In the
Shadow of Beethoven: Widmann, Liszt, and Wagner
JÖRG WIDMANN • Con brio, Concert overture for Orchestra (2008)
FRANZ LISZT • Concerto for Piano and
Orchestra no.1 in E-flat majorRICHARD WAGNER • Overture to Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg
RICHARD WAGNER • “Morgendämmerung” from Götterdämmerung
RICHARD WAGNER • “Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt” from Götterdämmerung
RICHARD WAGNER • “Trauermarsch” from Götterdämmerung
RICHARD WAGNER • Prelude to Act I, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg
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| Unveiling of Beethoven monument, Bonn, 1845. As so often, Liszt's doing... |
Before Wagner, before Liszt, before every
other noteworthy nineteenth-century composer save for Chopin, stands and stood Beethoven.
He now stands before Jörg Widmann too, although with the twist that Widmann
also stands between Beethoven and Beethoven. Con brio, Widmann’s 2008 Overture, was commissioned by Mariss
Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to accompany Beethoven’s
Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. It plays intriguingly with the remains of
tonality without lapsing into neo-tonalism. Moreover, it plays with Beethoven’s
tonalities, A major and F major, a third apart, a relationship with distinctly
Beethovenian, also Schubertian, resonances. There is throughout a strong and
yet elusive sense of Beethovenian presence: allusion wins out over quotation;
longing, haunting, perhaps even resistence, over recreation. This is no
pastiche. Audible ‘cuts’, as well as a few instances of extended instrumental
techniques, are perhaps the most audible signals of Berio-like ‘modernity’ in a
temporal sense. What we post-Romantics most associate with Beethoven, symphonic
development, is, it seems, no longer possible. Did not Thomas Mann’s Adrian
Leverkühn, after all, revoke the Ninth Symphony, as a necessary break with the
‘German catastrophe’ that had led him, as composer and as German, and his
country, as cultural and political entity, to the darkest night of its soul?
The road to Leverkühn’s act is in good part
the road of German musical Romanticism, to which we now turn, although we
should recall the problematical nature of ‘Romanticism’ here: a term taken from
literature, it does not quite ‘fit’ music analogously, or at least
contemporaneously, whilst apparently serving it all the better. It was, after
all, Beethoven whom ETA Hoffmann and many other Romantics had most firmly in
mind when considering music and elevating it to the status of most exalted of
all the arts.
Liszt was one of those Romantics; amongst
composers, he perhaps remains still the most underestimated. Some critics, far
less so audiences, seem jealously unable to accept that the greatest pianist in
history could also have been a great composer, let alone, in a very modern
sense, a great sex symbol; they seem unable to appreciate that Liszt, who
turned his back on the celebrity and fortune of a world-touring piano
recitalist to concentrate upon composition, used his virtuosity, at least in
his finest works, to defeat ‘mere’ virtuosity, not to enthrone it. He might, as
a nineteenth-century performer, have taken his leave from Paganini’s devilry,
but Liszt’s Transcendental Studies
have more musical interest in a few
bars than all of the violinist’s Caprices; likewise Liszt’s piano concertos
vis-à-vis the concertos of Paganini, or indeed those of ‘mere’ piano virtuosi.
The First Piano Concerto was nevertheless
written for Liszt to perform in the first instance, its 1855 Weimar premiere –
Liszt, in order to work with an orchestra, had ‘retreated’ from the bourgeois
marketplace into court employment – conducted by Berlioz. It suggests, both in
construction and in the ‘transcendental’ calls made upon the pianist, that, to
quote the celebrated motto of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, ‘Res
severa est verum gaudium’: true pleasure is a serious thing. Such might in many
respects have been the motto too of Liszt, ever conscious of Beethoven’s ghost,
ever unable to ignore it, even had he wished. In 1823, the composer was said to
have given the twelve-year old Wunderkind a kiss of consecration (Weihekuss).) Beethoven’s was a mantle he must grasp with new means, or perhaps, in
Beckettian fashion, continually fail better in his attempt to grasp it. As
Liszt put it, new wine – whether that occasioned by new instruments, new
instrumental techniques, or different musical material – demanded new bottles.
That
meant, above all else, formally. Liszt’s fondness not only for one-movement
structures which contained within them ‘traditional’ multi-movement form was
partly inspired by what he and many Romantics saw, rightly or wrongly, as
Beethoven’s dissolution of Classical forms and still more so by Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy;
however, he was never one to rest content, ensuring that the formal dynamism of
each work varied according to its material, or at least attempted to do so. The
four short ‘movements’ resemble in some ways those of Beethoven – although he
would never have written a four-movement concerto
– but their interconnection is crucial. Themes are transformed, one of Liszt’s
greatest legacies to the twentieth century, the technique fascinating serial composers
beyond Schoenberg, at least as far as Boulez, so that what one hears initially
as contrasting lays claim also to unity. The transformation and combination of
all the work’s principal themes in the final Allegro marziale animato is
no simple matter of recollection, but above all of binding together, within a
twenty-minute span, a plethora of musical material – retrospectively or
otherwise. Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony is but a stone’s throw away.
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| First edition, Vienna: Charles Haslinger |
Apparent
lack of chamber music in Liszt’s output is only apparent, for, as with Wagner,
there is a great deal of chamber music in his orchestral writing; such, in one
respect, is the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Listen, for instance, to the duet for piano and clarinet in the opening Allegro maestoso of
the writing for string quartet in the third section. The ludicrous, malicious
claim by Joseph Joachim – he, Clara Schumann, and Brahms were adamant that
Liszt was in no way an heir to Beethoven, and behaved quite appallingly to him
– that Joseph Raff had orchestrated the piece is utterly false. There are many
felicities and originalities of orchestration that we now think of as
quintessentially Lisztian, the scherzo’s opening use of the triangle as solo
instrument only the most celebrated. Liszt was equally concerned that
orchestral blend and rhythm should match that of the soloist. He wrote to
Alfred Jaëll that he should only consider performing the concerto after two or
three ‘through rehearsals. … In Berlin [a performance by Hans von Bülow] there
was still a little hesitancy in the attack of the woodwind instruments, which
must function like trumpets at this moment, in a military style,
and not like the national guard, helter-skelter!’ Technological, technical, and
musical developments were for him, as for Wagner, as for Widmann, as for
Beethoven, at least in his imagination’s ear, as one. Even that triangle solo
must use an instrument ‘not of too base extraction’ and have ‘not too vulgar a
vibration’. The triangle player, then, must too be a virtuoso – to defeat mere
virtuosity.
Wagner
was no piano virtuoso, although his deficiencies as a pianist and indeed as a
composer of piano music have been exaggerated. Where he unleashed his
virtuosity, again to defeat the ‘mere’ virtuosity of Parisian grand opéra
was, above all, still more so than onstage, in the opera orchestra, the ‘Greek
Chorus’, as he put it, of his music dramas: commenting, foretelling,
precipitating, contradicting, recollecting, reflecting. Wagner wanted to
combine the dramatic means of the greatest of spoken drama, above all Aeschylus
and Shakespeare, with the symphonic achievement of Beethoven, whose works, he
believed, at least for some time, had taken purely instrumental music as far as
it could go. Both music and drama now needed each other. That is, perhaps, less
so for the relatively traditional Tannhäuser
Overture, although the composer’s subsequent
musico-dramatic theorising would often be as much based upon what he had
written as upon what he intended to write. Liszt relished transcribing for
piano – extremely faithfully, as in the case of Beethoven’s symphonies too – the
Overture, and it is remarkable how little is lost. Nevertheless, Wagner’s
orchestral writing retains its own allure and majesty, never more so than in
the wind. The sturdy, moral, ‘German’ Pilgrim’s Chorus, assailed by the
disintegrative, perhaps Parisian tendencies – timbral, harmonic, frankly sexual
– of the Venusberg, seems to emerge victorious, but do the brass, does the
diatonicism, protest too much? Even in concert, we are both satisfied and longing
for more: the sign of a successful Overture.
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| Joseph Tichatschek (Tannhäuser) and Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Venus); premiere, also 1845 |
The extracts from Götterdämmerung
– ‘bleeding chunks’, in Donald Tovey’s phrase – tell the story of the hero, at
least his story in this concluding Ring drama, in miniature. We are
first presented with ‘Dawn’ – in Wagner, time, weather, everything, are to be
understood materially and metaphysically – on Brünnhilde’s rock. Siegfried has
braved the fire, won Brünnhilde, and now must go back into the world ‘to new
deeds’; but first, an evocation of that glorious first morning together. His
Rhine Journey sends him out into the world, as he must, and as even Brünnhilde,
who tragically believes the ring to betoken her marriage to the freest of
heroes, recognises, indeed bids him. Where, in the first part of the Ring,
Das Rheingold,
the Rhine music had sounded relatively uncomplicated, home to the Rhinemaidens,
now the contrapuntal complexity of Wagner’s late music – Bach increasingly a
rival to Beethoven – is well suited to the greater complexity of the hero’s
descent into the world of ‘civilisation’, the realm of the Gibichungs, in
which, through Hagen’s machinations, he will find betrayal and death. Political
modernity, as Wagner, student of Hegel knew, was as complex as the musical
modernity he knew as student of Beethoven. So it is, still more so, in
Siegfried’s Funeral March, which dramatically (in every sense) extends Liszt’s
method in his own revolutionary tribute, the symphonic poem, Héroïde funèbre.
In Götterdämmerung, the weight of memory, the
outpouring, combination, in some cases culmination, of motifs is of a different
order. Thomas Mann summarised Wagner’s genealogical method here as ‘an overwhelming celebration of memory and
mind, from recalling ‘the longing questions of the boy [Siegfried] about his
mother’ to the present ‘earth-shakings and thunderings, with the body
borne high on its bier’.
The
programme ends not, however, with the myth of Siegfried’s obsequies, but with
the ‘real-world’ comedy of Wagner’s maturity. In the opening Prelude to Die Meistersinger, we hear five of the work’s principal motifs
adumbrated, three of them combined in brazen tour de force contrapuntal mastery at the moment of return to the
work’s deceptively wholesome C major tonality. That moment is humorously
signalled by the triangle: a recollection of Tannhäuser’s Overture or Liszt’s concerto? It need not be
either/or. Wagner’s counterpoint, like his reckless hero, Walther von Stolzing,
disregards tradition, themes yoked together as much out of ‘dramatic’ as what
he derided as ‘purely musical’ necessity. Sometimes, the better to honour
Beethoven (or Bach), it is necessary to disregard him.
