Brahms, arr. Busoni: Chorale Preludes, BV B 50 Fred Hersch: Variations on a Folk Song Wagner, arr. Kocsis: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178
Igor Levit (piano)
A typically thoughtful programme,
brilliantly performed, from Igor Levit: the second half reprising that of his
Salzburg recital in August, the first quite different, yet forming an equally
coherent whole. First we heard the six of Brahms’s eleven late organ chorale
preludes Busoni arranged for piano in 1902. The first, ‘Herzlich tut mich
erfreuen’, rightly announced itself paradoxically, or better dialectically,
both emphatically as piano music and yet also as ‘letting the music speak for
itself’, in that most necessary of clichés. Musical processes behind and
beneath the melody revealed two—sorry, three—great minds at work. Brahms’s
arpeggiated half-lights emerged, as if from his own piano music; they were
never imposed. That attentiveness to material—a sort of dual authenticity, though
not in the debased sense the later twentieth century made all too current—marked
out ‘Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele’ as more yielding, yet similarly
straightforward, and the ineffably lovely ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ as
differently inward, Levit relishing Busoni’s modest interventions. The two preludes
on ‘Herzlich tut mich verlangen’ were properly contrasted, the first speaking
with a richness of tone apt for a more overtly Romantic outpouring (from both
Brahms and Busoni), the second acting with ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ both to
encase that passion, and coming closest to the Passions of Bach. It was deeply
moving in its modesty, patience, and depth. Levit took his time, rather
beautifully, with the heartbreaking ‘O Welt, ich muß dich lassen’. His dignified
performance spoke with a distilled wisdom, like Brahms’s, that seemed to say
all that need, perhaps all that could, be said.
Fred Hersch’s 2021 Variations on a Folk
Song followed. An initial statement of a time-honoured theme, here ‘Oh
Shenandoah’, provided a connection rather than kinship with Brahms, but enough
to have one think. Twenty variations followed. Harmonic recolouring came first
to the fore, followed in what I think may have been the third variation by a
change of mood to something less ruminative, more extrovert. A wide variety of
treatments ensued, one (mostly) for the left hand standing out in dark,
muscular fashion, as an heir to Romantic tradition, another insistent and ardent,
perhaps a little after Liszt (to come). Others were more inward or floating. This
was evidently music Levit had internalised, just as it this clearly represented
a tribute from one pianist to another pianist—and vice versa. The
principal language may have been forged in the jazz world, but it was generous
in its frame of reference—and that generosity extended to spirit too.
Zoltán Kocsis’s transcription of the
Prelude to Act I of Tristan was strenuous, big-boned, virtuosic, the
emphasis placed very much on struggle, on becoming. Always directed to a goal
that was never reached, its oppressive lack of resolution (in more than one
sense) led us directly into a performance of Liszt’s B minor Sonata perhaps
still more fiery, still more coherent than that I had admired a month earlier
in Salzburg. It was similarly bold and questing, and of course more
unremittingly virtuosic, virtuosity and rhetoric always means to an end rather
than ends in themselves. Post-Beethovenian goal-direction was equally apparent,
through rather than despite flexibility. Bringing us to the recapitulation, for
instance, Levit triumphantly banished the false dawn of the preceding fugato to
the fiery furnace. Form was a living, breathing, even diabolical thing. Liszt
here was, quite rightly, both highly integrated and far-flung, Liszt’s essence grasped
and communicated.
Detail mattered too: the return of those strange descending scales told us
beyond any doubt that, were a single note in them to be changed, so too would the
rest of the work. Never, not for one moment, could one doubt our guide knew
where he was leading us. For Levit’s command of line, which one might well
consider ‘Wagnerian’ in terms of unendliche Melodie, was not the least tool
in communicating a pianistic sorcery on Liszt’s part that under the right hands
is anything but rhapsodic. As for hands, had I not witnessed the performance
with my own eyes as well as ears, I might have sworn there were four at work. This
is a masterpiece of musical thought, of course, but it is equally piano
music, and sounded as such, reminding me of Donald Tovey’s observation that
Liszt’s piano music was that of someone who could not fail to make a beautiful
sound when touching the keys. Beauty takes many guises, of course, but Liszt
never, ever writes against the instrument. Nor, so it seems, does Levit ever
play against it. A beatific close seemed, at least in retrospect, to
necessitate the lovely yet plain-spoken encore, (as in Salzburg) Schumann’s ‘Der
Dichter spricht’.
Waldemar – David Butt Philip Tove – Lise Lindstrom Wood-dove – Karen Cargill Klaus-Narr – Robert Murray Peasant – James Creswell Speaker – Alex Jennings
London Philharmonic Choir (chorus director: Neville Creed)
London Symphony Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Edward Gardner (conductor)
Image: London Philharmonic Orchestra
The pandemic is not over. But I remember
thinking, when some sort of minimal concert life was intermittently starting up
again—socially distanced concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields with a maximum
audience of thirty, the first and second series of Spotlight Chamber Concerts
at St John’s Waterloo, and so on—what resumption of a full range of musical
life would entail for me. I chose three examples, which have remained in my
mind ever since: a large-scale work by Richard Strauss, a full staging of Die
Meistersinger, and a performance of Gurrelieder. Strauss came a
little while ago, in a performance of the Alpine Symphony—though I await
a Frau ohne Schatten. Meistersinger is yet to come. On this
Wagner-and-Strauss-starved island, we should probably not hold our collective
breath. Nevertheless, even if accompanied by precious little other Schoenberg, Gurrelieder
has returned.
It was, if truth be told, a somewhat mixed
performance we heard from Edward Gardner and the LPO: well sung and played, Gardner’s
conducting more variable yet growing in stature, with one major, well-nigh
catastrophic miscalculation for the closing melodrama. The Royal Festival Hall
is far from ideal for this work, yet Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia
performances in 2009
and 2018
had seemed far more at home. Contrast was glaring in the opening bars. Both Salonen
and Gardner achieved great clarity; whatever the Festival Hall’s shortcomings,
it probably helped in that respect. Gardner and the LPO, however, sounded oddly
mechanical, as opposed to pointillistic; the strange impression was of oddly
balanced strings and flutes out of sync, even when they were not. And even once
the music had settled, Gardner imparted an oddly regimented quality to it,
moving bar-to-bar rather than via paragraph. There were, though, some inviting,
dangerous, Tristan-esque sounds from the LPO that prepared the way
splendidly for David Butt Philip’s first entry.
Butt Philip showed himself, without
exaggeration, to be one of the finest Waldemars I have heard. His way with
words and shaping of vocal lines were beyond reproach. As the first part
progressed, his emotional range widened to encompass, as does the work, the impetuous,
the angry, and also greater dynamic range. The ardent lyricism as he told of Waldemar’s
pride, likened unto that of Christ seated once more next to His father, was an
object lesson in dramatic delivery that yet retained a Lieder-singer’s
attention to detail. Lindstrom offered a womanly Tove with Nordic steel: no
false purity, and again a performance that took its leave from the verse. The
LPO generally sounded gorgeous. Earlier on, Gardner might have lingered to
advantage. Greater flexibility did come, though, whether in the coital
stillness of Tove’s response or the ghostly, again Tristan-like brass of
‘unsel’ger Geschlechter’ foretold, developing via frightening double basses
into something more ominous. Waldemar’s words ‘Unsere Zeit ist um’ offered
ecstatic contradiction, already tinged with irony concerning fate and the
future. Yet the sweetness of the interlude introducing Tove’s last words
consoled, as it should. Could Lindstrom’s delivery here have been more lyrical?
Probably. Her care for verbal expression nonetheless offered compensation enough,
and the climax on ‘Kuß’, her final word, sent shivers down the spine, with
credit due to all concerned: soloist, conductor, and orchestra.
The Wood-dove’s song was, quite simply,
outstanding. Karen Cargill’s deep, rich tone furthered an interpretation once
more unquestionably rooted in the text. Rising out of the orchestra, this was a
forest messenger one knew one could trust, however much one wanted her words
not to be true. Gardner here captured to a tee the crucial role of rhythm, not
least in relation to harmony. It made for a gripping conclusion to the first part,
the strange decision to break for an interval all the more regrettable.
That said, the brief Part Two plunged us,
orchestrally and vocally, straight back into the action. Butt Philip showed
anger, increasingly blasphemous, without hectoring. Crucially, he continued to
sing, never shouting, and in highly variegated fashion too. Gardner
communicated well the fulfilment of those early ghostly sounds in the opening
of Part Three, Butt Philip and the LPO audibly responding by taking us on a
journey to new, more bracingly modernist sounds, though the direction of travel
rightly remained unclear, a veritable Götterdämmerung Hallowe’en from
male chorus and James Creswell’s Peasant alike highly impressive. Robert Murray’s
Klaus-Narr was nicely animated, communicating like Cargill’s Wood-dove with
evident sincerity and truthfulness. Again, this was music that was sung, here
in Straussian fashion, albeit more grateful for the tenor. Meistersinger-ish
tendencies in the orchestra were welcome and revealing, preparing the way for
that extraordinary experience in the prelude to the Speaker’s appearance of
material transformed before our ears, almost against our (even Schoenberg’s?)
will. History’s demand, the material’s, or the drama’s? Why choose?
And then, talk about spoiling the ship for
a ha’p’orth of tar. The Speaker entered, perversely miked, and in English
translation. One can perform Gurrelieder in English, I suppose, but then
it should surely be the whole thing. The ‘effect’ was alienating in quite the
wrong way, exacerbated by laboured, ac-tor-ly delivery on the part of Alex Jennings.
The idea, it seems, was Gardner’s own; someone should have dissuaded him. For however
sardonic, at times even vicious, the LPO sounded, this was a conceptual miscalculation
that torpedoed the performance as a whole. How I longed for the inimitable
Barbara Sukowa, icing on the cake for both of Salonen’s performances (as well
as Claudio Abbado’s Vienna recording). Even the strange, choral climax, sincere
in its way yet knowing that such tonal sounds can no longer truly convince, failed
through no fault of the chorus to salvage matters. A great pity indeed.
Narraboth – Thomas Atkins Page of Herodias – Annika Schlicht First Soldier – Simon Shibambu Second Soldier – Simon Wilding Jokanaan – Jordan Shanahan Cappadocian – John Cunningham Salome – Elena Stikhina Slave – Sarah Dufresne Herod – John Daszak Herodias – Katarina Dalayman First Jew – Paul Curievici Second Jew – Michael J. Scott Third Jew – Aled Hall Fourth Jew – Alasdair Elliott Fifth Jew – Jeremy White First Nazarene – James Platt Second Nazarene – Chuma Sijeqa Naaman – Duncan Meadows
David McVicar (director) Bárbara Lluch (revival director) Es Devlin (designs) Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting) Andrew George (choreography, movement) Emily Piercy (revival choreography) 59 Productions (video)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Alexander Soddy (conductor)
This was a Salome best remembered
for its singing, at least once beyond the absurdity of prefacing it with ‘God
save the King’. (The production might have been adapted, I suppose, to have
Herod come onstage to receive his tribute, but that was not to be.) Stepping in
for Malin Byström, Elena Stikhina acquitted herself very well in the title
role, short notice or not. One more or less has to forgive a lack of consonants
from time to time in this role; so long as that could be agreed upon, this was an
involving, increasingly commanding performance, to which Stikhina clearly gave
her all. Thomas Atkins’s heartfelt lyricism heightened rather than detracted
from dramatic portrayal of Narraboth: another definite highlight. John Daszak
and Katarina Dalayman convinced as Herod and Herodias, both very much stage
animals, though there were times when insensitive conducting had one struggle
to hear the latter’s words. Jordan Shanahan’s thoughtful Jokaanan had the great
virtue of leading one to concentrate on words rather than aura, though I would
not have minded a little more in the latter sense too. A fine supporting cast,
assembled from depth, was another signal virtue; as, doubtless, was its
direction. For trying to identify precisely who is responsible for what is
often a fool’s errand; opera is, or should be, a team effort to which all
contribute.
Sadly, in that respect, this performance
was sorely let down by the conducting of Alexander Soddy. That side of things improved
somewhat, though even the final scene turned out at best Kapellmeister-ish:
a reasonable sense of how it should go, yet little beyond. Earlier on, though, it
was a depressing account, for which the orchestra should probably bear some responsibility
too. (Who knows, though, what havoc recent ‘events’ may have wrought with rehearsal
schedules?) The first scene was all over the place, stage and pit unsynchronised
and plagued by balance issues that marked the entire performance. Various
orchestral lines went unheard, bludgeoned by shattering insensitivity. Even
when together, Strauss sounded like a poor-to-stolid Wagner imitator, the
phantasmagorical magic of his orchestration going for nothing in as
non-transparent a reading of his music as I have ever heard. The aestheticism
that marks not only Salome’s subject matter but the score itself,
Strauss’s Nietzscheanism triumphantly rejecting, even mocking, Wagner and Schopenhauer
alike was disturbingly absent, replaced not with an alternative view but merely
an effort to progress from one bar to the next. Strangely pronounced bass lines
neither grounded nor propelled the harmony; they were just strangely
pronounced. Some passages—rarely anything longer than that—were better, but really
this was playing unworthy of a major international house.
That aestheticism was, however, touched
upon in the fourth revival of David McVicar’s production, here renewed by
Bárbara Llano. My response to McVicar’s staging has varied over the years, increasingly
suspecting that its ‘house of horrors’ approach threw too many bags into the
same basket. It is also, if we are honest, looking a little tired by now. That
said, I was grateful not only for the sheer professionalism at work, but all
the more so for ideas—my fault, I am sure—that had barely registered with me
previously. Gore is still present, most memorably in the bloodstained emergence
of the naked executioner Naaman, fresh from his deed. Whether one considers
that gratuitous will probably remain a matter of taste, but it seemed to me
clear, indeed far clearer than before, that this was a comment not only on an
interwar world of militarised, fascist violence, but also, more importantly, on
the dangers and joys of an aestheticism passed from Wilde to Strauss, via
Pasolini’s Salò and Sade himself to McVicar and to us. Politics and
aesthetics are not to be disentangled, however much characters onstage and
audience offstage might wish them to be. Nor can we forget the past; a
harrowing retelling of abuse during the Dance of the Seven Veils makes that clear.
There are doubtless lessons to be learned there, but no one, least of all
Salome, will do so: itself, of course, an important further lesson.
In a 1958 article on Luciano Berio for the Darmstadt Summer School’s house journal Die Reihe, Piero Santi outlined the post-war Italian avant-garde’s guiding principles:
Everybody’s purpose is authentic organization of the world of sound, which is finally to be freed from […] external compulsion […]. Thus, in the years after World War II, new Italian music, too, had a role marked out. Naturally, it profited from study of hitherto unavailable [modernist] works, and from insights gained elsewhere, but the natural reaction was against our most recent past. To put it more bluntly: there was a reaction against ‘expression at all costs’, against rhetoric (veiled to a greater or lesser degree), against sentimentality which no longer dared to express itself melodramatically, unreservedly.
Politics and aesthetics are interrelated, even identified, more strongly than might have been the case in Germany or France, although everywhere the fiction of a 1945 ‘Zero Hour’, sharply distinguishing post-war endeavour from a world culminating in Auschwitz (and Hiroshima) proved persuasive. In contrast to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy had in any case remained strikingly open to modernism. Berg’s Wozzeck received its Italian premiere in 1942; and at the Venice Conservatory from 1941 to 1945, Nono had been introduced to music by the Second Viennese School, Stravinsky, Bartók and others.
In Nono’s case, a further imperative was political engagement. He took A Survivor from Warsaw by Schoenberg, his posthumous father-in-law, as emblematic for what composition might accomplish. We might also ask to what extent it is meaningful to consider Nono, very much a Venetian as well as an internationalist, as an ‘Italian composer’ at all. In any case, no more than Schoenberg was Nono inclined to lack of ‘expression’; their music rather tends towards hyper-expressivity in which not only every note but also the network of relationships between each note is loaded with significance. The problem, rather, was perceived of sentimentality. In a lecture Nono gave on Schoenberg’s Survivor, ‘the musical-aesthetic manifesto of our era’, he located it in the line of Jean-Paul Sartre’s question ‘why write?’ and Sartre’s response:
And if I am presented with this world and its injustices, then I should not look at it coldly, but [...] with indignation, that I might expose it and create it in its nature as injustice and abuse.’ […]
And further, should someone refuse to recognise Schoenberg’s docere and movere, […] he should know that the words which the nineteen-year-old student, Giacomo Levi, wrote in his last letter before execution by the Fascists in Modena in 1942, are also addressed to him: ‘Do not say that you no longer wish to know anything about it. Consider this, that all that has happened is because you no longer wished to know anything more about it.'
Nono found such a ‘provocation’ necessary for artistic creation. ‘The genesis of any of my works is always to be found in a human provocation (provocazione umana): an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness.’
Expressing the inexpressive
Emblematic even among the death camps, Auschwitz was more than a ‘provocation’, however severe. If the word seems blasphemously insufficient, so does all else, save the imperative to bear witness. Theodor Adorno’s celebrated, often misquoted 1955 claim, made roughly halfway between ‘liberation’ and Nono’s work, retains its sting even after neutering by the culture industry Adorno (and Nono) justly loathed: ‘Cultural criticism finds itself confronting the last stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and this also gnaws at the realization that expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.’ Adorno presented a problem, not a prohibition; the creative imperative remained.
In 1965, Erwin Piscator asked Nono to provide music for his staging of Peter Weiss’s new play on the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, Die Ermittlung (The Investigation), at West Berlin’s Freie Volksbühne. Nono recalled that Piscator had been ‘right’ with respect to ‘the relationship between music and theatre: what neither words nor scenes could express and represent, music must’. The following year, Nono reworked the musical material at Milan’s Studio di Fonologia della Radio into a stand-alone work for tape. Material from the children’s choir of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, sounds and phonemes provided by the Polish soprano Stefania Woytowitz, and orchestral and choral material produced electronically in the Studio from earlier Nono works were combined and elaborated, so as to focus on and give expression to the human voice, while liberating it from the need to ‘set’ or to ‘express’ a pre-existing text, be it verbal (e.g. Weiss) or theatrical (e.g. Piscator). For voices, not words, Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (Remember what they did to you in Auschwitz), its title inspired by Alberto Nirenstein’s Ricorda cosa ti ha fatto Amalek, a reconstruction of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere in Poland, was the latest of Nono’s memorials with a contemporary imperative.
That attempt was grounded in a technical-aesthetic as well as a socio-political quest; arguably the two were for him the same. Nono’s interest lay less in an attempt to express what cannot be expressed – Auschwitz ‘itself’, say, or the Warsaw Ghetto of Schoenberg or Nirenstein – but in what might never have been considered ‘expressive’ in the first place. One can fancy here, for instance, that one hears a marching band or a chill wind, but the sound is almost certainly not intended to represent or to express that; more likely, it may express the dread force we feel to lie behind such representations of destruction. Violent and raucous, tender and sweet within a few seconds: those swings are doubtless part of a continuum of experience, but also seem to be opposing forces, one might even suggest of good and evil. Sound lies within an ominously contained band, beyond which is the uncanny realm of memory, Nono’s own included. His choice of self-quotations was instructive: Composizione per orchestra no.2: Diario polacco ’58, in which he had previously memorialized his visit to Auschwitz; Cori di Didone, in some sense expressing, if hardly representing, the atmosphere of death; and La fabbrica illuminata, whose ‘virtual sonic theatre’ of industrial sound and workers’ voices took on a still more ominous and deadly exposition of factory conditions in its new setting. This was an industrial and capitalist as well as racial genocide.
And yet, Nono’s longstanding fascination with voices solo and polyphonic, their embodiment and our spatial experience of them endures. As his friend Claudio Abbado attested, Nono ‘never lost the deep-rooted ties to the long tradition of Venetian music, as demonstrated by his unerring feeling for the relation of sound and space, recalling the music [Giovanni] Gabrieli wrote for the church of San Marco. Gigi’s sense of an espressivo or cantabile line also stems from this tradition.’ Here a voice that cries, that laments, that exults, is a voice, albeit mediated; yet no more than in Fidelio or Nono’s own Prometeo is it only a voice. It can express, if not represent, something of humanity, of resistance, however tragic and unspeakable its fate. There is no utopian liberation to be heard; the work is not concerned with survival or redemption. Yet perhaps freedom lies nonetheless in truth, witness and action.
.
Return (or not) to Poland
Nono’s 1958 Polish visit and musical ‘diary’, ‘in memory of my Polish friends and of that country’, was followed almost a quarter of a century later by a Diario polacco No.2. This witnessed a non-visit to the Warsaw Autumn festival of contemporary music – for there was no 1982 festival, on account of General Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law. Nono dedicated Quando stanno morendo (When they are dying) to those who had invited and commissioned him in 1981, yet from whom he had heard no more: ‘To my Polish friends and comrades who, in exile, in hiding, in prison, at work, continue to resist and hope even in despair, to believe even in disbelief.’ Or, as we read in Nono’s own ‘Appeal for Solidarnosc’ combining specific, Polish resistance and universal, socialist humanism:
Condemnation of […] [the] coup no longer suffices. Condemnation of the military’s repression of the union movement, of independent Polish political bodies, no longer suffices. Nor is the simple denunciation of oppressive Soviet intervention or the concrete support given to the authoritarian regime in Warsaw by the USSR any longer sufficient. Every democratic, political, trade union and cultural body must now take advantage of every opportunity to give life to a mass movement in concrete solidarity with the Polish people and their freedom of expression.
Resistance and organization, like human activity in general, were complex, not simple. Art was no mere protest; nor was solidarity.
Nono’s friend and comrade, the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, assembled the written texts from verse by Czesław Miłosz (1980 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature), Endre Ady and Alexander Blok (Part I); Velemir Chlebnikov (Part II); and Boris Pasternak, Miłosz and Chlebnikov (Part III). Voices are to the fore in the first (initially, quasi-monodic) and third parts; instruments in the second, where text-setting is at first less fragmentary, more immediately comprehensible, until instruments and electronics do their invasive, even corrosive work. ‘The music “contracts”’, to quote Jürg Stenzl, although an a cappella close offers greater prospect of hope than had been permitted by the Auschwitz work. Where sound and music then had been constrained, now they look – listen, and enable us to listen – outwards. The world of Prometeo, Nono’s third and final opera and another Cacciari collaboration, beckons. As Nono and Cacciari explained: ‘we shall still be able to make “daylight” by refusing the death now coming to us. […] it will never be Death, so long as these voices speak.’
Renaissance polyphony and Venetian madrigalism meet a post-Webern present in which the qualities of every note and the connections between each one of them – intervals and other parameters – take upon themselves expressive force, moral and political as well as aesthetic, pointing in solidarity toward the future. Nono shadows and extends the horizons of voices (four female) and instruments (cello and bass flute) with live electronics, technological advances having enabled greater openness in every sense. He even declared that the score would ‘be born after the Venice “premiere”’. He did in fact produce a score beforehand, albeit one explicitly marked as ‘non-definitive’, pending eventual publication with greater information achieved in the light of performance.
The day before the premiere, Nono gave an interview to the Communist newspaper L’Unità, entitled ‘Electronic Solidarnosc’. In it, he declared that today, more than ever, ‘the artist has the responsibility to avoid conclusive, finalized results. He must understand that (as [Robert] Musil says): “it is not important what is, but rather what might have been.” This does away with all Manichaeism, all sectarianism, and all intellectual rigidity.’ Right up until the last moment, Nono insisted, his new work remained ‘open to all possible transformations’. The owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk, leaving the future open through understanding and empathy with present, past and alternative paths not yet taken but that might be. ‘When they die, men sing …’ concludes the final line of Chlebnikov’s verse. Therein lie hope and freedom of a kind.
(This essay was first published as a programme note for the 2022 Salzburg Festival.)
1 Sonata I 2 ‘Tristis est anima mea’ 3 Sonata II 4 ‘Ecce vidimus cum non habentem speciem’ 5 Sonata III 6 ‘Velum templi scissum est’ 7 Sonata IV 8 ‘Tenebrae factae sunt’ 9 Sonata V 10 ‘Caligaverunt oculi mei a fletu meo’ 11 Sonata VI 12 ‘Recessit pastor noster 13 Sonata VII 14 ‘Aestimatus sum cum descendentibus in lacum’ 15 ‘Miserere’
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809):
Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers
am Kreuze, in the string quartet arrangement
1 Introduzione: Maestoso ed adagio 2 Sonata I: ‘Pater, dimitte illis, non
enim sciunt, quid faciunt’: Largo 3 Sonata II: ‘Amen, dico tibi: hodium
mecum eris in paradiso’: Grave e cantabile 4 Sonata III ‘Mulier, ecce filius tuus, et
tu, ecce mater tua!’: Grave 5 Sonata IV: ‘Eli, eli lama sabachthani’:
Largo 6 Sonata V: ‘Sitio’: Adagio 7 Sonata VI: ‘Consummatum est!’: Lento 8 Sonata VII: ‘Pater! In manus tuas
commendo spiritum meum’: Largo 9 ‘Il terremoto’: Presto e con tutta la
forza
Haydn, Rihm, and connecting threads
‘Concerts
as we know them are organized so that one piece follows another, sometimes like
alien substances,’ wrote Wolfgang Rihm in a 2005 programme note, adding ‘there
is always a secret thread linking our artificial arrangements, from which
questions and replies will arise.’ One can understand why he might have said
that concerning a programme of Haydn’s Symphony No.95 and the world premiere of
his own Two Other Movements, alongside
Ravel’s Boléro, Ernest Chausson’s Poème op.25 and Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso.
In
the present case, works by Rihm and Haydn are more obviously connected, yet
that too requires a warning. One thread may be evident, but our ears should not
rule out the possibility of a secret labyrinth too. Haydn is programmed more
often than one might expect with Rihm, a composer fascinated by reckoning with the
Classical-Romantic tradition at whose head Haydn in many respects stands. Indeed,
one recent book on the piano trio is subtitled ‘from Joseph Haydn to Wolfgang
Rihm’. Instrumental, chamber, orchestral and even sacred music – for some now
itself a ghost at the musical feast – offer connecting threads, questions and
replies both secret and revealed.
Rihm: Sonata, vigil, and plea for mercy
If
six has often been thought a good number for instrumental collections (Haydn’s
string quartets and even his symphonies), Jewish, Christian and other religious
traditions have long considered the prime seven a ‘perfect’ number. Scripture
takes us from the seven days of Creation, through seven days of Passover, to
the seven last words or sayings of Christ on the Cross and, beyond, to seven
seals in the Book of Revelation. Christian tradition presents seven gifts of
the Holy Spirit, seven heavenly virtues, seven deadly sins, seven sacraments,
and more. Rihm initially composed movements of his Seven Passion Texts between 2001 and 2006, one by one lightening
the darkness of Holy Week vigils, knowingly in the venerable responsorial
tradition (for six vocal parts) of Carlo Gesualdo. At the premieres of the sixth
and seventh texts, he presented them as part of a larger work, Vigilia, now with preceding instrumental
‘Sonatas’, and a closing ‘Miserere’.
Easter
is coming, albeit not yet. There will be greater darkness, the greatest of all,
entailing God’s death on the Cross and sojourn in Hell. Hence the vigils (the
nocturnal hours of watching until Easter morning itself), their texts either
straightforwardly depicting, referring to (Peter 1), or foretelling (Isaiah,
Lamentations, Jeremiah, Psalms) the four Gospel accounts of the
Crucifixion. A sense of uncertainty even in direction seems to hold particular
appeal for Rihm, who in 2006 described himself as ‘one who does not pray, but speaks with God’.
This stance we hear reflected and developed in Vigilia.
Sonatas precede motets, but are no mere preludes.
Rather they introduce the text from Scripture and respond to it with a
subjectivity rarely if at all present in the motet to come. Clarinet and horn
stand apart from the rest of the ensemble (perhaps an updated version of an
ancient, largely tenebrous consort): two trombones, tuba, percussion, organ,
viola, cello and double bass. There is musical violence here, to counterpoint,
if not necessarily straightforwardly to depict, the agonies of Christ on the
Cross. This is nowhere more striking than in the antiphonal organ and brass
exchanges, mediated by percussion, of Sonata V; likewise from the organ and
percussion at the opening of the final Sonata, where horn and clarinet respond
as if from the other side of the void. Stinging dynamic contrasts and
dissonance – the idea remains just about operative – contrast in turn with less
‘extreme’, more contemplative vocal liturgies, whose melody, rhythm and even
harmony owe much to the mediating role of memory in reimagination of ‘early
music’. Even a marking of ‘calmo’ (Sonata IV) seems to pertain more to volume and,
latterly, to a Stravinskian coolness that is anything but without tension.
The opening of the first Sonata with its
leading brace of trombones has something about it of the late Renaissance,
reimagined through time and paving the way for something more overtly modernist
in timbre and gesture. Intervallic construction suggests Webern – and perhaps
the early polyphony Webern avidly studied. (Seek and ye shall find, perhaps.)
At any rate, the first of seven motets – notwithstanding its text ‘Tristis est
anima mea’ – offers seraphic contrast. Likewise in Sonata III, first from brass
and then from strings, agitato ghosts
of Webern and Stockhausen joust in a musical drama denied the ensuing verbal
setting of the temple rent in twain. Pesante
octaves of two trombones and tuba in Sonata VI suggest distilled Bruckner, and woodblock
intervention a modernist, even Messiaen-esque intervention, heralding the motet
to follow. A lack of dynamic contrasts and markings in the motets as a whole
speaks of an unmistakeably modern conception of non-subjective, even
‘expressionless’ early music. The accents of ‘Recessit pastor noster’ correct
that even on its own terms, but it remains a contrast worth noting. At any
rate, here is apparently timeless liturgy: a
cappella other than low-key appearances of strings in this motet and
percussion in ‘Tenebrae factae sunt’.
Peter Bannister’s comparison of Rihm to the
Catholic-Marxist philosopher Gianni Vattimo is revealing. Bannister suggests
that 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 Rihm’s ‘language suggests directionality and simultaneously subverts it
at every stage, hinting at “strong structures” but scrupulously avoiding them’.
In the ‘Miserere’, more than three times the length of the lengthiest motet, a
productive yet provisional synthesis peters out (‘Tunc … tunc…’ – not entirely
unlike the ‘ewig … ewig’ of Mahler’s Das
Lied von der Erde) into alternation between voices and instruments, further
suggesting the productive scepticism of Vattimo’s ‘half-believer’. Liturgy has
become personally expressive after all, in a plea for forgiveness to which a response
from beyond these nights of darkness remains as yet uncertain.
Haydn:
Vigil in sonata, and earthquake
Rihm’s
works for string quartet, dating from an unnumbered work of 1966 to the 2015 Geste zu Vedova, run throughout his
career. So too do Haydn’s. If not quite the genre’s inventor, he was its first
master. The Sieben
letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross) was
first composed in 1786 for orchestra, with arrangements for string quartet and
piano coming the next year (eventually joined by an oratorio version in 1796,
with an additional piece of Harmoniemusik).
The quartet version is now the best known. This is doubtless in part due to an
economy of pragmatism concerning performing forces – but chamber conversation imparts
intimacy and immediacy, with very much their own dramatic strength.
The
so-called seven last words (ultima septem
verba) – more properly ‘sayings’ since, though brief, they are more than
single words – of Christ on the Cross have been a focus of Christian Lenten
devotion since the early 16th century. They come from the four canonical
Gospels, though none is found in all; they have proved equally popular in
Catholic, Protestant and other Christian traditions. The traditional order has
been words of forgiveness, salvation, relationship, abandonment, distress,
triumph (of a sort) and reunion. Musical settings and responses have ranged from Heinrich Schütz’s Die sieben Worte Jesu Christi am Kreuz, through choral works by César Franck and Charles Gounod, to more recent works by Sofia Gubaidulina (cello, bayan, string orchestra) and Tristan Murail (orchestra, chorus, electronics).
Haydn
recalled his commission when dictating, 15 years later, a foreword to the score
of the oratorio for Breitkopf & Härtel:
About fifteen years ago I was requested
by a canon of Cádiz to compose instrumental music on The Seven Last Words of
Our Saviour on the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce
an oratorio every year during Lent ... . The walls, windows, and pillars of the
church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the
centre of the roof broke the solemn darkness. At midday, the doors were closed
and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced
the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse thereon.
This ended, he left the pulpit, and prostrated himself before the altar. The
interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the
second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the
conclusion of each discourse. My composition was subject to these conditions,
and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and
to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it
quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits.
Haydn
asked the Abbé Stadler for his thoughts. ‘I answered’, Stadler relates in his
autobiography, ‘that it seemed to me advisable that over the words an
appropriate melody should be fitted, which afterwards should be performed only
by instruments’, though he did not know whether that had always been Haydn’s
intention. Haydn requested permission from the Bishop of Cádiz to exceed the ten-minute
limit for his ‘sonatas’ – the same term as Rihm – if necessary, and received it:
the Bishop responded that he would limit the length of his homilies to ten
minutes each, ensuring scope for musical overrun. The music, though, was
intended not for the Cathedral but for the subterranean Oratorio de la Santa
Cueva, whose reconditioning, completed in 1756, had been the project of the
priest José Saluz de Santamaria, original source of Haydn’s commission as communicated
by an intermediary, Don Francisco Micon.
A severe,
double-dotted D minor ‘Introduzione’ suggests with its angular melodies and
rhythms Crucifixion: late-Baroque iconography surely comprehensible to Haydn’s
audience-congregation in Cádiz. Sonata I (identical nomenclature as Rihm) turns
to relatively relaxed lyricism in related B flat major. (There is no overall
tonic, though surely there is iconography of Affekt.) Christ seeks forgiveness for his persecutors, ‘for they
know not what they do’. Haydn’s setting is unusually homophonic: if not quite a
necessary than a likely consequence of a string of Adagios. His setting of the
‘words’ is straightforwardly, unanswerably melodic, followed by musical
response, commentary and development. The second Sonata takes us from stern C
minor command – ‘Verily I say unto thee’ – to a promise of salvation with
arpeggiated, angelic accompaniment, in pure, heavenly C major: ‘Today shalt
thou be with me in Paradise’. E major maternal tenderness, inflected on
occasion by visions of surrounding darkness (Sonata III) leads to Christ’s
celebrated cry of anguish to His Father, in darkest, deepest F minor: ‘My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
Through
agonising thirst, Johannine predestined accomplishment (‘it is finished’), and
final commendation into God’s hands in the literally muted (con sordino)consolation of E flat major (Sonata VII), Haydn concludes with a
brief, terrible C minor earthquake. Its sudden eruption, more fulfilment than
contrast or release, leaves us in wait, as with Rihm or with the Passions of
Bach. For now, our lot is to contemplate, grief-stricken yet in hope of
something redemptive from beyond.
(This essay was first published as a programme note for the 2022 Salzburg Festival.)
George Walker:Lilacs Beethoven: Symphony no.9 in D minor, op.125
Nicole Cabell (soprano)
Raehann Bryce-Davis (mezzo-soprano)
Zwakele Tshabalala (tenor)
Ryan Speedo Green (baritone)
Chineke! Voices (chorus master: Simon Halsey)
Chineke! Orchestra
Kevin John Edusei (conductor)
Very much a concert of two (unequal)
halves, I am afraid. The first Proms performance of George Walker’s 1995 Lilacs
promised and delivered much. However, the following performance of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, though loudly acclaimed by much of the audience, exposed yet
another contemporary conductor’s inability or unwillingness to do much more
than skate over and harry this unluckiest of scores.
Walker’s piece, for voice (Nicole Cabell)
and orchestra offered many connections, even correspondences, with other music.
What music, after all, does not? It could never, however, be reduced to those
correspondences, speaking very much with its own voice and in its own way:
direct yet rich, purposeful, yet (unlike poor Beethoven) with plenty of space.
The opening horn solo and uneasy, gorgeous post-Romantic harmonies brought
Henze to my mind. Certainly, when the voice entered in the first of the four
movements, each setting a stanza from Walt Whitman, it was a post-Bergian world
the grateful vocal line announced. Well-shaped, alluring, satisfyingly
coherent: one might say the same for work as for performance, and for each of
those four movements. Each was characterised by an arresting opening, low
angular brass answered by strings at the outset of the second; a wandering
flute line, then oboe, preparing the way for the voice in the third; and a
clockwork, ghost-in-the-machine introduction announcing the fourth, answered by
exultant vocal freedom from Cabell. ‘Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird…’.
The lingering postlude found the Chineke! Orchestra, as elsewhere, very much in
its element, sensitively directed by Kevin John Edusei.
I shall try not to linger describing the
Ninth. I desperately wanted to like, to respond positively to a performance of
such enthusiasm from the young players. Edusei’s conception, conducted from
memory, seemed to me so perverse, though, that I can only wish I had left at
the interval. The first movement I have never heard taken at such a speed; not
only that, but its short-breathed quality (repeated, alas, throughout the
symphony) robbed it of line, consequence, more or less any possibility of
musical meaning. Such hyper-urgency worked a little better in the development,
but what should have been the wildness of the return sounded far too controlled
to register for much. The coda had a little more fire, yet was so brittle it
might have snapped. Edusei’s approach was more suited to the scherzo, and there
was no gainsaying the admirable clarity of the orchestral playing. The trio was
similarly athletic, not relaxing a jot. The Adagio flowed, as they say;
it was at first amiable enough. We can talk all we like about how constructed
German ideas of musical ‘depth’ may be; of course they are. But really, was
that it? Apparently so.
As for the finale, that must have been the
most underwhelming I have heard its opening. It went on its way, finely
articulated, something akin perhaps to ‘designer Beethoven’. Matters picked up
with the advent of the voice, Ryan Speedo Green truly using words and music to
communicate Schiller as well as Beethoven. The chorus and other soloists
responded in lively fashion. It was all extremely regimented. Without space to
breathe or anything much in the sense of harmonic development, though, this came
across more as a musical patchwork, with various incidental pleasures to be
heard in the quality of singing and playing. I could not help but think of
Daniel Barenboim conducting this same work here with the West-Eastern Divan
Orchestra ten years earlier. That, for me, had been air from another planet,
but I should repeat that many in the hall appeared to respond with similar
enthusiasm here.
Wagner:Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and ‘Liebestod’ Messiaen:Turangalîla-Symphonie
Yuja Wang (piano)
Cécile Lartigau (ondes martenot)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
A little morning light music by Wagner and
Messiaen proved a fine way to round off my visit to this year’s Salzburg
Festival. Esa-Pekka Salonen is by now quite an experienced Wagnerian,
especially for one not so associated with the opera house. His association with
Tristan und Isolde goes back many years by now; I have heard him conduct
it both in Paris and (in concert) in London. This performance of the first-act Prelude
and so-called ‘Liebestod’—Wagner’s ‘Verklärung’ is surely closer to the mark—spoke
with the wisdom of long acquaintance, yet not the slightest hint of staleness.
The same, of course, could be said of the Vienna Philharmonic—Wagner’s abortive
planned Vienna premiere notwithstanding. Indeed, both conductor and orchestra
took care to ensure that there was much more to the sound than string-saturated
‘voluptuousness of hell’ (Nietzsche); the Viennese woodwind in particular had
considerable bite. Salonen’s ears seemed focused on the century to come, whilst
remaining rooted in Wagner’s own. Taking all the time that was needed, the performance
nonetheless always moved, always evolved. Climaxes shattered and thrilled. One
could lose oneself, but it would have been a pity to have done so.
The Prelude’s after-glow or -shock proved especially
inviting, ushering in Isolde’s transfiguration as if it were telescoping the
action in between. It appeared as if out of a dream, a neat solution to what
remains tonally a problematic non-connection between the two movements. Under
Salonen, the music truly teemed with life; it was not done for yet. The VPO
shimmered, almost as if it were Liszt’s piano. And what a final climax ir proved
to be.
Messiaen’s vast Turangalîla-Symphonie
followed without a break. Two apparently affronted audience members left within
a minute or two; I wonder what they had been expecting. Whatever divine and/or
diabolical force was at work in the Introduction, it certainly made its
immanence felt. As did Yuja Wang, whether solo or as part of the ensemble, for instance
in dizzying duet with xylophone. The crazy imagination of Olivier Messiaen—almost
as crazy as that of Richard Wagner—had been unleashed: awe-inspiring.
It did not take long before the two ‘Chants
d’amour’ revealed Tristan-esque yearning and languor. Cécile Lartigau’s
ondes martenot worked its weird and wonderful magic, slightly beyond yet never
dissociated. Wang’s piano glistened and shuddered. This is not subtle music,
and why should it be? In between, though, lay something far more inscrutable,
the beguiling, even forbidding ‘Turangalîla 1’. It seemed, to return to
Nietzsche, to lie beyond good and evil, beyond morality; it simply ‘was’.
A duly wacky ‘Joie du sang des étoiles’
fully embraced its big-heartedness, the whole of Creation seemingly in motion. Its
successor, the ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ offered a welcome, even necessary
change of piece. The ‘rightness’ of Salonen’s tempi almost had one fail to
notice them; on that account, it is all the more important to recognise them. There
were darker, or at least less sweet, undercurrents, but undercurrents they
remained. ‘Turangalîla 2’ in turn offered relief and contrast, before a ‘Developpement
de l’amour’ designed to test the limits. Dynamic contrasts and moods of introversion
and extroversion (albeit biased towards the latter) pushed each climax further.
Apart from anything else, it was quite a noise. The close sounded, even tasted,
as if an antidote we suspected might actually be a variant of the same witches’
brew.
‘Turangalîla 3’ extended the ambiguity of
that close, erupting in hieratic, hypnotic mystery, as if aurally tasting—that sense
again—a Boulezian sorbet. Hand on heart, I sometimes wish more of the work were
like that; but then, it would be a different work. The final movement certainly
functioned as such, motivically and in mood. It did not just happen to be last;
it culminated.
Sarastro – Tareq Nazmi Tamino – David Fischer, Mauro Peter Queen of the Night – Brenda Rae Pamina – Regula Mühlemann Three Ladies – Ilse Eerens, Sophie Rennert, Noa Beinart Papageno – Michael Nagl Papagena – Maria Nazarova Monostatos – Peter Tantsits Speaker, First Priest, Second Armoured Man – Henning von Schulman Second Priest, First Armoured Man – Simon Bode Grandfather – Roland Koch Three Boys – Stanislas Koromyslov, Yvo Otelli, Raphael Andreas Chiang Old Papagena/Cook – Stefan Vitu Third Priest – Valérie Junker
Lydia Steier (director) Katharina Schlipf (set designs) Ursula Kudrna (costumes) Olaf Freese (lighting) Momme Hinrichs (video) Ina Karr, Maurice Lenhard (dramaturgy)
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera (chorus director: Jörn Hinnerk Andresen)
Angelika-Prokopp-Summer Academy of the Vienna Philharmonic (stage music)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Joana Mallwitz (conductor)
When Lydia Steier first presented her
Salzburg Magic Flute in 2018, the world was, as they say, a very
different place. The trials of the intervening years have left their mark on
this wholesale revision. So, I think, has more general experience. Perhaps it
is also a matter of my being more receptive; it is always difficult to know
about oneself. (These are all, by the way, surely themes of the opera, as well
as of this production and its way into the world.) At any rate, where I was far
from convinced by its earlier, circus incarnation—not on principle, Achim Freyer’s
enchanting, classic production remaining one of my favourites—I found myself intrigued
and involved by many aspects of this Neueinstudierung.
It takes place in an upper-class household shortly
before the outbreak of the Great War. Parallels, sadly, speak all too well for
themselves here. Following an argument over dinner—staged as an overture
pantomime—the three boys are sent to their room, and their grandfather reads
them a story, his narration largely though not entirely replacing Schikaneder’s
dialogue. (It is a pity, but Steier in the programme makes a good case that,
given the realities of theatre and rehearsal, even at a Festival such as this,
despatch of the dialogue by an international cast will often leave a good deal
to be desired.) A fairytale unfolds, in words (by Steier and dramaturge Ina
Karr, paying homage to venerable collections such as those of the Brothers
Grimm), the imagination of grandfather and boys alike, and thus also in gesture
and music. Members of the household—family, servants, and visitors—furnish the
cast of the Singspiel. Tragedy from the grandfather’s past informs the
action, when, in a magical feat fully worthy of the opera, his late wife, who
took her own life, steps out of the painting on the wall. Will Tamino and
Pamina fare better? Perhaps that hope, that intent, informs the story the captivating
Roland Koch continues to tell.
Steier captures well many of the work's ambiguities,
rightly saying (in a programme interview) that ‘there is no black or white in
this opera, only grey’. Or rather a multitude of colours, but perhaps that
amounts to the same thing ethically. In the second act, it becomes clear that a
male-dominated society, Sarastro’s, will lead the boys—and the world—to war. There
is a degree of excitement to that for the boys, of course, but we, quite
rightly, fear. The sermonising of Sarastro and his order should not be taken at
face value. Perhaps ‘wisdom’ is not always what it seems, and Papageno (the
butcher’s boy) might have a better idea. Pamina’s boldness, quite different
from that of the mute, veiled women we see elsewhere, permits her entry. But
perhaps there was no right path after all; that will most likely be a story for
another day.
Joana Mallwitz’s conducting was to my ears considerably
more successful than that of her 1998 predecessor (Constantinos Carydis). It is
fresh, almost modest, certainly worlds away from a Klemperer or a Böhm (or a
Colin Davis, for that matter). But the production teaches us to beware male
authority figures. In any case, this is clearly how Mallwitz hears the music; she
and the Vienna Philharmonic communicate well its inner life, its sheer variety and,
ultimately, many aspects of its miraculous unity.
Tareq Nazmi’s Sarastro was in something of
a similar vein: less stolid than sometimes one hears, though with enough pomposity
to fit role and production. Brenda Rae’s Queen of the Night startled in
offering much more than mere set pieces; within the confines of the role, she
hinted at greater humanity, more of a back story, and she acted as well as
sang. An indisposed Mauro Peter’s last replacement, David Fischer—Peter continuing
to act the role onstage—impressed greatly as Tamino. He would have done
regardless of the circumstances. Ardent, sweet-toned, and well able to shape a
clean yet infinitely touching line, Fischer offered Mozart singing of the first
rank. Regula Mühlemann’s Pamina, possessed of clear inner resolve, likewise
touched the heart-strings, not least in a well-judged ‘Ach, ich fühl’s, which
resisted the unaccountable fashion of taking it as fast as possible. Michael
Nagl’s lively Papageno chose to look on the brighter side of life, but hinted,
sometimes more than that, at a broader emotional hinterland too. The chorus,
unseen (Covid-safe, perhaps), impressed throughout.
Special mention, though, should go to the
three members of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Stanislas Koromyslov, Yvo Otelli, and Raphael
Andreas Chiang: on stage pretty much the whole time, now with important
speaking and acting roles, in addition to their singing, all of which was
accomplished with convincing, indeed outstanding results. Maybe there is, after
all, hope for a European future, whether in musical terms or beyond.
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