This is how a festival should
open: world-class performance – a performance, I should wager, that has never
been bettered – of a monument of the piano literature, more often spoken of
than heard, at least in its entirety. Who better to perform Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux than Pierre-Laurent
Aimard? As previously implied, no one. If ever there were royal lineage, it
must be his: a direct link both to Messiaen and to Boulez, at one of whose
Domaine musical concerts in 1959 Yvonne Loriod gave the premiere of this one
collection, seven books, thirteen pieces, each of the latter bearing the name
of a bird but that name providing the gateway to a French province. ‘Chaque pièce,’ in Messiaen’s words, wrote, ‘est écrite en l'honneur
d'une province française. Elle porte en titre le nom de l'oiseau-type de la région
choisie. Il n'est pas seul: ses voisins d'habitat l'entourent et chantent aussi
… – son paysage, les heures du jour et de la nuit qui changent ce paysage, sont
également présents, avec leurs couleurs, leur températures, la magie de leurs
parfums.’ And so it was in practice: no need to concentrate on lineage, for
this was a performance
for the here and now, in which those regions, landscapes, times of day and
night, colours, temperatures, and perfumes presented themselves within this
‘catalogue’, surely as theological as natural-historical. As ever in Messiaen
as in Christianity worthy of the name, the systematic and the mystical go hand
in hand. In truth, as in any performance, different listeners would take
different things from it. It is difficult, however, to imagine anyone doubting
its commitment, distinction, and enlightenment.
Aimard performed the work in
three sections: Books I-III, Book IV (with just a single piece, no.7, ‘La
Rousserolle effarvatte’), and Books V-VII, highlighting the symmetry of the
whole (not so exact as some might claim, but what is?) and the special quality
of that reed warbler and its companions’ journey from midnight through an
entire day’s cycle and on to the following day’s three o’clock in the morning. One
thing that struck me most strongly of all during that summit of the recital was
the different character of sound Aimard elicited from different registers of
his piano: almost organ-like (apt for Messiaen!) but also, somehow, reminiscent
of the capabilities of earlier pianos, without loss of the advantages of the
modern instrument. Quite how he accomplished that remained obscure, at least to
me: pedals helped, touch too of course, but beyond that…? Likewise the
different colours one heard within single chords, even within rests and fermatas,
in some respects the most dramatically pregnant sections of whole. Another mystery.
Strikingly Boulezian grand gestures to the middle of the night assisted with
the sense of ‘parfum’, ‘couleur’, ‘températures’, and much else. A liturgical
sense of time’s passing, as well as play with time, both in work and
performance, proved as fascinating as anything of that ilk in Wagner.
There, as elsewhere, the
character of different varieties of material but also the confrontation between
them seemed to be at the heart of the drama that unfolded. The very opening of
the first piece, ‘Le Chocard des Alpes’, was declamatory, even implacable,
chords (literally colours, to a synaesthete such as Messiaen) confronting each
other in unmistakeably 1950s-fashion, not unlike Aimard’s extraordinary way
with Bach’s Art of Fugue, which I
should probably try to hear again. The host of birds, their songs, those songs’
implications and connections, even in that first piece, set up patterns of
contrast and sequence, of comparison and surprise, that would never be
replicated, but certainly built upon. One passage there even suggested Jacob’s
Ladder to me, as if the birds – humans too – were making their way to the
celestial city itself. If so, it were a thoroughly constructed city, no mere
mirage, Rameau as significant a predecessor as Debussy (well, not far off,
anyway). There were certainly Debussyan castle ramparts to be discerned, not a
million miles from Allemonde, later in that first book, alongside Mussorgskian
sounds that would surely have enchanted and inspired both composers. Indeed,
time and again, I heard Boris Godunov
in downward-shifting harmonies – and their wordless dramatic import – in ‘L’Alouette
lulu’, prior to the first interval.
In revelation of relationships
between pitch and duration, work and performance alike inevitably recalled some
of Messiaen’s pupils: not only Boulez, but perhaps more intriguingly,
Stockhausen too. It is surely no coincidence that Aimard has recently been
performing the latter’s Klavierstücke
across Europe. (I heard him do so twice, in Berlin
and in London.)
Resonance, harmony, rhythm, everything came together in a totality that was yet
quite different from that of those Messiaen instructed. Repeated chords in ‘L’Alouette
calandrelle’, for instance, told as much as any in Stockhausen.There was still starker simplicity too, in
the way a final phrase in more than one of the pieces could float like
plainsong: complete and yet also implicitly bidding and referring to more, to
something beyond. We heard, felt, were vouchsafed divine magnificence as well
as avian ecstasy. How, moreover, a captivating diminuendo to the close could
hypnotise, as seductively, humanly ‘poetic’ as anything in the repertoire. Ultimately,
mystery was renewed, its boundaries dissolved even as work and performances
revealed its workings.
Schoenberg, Nono and Beethoven:
three composers and five works present a coherent programme that denies, even
scorns, sentimental distinction between emotion and intellect. Dialectics of the
conscious and unconscious, of struggle and serenity play out within and
between, leading us not only back but also forward to Beethoven. All these
works, moreover, have classic Pollini performances and recordings to their
name. That does not mean we should know what to expect: both in themselves and
in combination, there will always remain more to be said, played, and heard.
Illogic
of the Unconscious
In 1908, Schoenberg had written
his Second String Quartet op. 10, first freely breathing Stefan George’s ‘air
of another planet’ – or what we, Schoenberg’s dislike notwithstanding, have
come to know as ‘free atonality’. The following year proved a veritable Wunderjahr, the Drei Klavierstucke, op.11,initiating
a white-heat outpouring of music: Das
Buch der hängenden Gärten op. 15, the Fünf
Orchesterstücke op. 16 and Schoenberg’s first completed opera, Erwartung op. 17 quickly followed.
Brahms’s ghost often looms large
in Schoenberg’s piano writing – and not only in his piano writing; the
instrument had never really been Schoenberg’s ‘own’. By contrast, however, with
Schoenberg’s earlier, (then) unpublished piano pieces, ‘influence’ had now been
thoroughly absorbed. Crashing Romantic chords, liable to fragment horizontally
and vertically at any moment, are part of the picture; so are remnants of the
idea, even the form, of Brahms’s late piano works: ‘pieces’, intermezzos,
rhapsodies and so on. The first piece’s ternary form (ABA) invites comparison with
Brahms, as do aspects of motivic progression, though any Classicism is swiftly
and, later, savagely eroded. Energy lies in a very 1909 (for Schoenberg) state
of permanent flux, form and tonality dynamically annihilated almost before it
can come into being: Mephistophelian or Lisztian, we might say with equal
justice. That ‘almost’, though, remains.
Arnold Schönberg Center
D minor, always a favourite ‘Second
Viennese School’ key, haunts the left-hand, minor-third (D–F) ostinato of the
second piece, playing with thirds itself a favourite procedure of Brahms. It is
nonetheless a ghost suspended and, in the third, flayed alive. ‘For a human
being’, Schoenberg wrote to Busoni in 1909, ‘it is impossible to feel but one
sensation at a time. One has thousands at once. […T]his variegation, this
illogicality […] set forth by a soaring wave of blood, by some sense- or
nerve-reaction, this I should like to have in my music.’ Schoenberg here comes
close to that very ‘expression of feeling […] which connects us with our
unconscious’. Ruthless deletion of all hints of repetition in manuscript emendations
had him come closer still
Distilled
Drama
Schoenberg’s musical thought,
then, was ever dialectical, without that precluding great variety of
expression, whether within and between works. In Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op.19, we hear Schoenberg at close to
his most aphoristic, each piece of a brevity courting comparison with Webern.
That, however, is the only point truly held in common – and places excessive
emphasis on duration. Beethoven’s late bagatellesperhaps offer more meaningful kinship: apparently simpler than
much of his piano writing in their distillation of drama, expression and
technique, yet at least as enigmatic as the sonatas. The hyper-expressivity of
op. 11 is taken less to its logical – recall Schoenberg’s insistence on illogic
– than to another, different conclusion. A line, a harmony, a poetic suggestion
is voiced in purest essence: continuation of and escape from Schoenberg’s earlier self. Preoccupation with
intervallic relationships characterizes many of these utterances, heard as if
spoken epigrams, rich in both Brahmsian homage and serial anticipation. Obstinacy
of the repeated major third (G–B) in the second piece is both generative of
conflict and yet serenely unchallenged by it. Violence in the fourth likewise recalls
op.11, yet stands also beyond that invitation to the abyss, on the cusp of
Schoenberg’s later neoclassicism. In the final piece, inspired by the bells of
Mahler’s funeral, we feel the graveyard’s chill breath: ‘wie ein Hauch’. Simultaneity
of subsidence and climax offers further ‘nerve-reaction’ and an unusual degree
of final peace.
Suffering
Serenity
Such serenity provides both starting point and goal for the poetic idea of
Luigi Nono’s 1976 …sofferte onde serene….
The waves are Venetian, so too is the tolling of bells, almost as if transposed
from the Vienna of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6. Heard, felt and answered from
Nono’s home on the Giudecca, those sounds seem, as with Schoenberg’s, not only
to say farewell to earlier, angrier compositional and aesthetic tendencies –
tendencies that had culminated for Nono in the high-watermark of his
politically committed art, the opera Al
gran sole carico d’amore – but also to sustain them in distillation, in
further development. ‘I could say’, Nono remarked, ‘as Schoenberg did, that, at
the conclusion of each work, I wish more than ever to breathe the air of new
planets’. It also continued Nono’s artistic collaboration with Pollini,
initiated by Como un ola de fuerza y luz
(1971–2), although the two leftist musicians had known each other since the
mid-1960s. …sofferte onde serene… displayed,
as Nono averred, a reduction in the multiplicity of musical material: a new
path taken following a period of compositional silence.
Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono, Maurizio Pollini
That apparent simplification in
itself inspired further ‘waves’ – lagoonal and sonic – in collaboration
enshrined at the work’s heart, Nono’s purpose amplification rather than counterpoint.
Dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini, it operates on two acoustic planes:
Pollini live and on tape. They merge, realized in the air through artistry of
sound direction – first Nono himself; tonight, André Richard. Vibrations,
shadows and resonances sustain and transform memories of loss suffered by
composer and pianist. Ghosts of other sounds and works in Pollini’s repertoire
are honoured and transformed. (Late, Venetian-themed works by Liszt, La lugubre gondola and R.W. Venezia,were performed at the 1977 premiere.) The moment of Schoenbergian
hyper-expressivity – sometimes stark, sometimes on the edge of audibility,
sometimes even falling into silence –compels active listening. Nono’s politics
have not drowned; they are revealed anew in the waters. So as not to confuse
the political ‘provocations’ for earlier works with their substance, we must
listen, suffering to break musical silence as the composer did, inspired by his
pianist and friend as much as by the instrument. Counterpoint and conflict seem
conspicuous by their absence, certainly by comparison to Nono’s preceding
works. Whether we feel that absence as an integral aspect of the work is an impossible
yet necessary question.
Fracture
and enigma
Beethoven’s final two piano
sonatas, opp.110 and 111, foreshadow – or in this programme, echo – the
co-dependent anger and serenity of Schoenberg’s piano pieces; we might also hear
them in this context heroically responding to, retrospectively inciting, the
kindred humanism of Nono’s suffering waves. There are dialectics aplenty. Furious
counterpoint already strains at the bounds of tonality, even the bounds of the
sonata principle. By contrast, in apparently necessary response, we find music of
a doubtless illusory simplicity that comes just as close to Beethovenian rage to
defining our notions of the Romantic sublime.
The A-flat major sonata, though in
three movements, hardly conforms to Classical expectations, the first two far
shorter together than the expansive, complex finale. The serene first movement’s
songfulness extends even to typically ‘late’ trills. It is marked sanft – probably at Beethoven’s
dictation, for the manuscript reveals another hand – in an attempt to render con amabilità into the language not only of Goethe but also of
Romantics such as Novalis. For
Donald Tovey, that did not ‘mean “soft” but, as nearly as may be, “gentle” in
the most ethical sense of the word.’ A sonata form that seems almost to
preclude conflict, yet cannot quite, offers in its way as great a challenge as
more overtly ‘heroic’ struggle. In its final bars, a prominent third
interval, C to A-flat, prepares the way for re-harmonised restatement in the
second movement’s new key of F minor. A scherzo in all but name, this flash of
gruff, humorous brilliance proves once more, like its composer, very much its
own beast, resistant to categories that would pin down rather than liberate. It
culminates in a coda of sforzando cries
and whispered intimacies that here may recall Schoenberg.
Highly
expressive instrumental recitative prepares the way for the finale’s Klagender Gesang (‘lamenting
song’), opening out a chord of A-flat minor as if a musical version
of the Romanticism’s proverbial blue flower against a wintry landscape. Beethoven
alternates between arioso of great sadness and fugue in constructive chain of
fourths. The latter emerges in almost conciliatory fashion, in turn rendering the
arioso’s Neapolitan-hued return all the greater in tragedy. Hope is restored by
fugue-in-inversion, so confident in its play as to tempt one to consider it
divine, beyond those mere mortals who must listen and – perhaps – even perform
it. Una corda pedal extends a twin
sense of mystery and certainty: the realm, perhaps, of religious faith.Through enigmas and fractures alike, Beethoven’s
humanity shines through in all its contrapuntal – and other – obstinacy. Perhaps
there is something, then, of the still later Missa solemnis to Beethoven’s plan. Bach’s lessons are Romanticised
in music defiantly strange and strangely defiant, played out in a tonal arena
that can only make sense, and then only just, in the age of the sonata.
Exorcising
the daemon
The C minor sonata stands in two,
highly contrasted movements, in tonic minor and tonic major respectively,
symbolic in themselves of struggle and reconciliation. The
diminished seventh chord, as in Beethoven’s own C minor Pathétique Sonata (op.13) and Fifth Symphony, offers both vertical
and horizontal impetus from the opening melodic interval onwards: a lesson well
learned later by Wagner, leading to the threshold of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke. Fugal methods again feature
strongly, heightening the sonata form struggle. The exposition’s move to the
submediant, to A-flat major, rather than to the expected relative major,
E-flat, helps prepare the surprise, hushed tierce
di Picardie conclusion in C major, presaging the finale’s tonality.
It is a set of
variations on a hymn-like ‘Arietta’, caught in the balance and dialectic – no
more than with Mozart is this a case of either/or – between sublime simplicity
and necessary complexity. Beethoven’s metrical shifts can hardly fail to
register, nowhere more so than in the celebrated ‘boogie-woogie’ variation – in
reality, nothing of the sort. Nevertheless, harmonic
rhythm, as always with Beethoven, proves the true engine of progress. Asked by
Anton Schindler why he had written no traditional third movement, Beethoven,
should we trust his interlocutor’s account, contemptuously responded that there
had been no time to do so. For there can be no doubting the transcending
finality of these variations: nor the profound quality of resolution Beethoven
here offers to the violent conflicts enunciated in the preceding Allegro. White-key C major, possessed
once more of but a very few inflections, spins a trilling gossamer path towards
a quietly intoned, serenely unanswerable Amen. This, then, is truly music that breathes
the air of another planet.
(This essay was originally published in a 2019 Salzburg Festival programme for a recital by Maurizio Pollini.)
Openness takes many forms,
musical and otherwise, and often lies in the eye or ear of the beholder or
listener, not to mention particular decisions taken by performers. So too do
its dialectical opposites. The music of both Berio and Mahler offers, as we
shall hear, cases in point.
Elaboration
and Transformation
Berio’s Voci, for viola and two instrumental groups, is subtitled ‘Folk
Songs II’, immediately suggesting lineage with Berio’s 1964 cycle of Folk Songs, written for Cathy Berberian.
There, folk and other songs are arranged, first for small ensemble, later, in
1973, for large orchestra, opening with viola, encouraged to play ‘like a
wistful country dance fiddler’. Voci,
continuing the practice of ‘return’ at roughly ten-year intervals, was composed
in 1984, for the Sicilian viola player Aldo Bennici, who provided Berio with
the work’s ‘original’ musical material: ‘songs of work and love, lullabies and
“street cries” from different parts of Sicily’.
This time, however, Berio hoped,
as he put it, ‘to contribute to the enhancement of a more profound interest in
the Sicilian folklore which, along with that of Sardinia, is certainly the
richest, most complex and incandescent of our Mediterranean culture’. Echoing
and extending the ideas of friends such as Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, Berio
sought an ‘act of transcription (like that of translation)’, that would ‘imply
three different conditions’:
The identification of the
composer with the original musical text, the turning of the text into a pretext
for analytical experimentation and, finally, the overpowering of the text, its
deconstruction and its philological “abuse”. I believe that an ideal situation
occurs only when the three conditions come to blend and co-exist. Only then may
transcription become a truly creative, constructive act.
Verbal and musical narrative
alike are endless, layered, endlessly layered processes.
Not that this is all ‘meta’ in
quality. The sounds, sights, even the smells and spices of Sicily and the
Mediterranean world surrounding it, come before our ears. Physicality and
performance are intimately intertwined. Bells and violas – the latter both as
soloist and in the second group – inaugurate a typical musico-theatrical
display, the opening solo line suggesting both ‘folk music’ and our
aestheticized ‘concert’ versions thereof – Berio rarely deals in the either/or.
If we may speak at all of what Voci
‘is’, though, it is no showpiece. It seems rather to permit folk material to go
where it will, for us as listeners to hear it as we will – or as it wills.
‘Traditional’ accompaniments come and go, sometimes explicit, sometimes
suggested, ever ‘transcribed’.
This is emphatically not the
world of Folk Songs in its first
incarnation. The viola here is the singer, but more than that: even, at a
pinch, the singer-songwriter. Songs, cries, colours, memories, and
anticipations thereof, are material for composition, as Diabelli’s ‘cobbler’s
patch’ waltz is for Beethoven’s set of variations. If Berio and his viola alter
ego seem to respect the mood of the ‘originals’ more than the haughtily
contemptuous Beethoven, their fidelity nonetheless lies in infidelity: like a
Liszt at the piano or a director on stage. In the manner of Berio’s series of Chemins for solo instrument and
orchestra, where, to cite the composer, ‘I quote, translate, expand and
transcribe my Sequenzas for solo instrument’, those Chemins also proving the Sequenzas’ bestanalyses,
material is further analysed, developed, played with, elaborated. We could even say that Berio’s Folk Songs, as well as Sicily’s
folksongs are here, in the composer’s fullest sense, transcribed. ‘Why this
insistence on elaborating and transforming again the same material?’, Berio
once asked, again with reference to his Chemins,
fellow-travellers on the way, as it were:
It is, maybe, a tribute to the
belief that a thing done is never finished. Even the “completed” work is the
ritual and the commentary of something which preceded it, of something which will
follow it, as a question that does not provoke an answer but a commentary, and
another question.
Humanistic
Drama
There is existing music to be
found in Mahler’s First Symphony too; there is also music that might be
imagined to have existed previously yet has actually been ‘fully’ composed. It
is no transcription in the usual sense, but in the present context, one of the
many ways in which we might hear it might involve the elaboration and
transformation of which Berio speaks – and, more to the point, which he puts
into practice. Mahler’s music was certainly of great interest to the Italian
composer, whether in his 1987 orchestration of Six Early Songs or the underlay
to the third movement of Sinfonia
provided by the Scherzo to Mahler’s Second Symphony. Moreover, just as Sicily
is only partly – very partially – ‘Italian’, far better understood as
Mediterranean, Mahler’s mitteleuropäisch
material and musical world likewise confound easy categorization of
nationality, creed, or anything else. Both composers, both works, are synthetic
and, yes, open in their approach to original material and to its development.
Bearing that lightly in mind, we
might hear the opening of the first movement both with hindsight and without,
aware of the complexity of the relationship between artworks and history, as
fruitful in performance as in analysis. To quote the doyen of Mahler scholars,
Henry-Louis de La Grange, ‘few composers have succeeded in evoking so
poetically and with such simple means the romantic magic of nature’s awakening,
its birdsong, legendary hunting horns and distant fanfares’. This music, marked
‘slow, dragging’ and ‘like a sound of Nature’ (Naturlaut), seems perhaps less to drag, more to stand in a state of
suspended animation. It will return, as if an adult, even Freudian, memory of
Mahler’s eternal childhood, a memory of eternal magic and Wunderhorn Romanticism, both of which, in Berio’s sense, are
‘transcribed’ here. Mahler’s own early cantata, Das klagende Lied (1878–80, though unperformed until 1901, and then
in substantially revised form), as well as other early compositions, such as
the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1883–5)
seem both to pave the way and to find fulfilment.
This introduction moves, like Don Giovanni or Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony, from D minor to D major, from glistening harmonics that seem already
to steal from Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder
music of the future, to rambunctious ‘transcription’ of the second of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Yet,
unlike those Mozart and Beethoven works, models for a Romantic journey from
darkness to light, Mahler’s Naturlaut
in a forest-world of trees and birds – listen for the clarinet cuckoo – is prior
to, or beyond, our experience: a Caspar David Friedrich landscape, without its
solitary human hero. Harmonics were not, however, part of Mahler’s initial
conception, but rather a revision, such as he always made, in the light of
performance: in this case, following the 1889 Budapest premiere, at which, he
wrote, the music had ‘sounded far too substantial for the shimmering and
glimmering of the air I had in mind’. Alienation from nature required, in the
first place, alienation from society – and, of course, an astounding technical
command of harmony, orchestral colour and blend, pulse (or lack thereof), and
space, so that fanfares from without can register without truly disturbing.
The first movement ‘proper’, at
least to conventional sonata-form understanding, is perhaps surprisingly focussed
upon this single and singular material; as Mozart before him, Mahler knows very
well when something approaching monothematicism will counter trademark melodic
profusion. We are now in the human world, that human presence called forth, in
Julian Johnson’s words, ‘literally […] from the absence defined by the
introduction’. Contrast between this block – in an almost Brucknerian sense –
of material and that of the introduction is more the driving force of this
movement than ‘traditional’ symphonism, if indeed such a thing still existed.
In its initial five-movement form – a serenading ‘Blumine’ second movement,
rediscovered by Donald Mitchell in 1966, was eventually discarded in the light
of harsh criticism – Mahler spoke of a ‘symphonic poem’ and, in cumbersome
nomenclature of Wagnerian proportions, a ‘tone poem in form of a symphony’.
Such apparent hybrids were very much the province of Wagner’s ‘New German’ confrères Berlioz and Liszt too, yet
very much opposed by self-appointed guardians of the Classical flame such as
Eduard Hanslick (allegedly on behalf of Brahms). Perhaps it was as well, then,
that the Symphony did not reach Vienna until 1900, four years after initial
conversion into four movements.
The A major second movement is a
Ländler, never quite as expected, the Mahlerian subject, whoever that may be,
alienated already, though we know not yet – shall we ever? – from what.
Material from his early song ‘Hans und Grethe’, later orchestrated by Berio, is
‘transcribed’, glorying in rusticity and/or its parody. As traditional for a
scherzo, whether in duple, triple (as here) or any other metre, the Trio
relaxes; what Mahler would instinctively have applied to Mozart or Beethoven is
here written in and thus slightly exaggerated: ‘recht gemächlich’ (rather
leisurely). We often, rightly, tend to think of Bruckner and Mahler as mutually
opposed, not least given their radically different approaches to orchestration.
Here, once again, however, there is a sign of ‘Austrian’ kinship, extending
back, at least as far as Schubert.
A ghostly D minor version of the
folksong ‘Bruder Martin’ (perhaps more widely known as ‘Frère Jacques’) takes
the woodland wonder of Mendelssohn’s Ein
Sommernachtstraum funeral march to disconcerting, downright bizarre
extremes. Solo double bass, muted, straining at the top of its register, initiates
a canonic processional, first involving other bass instruments (bassoon, cellos
and tuba), supplemented by a growing throng, until rudely interrupted by a
Bohemian klezmer band to rival anything ‘transcribed’ by Berio. Mahler’s craft
is anything but vulgar; this is knowing depiction, a contest of material and of
worlds, complicated by another unprepared move to G major, now for the
Schubertian linden tree of another Gesellen
song. The deathly marionettes, the bitter irony, the clashes and vistas of later
Mahler symphonies: all are here in more than embryo in this astonishing
movement.
The Finale explodes onto the
scene, not unlike the Symphony as a whole. Most of the material with which
Mahler will construct the battle to come is heard in quick succession, as if
newly emboldened characters drawn from the observers of that march (a snatch
from absent ‘Blumine’ included). D major is here to triumph, but not quite yet.
A notably ‘feminine’, even Tchaikovsky-like second theme in D flat major, ‘sehr
gesangvoll’ (very songful), has a ‘mystical stillness’ to its lengthy violin
cantilena that, as De La Grange points out, ‘is also intensely Mahlerian’.
Distance from the opening material is retrospectively sanctioned by exclusion
from the development until its close, heralding a recapitulation that has
mystified many, some even decrying empty repetition. Listen, however, to this
violent, ultimately humanistic drama – having left behind the first movement
introduction forever – with the ‘New German School’ in mind, and you will hear
an unabashed symphonic drama, albeit not as the world yet knew it.
(This essay was first published in a 2019 Salzburg Festival programme for performances by Antoine Tamestit, the ORF RSO Vienna, and Jonathan Nott.)
To view the relationship between Italian and German music as
the fundamental driving force of modern Western musical history would be a
gross oversimplification. However, in Salzburg of all places, ‘the Rome of the
North’, it is a temptation that might be forgiven. It was here, after all, not
long after the original 1608 premiere, that Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo
received its first performances outside Italy, at more or less the same time as
the foundation stone was laid for the new Cathedral (in 1614). Salzburg’s
crucial importance as a staging post for the northward progress of the Italian
Baroque, architectural and musical, renders it an especially apt home for this
concert, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Kollegienkirche, built between
1694 and 1707, in turn an especially apt venue, steeped in the tradition of
Francesco Borromini and Gianlorenzo Bernini. Yet, just as we should rightly
cavil at speaking of the Salzburg of the 17th or 18th centuries as ‘Austrian’ –
‘German’ is closer to the mark, if still misleading – so should we be wary of
straightforwardly ascribing ‘Italian’ status to the southern culture from which
many of its treasures had sprung.
Kollegienkirche, this summer
Gesualdo’s Pardon
Stepping back another century, we might ask how meaningful it
is to call Carlo Gesualdo an ‘Italian’ composer. It is perhaps inevitable that
we should do so with hindsight. So long as we are clear that Renaissance Italy
had little conception of nationhood comparable to our own, it will do no harm.
Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, Gesualdo came from the south, from the
Kingdom of Naples, although he also spent time in Ferrara and Rome. By the time
Gesualdo came to write his late Tenebrae Responsories, however, he was largely
a recluse, confined to his estate in ‘melancholy’. It was Gesualdo’s uncle,
Cardinal Carlo (St Charles) Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, who had suggested in
Gesualdo’s youth that sacred music might be written in a less conservative,
more madrigalian fashion. Borromeo increasingly became an object of veneration
for Gesualdo. A 1609 altarpiece commissioned from Giovanni Balducci for the
Capuchin church on the Gesualdo estate, Santa Maria delle Grazie, brings
together in sacra conversazione Borromeo (canonized the following year),
Gesualdo, his second wife Leonora and their dead son’s purified soul. 1611 saw
publication of his Tenebrae Responsories, written with private performance in
mind beneath that image: Il perdono di Gesualdo.
There is something especially intimate to these 27
motets, from which we shall hear but four: intimate in their relative
emotionalism, far more readily associated with single motets than with such
collections. Counter-Reformation Italy heard many such settings of combined
offices of Matins and Lauds for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday:
the ‘triduum sacrum’, heard in the dark shadow, ‘in tenebris’, of their
preceding evenings. Laden with grief, Gesualdo’s expression –
anachronistically, ‘expressionism’ – is less exaggerated in these six-voice
settings than in his more overtly experimental madrigals, yet perhaps more
distilled, more integrated, such has often tended to be the way with music for
the church. It is difficult, however, and perhaps impossible, even undesirable,
to dissociate the travails of Gesualdo’s life and suffering entirely from their
style and content. Suffering, betrayal, agony here seem both present and
sublimated: a musical act of contrition to accompany, even to intensify, the
scene in the altarpiece above.
Gesualdo Beyond the Grave
Varieties of Gesualdo’s notoriety, be it autobiographical or
musical, have by now been rendered more or less indistinguishable. Aristocratic
licence – Gesualdo had no need of a patron – helps provide some connection for the
composer perhaps still known best for having murdered his first wife and her
lover in flagrante. We should probably concede that, whether we like it
or not, our Gesualdo, as man, composer, or both, is in many ways a different
figure from the Gesualdo of his own time. There is nothing wrong with that; we
might speak similarly of any artist of the past, from Machaut to Webern and
beyond. At any rate, the Gesualdo of scandals personal and artistic has
inspired many composers since his 20th-century rediscovery: among them, Peter
Warlock, Igor Stravinsky, Peter Maxwell Davies, Alfred Schnittke, Salvatore
Sciarrino, Georg Friedrich Haas and Hilda Parades. Rihm’s Seven Passion
Texts (2001–6, later published with instrumental interludes as Vigilia)
takes its place in this tradition: knowing, intentional response to Gesualdo’s
responsories, likewise for six voices.
Speaking with God
Gianni Vattimo
Rihm described himself in 2006 as ‘one who does not pray, but
speaks with God’, and has turned to setting sacred texts increasingly since the
Millennium. He also, not uncommonly among artists, had childhood dreams of the
priesthood. Composer Peter Bannister has enlighteningly compared Rihm to the
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, a writer with strong Marxist and Roman
Catholic strands to his thinking. Bannister asks whether Rihm’s ‘harmonic idiom
in these pieces’ may be heard analogously ‘to Vattimo’s “weak thought”’, the
thought of a ‘self-confessed “half-believer”’, in that ‘his language suggests
directionality and simultaneously subverts it at every stage, hinting at
“strong structures” but scrupulously avoiding them’. There is certainly
reference as well as affinity to be found in these motets to the glories of
polyphony. As often with Rihm, there are tonal affinities too, sometimes more
oblique than others. Even at their strongest, though, as perhaps in ‘Tristis
est anima mea’, one would never mistake them for the once-fashionable
‘spirituality’ of so-called ‘holy minimalism’.
This is not the fervent belief of a Messiaen,
perhaps not belief at all, but it is of a piece with Rihm’s ongoing fascination
with music and practices of the past. To quote Edward Campbell, Rihm has ‘no
compunction in juxtaposing music […] flagrantly modernist in aesthetic
alongside passages that cut deeply into the DNA of the German Romantic
tradition’. Here, another tradition too, albeit seen and heard through a
Romantic-modernist prism. For Rihm, moreover, the Holocaust inevitably casts a
particular, as well as universal shadow, over tales and rites of suffering. In
his Deus Passus, written for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death in
2000, his new St Luke Passion came strikingly to an unfulfilled close with Paul
Celan’s poem Tenebrae. That may surely be felt here in a chromaticism
unfulfilled because it cannot be.
Music of Resistance and Liberation
Rihm has freely acknowledged the importance of Luigi Nono for
his music too, helping – as so often in the dialectic between German and
Italian music – impart a clarity of line often welcome among the thickets of
German post-expressionism. The kinship between Nono’s and Rihm’s Hölderlin
fragments is clear to all, but Nono’s importance as ‘a model I cherish’ has
clearly been broader, Rihm going so far as to call Nono ‘the prototypical
artist, searching and failing, extremely secure and extremely insecure’,
calling particular attention to the ‘ecstasy’ of Nono’s ‘sound language’.
Image: Archivio Luigi Nono
A Venetian by birth, in 1924, and death, in 1990,
Nono evinced considerable interest in early ‘Italian’, often Venetian, music;
his final music drama, Prometeo, often conjuring up the impression of a
marriage between Marx and Palestrina and other late polyphonists, Gesualdo
included, mediated by Walter Benjamin and Nono’s librettist, Massimo Cacciari.
For, as Nono’s friend and colleague Claudio Abbado attested, Nono ‘never lost
the deep-rooted ties to the long tradition of Venetian music […] Gigi’s sense
of an espressivo or cantabile line also stems from this
tradition’. Nono’s studies at the Venice Conservatory with Gian Francesco Malipiero
had encompassed study of earlier traditions. Sheer delight in vocal writing and
the potential of the human voice, would inform Nono’s work throughout his life,
nowhere more so than in the 1955–6 cantata Il canto sospeso.Nono
would recall in 1973 that Malipiero had been:
A lovingly concerned master, as I learned when he took me as a
pupil during the bestial rule of fascism (from 1943 to 1945) and in his courses
and seminars opened the door to study and knowledge of music which at that time
lay prohibited in Italy: Schoenberg, Webern, also Dallapiccola, and naturally
Monteverdi and the music of the Italian Renaissance.
This setting of texts from European resistance fighters unites
all such strands, Il canto sospeso being, again to quote Abbado, ‘music
born of deep dismay, painful and accusing’. Every work, for Nono, required what
he called ‘a human “provocation”: an event, an experience, a test in our lives,
which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear
witness’. Each of the texts we hear offers testimony from a resistance fighter
shortly to be killed by the Nazis. There is here a glowing post-Romanticism:
painful, even agonizing, in its beauty, nowhere more so than in the sixth
movement, when, after what we may think of as a choral Dies irae without end –
remembrance of Esther Srul, a victim of Operation Barbarossa – orchestral music
beguiles perhaps all too readily. Words, witness, their horror nonetheless
continue to resist their aestheticization. The Webern-like tenor aria-with-ensemble
in which we hear from Chaim, a 14-year-old Jew from Galicia, or the ravishing
melismatic writing for soprano in particular, suggest promise that cannot,
should not, be fulfilled. We await, wish for reconciliation, even benediction,
but know, with Nono – as, with Rihm, perhaps even with Gesualdo – that it will
not, cannot happen. For the ‘wedge’ quality to Nono’s 12-note row, intervals
gradually broadening out – heard in linear fashion for the first time in the
fourth movement – recalls certain Bach fugues, but also, tellingly here,
Dallapiccola’s beacon of (false) hope in his anti-fascist opera Il
prigioniero. We must hope, even if we have few grounds for doing so.
That said, words find themselves liberated from
the tyranny of expectations. Broken down into constituent parts, as well as
savoured melismatically, there is music to be experienced here that goes beyond
the serial parameters of pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics, and so on. Nono’s
point here was not, as his fellow avant-gardist Stockhausen believed, to divest
the text of meaning; it was not ‘to withdraw it from the public eye where it
has no place’. In his 1960 Darmstadt lecture, Text – Musik – Gesang, as
transcribed by his pupil Helmut Lachenmann, Nono explicitly took issue with that
very claim, having looked at Schubert, Monteverdi, Schoenberg, Bach, Gabrieli
and others, proceeding to relish one particular an instance of Gesualdo’s
madrigal word-setting – the word ‘splende’ in Il sol, qual or più splende
– as a presentiment of his own: sounds verbal, phonetic, and musical created a
‘pluridimensional whole’, a counterpoint of sounds in musical declamation.
‘The final unity’ for Nono nonetheless remained in
words rather than syllables or parts thereof. In a sense, it is the old controversy
concerning polyphony and verbal comprehension, familiar to all students of
Palestrina and the Council of Trent (or of Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina).
Some controversies, quite rightly, never die, not least those in the endlessly
fascinating relationships – however understood or misunderstood, however
constructed or deconstructed – between German, Italian and countless other
musics, between the art and thought of other times and our own.
(This essay was first published in a 2019 Salzburg Festival programme for a concert from the SWR Vokalensemble, SWR SO, Marcus Creed, and Peter Rundel.)
Many of
Liszt’s works have complex, protracted geneses. Rather than chisel away in
furious, even obsessive, self-criticism like Brahms, working his way toward a
final, perfected version – there are exceptions – Liszt tended to move on,
sometimes furnishing several, competing versions of an ‘original’ work. In
addition, there are, of course, arrangements, transcriptions, paraphrases, and
much in between, often again in more than one version. Not all of Liszt’s works
– nor Busoni’s, following closely in the footsteps of his great
pianist-composer predecessor – are works in progress. Even when not, though, we
can sense a restless tendency, something moreover of an improvisatory,
experimental beginning, with or without closure.
A Father’s Grief
The
origins and ‘poetic idea’ of Liszt’s Weinen,
Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen Variations are autobiographical. Liszt’s daughter
Blandine had died on 11 September 1862; at the end of that month, his
son-in-law Émile Ollivier travelled from Saint-Tropez to Rome to inform Liszt
of her last days. In response, Liszt penned a series of 48 variations on the
ground bass from the opening movement of Bach’s 1714 cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen BWV 12,
also familiar from Bach’s own recycling in the ‘Crucifixus’ of the Mass in B
minor. A chromatically descending line furnishes Liszt, as it had Bach, with
plenty of scope for what Schoenberg would christen ‘developing variation’.
However,
Liszt, following and extending Beethoven’s example as composer of variations,
begins in a different key, D flat major. Typically crashing chords make their
way to the tonic, F minor, long a key of mourning for Liszt, through the
offices of an anguish that borders upon mental collapse. Sovereign command of
his instrument enables Liszt to coax, to compel, even to coerce the piano to
join him, Bach and the listener in the weeping, lamenting, sorrowing and
fearing that combine in mourning. First introspective, relatively strict in its
contrapuntal homage to Bach, then broadening out until it brings the very idea
of variation under Mephistophelian attack, the work’s progress might be
understood to mirror that of Liszt confronting the death of a second child – his
son, Daniel, had died less than three years earlier. Several years of a process
yet to be concluded are condensed into a grand sweep that is musico-dramatic in
an almost Wagnerian sense.
Arioso
tendencies certainly inform the spirit and progress of the 48 variations,
negating the letter and yet ultimately reinstating the spirit of Bach’s
passacaglia. Telescoping Bach’s plan in his cantata as a whole, Liszt reaches
the Lutheran chorale in F major, ‘Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan’ (What God
does, that is well done). Or is it? Such affirmation attempts to proffer
retrospective meaning on the search, the struggle, the soul bearing of the work
as a whole. The Abbé Liszt nods assent as he must, even in grief. He adds the
words of the hymn above: plain and unanswerable. Chromatic daemons nonetheless
work to undermine it before the close; if their success is not unambiguous, the
major mode of the ending is scarcely affirmative, the insistence upon the final
tonic chord weary in alleged triumph.
Tears at the Heart of Things
Mourning
as unending process is again the subject of the next piece, written in 1872,
later published as part of the third book (of 1883) of the Années de pèlerinage: ‘En Priamus. Sunt hic etiam sua praemia
laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem
mortalia tangunt’. Even for a poem, Virgil’s Aeneid, hardly lacking in scholarly, artistic, all manner of
attention, these words have been considered exhaustively. Having come upon a
Carthaginian temple dedicated to Juno, its walls decorated with scenes from the
Trojan War that had turned his and his men’s lives upside down as refugees,
Aeneas exclaims to (the memory of) his father, Priam: ‘there are tears at the
heart of things’ (according to Seamus Heaney’s translation). A 19th-century
artist as pluralistic in national and cosmopolitan identity and thus as
homeless as any – in a state of permanent pèlerinage
– Liszt knew this well. His subtitle renders the general claim particular:
‘en mode hongrois’ (in the Hungarian style).
This is
no divertissement, though ‘gypsy’ or ‘Magyar’ – for Liszt, the two were more
readily interchangeable than for his more ethnomusicologically minded
successors, such as Bartók.As in the
1849 ‘Funérailles’ from his Harmonies
poétiques et réligieuses, an angry elegy for the Hungarian Revolution
crushed that year by the Habsburgs, Liszt, like Aeneas, remembers his comrades.
This piece shares the growling low register of that earlier work, the obsession
with unstable, even brutal augmented seconds; it shares its rhythmic and
harmonic defiance too, its refusal to be cowed. Themes, intervals,
progressions, gestures which one might hear as anticipatory modernist in the
throes of, say, the Piano Sonata in B minor are now found in isolated, even
distilled form, the essence of an almost responsorial music. For this is a work
of Liszt’s old age, a gateway to a world of further elegies and threnodies, of
embittered near atonality: seraphic in transcendence, yet also, far more
clearly than the Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen,
Zagen Variations, dejected in temporal contemplation. Liszt’s utterances remain
Janus-faced, similarly refined glances to the world of his first book of
pilgrimages, reminding us of a Romantic world that he and his people – real or
imaginary – cannot, will not, relinquish.
Day of Judgement
Another
day ‘full of tears’ is the Day of Judgement: certainly, according to the
Lacrimosa of the Requiem Mass. No setting is more celebrated than Mozart’s, not
only on account of the manuscript breaking off, with almost unbearable Romantic
poignancy, just eight bars in, the life of our misunderstood, suffering
(allegedly) genius cruelly cut short, yet still more so on account of its
musical quality. Franz Xaver Süssmayr’s completion has never seriously been
challenged, the ‘scraps of paper’ given him by Mozart’s widow, Constanze,
having clearly offered expert guidance. The D minor pathos, perfectly judged
harmonically and rhythmically – rocking metre and rests of equal importance
here – could hardly have failed to appeal to Liszt. He chose this and the
Confutatis to transcribe for piano, his work here respectful, restrained, in no
sense a paraphrase such as the Evocation
à la Chapelle Sixtine – based on Mozart’s Ave verum corpus and Allegri’s Miserere
– penned on the same 1860s visit to Rome. It is not difficult to imagine him warming
to the legend that this movement was sung at Mozart’s death bed; hearing or
playing this 19th-century homage, it is not difficult for us to warm to that
legend too.
Liszt and Busoni
More
neglected still as a composer than Liszt, Busoni would have understood only too
well Liszt’s pessimism concerning performance of his later works. Liszt had
gone even so far as to forbid, at least strongly to counsel against,
performance, fearing it would harm his pupils’ careers and elicit further
hostile criticism. At any rate, Liszt proved a crucial forerunner, example and
inspiration to Busoni throughout his life and career – as, of course, did Bach.
Busoni suffered personally and vicariously for his Lisztian advocacy, a
clueless London critic for The Times
lamenting of a February 1913 visit to the Bechstein (now Wigmore) Hall, which
included the Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen,
Zagen Variations:
There are
many people who regret that a great pianist whom they otherwise want to hear
should spend the afternoon playing Liszt, and the regret is intelligible
enough. But if a whole programme of Liszt is to the played at all, probably everyone
would agree that there is no pianist so able to hold the attention through it
and give pleasure at the same time.
In
grudging concession, the anonymous critic owned that:
[Many] must
have realized in listening merely to the Variations on Bach’s theme […] that
the most advanced technique discovered, one may say, by Liszt and pushed to the
point to which Signor Busoni has brought it, is capable of making the
pianoforte express new ideas and a new kind of beauty (with the corollary that
there may be new kinds of vulgarity).
Performance as Transcription
Onwards
and upwards, then, to Busoni’s ultimate reckoning with Bach, via Liszt’s example
as transcriber, composer, tireless advocate: the Fantasia contrappuntistica, its D minor tonality provided by Bach,
though it follows nicely here from Liszt’s Mozart transcription. The Fantasia grew out of Busoni’s work on a
critical edition of Die Kunst der Fuge.
His friend, Bernard Ziehn, composer and music theorist, persuaded him that the
trick to completing Bach’s final, quadruple fugue was to understand that the
missing subject was in fact the principal theme to the work as a whole,
offering obvious cyclical unity. Busoni set to work, initially on a ‘Grosse
Fuge’ – ‘it will be like something between C. Franck and the “Hammerklavier”
Sonata, but with an individual nuance’ – which was almost immediately expanded
into the work we know today. In homage to Bach, the master of the organ chorale
prelude, the work opens with variations on ‘Allein Gott in der Höh sei Her’ –
essentially an expansion and revision of the third of Busoni’s pianoelegies.
Three
fugues arise from its ashes, by way of a lovely three-part invention,
‘intimamente e indugiando’. Drawing upon scholarship and imagination,
transcription and composition, something both old and new is created, tracing
Bach’s lines to what Busoni considered to be their provisional – there could
surely never be an ultimate – conclusion. And so, an intermezzo, haunted, like
much of the rest of the score by the monogram, ‘B–A–C–H’, has its own material
transmuted into a series of three variations, cadenza and a further transition
– in a strong sense, the work is entirely transition – into the fourth fugue.
It triumphantly, yet not without chromatic dissent, reinstates D minor, furious
in the enormity of its necessarily unsuccessful attempt to ‘complete’ Bach.
Reimagination of the opening chorale – comparison and contrast with Liszt are
equally valid – and a concluding, climactic stretta
prepare a close as climactic and, in retrospect, if not in the moment, as
open-ended as we might hope.
It is on
the grandest scale, if not of the Piano Concerto’s duration (roughly 70
minutes), then aspiring to it and conceived as a magnum opus of similar vein. An extraordinary Berlin concert of
1912 offered both, with the Fantasia
in an orchestration by Frederick Stock and the exquisite orchestral miniature –
at least by comparison – Berceuse
élégiaque in between. We might also think of the composer’s – ironically,
perhaps necessarily – incomplete opera as summa:
Doktor Faust. Ideas, expressed
conceptually and emotionally, of transcription and variation remain public andprivate. Let us grant Busoni the final
say:
Every
notation is itself the transcription of an abstract idea. The instant the pen
seizes it, the idea loses its original form. The very intention to write down
the idea compels a choice of measure and key. [...] Again the performance of a
work is also a transcription. Whatever liberties it may take it can never
annihilate the original. [...] So the arrangement is not good, because it varies
the original; and the variation is
good, although it “arranges” the original.
(This essay was originally published as a programme note for a 2019 Salzburg Festival recital by Igor Levit.)
