonio Pappano, is one of the best all-around
conductors of opera now working; unless the byzantine management structure makes a
victim of him, he ought to have a long and happy reign. The house that rode so high
under Georg Solti’s direction in the nineteen-sixties once again has the swagger of
success.
Pappano is forty-two years old; he was born in London and spent much of his youth in
Connecticut. He got his start as a rehearsal coach at the New York City Opera but soon
moved to European stages, gaining precious hands-on experience in Frankfurt. From
1992 until this year, he was the music director of the perennially adventurous Théâtre
Royale de la Monnaie, in Brussels. He has a pleasant, soft-featured face and speaks in a
flat-toned American accent that can only be described as pure Washington, D.C. Padding
around Covent Garden in slacks and a green Lacoste shirt, he has no air of
grandiloquence about him. He even seems a little bland. But when he speaks about his
plans for Covent Garden he assumes the air of someone who has decided what he wants
and has no time to argue.
"My job is to be a point of focus for this incredible community of artists and art-minded
people," he told me, in his not yet fully furbished Covent Garden office. "They need to
funnel all their talents in one direction, rather than in twenty directions at once. This is
what Covent Garden has lacked in the recent past. All that infighting you read about was
just filling a vacuum. At the same time, my job is to provide flash points for the
audience—dramatic moments where the music and the image come together as one. I’d
like to work with directors who challenge clichés without going to conceptual extremes."
The new "Wozzeck," directed by Keith Warner, with sets designed by Stefanos Lazaridis,
was a model display of Pappano’s philosophy. Purists could advance any number of
criticisms of this wholesale revision of Berg’s opera, in which an unlucky soldier is
driven insane by military discipline and medical experiments. At the start of Warner’s
scenario, Wozzeck is already cooped up in a gruesome white-walled asylum, and it seems
as though he is telling his story in flashback. The images are vague and disorienting, but
they strike home in uncanny ways. We see an assortment of objects—models of houses,
mushrooms, other nameless organic matter—sealed up in Damien Hirst-like glass tanks.
One of them contains nothing but water. When Wozzeck kills his wife, Marie, holding
her over the tank, the water turns red. Then, at the moment where the libretto calls for
him to drown in a river, Wozzeck climbs into the tank and submerges himself entirely.
The baritone Matthias Goerne gave a terrifyingly believable performance; he made
himself a baffled, agitated hulk of a man, his limbs going every which way as if they had
minds of their own. Katarina Dalayman sang Marie in grand lyrical paragraphs, like a
creature of Wozzeck’s better dreams. The mostly English supporting cast, including
Graham Clark, Eric Halfvarson, and Kim Begley, were an excellent gallery of grotesques.
The orchestra’s playing was extraordinarily clear. It made expressive points in quick
bursts, without ever overwhelming the singers. Some passages were a little scrappy,
suffering in comparison with the voluptuous detail that James Levine brings to this score
at the Met. The huge crescendo on a single note in Act III, for example, was something
less than a perfectly balanced pillar of sound. Then again, Warner’s production did not
highlight the moment, so no big effect was called for. It struck me, in this passage, that
Pappano was conducting with his eyes on the stage, tailoring his phrases to suit the
action. His hair-raisingly vehement conducting of the final D-minor interlude clinched
the production’s climactic coup de théâtre, in which bright lights bore down clinically on
the floating body in the tank. (The audience could see that Goerne was breathing through
a plastic tube, which somehow made the image all the more disturbing.) The idea of
shaping the music to fit the action may not seem like much of a breakthrough, but in the
modern opera world, where orchestra and conductor too often inhabit an impeccable but
irrelevant world of their own, it is a minor revolution.
Covent Garden still has a long way to go before it fulfills the dreams that were vested in
it back in 1945. At that time, a group of highly placed intellectuals, led by John Maynard
Keynes, envisioned the Royal Opera and Ballet as the crowning glories of a national arts
program. "Let every part of Merrie England be merry in its own way," Keynes
proclaimed, adding, for effect, "Death to Hollywood." Institutions, he said, should instill
confidence in the country’s artists and give them every opportunity. Yet the Royal Opera
has a very erratic track record with regard to English composers. In the early postwar
years, when Benjamin Britten gave the house two masterpieces, "Billy Budd" and
"Gloriana," he encountered a wall of indifference, and took his genius elsewhere. After
that, premières were sporadic and often ill conceived. Covent Garden can redress the
wrong by reaching out now to England’s brilliant contemporary talents, and it has in fact
sent one or two positive signals. This December, it will give the première of Nicholas
Maw’s "Sophie’s Choice," and in 2004 it will present "The Tempest," an opera by
Thomas Adès. Perplexingly, however, the conductor Lorin Maazel has been asked to
write a work based on Orwell’s "1984." English composers are scratching their heads
over that.
There is still some debate over the relationship between Covent Garden and Her
Majesty’s Government, which supplies about a third of the budget. Tony Blair’s culture
mavens have tried to score political points by distancing themselves from so-called
"élite" arts. But was their Millennium Dome really a better use of the people’s money?
Some critics want the Royal Opera to get out of politics altogether and convert to what
they call the "American system," where all funds come from donors and subscribers.
Perhaps if these pundits had to sit through the Metropolitan Opera’s fifteenth "La
Bohème" of the season, with a new Mimi fresh off the plane from Sydney, they would
have second thoughts. (America doesn’t have a "system"; it has grim reality.) If, on the
other hand, Covent Garden is to retain official status, it will have to discard its air of
lordly entitlement and appeal to a larger cross-section of the public. The only way to
bring in new fans is to lower ticket prices; paradoxically, it cannot do this without more
government support. To this end, the new "Wozzeck" was a promising test run for a
future pricing scheme, with the top tickets set at fifty pounds. On the second night of the
run, there were no empty seats. _
1/6/03
MUSICAL EVENTS about recitals by pianists Mitsuko Uchida and Leif Ove Andsnes...
Full Text:
Schubert’s Sonata in G begins with a beautiful, sleepy, not immediately gripping
theme—not so much a melody as a murmur of chords. It keeps ambling out in various
directions only to retreat to the same delectable place, as if it could not rouse itself from
its G-major bed. When I was studying piano, I foolishly decided that this was one of the
Master’s more insignificant efforts, and skipped forward to the Sonata in B Flat, which
has a way of sounding unutterably sublime even in the hands of a bumbling amateur. I
felt an extra, private sense of wonder when Mitsuko Uchida played the G-Major Sonata
the other night at Carnegie Hall and unlocked Schubert’s secrets one by one. It is one
thing to get all the notes right; any number of unsocialized conservatory prodigies can do
that. It is another thing to play the thoughts within the notes, the light around them, the
darkness behind them, the silence at the end of the phrase. That is what inspires awe.
Carnegie has given Uchida a place in its "Perspectives" series, which allows a performer
to step outside the virtuoso role and become a roving programming consultant,
responsible not only for recitals but also for chamber-music and orchestral events.
Uchida’s series explores links between the Austro-German classics and composers of the
Second Viennese School; her recent solo recital juxtaposed Schubert with Schoenberg
and Schumann. Such intellectual conceits, invigorating as they are on paper, tend to
dissolve in the heat of live performance. Most of us would be happy to hear this pianist
play any random music in any order, whether by Schnittke, Schnebel, Schnabel, or Cher.
Uchida coaxes a sensationally warm tone out of the piano, and she can linger lovingly
over individual notes without losing the main pulse of the phrase. She creates a picture so
finely shaded in color and intensity that it becomes an unreal landscape in the middle
distance. This total transport is what the grateful crowd at Carnegie seemed to want, in
the middle of another shaky week in New York.
Uchida is a great Schubertian because she takes the music at face value, discarding
stereotypes of the composer as a twee melodist or a doleful martyr. She follows without
hesitation as the G-Major Sonata moves from spells of loveliness to binges of violence.
At the beginning of the development section, that innocuous opening theme is suddenly
shoved into the minor and blasted at high volume—it is less a development than a
demonic possession. Uchida rendered this passage with the utmost force and the utmost
coldness, as if she were following the instruction in Boulez’s Second Sonata: "Pulverize
the sound." Then the balm of G returns, almost as if those shattering blows had never
happened, although scattered fortissimos recall the trauma. In the latter part of the
movement, Uchida clung to each passing lyrical moment, reluctant to let the music end.
Schubert marks his softer dynamics with the simple symbols p, pp, ppp; Uchida finds a
dozen more gradations in between, microtones of pianissimo.
The "Perspectives" thesis notwithstanding, Schoenberg’s Three Pieces Opus 11 sound
nothing like Schubert. But Uchida lavished enough care to give them the sex appeal of,
say, dissonant Ravel. Textures that come across as jarring and ugly in the hands of other
players here became Fauvist splashes of color, all surface and no theory. The program
ended with Schumann’s Fantasy in C, which, for all its wealth of detail, carried less
conviction than the Schoenberg or the Schubert. Uchida somehow missed the big picture
of the work, its extravagance, its monumental, arc-like shape. Some passages were too
vague and gauzy in execution—Uchida uses a lot of pedal these days—while others
threatened to clatter out of control. Still, marvels unfolded on every page. I was struck by
the phenomenon of a single note: an E suspended over a G-major dominant seventh, at
the end of the first section. This note pulsed with inner life, as if it were being sounded by
a clarinet against a blanket of strings. As before, Uchida played music on the edge of
silence, and then, releasing the pedal a moment early, she played the silence itself.
Pianists with consummately brilliant technique are all too often featureless people who
express nothing but their own perfection. Leif Ove Andsnes, a down-to-earth, thirty-two-
year-old Norwegian, is one of the intimidating few who possess power and personality in
equal measure. He gave a recital at Carnegie a week after Uchida, and afterward many
musicians shook their heads in astonishment. For this pianist, technique is not an end in
itself but a means of expression; the supernatural dexterity of his playing is beside the
point. What is more, he seems to become a better musician with each appearance. When
he made his Carnegie début, in 1999, a certain high-tech steeliness in his fingerwork got
in the way of the obvious intelligence of his music-making. Now, visibly more relaxed,
he floods the music with grace and wit. It seems almost unfair that he should be able to
do all that he does in, say, the Chopin Third Sonata: flawless, glittering passagework in
the first movement; then, in the Largo, an endless, simple, singing line.
Between Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie and the Third Sonata, Andsnes offered an array of
pieces by Grieg, Debussy, and the contemporary Japanese composer Akira Miyoshi. It
was, essentially, a lightning tour of Impressionism early, middle, and late. Grieg’s Lyric
Pieces, of which Andsnes played five, are often pigeonholed as salon trifles, and they
have seldom been heard at Carnegie Hall. "Bell Ringing," an astounding piece that
abandons conventional tonality for a world of free-floating open fifths, had, according to
Carnegie records, never before appeared on a recital program in the main auditorium. The
dates of composition, 1889 to 1891, look like a misprint, but they aren’t. Andsnes went
without a pause from "Bell Ringing" to two Debussy études, as if to make the point that
his Norwegian countryman was writing like Debussy almost before Debussy existed.
Andsnes’s artistic profile still lacks an elusive element: spontaneity, perhaps, or
emotional risk. When, more than a year ago, the august Czech pianist Ivan Moravec
presented a program of Chopin and Debussy, the music flowed as if from the source, and
something about Moravec’s bearing suggested that he could have done it all another way
if he had been in a different mood. No doubt this was an illusion, but it is an illusion that
comes from a total intimacy with the repertory, a reduction of music to late-night,
freewheeling conversation. It is the air of a master, and Andsnes will probably acquire it
with time.
The downturn in the CD market has curtailed many recording careers, but Andsnes and
Uchida are both securely busy at their respective labels— Andsnes at EMI Classics,
Uchida at Philips. Uchida’s ongoing survey of Schubert sonatas is the most formidable
since Radu Lupu’s. Her disk of the G-Major Sonata stands out, as does her grand, darktoned traversal of the C-Minor Sonata. She also recently recorded the Schoenberg Piano
Concerto, with Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra; atonality never sounded so
good. A two-disk set entitled "Perspectives" culls some of the best of her Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Debussy, and Schoenberg. Andsnes, too, has started a
Schubert survey, in which he plays the sonatas and accompanies the tenor Ian Bostridge
in small groups of songs. The first installment pairs the "big" Sonata in A with such nonstandard lieder as "Pilgerweise" and "Der Unglückliche." Andsnes gives the first
movement of the sonata a severe, muscular sound—he, too, takes Schubert at face
value—while the Andantino is alternately melting and chilling.
This is all great music, forcefully played. For some reason, however, the new piano CD
that I’ve listened to most is Andsnes’ compilation of the Grieg Lyric Pieces. They are
recorded on the composer’s own piano, which has a rich, deep, slightly quirky tone, and
EMI’s engineers have managed to preserve the aura of sound reverberating in an intimate
room. The music speaks with almost contemporary freshness; you get the sense that some
kind of visionary or maverick lurked behind the stereotype of Grieg, Bard of the Fjords,
but never quite made it into the open. Andsnes omits "Bell Ringing," but he devotes
himself to other dreamlike miniatures—"Notturno," "Evening in the Mountains,"
"Gone"—that hover outside history and haunt us with the nearness of the past.
3/17/03
A CRITIC AT LARGE about philosopher, sociologist, music critic, sometime composer,
and all-around conversation-stopper Theodor Adorno & German music... After 1945, a
new morality of music evolved, based on two questionable but potent syllogisms: (1) if
Hitler liked it, it must be bad; (2) if Hitler hated it, it must be good. Writer discusses the
rise of Schoenberg, the inventor of atonality and of twelve-tone composition... Next
September 11th is the centennial of Adorno’s birth (how like Adorno to be born on that
day), and one learns from a recent full-page feuilleton on the philosopher in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung that no fewer than four biographies are on the way... When Adorno
lived in America, from 1938 to 1949, he advanced the now familiar argument—
practically printed on the menus of European cafés—that American culture was fascism
with a happy face... . A composer of no small ability, and no large ability, either, Adorno
studied in the nineteen-twenties with Alban Berg, Schoenberg’s most gifted pupil. From
Berg he absorbed the tenets of Schoenbergian philosophy, which held that music had to
strike out into unknown regions in order to stay true to a Wagnerian ideology of
progress... His 1949 "The Philosophy of New Music" wowed the confused young minds
who were seeking new certitudes, new laws, new gods. Adorno, together with his
comrade-in-arms Boulez, probably succeeded in frightening more than a few composers
of the neoclassical type into thinking that their music was not just bad but criminal...
Hitler still casts a mysterious spell over the music scene: the project of writing according
to his likes and dislikes gives him a power that should long ago have been denied.
Reading between the lines of Adorno’s brilliant, maddening books, I suspect that he
knew exactly what had gone wrong in German music but could not bring himself to
admit it. He might have put it this way: The pure is the false. The aesthetic of rejection
will always depend on the music it excludes. Continuously present in atonal music is the
C-major triad that the composer scans his pitch charts to avoid. The attempt to abolish
kitsch produces kitsch of a higher absurdity—an overebullient marketplace devoid of
consumers... Writer mentions German composers whose works have escaped
Schoenbergian modernist conceit: Wilhelm Killmayer; Helmut Oehring; and Heiner
Goebbels... At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no impregnable high-culture
fortresses remain. If composers are to survive, they must learn the art of compromise.
They might bear in mind the instruction that Leopold Mozart gave to his son: every work
should have in it something for the connoisseurs and something for the people. It is a
simple, even naïve-sounding principle, yet an entire majestic tradition rests upon it...
Full Text:
Dr. Mengele, we are told, sometimes relaxed to the strains of "Tristan und Isolde" after
performing his experiments. The Berlin Staatskapelle played Siegfried’s Funeral Music at
the state funeral of S.S. Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, whose middle name was
Tristan. Adolf Hitler, intending to make Wagner’s operas the liturgy of a new religion,
saluted the 1933 Nuremberg Party Congress with a quotation from "Die Meistersinger":
"Wac h’ auf ! " For a time, Hitler’s speeches on cultural matters were preceded by
excerpts from the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. That horrible musical scene in
"Schindler’s List," in which an S.S. man plays Bach on an upright piano while Jews are
being shot around him, is apparently based on fact. At one of the Berlin Philharmonic’s
final performances of the Nazi era, members of the Hitler Youth handed out cyanide
capsules to members of the audience. There are many such anecdotes about music in the
Third Reich, and they serve to back up Thomas Mann’s controversial but not easily
refuted contention that in Nazi Germany the greatest art was implicated in the greatest
evil. The association of classical music with spiritual corruption has become so prevalent
that it is now a staple of popular culture. Ben Hecht, in a wartime polemic, wrote of
Germans who "listen to Beethoven and dream of murder," and such images multiplied in
movies of the postwar years. Where musicians were once the noble, fragile heroes of
high-class studio pictures, after the war they acquired a hint of sadism, of cultivated
malice. Now when any self-respecting Hollywood arch-criminal sets out to annihilate
mankind he listens to a little opera to get in the mood. Even Hannibal Lecter, mov-ing his
bloodstained fingers in time to the "Goldberg Variations," might be distantly echoing the
Nazis’ twin enthusiasms for music and death. Hitler seemingly tainted the art; he made it
dubious. No music was more suspect than the Führer’s favorite late-Romantic strains of
Wagner, Bruckner, and Strauss, a few bars of which are enough to give Holocaust
survivors flashbacks of horror. Conversely, it was thought that no music resisted the Nazi
taint more thoroughly than the modernist school that Hitler detested. Thus did Arnold
Schoenberg, the inventor of atonality and of twelve-tone composition, become a heroic
figure in the post-war years; he had stayed, it seemed, absolutely pure. After 1945, a new
morality of music evolved, based on two questionable but potent syllogisms: (1) if Hitler
liked it, it must be bad; (2) if Hitler hated it, it must be good. There are many things to be
said against this way of thinking, the first of which is "So what?" The fact that Hitler
loved music says as much about the nature of his crimes as the fact that he loved dogs.
All it really tells us is that he emerged out of a culture that had already made music a
religion. Hitler loved Beethoven because everyone loved Beethoven. The orchestras of
Auschwitz and Theresienstadt played Beethoven, too, with desperate devotion. The
threadbare ranks of the German resistance had as many music lovers as the entire upper
echelon of the Nazi Party. Hans von Dohnányi, one of those who plotted against Hitler,
was the son of the composer Ernst von Dohnányi and the father of the future conductor
Christoph von Dohnányi; he, too, listened to Beethoven as he dreamed. Roman
Polanski’s film "The Pianist" tells the true story of the Polish Jewish pianist Wladyslaw
Szpilman, who was saved from certain death by an anti-Nazi Wehrmacht officer named
Wilm Hosenfeld. As Szpilman plays Chopin’s Ballade in G Minor for his enemy, each
man seems to save the other. What this magnificent movie sug gests is that music was in
the end a neutral ground—another of the compromised geographies on which the Second
World War was fought. Today, younger composers can avail themselves of Wagner and
Strauss without any sense that they are treading on forbidden territory. Except in
Germany: there a deep mistrust of the musical past lingers. After Auschwitz, the thinking
goes, the comfort of C major is taboo. The entire classical and Romantic tradition
remains roped off, like a crime scene under investigation. Spending time in Berlin last
fall, I noticed how often Nazism was invoked in artistic matters—not as history but as a
negative example for contemporary style. I heard an architectural guide condemn one of
the new buildings in Potsdamer Platz for having too many right angles, and thereby
reviving a totalitarian aesthetic. Much the same critique extends to new music that uses
too many major and minor chords: even a few of these are liable to raise suspicions of
neofascist kitsch. It is understandable that such extreme attitudes took hold immediately
after the war, when Germany felt the need to wipe the slate clean and build anew. But
why are they so pervasive five decades later? Why do German composers still fetishize
dissonance and make a virtue of the ugly? This overweening selfdenial has become
absurd, and has contributed to the widespread perception that German music came to a
sudden end with the death of Richard Strauss, in 1949. " A fter Auschwitz" is the
signature slogan of the philosopher, sociologist, music critic, sometime composer, and
allaround conversationstopper Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, who, more than thirty
years after his death, still reigns as the godfather of German musical thought. There is no
better way to understand what has happened to German music than to spend a little time
in Adorno’s world. For most American readers, he is an obscure bogeyman of
postMarxist social theory, the author of such impenetrable tomes as "Negative
Dialectics." Readers of Thomas Mann know him as the musical expert who furnished
material for "Doctor Faustus," including a large chunk of the Devil’s disquisitions. In
Germany, however, Adorno is an intellectual folk hero, a symbol even to those who have
never tried to read him. Perhaps the principal source of his authority is the fact that, as a
German of partly Jewish descent in American exile, he recognized, as early as the autumn
of 1944, the enormity of what was happening in the death camps. Adorno thus became
the prophet of a modern Germany obsessed with understanding its past. Next September
11th is the centennial of his birth (how like Adorno to be born on that day), and one
learns from a recent full-page feuilleton on the philosopher in the Süddeutsche Zeitung
that no fewer than four biographies are on the way—a generous spotlight to shine on a
man who lived life almost exclusively inside his own cranium. Readers can content
themselves in the current season with a seven-hundred-and- forty-three-page
compendium of Adorno’s writings entitled "Essays on Music" (California). I studied
Adorno in college, at a time when it seemed provocative to read books about Charles
Manson and listen to rock bands that sounded like coffee grinders. My postadolescent
mind thrilled to the opulent negativity of Adorno’s proclamations, some of which I can
still recite off the top of my head: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." "The
fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." "Every work of art is an
uncommitted crime." "The whole is the false." Adorno is the dark prince of intellectual
life—the connoisseur of the dense, the difficult, the dire. He never met an apocalypse he
didn’t like. But he is not quite as solemn as he seems; he can be hilariously bitchy. Here
he is on the nascent American gym culture of the forties: "The very people who burst
with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom
the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of
population policy." On young left-wing intellectuals: "To see them as renegades is to
assess them too high; they mask mediocre faces with horn-rimmed spectacles betokening
‘brilliance,’ though with plain-glass lenses, solely in order to better themselves in their
own eyes and in the general rat-race." Adorno’s sentences twist around like scorpions to
deliver a valedictory sting. It is easy to see why Adorno has proved so durable in
Germany, which, having exhumed its own past, now wishes to confess the sins of the rest
of the world. When Adorno lived in America, from 1938 to 1949, he advanced the now
familiar argument—practically printed on the menus of European cafés—that American
culture was fascism with a happy face. Corporate capitalism, Adorno said, was turning
human beings into twitching drones, though its methods were subtle enough to conceal
from almost everyone the barbed wire at the edges of the theme park. Notorious among
his writings were his musings on jazz, in which he tried to find a sinister, quasifascistic
energy in collective improvisation and jitterbug dancing. Richard Leppert, the editor of
"Essays on Music," bravely defends these tirades; he wishes us to believe that Adorno
was attacking not authentic African-American composers such as Duke Ellington but
white jazzmen like Paul Whiteman— those who appropriated the original "hot music."
Indeed, when Adorno described thirties-era popular music as a "confusing parody of
colonial imperialism," he was on to something. But if he had any positive feelings about
the work of black musicians he failed to put them down on paper. The only jazzman
named in the essay "On Jazz" is Ellington. Adorno’s generalizations are sometimes so
brazenly sweeping as to make you want to throw his books against the wall. Here is a
choice pronunciamento from his New York period: "It is highly doubtful if the boy in the
subway whistling the main theme of the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony actually has
been gripped by that music." I think police records would show that the last boy to
whistle Brahms on the subway was beaten to a pulp in the seventies. "When people dance
to jazz, they do not dance for sensuous pleasure or in order to obtain release," he says, in
another essay. "Rather they merely depict the gestures of sensuous human beings." This
is the place to mention that Adorno, despite his mousy appearance, was reputed to have
been an excellent dancer. Implicit in his assault on mass culture is the belief that any
work of art that attracts large numbers of people has no value. This applies not just to
popular music but also to classical music that has reached a wide audience. Adorno was
never so ferocious as when writing about Arturo Toscanini, whose concerts on NBC
radio attracted millions of listeners. Adorno was convinced that Toscanini’s fans, like the
boy in the subway, were too stupid—"retarded" was the word he used—to grasp the
music of the Masters: "The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has
paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert." A footnote is called for: in 1938, when
Adorno wrote these words, tickets to Toscanini’s NBC concerts in Studio 8H were free.
Still, some of these poison darts hit their target. Adorno was certainly right when he said
that radio broadcasts of classical music flattened its dynamic extremes and muted its
colors, robbing it of passion and danger; today’s soporific all-Pachelbel stations vindicate
his critique. Pop-music scholars, for their part, stop short of dismissing Adorno out of
hand and, indeed, routinely rejigger his aesthetics to serve their own ends. Greil Marcus,
in his book "Lipstick Traces," ingeniously conscripted Adorno into the subversive élite of
punk rock. It seems that almost everyone believes that ninety per cent of music is junk;
we just can’t agree on what constitutes the remaining ten per cent. Adorno is to be
admired for lustily defending his chosen fraction—he was a snob of deep conviction.
Despite his Marxist trappings, he was really a bourgeois elegist, a prose poet singing of
lost childhood realms. The son of a Frankfurt wine merchant, he was born into the last
flowering of bourgeois culture, and he never came to terms with its overnight demise.
Tragically, Adorno was himself a victim of the shock tactics of pop culture. In April,
1969, a group of female activists interrupted his lecture "An Introduction to Dialectical
Thinking" by flashing their breasts in his face and taunting him with flowers. He died a
few months later, on August 6, 1969. It was twenty-four years to the day after the atomic
destruction of Hiroshima. A composer of no small ability, and no large ability, either,
Adorno studied in the nineteen-twenties with Alban Berg, Schoenberg’s most gifted
pupil. From Berg he absorbed the tenets of Schoenbergian philosophy, which held that
music had to strike out into unknown regions in order to stay true to a Wagnerian
ideology of progress. Adorno monumentalized Schoenberg’s thought in "The Philosophy
of New Music," published in 1949. This small book gave voice to the iconoclastic
mentality of firebrands like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who descended on
modern-music gatherings in Darmstadt and Donaueschingen and forged the splintered
sounds of the avant-garde. The "Philosophy," which still awaits a decent translation,
argues that music must expunge all familiar sounds and conventional notions of the
beautiful. In a world of triumphant kitsch, composition can justify its survival only by
becoming a mirror image of physical and spiritual destruction. Adorno sounds a call to
arms for those who wish to ride off into the sunset of avantgarde obscurity: [Modern
music] has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. All its happiness
comes in the perception of misery; all its beauty comes in the rejection of beauty’s
illusion. Neither the individual nor the col-lective wants to have any part of it. It dies
away unheard, without echo. When music is heard, it is shot through with time, like a
shining crystal; unheard music drops into empty space like a rotten bullet. New music
spontaneously takes aim at that final condition which mechanical music lives out hour by
hour—the condition of absolute oblivion. Such writing suggests the psychological state
of one who has been deeply hurt by rejection, and who wishes to burn all bridges of
reconciliation. It is the cry of a music lover who came into a world ruled by Mahler and
Strauss, and lived into the time of Sinatra and the Beatles. The "Philosophy" falls into
two main sections, one devoted to the music of Schoenberg and the other to the music of
Stravinsky. Schoenberg stood for the truth, for seeing the terror of the world as it was.
Stravinsky, who, at the time of the "Philosophy," was still working in the neoclassical
mode, stood for falsehood and regression. There was, of course, something fascistic about
Stravinsky. Adorno did not base this argument on the fact that Stravinsky himself voiced
sympathy for Mussolini in the nineteen-thirties; instead, he felt that a Fascist mentality
was ingrained in the music, simply in its reassertion of tonality after Schoenberg’s
putative annihilation of it. Repeated readings of the "Philosophy" fail to disclose exactly
which parts of a radiantly beautiful work like "Symphony of Psalms" display the
authoritarian personality, but the argument goes something like this: Even though tonality
has become irrational, Stravinsky forces it to remain in place, and mesmerizes his
audience into accepting the unacceptable. Merely by choosing to write in the key of A
minor, Stravinsky is acting like you-know-who. Adorno concludes, a little mysteriously,
"The statement attributed to Hitler, that a man could die only for an idea that he does not
understand, would be a good inscription for the gate of the neoclassical temple." A writer
who throws bombs of this kind should be very sure of his own ground. Adorno was not
quite safe, in several ways. He came late to an affirmation of his Jewish roots, and his
correspondence with Alban Berg contains moments of antiSemitism. In 1933, Adorno
advised his teacher not to feel solidarity with a Jewishness "about which one can
ultimately have few illusions"; and he suggested that Berg publicize his pure Aryan
ancestry to the Reich Music Chamber, whose president was Richard Strauss. There are
eerie moments when the agendas of Adorno and Hitler coincide. A 1933 essay entitled
"Farewell to Jazz" begins by noting that radio broadcasts of jazz have been banned in
Nazi Germany, and goes on to say, in so many words, "Good riddance." Interesting, too,
is the way Adorno denounced the Weimarera musical "Das Dreimäderlhaus" for abusing
the sacred melodies of Schubert; Hitler made the same point in a speech of 1929.
Adorno’s subsequent thunderings about Auschwitz have a self-corrective aspect, as if he
were making up for years of not quite looking evil in the face. Some skeptical
commentators argue that he continued to promote a nationalist musical agenda,
excoriating almost all composers who were not German or Austrian. It could be said that
Adorno used the Holocaust a little too freely, a little too superciliously, as a way of
escalating aesthetic battles that predated Hitler’s rise to power. The phrase "after
Auschwitz" sometimes comes crashing down like the sixteen-ton weight that ends certain
Monty Python skits. In 1949, it worked: "The Philosophy of New Music" wowed the
confused young minds who were seeking new certitudes, new laws, new gods. Adorno,
together with his comrade-in-arms Boulez, probably succeeded in frightening more than a
few composers of the neoclassical type into thinking that their music was not just bad but
criminal. It is instructive to look at the names of works that were played at Darmstadt
from 1946 on. In the first few years, you see titles such as Sonatine, Suite for Piano,
Chamber Symphony, Scherzo, and Concerto in E Flat. After 1949, the year of the
"Philosophy," neoclassical titles dwindle and are replaced by phrases fit for a "Star Trek"
episode: "Music in Two Dimensions," "Schipot," "Polyphonie X," "Syntaxis,"
"Anepigraphe." There was a fad for abstractions in the plural: "Perspectives,"
"Structures," "Quantities," "Configurations," "Interpolations." Audiences enjoyed
"Spectogram," "Seismogramme," "Audiogramme," and "Sphenogramme." Emblematic
was the career of the minor composer Hermann Heiss, who, back in the Nazi regime, had
written a "Fighter Pilot March." At the first Darmstadt gathering, in 1946, he was
represented by a Sonata for Flute and Piano. In 1956, sensing which way the wind was
blowing, he showed up with "Expression K."
Adorno, who taught at Darmstadt for nine summers after his return to Germany, knew
well that his beloved ideology of progress was yielding mixed results. To his credit, he
subjected the modernism of his day to the same withering critique that he applied to
Stravinsky and jazz. The saving grace of his writing, aside from its sheer tortured
elegance, is that it often veers in unpredictable directions; one would expect no less from
a man who in his student years was planning an opera about Tom Sawyer. The dirty
secret of "The Philosophy of New Music" is that, even as it savages Stravinsky, it picks
away at Schoenberg; this, perhaps, is the reason that Schoenberg instructed his wife,
Gertrud, to keep Adorno away from his manuscripts. The twelve-tone method, Adorno
said, tends to turn out same-sounding, deindividuated products, insidiously reflecting the
mass-culture marketplace. The 1955 essay "The Aging of the New Music"—one of the
highlights of "Essays on Music"—dissects the "sectarianism" and "academicism" of the
new-music scene, the "cheapness of being daring," the fetishism of elaborate
mathematical processes, the fascination with weird sound materials undigested by
compositional logic, and so on. Leading composers, he says, "never get farther than
abstract negation, and take off on an empty, high-spirited trip, through thinkably complex
scores, in which nothing actually occurs." Music had passed the limit of what the ear
could handle; one young composer at Darmstadt was said to be writing "the craziest
gibberish" and "purest nonsense." No doubt; but how was it given to Adorno to determine
when and where the avant-garde had finally devolved into gibberish? Many would say
that that point had arrived some time earlier. Like so many critics before him, Adorno
jumped off the merry-go-round of progress and threw up his hands at the lunacy of the
young. Indeed, in his later writings he seemed on the point of saying that a basic mistake
might have been made somewhere along the line. "There is a possibility of reopening the
question of harmony," he allowed. "Composite sounds may gain a specific significance
again." Chords? Exciting! But he could not follow up on that tentative lead. Instead, the
"negative" in "negative dialectics" really kicked into gear. Rather than move from one
extreme to another, in dialectical mode, Adorno stopped in his tracks and sank into
despair. There was no way, he said, to bring back the old chords. It would deny history; it
would be an exercise in nostalgia—or, worse, a "positive lie." Better to contemplate the
possibility of music’s falling silent altogether. In his last book, "Aesthetic Theory," he
wrote, "A latecomer among the arts, great music may well turn out to be an art form that
was possible only during a limited period of human history." This was the point at which
Adorno— together with legions of German musical pundits and pontiffs who followed
him—experienced a catastrophic failure of imagination. The claim that tonality had
permanently disintegrated was arbitrary and without intellectual foundation; not even
Schoenberg could endorse it in the end. The attempt to trash a masterpiece like
"Symphony of Psalms" causes a visible strain; you don’t believe that Adorno believes it.
Much of his social history was bunk, too. He could not see that music had been
commercialized before radio came along— that it was chopped to bits and consumed en
masse even in the golden age of Mozart and Beethoven. The entire theory rests on the
assumption that the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented suffering, which
required radical new languages in art. If history and art obeyed such a tidy, tit-for-tat
dynamic, then Italian painting after the Black Death, to take one of many possible
counterexamples, would become inexplicable. The insistence on the traumatic uniqueness
of one’s individual moment is the mark of an immature mind; it is not so far removed
from the rage of the teenager who runs up to his room and blasts Eminem from behind a
locked door. L ast October, the Berlin Festival presented a concert of works by the
twenty-eight-year-old Johannes Maria Staud, who is evidently a rising star in German
music. The event took place in the chamber hall of the Philharmonie, and drew a small
but avid crowd. The pre-concert chatter around me—from students in T-shirts and
camouflage pants—promised some kind of display of youthful renewal. But the titles in
the program—"Incipit," "Configurations/ Reflet," "perhaps at first really only"—
produced that familiar sinking feeling. Staud is a gifted, even brilliant composer; his
works were finely crafted, clearly instrumented, charged with energy and humor. The
rhythmic writing even sounded a bit pop, with thwacks of bass drum and splashes of
hihat thrown in. All the same, to quote Beckett, the sun shone on the nothing new. The
music had an antique flavor—the flavor of the fifties, of Darmstadt and Donaueschingen,
of university research and Cold War worry, of men in short-sleeved button-down shirts
and thick black glasses writing on chalkboards. Even the popular gestures recalled the
fifties—bebop jazz and early rock and roll. It amazed me that this music was composed
by someone born in 1974. In America, England, Russia, and Scandinavia, among other
places, composers have embraced a vast diversity of approaches to the problem of how to
write classical music in the twentyfirst century. Minimalism arrived decades ago; C
major is back. Manifestos and theorizing have fallen out of vogue; composers are more
likely to let their music speak for itself, or cite an image or story that inspired them. In
Germany, however, dyspeptic complexity of the Adornian variety still holds sway.
Everyone is writing fragments of sketches of pieces. Works are accompanied by notes
that take longer to read than the music takes to play. Parodies of Adornoese proliferate.
The gnarled art of the young Olga Neuwirth is said to be "running away from itself "; it is
"a running away and a staying at the same time, in the passing of time, which is,
however, no healing ointment." Notions of melody and harmony are verboten. Georg
Friedrich Haas, the composer of a piece entitled ". . . .," says, in one program note, "I
would like to avoid using the term ‘theme.’ " Sometimes composers allude in their works
to the canonical repertory or parody a certain kind of Romantic phrase, but these Zitate,
or citations, last for no more than few seconds. They are marched in and out of the music
as if under armed guard, with terrified looks on their faces. Forty years ago, the big man
in German music was Stockhausen, who unveiled revolutionary-sounding paradigms in
almost every festival season. Stockhausen is still around, but is no longer taken very
seriously, even though he plugs away on his mammoth days-of-the- week opera cycle,
"Licht" (the last part, "Sunday," will be ready in 2005). The current "great man" is a
sixty-seven-year- old experimentalist named Helmut Lachenmann, who, according to the
New Grove Dictionary of Music, specializes in "the exploitation of loud and
unconventional sounds more in the nature of noise, of the kind generally suppressed in
traditional instrumental performance." Curious readers are referred to supplementary
writings such as "Helmut Lachenmann’s Concept of Rejection" and "Moments of
Irritation." The composer states, "My music has been concerned with rigidly constructed
denial, with the exclusion of what appears to me as listening expectations performed by
society." Although Lachenmann has attacked Adorno as a "naïve Romantic," he honors
the Master’s spirit. There is no denying Lachenmann’s virtuosity; he is able to arrange
the unlikeliest assortment of sounds—flutes blown at the wrong end, cellos bowed in
places other than the strings, paper crinkled, sheet metal banged with rods—into an
intermittently gripping narrative. His most formidable achievement is the opera "The
Little Match Girl," based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the child who freezes to
death on New Year’s Eve after lighting matches to keep herself warm.The Andersen tale
is interwoven with quotations from Leonardo da Vinci and from the leftist radical Gudrun
Ensslin, one of the Baader-Meinhof gang, who was jailed for firebombing two Frankfurt
department stores. She wrote, "Criminal, madman, and suicide. . . . Their criminality,
their madness, their death express the revolt of the destroyed against his destruction." A
surefire holiday favorite. A key concept in the Lachenmannian Weltanschauung is
contamination. The commentator in New Grove writes, "Lachenmann has repeatedly
emphasized the novelty and uncontaminated aspect of his sound worlds." In case we
missed the point, we also hear of "sonorities which had remained unused and hence
uncontaminated in the past"; of sounds "not yet devalued by excessive use"; of "aesthetic
experience largely undistorted by habit." This thinking is of a piece with Adorno’s
potshots at Toscanini, and goes back to Schoenberg’s epic epigram "If it is art, it is not
for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." The notion that popularity destroys the purity of art
is so cherished in German-speaking lands—and, it should be said, on American college
campuses—that it takes on the solidity of religious belief. One may as well try to argue
with the men ranting in Times Square. But the fact is that mass culture has coopted the
weird sounds of the avant-garde as thoroughly as it has the splashy chords of
Romanticism. Every variety of dissonance, microtonal writing, and unpitched noise has
been used in a hundred horror movies and suspense thrillers. And there is something
creepy about the talk of "contamination" and "taint." It is redolent of turn-of-the-century
pseudoscientific textbooks about the invasion of German culture by alien bodies. At the
very least, Hitler still casts a mysterious spell over the music scene: the project of writing
according to his likes and dislikes gives him a power that should long ago have been
denied. Reading between the lines of Adorno’s brilliant, maddening books, I suspect that
he knew exactly what had gone wrong in German music but could not bring himself to
admit it. He might have put it this way: The pure is the false. The aesthetic of rejection
will always depend on the music it excludes. Continuously present in atonal music is the
C-major triad that the composer scans his pitch charts to avoid. The attempt to abolish
kitsch produces kitsch of a higher absurdity—an overebullient marketplace devoid of
consumers. Filling the empty seats at correctly subversive new-music concerts are the
laughing ghosts of a formerly outraged bourgeoisie that died out long before today’s
radical star was born. This scorched-earth music yearns for Hitler’s hate; in some
inverted way, it still salutes the Führer, by fanatically disobeying his orders. G erman
music is not entirely a waste-land of modernist conceits. A few composers have escaped
the culdesac of theory and have written works of immediate sensual appeal. One is
Wilhelm Killmayer, a seventy-five-year-old minor master whose music is almost entirely
unknown in this country. Without resorting to pastiche, Killmayer has found a kind of
secret doorway to the Romantic tradition of Schubert and Schumann; his "Heine-Lieder,"
newly recorded on the CPO label, show an electric connection between word and music.
Hans Werner Henze, who fled Germany for Italy in the fifties, maintains his
independence from musical dogma. Wolfgang Rihm veers between the high-modernist
and neoRomantic camps, and, in his more generous moods, writes with real expressive
force. Totally different in orientation is Helmut Oehring, the composer of "Lethal
Injection," "Suck the Brain Out of the Head," and "Do You Wanna Blow Job." At times
earsplittingly cacophonous, at times charged with an astonishing rhythmic energy,
Oehring’s music communicates a kind of savage joy; one twominute stretch in his piece
"SelfLiberator" could go over big on the dance floor of the Roxy. Another German
maverick is Heiner Goebbels, whose multimedia works run rampant over all available
styles, literary sources, and theatrical techniques. This month, the Brooklyn Academy of
Music is presenting a Goebbels piece entitled "Hashirigaki," which is described as a
synthesis of Gertrude Stein’s "The Making of Americans" and the Beach Boys’ album
"Pet Sounds." The German scene will surely change in coming years, now that
government and state subsidies for the arts are shrinking. Since the late forties,
composers have sustained themselves on radio commissions, teaching assignments,
festival appearances, and other institutional appointments. This arrangement goes back to
the days of the American occupation, when, in the interest of detaching young composers
from the Nazi past, the musical operatives of the Information Control Division—an out
growth of General Robert McClure’s Psychological Warfare Division—encouraged the
propagation of what one internal memo described as "modern music of the international
repertory." To this end, Darmstadt received in 1949 a grant of eight thousand Deutsche
marks from American "reorientation" funds. Irony of ironies: the holy ground on which
Adorno withstood the onslaught of mass culture was, in its own small way, part of the
militaryindustrial complex. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no impregnable
high-culture fortresses remain. If composers are to survive, they must learn the art of
compromise. They might bear in mind the instruction that Leopold Mozart gave to his
son: every work should have in it something for the connoisseurs and something for the
people. It is a simple, even naïvesounding principle, yet an entire majestic tradition rests
upon it. "Be embraced, you millions": the exul-tant shout of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony was, among other things, a statement of heated personal ambition. One of the
abiding myths of musical modernism is that the great masters were rejected by audiences
of their time. The history behind these claims is specious— Bach won respect wherever
he worked; Mozart thrived as much as he struggled; Beethoven became a living god—
and the logic is inane: from the fact that great music was rejected it does not follow that
rejected music is great. Certainly, a piece such as Beethoven’s Quartet Opus 130, with its
dissonant fugal finale, caused difficulties for its early listeners. "Incomprehensible, like
Chinese," a critic said. The telling thing, however, is what Beethoven did in response to
the criticism. He did not say, "Silence, retarded masses! This work displays the inherent
tendency of the material and cannot be altered! Perhaps you will understand it in a
hundred years; perhaps never. It is your problem." No, he took note of what a few
aristocratic dilettantes had to say and wrote a new, lighter-toned finale to replace the
Great Fugue. Beethoven, the god at the center of the musical pantheon, compromised.
Was this the tragedy of an unemancipated genius, as Schoenberg claimed? Or was it of a
piece with the composer’s greatness? As Lewis Lockwood notes, in a recent biography,
Beethoven lavished care on his new finale, using it to create a quite different trajectory
for the work. It was the last thing he ever wrote. Even though he was almost completely
deaf, and had only a few months to live, Beethoven was listening to his audience.
3/24/03
PROFILE of contemporary classical Californian composer John Adams, 53…
Writer compares the juxtapositions in Adams's music to the landscape of
Northern California as seen from Highway 1… Adams is not the only composer
who has combined a classical education with a pop sensibility, but he is the one
who has made the synthesis stick. His music, in spite of its discontinuities, has a
unifying hum, as if riding on fresh asphalt. It is probably this sense of a firm
foundation which has given his works their staying power… He has a youthful
and friendly face, framed by a neat, silvery beard. His eyes are sometimes bright
with curiosity, sometimes clouded by a slight sadness. He loves to read, and his
favorite gambit in conversation is to mention a book… Writer visits him at his
rural home, which until recently was a pot farm… America’s classical music,
then, is alive and well, and thriving in the oddest places. The minimalists’ chance
discovery of a huge new audience for contemporary music suggests that other
avenues are waiting to be found. When, in the seventies, Steve Reich sold
hundreds of thousands of copies of "Music for Eighteen Musicians," he destroyed
a central myth of modernism, demonstrating that music did not have to be
esoteric to be audacious. And when, at around the same time, John Adams
began writing serious concert works that drew on minimalist techniques, he
showed that classical forms were capable of absorbing almost anything… Adams
was something of a child prodigy. He wrote music, played the clarinet, and, on
occasion, conducted the local orchestra, which was sponsored by the New
Hampshire State Mental Hospital. He had to cope with the fact that the hospital
patients who played in the group sometimes improvised freely during the
performance. When he was thirteen, the orchestra presented his Suite for String
Orchestra, and he became the talk of the village. At this time, he was listening to
little twentieth-century music, although he did fall under the spell of Sibelius…
The pianist Sarah Cahill, who has known Adams since his early San Francisco
years, noticed early on his need for isolation. "He could be, and he can be now,
tremendously gregarious," she says, "but it was always understood that he had
to be out of touch for long stretches of time." In 1983, Adams had another stroke
of luck. While visiting his parents, in New Hampshire, he happened to meet a
recent Harvard graduate named Peter Sellars, who, in one of the operatic
brainstorms for which he would become famous, came up with the idea of
dramatizing Richard Nixon’s trip to China. For a libretto, Sellars turned to a
classmate, the poet Alice Goodman… Faced with this intricate text, Adams
restrained his own penchant for large gestures. He took a more neutral tone and
reacted to the text line by line. His demands on singers were sometimes hard,
but he turned out to have an extraordinary knack for vocal writing… In 1991,
under intense media scrutiny, Adams, Goodman, and Sellars reunited for a
second opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer." This one had a harder time. The
intention was to use the hijacking of the ocean liner Achille Lauro and the murder
of Leon Klinghoffer as the basis for a sort of Middle East Passion or Requiem.
Adams is one of the very few American composers who receive a comfortable
income from commissions and royalties. Robert Hurwitz, who has been Adams’s
producer at Nonesuch since 1985, told me that some of the records have sold
upward of fifty thousand copies, which is exceptional for a classical release and
altogether freakish for new music. Over the past decade, as performances of his
operas have become mysteriously scarce, Adams has immersed himself in
orchestral music. He wrote a Chamber Symphony, whose funky bass lines seem
to poke fun at Schoenberg’s work of the same title; a Violin Concerto, whose
otherworldly passacaglia slow movement can stand comparison with the
instrumental lamentations of Britten and Shostakovich; and "Century Rolls,"
which has hints of Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton in its easygoing bop and swing.
The multiple directions suggested by these pieces sometimes puzzled Adams’s
admirers, who found the Romantic minimalism of "Harmonielehre" so grippingly
likable that they simply wanted to hear ten more things in the same style. Tells
about his new work, "El Niño" which looks suspiciously like an opera in
disguise…. The music of John Adams, unlike so much classical composition of
the last fifty years, has the immediate power to enchant…
Full Text:
As Highway 1, the California coastal road, goes north of San Francisco, it holds
the eyes like a work of art. The landscape might have been devised by a trickster
genius who delights in grand effects and strange juxtapositions. Rolling meadows
end in sudden cliffs; redwoods rise above thin patches of beach. Towers of rock
rest on the surface of the ocean like the ghosts of clipper ships. Here and there,
a lost cow sits on the shoulder, looking out to sea. Side roads go up inland hills at
odd angles, tempting the aimless driver to follow them to the end. One especially
beguiling detour, the Meyers Grade Road, departs from Highway 1 shortly after
the town of Jenner. The grade in question is eighteen per cent, and the
steepness of the ascent causes dizzying distortions of perspective. The Pacific
rises in the rearview mirror like a blue hill across a hidden valley.
Not far from here is Brushy Ridge, the forest home of John Adams, who may be
the most vital and eloquent composer in America. If you had to sum up his music
in a single metaphor, you might say that it sounds like Highway 1. It is a cut-up
paradise, a sequence of familiar elements arranged in unfamiliar ways. A gaudy
Hollywood fanfare gives way to a trancelike sequence of shifting beats; billowing
clouds of Wagnerian harmony are dispersed by a quartet of saxophones. Adams
is not the only composer who has combined a classical education with a pop
sensibility, but he is the one who has made the synthesis stick. His music, in
spite of its discontinuities, has a unifying hum, as if riding on fresh asphalt. It is
probably this sense of a firm foundation which has given his works their staying
power. His first opera, "Nixon in China," had a triumphant revival in London last
spring. A recent orchestral piece, "Naïve and Sentimental Music," is making the
rounds of American cities. Before Christmas, the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris,
gave the first performance of "El Niño," a two-hour-long oratorio on the Nativity,
which will be performed again next week, in San Francisco. Adams wrote much
of the work at Brushy Ridge last summer.
Brushy Ridge is at the far end of the Meyers Grade Road. Even though Adams
supplies visitors with detailed instructions, the last part of the drive is a matter of
guesswork. Unmarked tracks diverge in the woods, one leading to a startup
winery and another to a corrugated-metal shack that the F.B.I. must have
searched while looking for the Unabomber. The Adams house is at the top of a
rocky hill. It is a comfortable, spare, rural-hippie kind of place. The composer is
asleep on the couch, with the collected poems of Allen Ginsberg lying open in
front of him. He wakes up, rubs his eyes, apologizes for a nonexistent mess, and
sets about making coffee. At the age of fifty-three, he has a youthful and friendly
face, framed by a neat, silvery beard. His eyes are sometimes bright with
curiosity, sometimes clouded by a slight sadness. He loves to read, and his
favorite gambit in conversation is to mention a book, such as the Ginsberg
collection, that has excited him. If you saw him in Berkeley, where he lives most
of the year, you might peg him as a U. Cal. professor—one of those plaid-shirted
intellectuals who sit outside the Cheese Board, on Shattuck Avenue, eating
organic pizza and annotating Wittgenstein.
When Adams is at Brushy Ridge, he is often joined on weekends by his wife, the
photographer Deborah O’Grady, and their two teen-age children, Emily and Sam.
But he is also alone for long stretches, and it takes him a few minutes to adjust to
company. There is an appealing innocence about him, but it is an innocence
sharpened by confidence. He speaks in mild, unhurried tones, halting to look for
words that please him. On occasion, he breaks into an unexpectedly aggressive
cackle, underscoring it with a clap of his hands and a merry roll of his eyes.
There is coiled energy behind his laconic exterior. He does not talk much about
his own work, but you sense that some portion of his mind is always occupied by
it. After a couple of hours of conversation, he seems to grow anxious about the
huge piece that is lying, incomplete, in his studio. But before he returns to work
he gives a tour of his property, which occupies forty acres. He points out a few
disused irrigation hoses in the woods; not too long ago, the place was a pot farm.
He greets one of his neighbors and gets into a "Chinatown" conversation about
the water supply and the winery’s adverse impact on it.
He makes his way across a steep ravine to a large, modern warehouse. "My
composing shed," he calls it. There is a tradition of composers working in the
woods; Gustav Mahler wrote many of his symphonies in a one-room hideaway
constructed to his specifications, and Adams can claim to have the largest
composing hut in history. He raises the overhead door and walks through the
warehouse, part of which is rented out to a woodcutter neighbor. There is a sharp
smell of freshly cut redwood. Adams goes into a smaller room, where sheets of
music paper are scattered around an electronic keyboard and a computer
terminal. He fiddles with the keys, commanding the computer to play the aria
"Pues mi Dios ha nacido a penar," or "Because my Lord was born to suffer,"
which opens the second part of the new oratorio. In meekly peeping tones, the
computer sings a sinuous, long-breathed Adamsian melody, twisting and turning
over lullaby chords. After about fifty bars, the music trails off into a single
unharmonized line. The composer stares at the floor, cupping his chin in his
hand. Then he goes back to work, chipping away at the silence of everything that
remains to be composed.
It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The
job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to
believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a
little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object—a
painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting—
but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then
you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even
notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead
or alien form—so much so that jazz aficionados routinely say, "Jazz is America’s
classical music." To make the counterargument that America’s classical music is
America’s classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost. In such a
climate, composers easily become embittered.
It is often suggested that American composers thrive in isolation, that they are
best understood as lonely mavericks. The prototype is Charles Ives, the putative
Beethoven of American music, who made money in the insurance business and
in his spare time produced radical collages of hymn-tune, marching-band
Americana. Wilfrid Mellers, in his classic book "Music in a New Found Land,"
said of Ives, "His integrity is synonymous with his experimental audacity," with his
"pioneer’s courage." Such sentiments look handsome on the page, but they can
serve to rationalize failure. Ives, for all his tremendous gifts, made only sporadic
efforts to reach an audience, and was most comfortable sketching in private.
Certain of his successors have taken pride in their obscurity, advertising
themselves as experimenters, technicians, amateurs, and curmudgeons. There
was a time, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the boundaries between the
classical and the popular were more fluid: Copland listened to Ellington, Ellington
listened to Ravel, Bernstein listened to them all. After the Second World War,
however, European doctrines of atonality swept the land like a virus, sending
composers into university quarantine.
In the sixties, a band of young composers struck out in a new direction. Their
music came to be called minimalism, and, by a curious chain of events, it
reversed the trend toward the marginalization of the American composer. A West
Coast visionary named La Monte Young became mesmerized by isolated
sonorities in the twelve-tone music of Anton Webern; in 1958, he wrote a String
Trio in which chords were sustained for minutes at a time. A Californian, Terry
Riley, applied Young’s "long tone" methods to the simplest chords, such as the
C-major triad. With "In C," Riley’s revolutionary work of repetition, minimalism
was off and running. Steve Reich perfected the process; Philip Glass popularized
it; rock stars of the sixties appropriated it. The Velvet Underground found its
signature sound when it incorporated the eerie viola drones of John Cale, who
had played in Young’s ensemble. Brian Eno used minimalist techniques to create
"ambient music," and from that source grew the electronic sounds that ripple
through dance clubs around the world.
America’s classical music, then, is alive and well, and thriving in the oddest
places. The minimalists’ chance discovery of a huge new audience for
contemporary music suggests that other avenues are waiting to be found. When,
in the seventies, Steve Reich sold hundreds of thousands of copies of "Music for
Eighteen Musicians," he destroyed a central myth of modernism, demonstrating
that music did not have to be esoteric to be audacious. And when, at around the
same time, John Adams began writing serious concert works that drew on
minimalist techniques, he showed that classical forms were capable of absorbing
almost anything. Minimalism, for him, was an art of amalgamation, a way of
linking together the widest possible gamut of American sounds. He resumed
Copland’s populist mission, but without any trace of big-city knowingness. His
open prairies became modern, moody spaces, lit up with neon red and bathed in
television blue.
When I visited Adams at his house in Brushy Ridge, last June, he was pondering
the composer’s relationship with the mass culture. "I like to think of culture as the
symbols that we share to understand each other," he said. "When we
communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to
make a point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a
John Lennon lyric, or ‘I’m not a crook.’ When I was young, I came to realize that
twelve-tone music, or, for that matter, all contemporary music, was so far
divorced from communal experience that it didn’t appear on the national radar
screen. It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the
moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’"
He began with the advantage of a memorable name. As far as he knows, he is
not related to the Boston Adamses, but he had an almost surreally old-fashioned
American upbringing. He was born in 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he
spent most of his childhood in the white-steepled hamlet of East Concord, New
Hampshire. His father played the clarinet, and his mother sang in musicals and
with big bands. His grandfather ran a dance hall on the shores of Lake
Winnipesaukee, and the family would go there to play music during the summer.
"It was called Irwin’s Winnipesaukee Gardens," Adams recalled in a 1992
interview. "It had a gorgeous hardwood dance floor built out on pilings over the
lake. It was incredibly romantic." Duke Ellington’s band played at Irwin’s once,
and Adams was allowed to go onstage and sit on the piano bench next to the
Master.
Adams was something of a child prodigy. He wrote music, played the clarinet,
and, on occasion, conducted the local orchestra, which was sponsored by the
New Hampshire State Mental Hospital. He had to cope with the fact that the
hospital patients who played in the group sometimes improvised freely during the
performance. When he was thirteen, the orchestra presented his Suite for String
Orchestra, and he became the talk of the village. At this time, he was listening to
little twentieth-century music, although he did fall under the spell of Sibelius. "I
was used to seeing snow and pine trees in New Hampshire," he explained.
"When I went into the record store, I bought albums with snow and pine trees on
them. They were all Sibelius." Adams has taken on many other influences with
the passing years, but he remains loyal to this early one; echoes of Sibelius’s
slowly evolving musical landscapes can be heard in all his major orchestral
works.
In 1965, Adams went to Harvard on a scholarship and heard the surprising news
that tonal music could no longer be written. Along with many other young
composers of the day, he was led to believe that Schoenberg’s twelve-tone
method was the only way forward. He even wrote a letter telling Leonard
Bernstein that his "Chichester Psalms" was in the "wrong" style. Adams’s teacher
was Leon Kirchner, who had studied with Schoenberg himself, and who held
sway over Harvard composition students for many years. "I respected Kirchner
deeply," Adams said, "but my relationship with him was complicated. He was
very severe with me early on. He would tell me, ‘Don’t bother to bring that kind of
thing in.’"
At the same time, Adams was soaking up the culture of the late sixties. He
counted twelve-tone rows by day and listened to the Beatles in the dorm by night.
The sense of disconnection between these worlds was so extreme that he wrote
almost nothing. "I had to turn something in for my senior thesis," he said, "so I
wrote a song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble, a setting of psychedelic
texts by another undergraduate. It is somewhere in the bowels of Widener
Library and, to my horror, will someday be exhumed." Most of his energies went
into performance. He conducted the Bach Society Orchestra and put on a
student production of "The Marriage of Figaro." His conducting was good enough
to attract the attention of one of Bernstein’s talent scouts, and, despite his
adverse review of "Chichester Psalms," he was invited to the maestro’s
conducting seminar at Tanglewood. But he turned down the invitation and
decided to devote himself to composition. He had a gift that Bernstein lacked—
the ability to say no.
By 1972, Adams had had enough of East Coast musical politics, and he drove to
San Francisco in a Volkswagen Beetle. After working for a year as a forklift
operator on the Oakland waterfront, he took a low-paying job at the San
Francisco Conservatory of Music, as a jack-of-all-trades instructor. He had been
studying the writings of John Cage and began organizing elaborately anarchic
Cagean happenings. For one piece, "lo-fi," he and his students assumed various
positions around the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park and played 78-r.p.m.
records that had turned up in Goodwill stores. This activity proved no more
satisfying than the highbrow work that he had done at Harvard. In an
autobiographical essay, he wrote that "the social aspect of these events was
piquant, and the post-concert parties were always memorable, but the musical
payoff always seemed ‘lite.’ I began to notice that often after an avant-garde
event I would drive home alone to my cottage on the beach, lock the door, and,
like a closet tippler, end the evening deep in a Beethoven quartet."
The pianist Sarah Cahill, who has known Adams since his early San Francisco
years, noticed early on his need for isolation. "He could be, and he can be now,
tremendously gregarious," she says, "but it was always understood that he had
to be out of touch for long stretches of time." During one of his spells of solitude,
he had an epiphany that led him in a new direction. "I was driving to the Sierra
Nevadas," he told me, "and excerpts from Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ came on
the radio. I was thunderstruck by the simplicity and power of the emotions in the
piece. I knew all at once that I wanted to move toward this intense emotionality in
my own music. I began to hear it echoing in my mind, as something within reach.
But it took me several years to find the technique to accomplish it."
He had another breakthrough during a trip to Florence, with a group of highschool students. "I was struck again," he recalled, "by the immediate and
transforming beauty of the surroundings—particularly the architecture. I began to
think about how I could create big architectural spaces in music through the
manipulation of patterns and repetition. There’s great drama to be found in the
use of a limited range of notes and then in the sudden introduction of something
deep in the bass or high in the treble. Then you achieve a real sense of space in
music." When he heard the minimalism of Riley, Reich, and Glass, the pieces of
his technique fell into place. He mapped fragments of Romantic harmony onto
the electric grid of minimalism. Adams announced himself with an astonishing
sequence of works, "Shaker Loops," "Harmonium," "Grand Pianola Music," and
"Harmonielehre," each of which was more confident than the last.
The title of "Harmonielehre," which had its first performance in 1985, was aimed
directly at the East Coast musical establishment. It took off from a famous text by
Schoenberg, in which the inventor of atonal music set out to anatomize the
preëxisting tonal system and, at the same time, to demonstrate that the system
had become decadent, even degenerate. "Somehow, the word really got to me—
the idea of this summa of harmony," Adams said. "I kept thinking about spiritual
harmony, too. Schoenberg seemed like some religious zealot cutting off his
genitals to prove how totally pure he is, how dedicated to the Lord." Adams
laughed, as if surprised by the violence of his image. "Yes, ‘Harmonielehre,’ my
version of it, is a kind of parody," he continued. "But I also reached out and
embraced all of that harmony that we weren’t supposed to touch." The piece
begins with a colossal blast of E minor, and, within a few minutes, decadent tonal
chords are proliferating everywhere.
The feeling is one of tonality rising from the dead. Although many twentiethcentury composers held on to tonality in various forms, few were able to make it
breathe with animal life, as Adams did in "Harmonielehre" and its companions.
The other American minimalists, for all their insistence on basic chords, had
shied away from such textbook progressions as I-V-I, or C-G-C. "Grand Pianola
Music" lands on that sequence with a vehemence that borders on the absurd.
These days, the composer is apt to be embarrassed by his youthful bravado—
"This piece is like a barking dog running around with no leash," he told an
audience in San Francisco—but "Grand Pianola Music" has aged well: it has a
startling transparency, mixing sweetness, sadness, madness, and joy.
In 1983, Adams had another stroke of luck. While visiting his parents, in New
Hampshire, he happened to meet a recent Harvard graduate named Peter
Sellars, who, in one of the operatic brainstorms for which he would become
famous, came up with the idea of dramatizing Richard Nixon’s trip to China. For a
libretto, Sellars turned to a classmate, the poet Alice Goodman, who extracted an
array of half-comic, half-epic archetypes from the documentary record of
Kissinger, Mao, Chou Enlai, and the Nixons. Goodman’s style, statuesque but
wry, reads like politicized Wallace Stevens. One aria is a fantasia on "The
Emperor of Ice-Cream," with Pat Nixon, transformed into a poet of American
virtues, proclaiming, "Let the band play on and on; /Let the stand-up comedian /
Finish his act, let Gypsy Rose/Kick off her high-heeled party shoes."
Faced with this intricate text, Adams restrained his own penchant for large
gestures. He took a more neutral tone and reacted to the text line by line. His
demands on singers were sometimes hard, but he turned out to have an
extraordinary knack for vocal writing. His preset style of musical speech—
flexible, irregular melodies, often switching back and forth between duple and
triple rhythm—matched the rise and fall of English speech. For example, in
Nixon’s opening monologue, "News has a kind of mystery," Adams had to set
these potentially unwieldy lines:
And though we spoke quietly
The eyes and ears of history
Caught every gesture
And every word.
Unpacking the images, Adams set the first line three times. The third time, he
stretched the word "quietly" into a gentle melisma—"qui-i-i-i-i-et-ly." The up-anddown arc of the voice is not only a lovely addition to the vocal line but also an
indication of Nixon’s character: he is, at heart, a dreamer, a fantasist. Whether
this trait conforms to the historical Nixon is beside the point: in this opera, he is a
composite politician, a merchant and consumer of American nostalgia. Adams
allows him eloquence, yet remains detached. The minimalist figuration churning
beneath the vocal lines is like a camera trained on a subject.
"Nixon in China" helped set off a fad for operas with contemporary subjects:
Charles Manson, Marilyn Monroe, Harvey Milk, and Rudolph Valentino, among
others, have been set to music. The genre has been given such condescending
labels as "CNN opera" and "docu-opera," but Adams bristles at the idea that
"Nixon" was some sort of trendy exercise. "Anyone who uses these terms," he
said, "just doesn’t begin to understand what opera is about, potentially or
historically." Indeed, Verdi, among other composers, kept as up-to-date with
current events as the censors would allow. With "Nixon," Adams plays a very
sophisticated game; the subject of the opera, to a great extent, is the idea of
political art itself. Much of Act II is taken up with one of Mme. Mao’s totalitarian
ballets, and Adams re-creates it with a transhistorical mix of secondhand pop and
secondhand Wagner. He portrays an antimusical phenomenon in a musical way.
The irony is worthy of Verdi himself.
In 1991, under intense media scrutiny, Adams, Goodman, and Sellars reunited
for a second opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer." This one had a harder time. The
intention was to use the hijacking of the ocean liner Achille Lauro and the murder
of Leon Klinghoffer as the basis for a sort of Middle East Passion or Requiem.
Two problems arose: first, Goodman’s libretto was not as sharply etched as the
one for "Nixon," and, second, the project came so close to current events as to
be singed by them. Sellars wanted to show all the characters, even the
Palestinian terrorists, as flesh-and-blood individuals, but the idea of giving voice
to the murderers of Jews did not sit well with some listeners—particularly since
the American première took place in Brooklyn less than a month after the Crown
Heights riots. Klinghoffer’s daughters said that the opera’s sketches of Jews were
anti-Semitic, failing to understand that the entire point of the piece was to
overcome stereotypes. Perhaps "Klinghoffer" tried to do too much; a forthcoming
film version, being produced for Channel Four in Great Britain, may tell more.
Certainly, the score is a coolly haunting creation. It shows a turn away from
minimalist processes and toward a sort of polyglot lyricism, or "hypermelody,"
which the composer continues to explore.
The reception of "Klinghoffer" still troubles Adams. "At the time, I was so upset. I
couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘Anti-Semitic Opera Opens in Brooklyn’—you
can’t shake that kind of thing," he said. "Not long afterward, plans for other
productions mysteriously folded. I won’t go into details, but I know that some
people were deterred by the so-called ‘controversy,’ which came from a few
critics looking to turn their reviews into op-ed pieces. It may be part of the reason
I haven’t had the inclination to spend another two years working on an opera. It’s
too depressing." Adams shook a little as he said all this, in the quiet of his Brushy
Ridge studio.
The "Klinghoffer" imbroglio was, in a way, a useful experience for Adams. It
showed him the outer limits of the popularity of serious classical music, beyond
which lay the no man’s land of media notoriety—the limbo zone of David Helfgott
and Andrea Bocelli. "Let’s face it, classical music just doesn’t sell," he told me,
regaining his usual equanimity. "I sell more records than most contemporary
composers, and I’m grateful for that, but it’s still a pretty puny number compared
with some records that my label, Nonesuch, puts out. I can’t compete with
‘Buena Vista Social Club.’ I’m not even famous on the level of, you know, Yo-Yo
Ma. But the audience isn’t an inconsiderable one—I’ll just say that measuring it
by pop standards doesn’t do it justice. I listen to what people say to me directly. If
a hundred people say they like a piece of mine, maybe it’ll be a thousand people
in ten years’ time, and the audience will build from there."
Adams is one of the very few American composers who receive a comfortable
income from commissions and royalties. Robert Hurwitz, who has been Adams’s
producer at Nonesuch since 1985, told me that some of the records have sold
upward of fifty thousand copies, which is exceptional for a classical release and
altogether freakish for new music. (The company recently released a de-luxe,
ten-CD boxed set, entitled "The John Adams Earbox.") Musicians of international
stature—Emanuel Ax, Simon Rattle, Gidon Kremer, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and
Kent Nagano among them—have given Adams’s music more than a dutiful onceover. Ax, whose reputation is based on authoritative readings of Beethoven and
Brahms, has gone all over the world with "Century Rolls," the concerto that
Adams wrote for him, and he has also recorded it for Nonesuch.
"It doesn’t look hard at first," Ax told me, examining the piece in preparation for
an all-Adams concert that will take place in Los Angeles in February. "The notes
are relatively sparse on the page. With a lot of twentieth-century works, and even
with a lot of Romantic concertos, such as the Rachmaninoff Third, you’re going
for gestures, for great waves of sound; if you ride the wave from the bottom D to
the top D, it’s all right to schmutz a little in the middle. ‘Century Rolls’ is more like
a Mozart concerto, where if you play a B-flat instead of a B-natural it’s a complete
disaster. Once every note is in place, once every rhythmical cell is in synch, the
jigsaw puzzle is complete, and the picture is fantastic."
Last June, the composer participated in an "American Mavericks" festival, in San
Francisco, at the invitation of Michael Tilson Thomas. Adams, who conducts
about fifteen weeks a year, led the New World Symphony in "Shaker Loops" and
"Grand Pianola Music." It was interesting to see how briskly his sound world
came to life once the musicians had solved a limited number of technical
problems. "Very precise on top, very lyrical underneath," he said, at a rehearsal.
"Off the string," he told the violins, in "Shaker Loops," and as the players
shortened their bowing the music became bright and crisp. In a passage where
most of the strings have to turn their pages at the same time, he asked them to
practice doing it as quietly as possible, so as not to spoil the transcendental
hush. "The New York Philharmonic would have had me for breakfast if I’d asked
them for that," he said afterward.
Over the past decade, as performances of his operas have become mysteriously
scarce, Adams has immersed himself in orchestral music. He wrote a Chamber
Symphony, whose funky bass lines seem to poke fun at Schoenberg’s work of
the same title; a Violin Concerto, whose otherworldly passacaglia slow
movement can stand comparison with the instrumental lamentations of Britten
and Shostakovich; and "Century Rolls," which has hints of Ellington and Jelly Roll
Morton in its easygoing bop and swing. The multiple directions suggested by
these pieces sometimes puzzled Adams’s admirers, who found the Romantic
minimalism of "Harmonielehre" so grippingly likable that they simply wanted to
hear ten more things in the same style. But Adams has resisted the temptation to
repeat himself and often takes pleasure in tweaking his audience.
With "Naïve and Sentimental Music," of 1999, Adams tried his hand at something
like a heroic American symphony. The title alludes to a celebrated essay by
Schiller that contrasts "naïve," or natural, art with the "sentimental," or selfconscious, kind. Adams says, essentially, that he can do both at once. His
control of orchestral resources is stupendous, but the real strength is in the
thematic writing: the work unfolds as an endless forty-five-minute melody. The
theme first shows up as a serpentine aria for flutes and oboes over strumming
harp and guitar; for long stretches, it disappears into a series of orchestral mob
scenes, only to resume without a pause; in the second movement, it mutates into
a slow, sad love song for guitar; and, finally, a fragment of it, run in reverse, is
blasted out by brass instruments in the densely minimalist finale. At once
rigorous and raw, the piece reveals Adams as a supremely confident symphonic
composer. It is strange to remember that he once described himself as an opera
composer who wrote for orchestra in order to fill up his spare time.
Composing is a difficult business, but the payoff can be profound. On December
15th, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Adams witnessed the first performance of "El
Niño," with Kent Nagano conducting. Paris was fairly abuzz over the event, to the
extent that the city is ever abuzz over anything in particular; the composer was
advertised as a purveyor of "flamboyance orchestrale, luxuriance instrumentale,
jubilation rythmique." The audience, an immaculately fashionable one, responded
with a long round of rhythmical clapping, which is the French version of a
standing ovation. There were also a few boos, but a total absence of scandal
would have been discouraging in the city that had famously mixed feelings about
"The Rite of Spring." The press was out in force, and it failed to reach a
consensus. The critic of Libération praised Adams’s "art of polyphony, borrowing
from the Middle Ages as much as from Ligeti." The critic of Le Figaro, however,
asserted that the composer displayed "too many contradictory influences," and
that the result was "vaguely Alzheimer-like."
The next morning, sipping coffee on the Place de la Bastille, Adams was in a
good mood. He had been in Paris for the rehearsals, and his family had come
over for the première; he was about to take his children to the Louvre. "I’m
usually horrified by my pieces when I first hear them," he said, "but this one feels
pretty good. I think I’ve finally learned how to write for voices. The orchestration
didn’t overwhelm them—I finally got that right, after having to make so many
adjustments to ‘Nixon.’ It’s such an astonishing feeling when all these elements
come together—voices, instruments, words, action. It makes me think about
writing for the stage again, terrifying as that is to contemplate. No more grand
opera, though. You end up talking about nothing but the budget. When they were
building Notre-Dame, did someone say, ‘Put up that buttress by next spring, and,
no, you can’t have any more money’?"
"El Niño" looks suspiciously like an opera in disguise. It can be done in concert
form, but for Paris, and for San Francisco next week, Peter Sellars has devised a
multimedia production in which soloists and chorus are joined by dancers and
film sequences. The libretto, which Sellars and Adams created together, draws
on the King James Bible, Gnostic Gospels, Martin Luther, medieval mystery
plays, and a selection of Latin-American poetry on Nativity themes. In the film,
which plays behind the stage, Hispanic actors present a dreamlike allegory of
Jesus’ birth in a Southern California setting. While he was working on the piece,
Adams delved deeply into Hispanic culture and learned Spanish from a teacher
in Berkeley. He now watches Spanish-language television to keep up with South
American news.
"El Niño" is a piece of grand dimensions and gentle details. The plot is advanced
by a neo-medieval trio of countertenors, who function as God’s backup singers.
Dawn Upshaw, in the role of the Virgin Mary, unfurls an indelible new melody for
the familiar words "My soul doth magnify the Lord." Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has
a series of ecstatic Marian rhapsodies of her own; one of them, "Pues mi Dios ha
nacido a penar," is a painstakingly filled-in and embroidered version of the aria
Adams sketched on his computer back in June. Moments of drama land like
shocks: when the chorus thunders, "For with God no thing shall be impossible";
when Willard White, in a convincing impersonation of God himself, sings, "I will
shake the heavens"; when the massacre of the innocents begins over a sinister
vamp of trombones and piano. This Nativity is laced with fear: Mary believes that
her miracle might be taken away, and hurries through the night. The emotional
ambiguity of the work is indicated in the title, which is Spanish for "infant" but also
calls to mind destructive weather.
The model is Handel’s "Messiah," but there is no "Hallelujah Chorus," no climax
of joy. The first part closes with a movement called "The Christmas Star," in
which the star of Bethlehem is represented by a shimmering, intricately
ornamented sequence of G-minor and D-major chords. It is not unlike the brazen
climax of "Grand Pianola Music," but the tone is more sombre, more muted.
When a D sounds low in the orchestra to anchor the harmony, Adams marks it
mezzo forte in the trombones—half loud. The miracle seems to hover at a
distance, just outside our reach. In the finale, a children’s chorus sings in
Spanish of the palm tree that bent down to give Mary refreshment. The work
closes with their small voices and solo guitar. The tune is Adams’s own, but it
sounds as if children had been singing it for hundreds of years. I thought back to
something the composer told me after he related his youthful encounter with
Duke Ellington. "The older I get," he said, "the more committed I am to
recapturing my first impressions of the world."
The music of John Adams, unlike so much classical composition of the last fifty
years, has the immediate power to enchant. When I first heard "Nixon in China,"
fragments of it invaded my head, and they did not leave for weeks. It seems likely
that a century from now audiences will still be fascinated by this opera, and that
some listeners will have to double-check the plot summary in order to remember
who Richard Nixon was. Such is the composer’s slow, posthumously sweet
revenge. "El Niño," too, tugs at the memory. As I walked away from the Place de
la Bastille in the rain, I hummed Adams’s palm-tree song to myself, and it
seemed to me that I had just spent the morning with a man who was never going
to die. _